A Parallel Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

found its way in. The sheets clung heavily, weighted with dampness. After a few moments, he came in and sat on the bed. “I can’t right now,” he said. “I want to but I can’t right now.”
    â€œI understand.” I pulled the sheet up to my chin and lay like a mummy. I’d never felt so naked. He put his hand on my shoulder as if I were the one who was ill, as if I were Roxie. I wanted to shrug off his hand. I wanted him to go away. I wanted more than anything to get dressed alone and leave by myself.
    â€œOh, Jesus,” he said, letting out a breath. “
I
don’t even understand.” He gripped my shoulder harder. I pulled from his grip, turned back the sheet, and moved to make room for him. He lowered himself and lay down withouteven taking off his shoes. Neither of us moved until the alarm that we set to remind us that we had lives to return to began to buzz.
    He called me at work the next morning and said he wanted to see me at lunch. We met outside the condominium door. He had trouble getting the key in the lock. His distress made him desperate. As soon as we were inside the door, he began to pull up my skirt. We made love not in bed but on the carpet in the living room with the draperies open and the louvers that protected the balcony from the eyes at the administration center open as well.
    We continued after that, meeting two or three times a week for the next two months as if everything would go on as before, as if Roxie’s crisis was happening in a foreign country and had nothing to do with us. And because Jack didn’t mention her, I made an effort to put her out of my mind. Like an oyster with a grain of sand in its shell, I coated thoughts of Roxie with a glaze that hid her from my mind’s eye. I made her existence easy to slip around.
    Then I saw her. Walnut Grove just isn’t big enough for these things never to occur. During my lunch break, I decided to go shopping. Mandy was going to be twelve soon and I wanted to find something for her. Bill had been a good tennis player when I’d met him and he and Mandy had begun playing last summer. With that in mind I thought I’d look for a decent tennis racquet for her, something better than the old wooden one she’d begun using as a beginner. I remembered a sporting goods store a few blocks from the library. It was one of several business in a small strip mall.
    I remembered a pizza place there as well, and a laundromat, and a printing shop. I’d never noticed that one of the businesses was a wig shop until I saw Jack and a woman coming out of the door. The woman was tall, almost his height, and very thin. She wore checked slacks and a raincoat, and she had a flowered scarf tied babushka style around her head. Jack carried a round box, like a hat box. The woman clung to his arm and talked softly but with animation, using her eyebrows a great deal and nodding her scarf-covered head from one side to the other. She was a pretty woman and there was a certain tentative seductiveness in the nodding as if, though she knew she had once been found attractive, she was not sure if she could still be found so. Jack nodded in reply and gave her attention so complete that he failed to notice me standing stock-still in front of the window of the printing shop with its arrangement of pink-and-silver wedding invitations.
    I kept my eyes on the display but watched him in the glass and saw his jolt of recognition as he looked my way. He made a swift recovery. Her back was to me and her monologue continued unbroken. She hadn’t noticed. I heard the words
conference
and then
attendance records
and then a small chirrupy laugh that requested the listener’s understanding and sympathy. He chuckled, three notes descending.
    In the window glass I watched him help her down from the curb and open the door of a station wagon for her to get in on the passenger side. I watched until they were on the street. Then I