Dale Loves Sophie to Death Read Online Free PDF Page B

finding what he needed, and then he would deposit those same clothes, once he had worn them, into the companion basket—only to begin all over again after doing a wash. The drawer from which he took a paper napkin to set the table for his meals was full of wire closures for plastic bags, substitute tops for open soda bottles, checked-off grocery lists:
    Milk ½ & ½
    granola bars
    chicken
    tomatoes
    Toby’s sd. drsg.
    chick-peas (4)
    He was overwhelmed with the sweet triviality of these things left behind, in the same way he would have been affected if his family had all gone off to war. In their bedroom he was even more overcome. Dinah’s books were shoved beneath the draped quilt which covered her round night table. A basket by her bed still enclosed a plethora of small articles she gathered throughout a day and deposited there at night when she emptied her pockets; she would sort them eventually. There was a book of matches, though she didn’t smoke, a child’s rubber eraser in the shape of a little car, spools of thread, a large cat’s-eye marble, etc. He sat on the edge of the bed transfixed, heady with the presence of his wife. He remembered when he had fallen in love with her, or at least he remembered the feeling of being in love with her, when there had been a sultry kind of tension between them, and now he would certainly say he loved her—he did love her—but that struck him as too simple a description. It was more as though she and he anticipated the other’s moods and longings so exactly that they forever wore the other’s persona like a cloak. Martin played the radio or the television most of the time the first few days of every summer to dispel the uncanny silence.
    Into the second week, though, he fell into the rituals of isolated domesticity he had developed over the many summers of Dinah’s absence. The world
beyond
the house became suddenly erotic to him as well, so that even at the grocery store as he was sorting through the onions he might look across the aisle at a stringy girl choosing among the bell peppers and be stunned by desire. Ordinary people all at once seemed extraordinary in their mundane surroundings; their images leaped out at him from a hazy background like those photographs from SX–70 cameras in which the colors are more than real.
    He grew even trimmer, because there was no comfort in having his meals alone at the kitchen table without his family. He took up his summer life as usual, relying more and more on Vic and Ellen. He spent a great deal of time with them, often bringing food to their house to be cooked and shared with them for dinner. Ellen’s sister, Claire, was there for the summer—or perhaps forever; Martin had long ago stopped asking Vic and Ellen for information about themselves when he had at last discovered that they would only look back at him with a smile—ironic and mysterious. It baffled him, but it stifled his curiosity.
    When he and Dinah had first come to know the Hofstatters, the four of them had been inseparable. They had all, for a while, felt that they had found soulmates—two happy couples, intelligent, young—and then subtly Dinah’s disaffection began to settle into a solid enough persuasion so that Martin became aware of it. At first he had suspected jealousy, because Ellen was many things that Dinah was not. She was petite and exact and careful in her housekeeping, just as Vic was so precise in all his habits. Ellen had a mind and temperament like glistening, cool metal. She could be sharp; she was slightly inflexible. Martin knew that Dinah did not think
he
particularly admired those traits or even thought much about the difference between the two women. He thought Dinah might be jealous solely on her own behalf, because Ellen possessed qualities of order and emotional discipline that Dinah had longed for all her life. But one day Dinah had walked quietly into Ellen’s kitchen while Ellen shelled peas at the sink and found Martin, taken