Darling? Read Online Free PDF Page B

crack as he bit down.
    “Very good, delicious!” said he, who can’t bear to drop a lobster into a pot. I bit a bird in two at the belly so as to avoid its little beak—it tasted mostly of ashes.
    Gino cocked a brow and moved as if to give Garrett another helping.
    “Oh, no, I couldn’t, I’ve had four already.”
    Gino leaned across the table and counted with his fork. “No, two,” he said.
    Etta fed Giorgio a spoonful of polenta. “They made me a little nervous, when I first came,” she said with some condescension, “but now I really like them. I mean, it’s no different than beef, really.” She still sounded ready for a fight. Had I imagined I could fall so easily into the flow of Italy, with no understanding of all she had to swallow? Well, then, more songbirds! Wasn’t she the gentle sister, the one who deserved all the babies and love? See the tender care she took, twisting off each little foot, adding it to the neat pile at the side of her plate. “I’m surprised ’Nardo had them this time of year,” she said.
    “They come in from China,” Gino said. “No Italian birdies left.”
    Garrett poured more wine, and I drank it, wondering if I ought to, but really it seemed impossible that I could be nourishing, or poisoning, some new being inside myself, a child who would inherit a legacy of love and rage like the one passed so long ago to Etta and me. I took a little scorched head in my mouth and snapped its neck with ease.
    “You didn’t need to go to so much trouble just for us, Etta,” I said. “We’re family.”

Darling?
    Waiting at Karp’s office door, Daisy thought of Freud’s admission that women were still a dark continent to him, and so very nearly said “Dr. Livingstone!” when he appeared. She had insisted on a man, someone honest and exact whose tenderness would be hidden, of course, but vast. Seeing Karp she felt she was safe: he was stooped as under some ancient weight, his nervous fingers raked thin hair.… He extended a damp hand, and she relaxed: there would be no accidents of magnetism here. Daisy knew how to fall in love, how to let a man fall in love with her, but now that she was married, settled in life, this attribute had become a liability. It was like having an old gun around; you might lock it away in the attic, put it out of your mind, but sooner or later some rage or despair would remind you that just a few steps up the back staircase and into the dark, you’ll find the means to blow a big hole in the world.
    She had her rages and despairs listed on a notecard, and rattled them off for Karp: Hugh, her husband, was too gloomy. He had refused her a child, and out with the baby had gone the whole marriage. He touched her now as if she were an unexploded bomb. Not that she couldn’t manage, she was an excellent manager—all lives are compromised after all, God knew she was lucky, living in an old whaling port where the feel of history (dark, cold, and fear, transmuted by nostalgia and electricity into a sense of mysterious comfort and intrigue) was still resident in the narrow streets so that vacationers yearned for a keepsake of that time. Daisy kept an antique shop. She had been saved from an anxious, threadbare life: she ought to have been grateful. A marriage requires sacrifice.…
    She glanced over at Karp: he’d slid down in his chair and was absently rubbing his neck, craning it, absorbed in some sensual agony, while she went on in a dull querulous voice—“I’m sorry,” she said, “I need to be less dependent, I expect so much.…”
    “You feel there are people who make do with less love and encouragement than you, and you’d like to be more like them, so you wouldn’t be lonely and sad.”
    “I didn’t say lonely and sad.”
    “Maybe not. Next week then?”
    It was a disappointment—nothing had happened. But then, what was he supposed to do, turn into Fred Astaire and dance her up the wall? One is ridiculous, she thought, driving the hundred