Free Glass Grapes by Martha Ronk Page A

must call cabs for her to go anywhere, which he believes she is owed because unlike the students he teaches, he insists, she is without wealth or guile. The cabs pay for his guilt.
    He is guilty for having left his wife in the States. Although they are psychically estranged and live together guardedly—she having taken up a purportedly secret lover—he knows she has done this in response to his years of neglect and so feels, not guilty—since his leftist ideology leads him to oppose guilt on principle—but uneasy, although others would think it, he knows, perfectly within his rights to have taken a lover as well. Only he also knows, to his credit perhaps, that their estrangement is not the result of her lover who is simply a lover. He knows that his inattentiveness (not in bed—it hadn’t so much to do with that—but with avaguer and more encompassing inattentiveness that he would will away if he could) has not encouraged her, but has left her open, if not vulnerable, to anyone who might approach her.
    One night he was relieved to watch his wife’s new lover sit at table and engage her, ask her questions, listen to her not foolish responses (because indeed he allows himself to think no one foolish, especially not his wife whom he finds touching), but to responses that he felt obliged to dismiss, for reasons he couldn’t name exactly. Her facts weren’t wrong; they were, rather, extravagant—she tended to “enthuse”—and so it was more with relief than jealousy that he watched this lovely man take on his lovely wife as if her gestures were, as he knew they were, beautiful, as if her account of a walk she had taken the night before were, as it indeed was, expressive, if also, so he judged, overly poetic and gushing. He didn’t wish to be embarrassed by her lack of verbal restraint, and, indeed, wasn’t just one moment later when he found himself still sitting at table, entirely at ease and cheered by the thought of acute angles, infinity, space. He might, he thinks, looking at the lover looking at her, want to behave in exactly this way, if by some stroke of fate he were another person or a person he used to be, perhaps, or if it weren’t at odds with his resolve, or more precisely his leaning towards the inattentive, but such lines of thinking he found useless and he cut them into shorter and shorter segments.
    Sometimes he wondered himself when his wife described the shape of flowers which she loved so well, getting the color of a petal exactly right or the color of their daughter’s “faded rose” socks which he himself had folded in the laundry basket (thinking also of how he loved both of these women, the older blond and the girl with the same blond hair), why such description drove him mad, made him want—although he never would do so decidedly crude a thing—an act of violent disruption. At night at home he would get in his car and drive and drive until emptiness defeated her too heady perfume.
    Which is why, the narrator thought, his new Italian lover had such a so-much-better chance with him, because she drew him not intellectually exactly, but disembodyingly, not because she was not a physical being, indeed her particular and acrid odor was the very announcement of sexuality, but that she knew how to set it aside for him so that it was impossible for him not to be at her side, not pulled—for that would suggest something too raw, but drawn there nonetheless.
    At a local restaurant they sit across from one another at a large table looped over by fellow teachers, resident philosophers and their girlfriends, students and leather jackets. He never looks in her direction although she is speaking in a voice raised just a notch over the din of glasses and conversation so he can be sure to hear her without anyone’s attention being drawn to the fact that everything she is saying is directed at him, designed forhim, an echo of his