Evil Eye Read Online Free PDF Page A

chagrined rather than hurt. (For lovemaking was so much less personal than other forms of engagement. In lovemaking, Mariana had no doubt but that her widely experienced husband scarcely recalled which wife, or which mistress, he held in his straining arms.) But their lovemaking passed almost entirely in silence and so the particular hurt might be more readily forgotten.
    If Mariana whispered I love you! to Austin, often he’d drifted into sleep and could not respond. His sleep was heavy, sweaty, labored; his breathing was hoarse and irregular; like a waterlogged body Mariana thought him, floating just beneath the surface of the water. . . .
    The thought of Austin’s death terrified her. Her throat closed up, the thought was so awful.
    Oh but I love you! I love you. . . .
    Yet how strange it was to Mariana, that Austin seemed deaf to her apologies. She had never met anyone who seemed so resolutely not to hear . It hardly mattered if Mariana gave in immediately, admitting her mistake and apologizing, as if in his fury Austin was remembering previous experiences with women in which he’d been thwarted, insulted, betrayed.
    She wondered if he blamed the first wife, Ines, for the son’s death. Maybe that was it: he could not forgive the woman, he was not even aware of his rage for her, that spilled over onto Mariana.
    She was so lonely sometimes! The mad thought came to her, she would become pregnant, despite the man’s precautions: she would have a baby, that she would be less lonely.
    But now, how wounding it was to Mariana, a soft-spoken young woman who had never learned to assert herself, still less to defend herself—the way in which her husband glared at her as if he loathed her; the very man who, in the early weeks of their romance, had gazed at Mariana with eyes soft with love.
    That love she’d believed—-she’d known— to be genuine.
    Now she didn’t know what to believe. Her husband would “love” her again—but could she believe him?
    It was as if Austin saw, in Mariana’s place, an ever-shifting female form, diaphanous, unpredictable, and untrustworthy, that fascinated and enraged him by turns. He did not see her.
    Already in this first year of marriage Mariana had thought several times that the marriage must be over. Her husband had had enough of her—was finished with her. He’d looked at her with such disgust, dismay, incredulity, rage—he’d actually clenched his fists as if he’d have liked nothing better than to strike her.
    She’d wanted to flee the house. It was a beautiful house in a beautiful setting and yet—Mariana was coming to hate it.
    Flee the Berkeley hills, so beautiful and yet so treacherous—the tight-curving narrow roads, hardly more than single lanes, rising into the steep misshapen hills, in which more than one center of gravity seemed to draw one downward, vertiginously; all of Panoramic Hill, as it was called, a fire hazard, obviously—for no fire trucks could make their way on such twisting roads.
    It was earthquake terrain, too. When Mariana mentioned this fact, Austin laughed dismissively.
    â€œThe world will end, too, one day. Fortunately, I don’t plan on being here.”
    Here was I , and not we. In his careless fantasy of the apocalypse, Austin wasn’t including any wife.
    After one of Austin’s outbursts Mariana was sure that Austin would let her go. And she wasn’t sure that she really wanted to remain with him, in so precarious and unstable a marriage.
    Then again she thought, chilled, Without this man, I am nothing. I am a daughter/orphan. I don’t exist.
    After the spinach incident they’d had a strained dinner together on the deck overlooking the Pacific sunset: Mariana hadn’t dared to speak, and Austin had scarcely glanced at her. He’d been preoccupied with other thoughts, that Mariana supposed had little to do with her, who’d entered his life