Envy Read Online Free PDF Page B

moves. Through the turning circle she jumps, over and over, the scuff of shoes against pavement alternating with the light slap of the rope. The elastic comes off the end of her moving braid, and her hair, after a few turns of the rope, comes undone and flies up with every jump. She smiles and shows him the completely unexpected beauty of the gap between her teeth. Coming home from work, he finds a smudgy greeting underfoot, chalk hieroglyphs on the sidewalk in front of their house. How many times in a single day can he bear to be shown what is at once too valuable to surrender and guaranteed to be taken? She is flesh of his flesh, a small and perfect creature who is all promise, no regrets or disappointed hopes. He is her father. That her life will have its portion of unhappiness and ill fortune seems impossible, a species of crime, a wrong that must be righted.
    Is Carole prey to thoughts like these when she watches their daughter in a school play, when she counts her years in cake candles? Will doesn’t think so. The woman he married isn’t inclined to melancholy; she neither speculates about what might go wrong nor dwells on what already has. She loves him, even as much as he loves her, Will believes, but she isn’t romantic or even sentimental; her boundaries are definite; she has thoughts she will not share and assumes the same is true of him. A blessing, in that certain of his preoccupations are those that might alarm a wife. His sexual fixation, for example, which is beginning to feel too big to keep inside his head. Was there even one woman he encountered the previous evening, one upon whose body he allowed his gaze to linger, without seeing himself— seeing her—well, without seeing what he saw? Even were he to remember one, the act of calling her back before his mind’s eye would disqualify her: she wouldn’t get away a second time.
    He wants to believe that love can’t make mistakes, but what he knows is that it’s like water, assuming the shape of the vessel, always imperfect, that holds it. He’s not a blameless father or a perfect husband, and though he’s made a career of listening to other people’s problems, he can’t always respond with patience and insight. He does bear witness: this is a role as old as childhood, as old as his consciousness of his brother’s suffering. He opens old wounds and binds up new ones, strips away defenses, shores up egos. To be paid for the work he craves seems marvelous to Will, a reason to give thanks—but to what, to whom? Because he’s also a tortured agnostic, suffering spasms of private, even desolate, self-examination. Alert to coincidence and unanticipated symmetry, to aspects aligning in patterns, almost readable, he sifts, sorts, and turns the pieces, lays them down and picks them up in what amounts to an endless game of mental solitaire, occasionally drawing close to something that comes out neatly and looks like a grand and universal plan, a sequence of details in which, as the saying goes, God resides. Summoned to his door by a pair of canvassing Jehovah’s Witnesses, Will not only accepts the literature they press into his hands, he reads it. Accosted on his own corner by a canvassing flock of young Lubavitchers who demand to know if he’s a Jew, he stammers in confusion, receiving the question as a challenge to him, him in particular, rather than the proselytizer’s customary preface. He’s not so much godless as God-bereft.
    Armed, of course, with distractions from existential anxiety. Apart from sex, there’s real estate: he’s landed. He’s even a landlord, if only incidentally and only as a means of managing the debt they carry on their home. A personal trainer who works at a local health club rents the top floor of the brownstone they were lucky enough to buy before the market recovered, a now mostly fixed fixer-upper, with bay windows, an ornate cornice, and a