Marry Me Read Online Free PDF

expressionless, rounded the corner and vanished. Surely she was mistaken; there are millions of men and only a few types, only a few men who aren’t types. But in fear of being recognized she lowered her gaze, so as Jerry had predicted, it was he who found her, though this was not Hell.
    ‘Sally!’ He was on the sunless side of I Street, hatless, his arm lifted as if for a taxi. In a business suit, he looked disconcertingly like everyone else, and as he waited at the intersection for the electric permission to walk, her stomach dipped as if she had been snapped awake two hundred miles from home. She asked herself, Who is this man? The sign said WALK. At the head of the pack, he trotted towards her; her heart thrashed. She hung helplessly on the curb while the distance between them diminished and her body, her whole hollowed body, remembered his twitchily posing hands, his hook nose that never took a tan but burned all summer long, hissad eyes of no certain colour, his crooked jubilant teeth. He grinned proudly but nervously stood uncertain a moment, then touched her elbow and kissed her cheek. ‘God, you look great,’ he said, ‘rolling along with that farm-girl gait, your big feet wobbling away in heels.’
    Her heart relaxed. No one else saw her this way. She came from Seattle and this made her in Jerry’s eyes a farm-girl. It was true, she had always felt uneasy in the East. There was a kind of Eastern woman, Ruth for example, who never bothered with make-up or conspicuously flirted and beside whom Sally felt clumsy. Richard noticed this and tried to analyse her insecurity. Jerry noticed and called her his girl in calico. Not since before her father died, on a trip to San Francisco, had she felt, what she supposed all children are supposed to feel, that it was somehow wonderful of her to be, in every detail, herself.
    ‘How on earth did you get away?’
    ‘I just said good-bye and got in the Saab and drove to the airport.’
    ‘You know, it’s marvellous to meet a woman who can really use the twentieth century.’ This was another fancy of his, that there was something comic and inappropriate in their living now, in this century. While making love he sometimes called her his squaw. He took pleasure, she felt, in delicately emphasizing, in never letting her forget, the incongruities that hemmed them in. His tenderness itself proclaimed that their love was illicit and doomed.
    ‘Hey’ he said, calling to her across the silence. ‘I don’t want you to take risks for me. I want to take them for you.’
    But you won’t , she thought, looping her arm through his arm and bowing her head in concentration on his walking rhythm. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said. ‘I’m here.’
    He said nothing.
    ‘You’re mad at me. I shouldn’t have come.’
    ‘I’m never mad with you. But how did you manage?’
    ‘I managed.’
    His body was mainly big bones and nerves; she felt she was holding on to a corner of a kite that was struggling to get high into the wind.
    He tugged her along. He asked, ‘Is Richard going to be away tonight?’
    ‘No.’
    He halted.
    ‘Jesus, Sally. What happened? Did you just break out? Can you get back?’
    His voice rose sharply, asking this last question. Her answer sounded in her own ears scratchy and faint. ‘Don’t worry about it, darling. I’m here with you, and everything else seems very far away.’
    ‘Talk to me. Don’t try to shame me. Tell me what happened.’
    She told him, reliving it all, frightening herself: the beach, her panic, the children, Josie, the aeroplane, her walk, her plan to call home in an hour saying she was in Manhattan and that the Saab had broken down, refusing to start, and the Fitches had invited her to stay the night, since the art-appreciation course she was taking at the Metropolitan Museum met tomorrow morning.
    ‘Sweetie, it won’t swing,’ he told her. ‘Let’s try to besane. If I put you on a plane now, you can still get back by