Bread Alone Read Online Free PDF Page A

David might want to know.
I soon realized that when he told me he’d been too busy working to have a relationship, he wasn’t kidding. He seemed to thrive on all the activity, but I was exhausted, and vaguely uneasy, like I was the great imposter and would be exposed sooner than later. I felt guilty about cultivating friends based on their potential to help us economically. But David explained that it was my job; I was his partner. As with any job, there would be facets of it that were less enjoyable, maybe even distasteful,but necessary nonetheless. In those too few, too brief times when we could relax by ourselves, he made it all seem okay. And for a while, it was.
One morning when I woke up with a sore throat and a body that felt like the doormat for a herd of buffalo, I lay in bed, drifting between consciousness and un, like you do when you’re sick, and I thought in strange little shards and crumbs about my life. I realized with a jolt that I’d been married for five years. That I hadn’t seen my best friend in months and I couldn’t remember when I’d last spoken to my mother. Or read a book just for the pleasure of it.
Or baked a loaf of bread. My chef that I’d carried home on the plane from France and nurtured and used for six years—or was it seven?—had long since expired because I’d forgotten to feed it. The thought of my faithful little yeasts starving to death and drowning in their own acid wastes had depressed me so that I’d cried for days. Scared the shit out of David. He was ready to bundle me off to a Beverly Hills shrink to get on the Prozac program, but I refused to go, having developed a deep distrust of the species after my father died.
Out of desperation, I think, he came home one night with a bread machine. From the start, he loved the thing, loved the whole concept of it. Loved the way you just dumped in all the ingredients, set the timer, and presto—fresh, hot bread overnight. Never even had to touch the stuff. Wouldn’t mess up my manicure. I was appalled.
He listened patiently while I explained that bread is a process, not a product, but admitted that he didn’t get it, and it just made both of us sad. I refused to use the machine, so he began to play with it. He got in the routine of making bread—if you could call it that—almost every night. But in the mornings, he was often so focused on work or in a hurry to go to some meeting that he’d rush off without waiting for it to be ready.
By then he was being mentioned as the next likely director of marketing—at twenty-nine, he’d be the youngest director in the company—and things began to change in earnest. There began to be even more meetings, weekend gatherings, sometimes including spouses. I wanted to be supportive, but these things were boring beyond all imagining;I didn’t handle them well. When I did attend, David was distant and condescending. We’d fight about it while we were getting dressed, driving in the car, or in our room if it was an overnight party. Then we’d have to go in to cocktails and dinner and pretend everything was fine.
I’d watch him over the shoulder of someone who was describing to me his hip-replacement surgery, and it was like watching a total stranger, or someone famous whose picture you’ve seen so many times that you recognize them instantly but there’s no personal acquaintance. His charm rarely failed him. One of the officers or the directors would put an arm across his shoulders, and you just knew they were thinking of him as the son they’d never had, or wondering why their son couldn’t have been like him instead of dropping out of school to be a surf bum. David made every one of those men feel like his hero, his mentor, and I think he sort of wished it, too. He never came on too strong, too challenging, too threatening.
And their wives—my God, the older ones wanted to take him home for milk and cookies. Some of the younger ones just wanted to take him home. I’d never