Best Intentions Read Online Free PDF

cataclysmic breakup with Jack when she refused to move to Cambridge with him no matter how much he reasoned, pleaded, banged on her door in the middle of the night with entreaties and threats, she reveled in the freedom. But I missed a sense of belonging to a person, a place. Most of all I missed Sam—the way he cupped my hip bone in the palm of his hand, the esoteric quotes he used to send me, the calm solidity he possessed that allowed me to relax in a way I never could with anyone else, the feeling of being known, truly known. When I ran into him at a party given by a mutual friend on a frigid December night—okay, actually I had asked my friend to be sure to invite him—it was like landing on familiar ground. He phoned the next morning. He, too, had come to think of our separation as a rebuke that had outlived its purpose. He refers to it now as our “period of exile” when he tells the story to friends, to our children. How foolish we were, everyone agrees, smiling because there was, after all, a happy ending.
    We were married within the year.
    We moved into a cheap studio apartment in Chelsea with a slanted splintery wooden floor that mocked us whenever we went barefoot and furnished it with pieces we picked up at thrift shops and the local flea market. I loved watching Sam on Sunday afternoons bare-chested in his tattered khaki shorts sanding away—his ability to refinish furniture a revelation to me—the radio blaring, his broad back, his muscles and his shoulder blades all the more erotic because he was truly mine. Even now, all these years later, a reverberation of that early desire passes through us both whenever we walk by that block and remember that compressed time when it was just us and we had so much to look forward to.
    â€œCan we make it six thirty?” she said. “Same place.”
    I turn up Forty-second Street and weave through a parade of women dressed as if from different hemispheres; some are wearing summer outfits that are not quite as fresh as they had been in June, others have impatiently pulled out their new fall clothes and are already trying to hide the inevitable wilting.
    When I first moved to Manhattan I studied other women’s habits of dress, of grooming, of speech and manners as closely as an anthropologist, anxious to pass as one of them. It was all I had dreamed of, coming here. Now, years later, I know that I do, most days, anyway—my hair is cut in a studio on lower Fifth Avenue favored by beauty editors, though I stretch out appointments for too many months, I know that pleated pants are the devil’s handiwork and if, at thirty-nine, I am endlessly battling the same five pounds, it is never more than that (well, rarely)—but I am constantly aware of the effort it takes. I sometimes wonder if everyone else in the city is passing, too.
    I used to think I could tell who was, who wasn’t.
    But I am beginning to think that I was wrong.

THREE
    I walk into the pseudo-French bistro across from Grand Central Terminal and scan the room crowded with men and women hunched over their croissants and their spreadsheets, looking for Deirdre. I finally spot her in a back booth, her head turned away from me to avoid the flash of annoyance she knows she will find on my face. Either that or she is so immersed in Ben she has forgotten all about my arrival.
    I watch them pry reluctantly apart when they notice me, peeling inch by inch off of each other as if their skin is covered with duct tape. They both smile a little too enthusiastically as I approach. Ben’s presence is breaking an unwritten rule barring intruders from our breakfasts. Under the best of circumstances it would make me feel slightly dispossessed. And I wouldn’t exactly call this morning the best of circumstances.
    I bend over, kiss them both hello, Deirdre’s dusky Creed perfume, at once familiar and exotic, filling my nostrils, and sit down opposite