Dale Loves Sophie to Death Read Online Free PDF

set atop his wrestler’s body was as surprising as the black dot in an exclamation point. His looks belied a mildly severe nature, and on airplanes he would have been pleased to look severe. He would have liked to look like a man who needed a drink to unwind. He didn’t know that he had aged, and that his round, choirboy’s face had elongated a bit with the pull of gravity. He had finally developed a faint air of irritation not so uncommon in people who otherwise have a look of boundless good nature. The stewardess accorded him due respect, though he didn’t perceive it, and no one else was paying attention, anyway.
    Vic met him at the airport, and he had not brought Ellen along just so he and Martin could discuss the
Review.
And they did discuss it all the way home. Aside from the two seminars he would teach at the college, most of Martin’s summer would be given over to discussions just of this sort, and he was weary in the car as they passed through the Berkshire Mountains to West Bradford. He was relieved to be quiet at last and back in his house when Vic dropped him off. But he was perplexed, too, when he was left there alone. He opened the shades, even the ones over the windows that looked down on the town’s single commercial street, and, most particularly, at a college bar and Laundromat adjacent to it. He had never found these buildings offensive; they weren’t so very near, just easily seen from the height of the house. The house was silent, but Dinah’s energy seemed to emanate from every corner and cubby of those rooms, and he was unnerved. When Martin was in this house he liked it; he always had, but now the rambling shell of the building shrouded him in a peculiar eroticism. He was more aware of his wife’s impact on these rooms now that she was
not
in them. His family’s artifacts were everywhere around him, and that was what buildings were to Martin: simply containers. He had no other vision of them, though he had tried at various times in his life to think of them apart, as art in themselves. But now, when he sat down in a chair, he never even considered the color of the woodwork or the very walls and the manner of their construction. He sat in a chair in his living room with the tall trees swaying in the yard outside and was aware only of the remnants his family had left behind them.
    What puzzled him unaccountably was the unperturbed order settled into every cranny, up the stairs, into the bathrooms, bristling at him from the closets and the cupboards. In the usual course of events this was a household state seldom attained, and even then attained only after the expenditure of great energy and fury, and always attained temporarily.
    “We’re terrible in this place together,” Dinah often said when they were in the midst of battling back the disorder that occasionally enveloped their lives so that they had to stop and put things right just to get on with their work. “You only understand neatness, and I only care about basic sanitation. You’d think it would work out so that we complemented each other, but instead we never really get the place either neat or clean!”
    When the house was put in a state of domestic efficiency—with every towel folded, beds made, sinks clean—the arrangement was tenuous. And it seemed ominous to Martin, just for a moment, that throughout the summer, with only its lone inhabitant, the household would function with a calm and gloomy regulation.
    As he walked around in his house, he found numerous plastic bins filled with carefully sorted toys. Each year, before they made the trip to Enfield, Dinah rearranged and straightened and cleaned all the rooms, because she didn’t want him to suffer from her habit of casual disarray. He discovered plastic building blocks in one bin, miniature cars in another, and so forth. In the kitchen there were two laundry baskets beside the clothes dryer. One was filled with clean clothes, through which he would sift this week,