Free Marry or Burn by Valerie Trueblood Page A

them into his eyes. A solemn shock ran through her, as if a comb had been dragged through her body.
    All the blood had run out of her brain and into the skin and muscles of her hands, which were like invalids given up to a drug, and at the same time she had a marvelous clarity of thought, of almost disinterested pity for him. But that was quickly replaced by the familiar dazed longing. It seemed to her that he must know, having forced her hands to be the envoys of the secret, and yet something told her not to move, because assuredly he did not know, and would not want to know. When he stopped grinding her knuckles into his eyes and let go of her hands, it would shock him, she knew, if she spread them on either side of his head and pulled him across the table to her. No, he was like an animal that had come up to her in the wild, trustingly, and she had to be still.
    â€œThat’s not really what I came about. There’s something else I need to talk to you about,” he said, still in the despairing voice. “Because of Alice.” What was coming? She had to steady herself, try not to let her chest display the speed and shallowness of her breathing.
    What is love? What is it? What is it? How can it be what it
seems to be, nothing? A vacancy, an invisibility, a configuration of the mind. But with a weight, perceptible to the body. And a married woman with a husband she loved and liked, caught under the weight, unable to breathe? And it wasn’t even a person for whom she felt this nothing, this love, not a personality, a self, a man who drank too much and wrote for the newspaper and had five kids, but the face and eyes of a being of some kind who lived in the body and looked out of the eyes of Mike O’Meara. A being from an earlier life trapped in the layers of this one. Or a primitive version of a human being, say a Pleistocene man off the northern grassy plain, looking for the first time into the eyes of a rough creature on the same plain, herself.
    It wasn’t even that she wanted all that intensely to go to bed with him. Or it wasn’t primarily that—though she knew a lot of people would have said so. “Lust,” Alice herself would have said in a minute, hearing of these symptoms.
    She wanted to see him. Just that. Year after year she had remembered and rehearsed and desired the sight of Mike O’Meara more than the sight of Jeff or her children or her dead mother or anyone else. She had wanted to know she would see him and for as long as possible each time and with some promise that he would come back so that she could see him again. It was a primitive feeling without very much of herself in it, like the wish to get warmer when you’re cold.
    She had other friends, who, if she had called them and wailed out what was happening to her, would have kindly said, “You pity him. He’s dying.”
    â€œTell me,” Molly said to him. But again the doorbell rang.
    It was Alice, at the door. “Hello, Molly,” she said. Her voice was that of a school principal who stands up by degrees and comes out from behind a desk. “I’m surprised.” She walked in. “I’m surprised.”

    Mike was coming out of the kitchen. “Hi,” he said to Alice with a benign tiredness.
    â€œHi, I saw the car,” Alice said, looking no different from the way she always looked, with her rosy cheeks and thick half-combed hair and her chin tucked into her neck in a motherly way. She had on her red necklace; her fingers were touching it. She didn’t look angry. “I just didn’t know where you’d be. Who .”
    â€œDon’t tell me you think I’m here with Molly.” Mike sat down heavily on the bench in Molly’s hall. Alice didn’t answer, she just stood there. Molly can still hear what he said next. “Don’t tell me you think that,” he said. “It’s not Molly.”
    â€œSorry,” Alice said, without