Kolchak's Gold Read Online Free PDF Page B

my love for Nikki.
    Her image intruded upon the screen of my vision at all times, yet this didn’t make my work more difficult; only more pleasant. Work, to me, has never been an ethical virtue; it has been the great pleasure of my life, my raison d’être. But with Nikki there was additional reward: the promise of happiness at the end of each day. The quiet talk, the candle-lit dinners and always the laughter. We regarded anything, no matter what, as a challenge to our sense of humor.
    But from the beginning we both knew that was a defensive barrier. Laughter is an expression of existential feelings: it is of the present. Rely on it too much and you preclude a view of the future. It was because both of us, for our own reasons, wanted to ignore consequences: we didn’t want to think of tomorrow.
    Tomorrow held no specific threat for me; whether it did for Nikki I had no way of knowing then. For me it was only the fear of repetition. I had helped ruin my marriage to Eileen and I was afraid of it happening again. There were vast differences between Eileen and Nikki but it was myself I feared.
    My marriage had been poor almost from the beginning; I had several tormented years with Eileen’s jealous hysterics but it was hard to forget her because I couldn’t help remembering the good times as well as the horrors. But it had always had a tentative quality. Eileen offered an American woman’s brand of love, which was about half the whole thing; she was presentable, she was sexually agreeable, she made a dutiful mother and hausfrau; and she was singularly unexciting. Wherever we lived she always put me in mind of a neat gadgety little house, a neat lawn blooming with roses, gravel driveways, Early American mailboxes. That was her background and she never escaped it. I kept an image of her laying the baby down wet in the bassinet, her mouth cooing, her hair done up in ugly curlers, the tails of one of my old shirts flapping around her hips.
    Our daughter was killed in a school bus that went over the edge into the Delaware River. She was eight years old. I suppose it was afterward that everything flew apart but the seeds had been germinating for years and there was nothing left to hold us together: the more bored we became with each other, the more jealousy ruled Eileen’s imagination. She became fixated on a wholly false idea that I had turned into a satyr; she asked constant idiotic questions in a demanding voice and finally it drove me in defiance into the very kind of meaningless affairs she dreaded. I made no great secret of them. There were three or four histrionic scenes and finally, having justified her near-paranoia, she filed for divorce. I did not contest it.
    It’s distasteful to write these things but it seems necessary. When I met Nikki I had convinced myself of my own unreliability; I did not regard myself as being capable of sustaining anything more demanding than a brief affair.
    Nikki had lost her husband two years ago and I assumed she too was not yet ready for anything like a serious relationship. We never mentioned marriage. It was as if the word had been erased from our lexicon. We made no plans more than a few days ahead. We delighted in each other in a broken instant of suspended time and gave no thought to what might come after. Yet it seems important to try and convey an understanding that we had no sense that it was temporary. That would have implied an anticipated ending, and we had none; we reserved nothing, withheld nothing—nothing intimate. There were things we did not discuss very much (our own backgrounds for example) but that was because those topics didn’t fit into the style we had adopted with each other, or so it seemed at the time; I had no feeling she was keeping deliberate secrets and I know I kept none.
    The idyll extended into the cherry-blossom spring; we took our exercise on horseback in Rock Creek Park, we drifted down the canals, we picnicked on