Dale Loves Sophie to Death Read Online Free PDF Page A

be loved or not to be loved to death.

Chapter Two
    Summer Time
    F or himself, Martin could scarcely bear this leave-taking each summer, always the same, their two weeks in Enfield culminating in an obligatory kiss at the departure gate. He walked away leaving Dinah standing alone and unhappy, but what he thought they both longed to do was to stay—somewhere, in the car, standing on the asphalt, simply stay—just to talk and talk to each other. His vision was of the many words spilling from their mouths and taking a physical shape, all those words entwining them vinelike in what would be the final explanation. They would be enclosed in an arbor that would be the exact definition of themselves. Then they could sigh with relief. They could hold hands and smile. But it never happened, and these summers they parted mute with bewildered misery, feeling at once that they were being forced apart, and yet each anxious to be away from the other. In two days, a week, many times over the summer, they would telephone, and little pieces of apologies, of curiosity and best wishes, would be passed back and forth over the wires, so that at summer’s end they had the illusion once more of having made a concrete alignment, a familiar bridge, a bond.
    And in the airport with Dinah, and as he took his seat on the plane, Martin was visited with his usual apprehension and fear of death, and also he was plagued by that now familiar but equally unsettling hollowness in his stomach at the prospect of taking up his life alone. That feeling approached sorrow and self-pity, and yet it was also comprised of the few, small lingering doubts about himself and the way he had chosen to live his life. The stretch of solitary time before him seemed shiny and glamorous with possibilities, and yet he did not hunger after change; he didn’t like to anticipate the unknown. He had never liked uncertainty, so he buckled his seat belt and sat back in his padded chair in a quandary.
    Whenever Martin was in transit, he was more or less a man absolutely free. All the thoughts that tied him either to one place or to another fled his mind; therefore, the trip was a gentle interlude. Once the plane left the ground, his mind went idle; he was fairly undisturbed. But as he glanced at the people in the seats around him and saw the stewardesses at the front of the plane bend to each passenger with some question or instruction, he did, as usual, become preoccupied with his appearance. He could never believe he looked like a man who should be on a plane, because Martin was just old enough, at thirty-eight, so that he could remember airports as exotic places. As a child he had relished his own self-importance when boarding those large passenger planes among the beautifully dressed travelers, and he had stared out the window over the wingspan to see the propellers putt-putt-putt and then become a transparent blur of motion. He could not lose that notion of air travel even now, when he observed that across the aisle a couple in jeans and with backpacks at their feet took it none too seriously. It seemed that it was no more to them than taking the bus.
    Still, he considered how he must look to the stewardess. Once, when his mother had come to meet him at the train station where he arrived on a trip home from graduate school, she had been laughing when he had finally made his way through the crowd and reached her. “Oh, Martin! You’ve gained some weight! Martin, your face looks like the full moon coming up over the bay!” He was trimmer now, but he did not have a look of authority or importance, even though, in his real life, these were qualities he possessed in some small way. This failure of his to match up to himself had always disappointed him. He was tall enough, but because of his thick torso and rather short legs, he looked stocky and bearlike—sometimes an endearing trait, he knew. His features, though, were so innocent and exactly arranged that his sweet, pale face