Abandon Read Online Free PDF Page B

moment—from Chicago! And this other time, I was in England, this was years ago, and I walked into a room, and there was the same person I’d met a year before. Somewhere completely different.”
    “England’s a small world.”
    “Not that small.” An unexpected sharpness.
    “You were a student there?” he said, to bring them onto safer footing.
    “Nineteen eighty-five,” she answered with pride. “At Oxford. It was the most beautiful experience of my life.” He kept quiet: clearly they were moving in opposite directions.
    “And you?”
    “The same. But that’s what I’ve come here to get away from.”
    “We were probably there at the same time!”
    “We probably were. Anyway, I should be off: I’ve taken up enough of your time.”
    “It changed my life,” she said, and again he had the sensation of having tripped some wire so that suddenly she became a deeper version of herself. She went in and out of focus like the sun behind clouds. “It was the first place I’d ever been where they had real respect for the past. Where they valued where they came from.”
    “I’m sure,” he said, and got up as a way to go. He’d learned long ago that the people here who longed for the Old World were the ones with whom he’d have least in common.
    “And you’re from Denmark originally?”
    “How did you know?” Again, she looked startled. “Are you telepathic?”
    “I don’t think so. Jensen’s a Danish name, isn’t it?”
    She nodded, obviously not satisfied by this. “Usually people say ‘Norway.’ But, yes, I’m the usual California mix-up: half Danish, half . . . something else.”
    “Well, I really appreciate your help. When you see your sister, please tell her she has a big fan in Damascus. Professor Khalil wanted me to pass on his warmest regards.”
    “They always do,” she said strangely, and he was thrown off-balance once again.
    “Thanks for the juice. Maybe we’ll bump into one another.”
    “Maybe,” she said, not sounding very confident. “Thank you for the telepathy.” And somehow, as she sat in the kitchen, letting him show himself out, leaving him with the unmistakable feeling that he was abandoning her in some way.
    That night, when he returned home, he found himself thinking about Martine. He took his glass of wine into the study, as usual, and looked out to sea, and all he could hear, for whatever reason, was her voice, the last night on the train. The couple next door was playing an old Dead album, very loud, and there were the usual shouts and barkings from the beach below, but all he could see was her eyes, pleading with him in that way that said she was so scared she’d prick him if he came any closer.
    It was three, four in the morning now, in his head, and they were on the bench by the river, under the trees, with all the punts moored up, banging now and then against the bank. The sound of a live band far away, under the tent, and only a few couples straggling across the lawns or stealing, periodically, through the great iron gates, into the quiet and privacy of the trees.
    She was stretched out as she liked to sit, her feet in his lap, he playing with the straps of her sandals. They’d both drunk too much, and when he moved his fingers under her dress, she giggled and squeezed and said, “Don’t!” in a way that meant she didn’t want him to stop.
    He ran his finger under the bottom of her legs, and then along the inside of her thigh, across the warm expanses, and she relaxed as she could never do indoors, and when the moment was over, she kissed him gently, and then they were farther apart than ever. The creakings on the lawns, the bottles scattered around the Cloisters, she pulling her legs sleepily back as soon as it was light, and saying, “I ought to go.”
    “Me, too.”
    “Of course,” she said. “That’s what you’re good at.”
    “The scholarship stipulates . . .”
    “I know what it stipulates: I’m the one who helped you fill out the