Attachment Read Online Free PDF Page A

clearly about any of this was hampered by the much more upsetting thought that, after twenty-three years together, she didn’t really know her husband.
    Plainly, this was a spoof of some kind. She could see you weren’t supposed to take it seriously. But affairs were always corny, always an imitation of other affairs. What would be the point of a highly original affair? Repetition was the whole idea, with thrilling (and repetitive) limits on time and place. Nothing like a marriage, with all its unrelieved specificity unfurling over the years, in a variety of landscapes, public and private, rural and urban, in the long roll from innocence to…loss of innocence. (Jean wasn’t sure anymore about knowledge: what did she know?) But being corny didn’t make it harmless, even if that’s what he’d told himself.
    Before she knew it, she was typing her reply.
Thing 2: Is it really you? (I’d forgotten how wonderful you look: was that—rather, were those—really you? More! Never 2 soon. PLEASE.)
    Write back. Telling detail, please, so I can be sure its you.
    T1
    Darling Munyeroo, bella stella giovanela, you slut! I adore you!
    She didn’t pause. And when she was done she read over her reply: not bad, she thought. Mark could be whimsical, uncertain about punctuation; his favorite word was “wonderful,” and “adore” his second favorite. Jean didn’t resist matching Giovana’s stray numeral—“4 your eyes only”—a rotting fish tossed to a trained seal. She had wavered between “slag” and “slut,” worried that the latter was too American, but finally decided it was somehow jollier, and above all she could hear him saying it. Finally, she trusted the recipient’s vanity to weaken her sleuthing skills.
    Jean sat upright and looked blankly through the window. Outside, the blinding day. She was acting almost robotically, but she couldn’t stop. The moral high ground held no appeal—and no information. She would continue even though, before she sent a single line, she knew that soon she would be like the boy who’d just left—foolishly awaiting replies she would then foolishly return, in a gripping, humiliating dunces’ volley. She checked her reply once more and pressed the send button. And she was, however briefly, euphoric.
    Driving home around the outskirts of Toussaint, Jean thought how much of her day so far had been about the body—a particular strain considering she’d always felt most herself with the smallest amount of movement: reading, thinking, writing; and watching, absolutely frozen, birds through binoculars. Very early on she’d discovered you could learn a great deal ifyou just stayed still and more or less left your body out of it. Suddenly it was all bodies—and breasts were in the air! Blown up and plastered on posters and billboards, or plumply rolling by on the sides of public buses, perfect pairs assailed her, incongruous and looming in this lapsed, rust-encrusted, weedinfested, sugarcaning community.
    The ads, featuring skin tones not seen here except on tourists, weren’t much noticed by locals, who passed them by in threes on mopeds and bicycles, or on foot, balancing barrels on their heads or bent under back loads of kindling. Jean passed a flock of schoolchildren in checked uniforms, skipping alongside leaching salt beds; she tracked broken-down farms and roadside food stands and tabagies and, in and among all this, stationed at regular intervals, the local prostitutes, their breasts spilling from front-tied halter-neck tops. Gift wrapped, she thought, helplessly slowing down to look.
    Out on the coastal road, the bay flashing beside her like a vast mirror, she was blocked by a delivery truck attempting to turn. She stopped right under a breast-festooned billboard. “There you go,” she said, as if it was proof of a general conspiracy, this one an ad for fizzy orange drink, in the photograph falling from some height, like a waterfall, into the mouth of an ecstatic bosomy