Darling? Read Online Free PDF Page A

Macedonia, Iraq—all the complexities, mistakes, and hypocrisies—he’s at work all the time, worrying the rage among nations as if the world were a Chinese puzzle he might solve. He talked and talked until the waitress brought him a plate of tiny calamari fried whole: tasting one he lost his train of thought.
    “I thought I ordered the pesto,” he said after he’d eaten half of them.
    “It’s so loud, I don’t think she could really hear us,” I said. The spirit of the party broke over us like a wave, a joyful shock that stood everything on its head so my little tragedy looked entirely amusing all of a sudden. “I mean, that’s why one travels, isn’t it?” I said, “So as to order the pesto and get the calamari, and have it all to remember.”
    “That’s not why I travel,” he said grimly, and I thought No, he travels in the hope of becoming someone like our Nabokov, so sophisticated life can’t get a firm grip on him. And here he found himself with a mouth full of tentacles—of course it was disappointing.
    “If people like us didn’t love each other, need each other, then we could die like ants under a shoe—so what?”
    His face softened, and I remembered that for all he reads, and knows, still he sees me as wise—an endearing thing in a man.
    “When you were lost, in Frankfurt—,” he said, taking my hands across the table, his face full of feeling.
    “You were the one who was lost in Frankfurt!”
    “Let’s stay the night here,” he said. His hands were shaking, it reminded me of our first meetings when I was so young and everything was so wrong between us that loving him seemed a great bold act of idiotic faith and I wanted only to open myself up to him and say “Come, come inside,” and when we went out to dinner he couldn’t stand up afterward lest the whole world see his erection.
    “Avete camere libre?” I asked, at the Locanda Garibaldi, “con un letto matrimoniale?” The innkeeper burst into Italian—did Garrett see how I slipped into the language?—by instinctive affinity. We were given a small chamber whose window opened onto a balcony, which looked down a shaft from which a fetid, watery odor arose: the canal. When I washed my face the water from the sink ran out and dripped over the edge. I called Etta from the desk phone.
    “The strike’s still on. I think we’d better stay here tonight,” I said.
    “But, dinner…”
    “You know how long that train takes—we’d never get there in time,” I said. “And I know Gino can’t take time to come get us. So, we’ll be back tomorrow and—and we’ll take you all out for dinner, how about that?”
    “Gino likes to eat at home.”
    As we went down the hallway Garrett slid his hand around to squeeze my breast like a teenager. He was resigned to me with all my failings—could I not reconcile myself to him? In the room he pulled my sweater over my head and I kissed him as if I were playing his lover in a movie. I wondered if my torment was some kind of penance: hadn’t I loved sex mostly out of pleasure in the munificence of my body, the tender amazement it would raise in a man’s eyes, the way one little arch of my back could incite …
    “You’re so beautiful,” Garrett said, in mourning for the thing that no longer moved him. He’ll destroy me out of curiosity, I thought— he wants to know what I look like in pain. When he touched me I expected his hands to burn me, but I wanted the child and I put the rest out of my mind, knelt on the bed beside him and let my breasts fall into his hands. He seemed bewitched, overcome—he didn’t know my actions were satirical, the motions of the dream woman he wanted me to be. In the end he nestled in against me, feeling, I guessed, forgiven, saying “Giudecca tomorrow,” so sleepily. I dreamed my milk wouldn’t come and I was trying to cut off my nipple with a pair of scissors, so the baby would have something at least to drink.
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    “We’ve started