Love Always Read Online Free PDF

the price of one, and a cold front moving in from the North. Then came a Möbius strip of music. All over America, people were driving around hearing a song and remembering exactly where they were, who they loved, how they thought it would turn out. In traffic jams, women with babies and grocery bags were suddenly eighteen years old, in summer, on the beach, in the arms of somebody who hummed that song in their ear. They ironed to songs they had slow-danced to, shot through intersections on yellow lights the way they always had, keeping time with the Doors’ drumbeat. They might have to be reminded of many of the names of kids they had gone to school with, but once they heard the name, they could say with certainty which of them thought John was the best Beatle and which thought Paul was. They were as sure of the top ten, the summer they graduated from high school, as any minister of the Ten Commandments. It was how people kept in touch with their past. And above all, no matter how many other people had danced to it or made love to it or hung pictures of Jackson Browne or Bruce Springsteen or Van Halen in their bedroom, it was personal. Cyndi Lauper was singing “Time After Time” when Lucy turned off the radio. Bad enough that one song, or two songs, could break your heart—she had to make the mistake of falling in love with somebody who was an addict to all of it. It was like falling in love with someone and having it be your own special secret that the sun went down at night.
    It was still difficult for Lucy to believe that she had spent more than ten years in New York. Every time she got in her car now, she remembered with amazement all the time she had spent on buses and in subways and being thrown around in cabs. She had had a car then, but it was impossible to drive inthe city. She stored it in a carport in Hackensack, for $25 a month, with a woman who was a cousin of a woman Lucy had gone to school with. At the time, this had made perfect sense. On weekends—almost every weekend, when she got together with Les Whitehall—they drove to the Hudson Valley, or to see friends of hers in Connecticut. In retrospect it was amazing to realize that at least once a week she had been amazed that there was still a sky. She had gotten so used to the hard edges of things that she had come to think of the world as a gigantic coloring book, all outlines and shapes, so clearly delineated that there was little need to fill it in. One star. Two. A sky that looked like corridors, one turn after another determined by the tops of buildings jutting up as obstacles. The most needed crayon was gray.
    Lucy had gone to New York because she thought that she would become a success. There was quite a difference between being successful, which she might have done anywhere, and being a success. Being a success meant being a personality, and New York was a big stage, always ready. The props distracted people, though, and Lucy was no exception. She began to work less; to worry more about getting enough sleep, which resulted in restless nights and dragged-out days; and as she lost ground, to fixate on what she had. By the time she doubted that she was going to be a success, it was also clear that the city had a way of keeping people. Life was so difficult that small triumphs began to look like success. Managing to keep your car so near the city seemed a real coup. The city always allowed people to fool themselves. There were statistics of people mugged or robbed or raped, but it still seemed that there was safety in numbers. There was something solid about New York that couldn’t be shaken. It was a wall, and the people were Humpty Dumpty; the New York
Times
, the mayor, even signs hurriedly printed and hung on trees warned them to be careful, so if they toppled, they could only blame themselves. The king’s horses and the king’s men couldn’t help them. The horses were for hire, trotting around Central Park with carriages full of