Middle Age Read Online Free PDF Page B

assure him. Knowing his instinct would be to draw away from her in manly embarrassment. How mortified Adam would be, laid out naked like this beneath a flimsy sheet, and he’d not have liked to see Marina here, nor any of his Salthill friends. Any of his women friends. Marina’s voice echoed faintly in the room that seemed so vast, her vision severely diminished, focused upon Adam. “Yes. I can give you his lawyer’s name. But just not now. Can I be alone with him, please. Now.” Her voice rose sharply on now . This hand gripped in both her shaky hands: clearly it was a “dead”
    hand. Yet it was her dear friend’s hand. The big, bruised knuckles, thick fingers and thumbs twice the size of her own, and the nails discolored and ridged with dirt. Adam was a gardener, a handyman, a stonemason, an occasional sculptor; a man who loved to work with his hands, and put them to hard use. You could see, in Adam’s use of himself, how a man wishes to
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    pay little heed to how he wears himself out physically. Adam’s fingernails had begun to crack recently, Adam had casually complained, and this made getting the dirt out virtually impossible even with a knife blade; Marina had said it must be a mineral or vitamin deficiency, concerned for him, but Adam had been indifferent and changed the subject. “Adam. Oh, my God.” Her head was ringing. Her heart was beating strangely. (Maybe it was a cerebral hemorrhage? A gathering of pressure as of water building up outside this lighted space; as if, and for a fleeting moment, as in dream logic, she thought this might be so, she’d descended into a vessel like a submarine, deep under water.) The strangers in white had left her alone with Adam. She had the idea that they were observing her through one-way glass brick. She touched Adam’s face as perhaps she wouldn’t have done, quite like this, in life. His cheeks had gone slack. Crepey flesh beneath his jaws. Strange, he looked ashen, who in life had always seemed flushed, overheated. Now his blood was draining out of his face. Draining downward. Blood thickening in its own rigidity, as if congealing from a massive wound. There was a gash in Adam’s skull and forehead where he’d been struck by a boat (a rescue boat?) and the gash had bled, but had ceased bleeding; it would not bleed now; if cut elsewhere, Adam wouldn’t bleed; his flesh was “dead.” Marina hated it that Adam was looking so old .
    She wanted to protest to the hospital staff, Adam Berendt didn’t look like this . So old, and so ugly. Deep shadowed creases beneath his eyes, his bumpy skull visible through his thinning, short-trimmed hair, that slack mouth. In the corner of the mouth, something white and crusty. If Marina could coax a smile from him, for Adam was the sort of man you could tease, he’d be himself again, and good-looking, with that bold funny sexy swagger, but she was beginning to feel desperate, she could not make him respond. Here I am. Marina. Adam, you know me . Of course she knew that he was dead. Yet she couldn’t help thinking that, in Adam’s sly way, he was kidding; had to be kidding; breathing very faintly, but breathing. “Could this man be in a coma? ” Marina spoke sharply, accusingly. She was shivering, her teeth chattering. Her skin puckered and pimpled in goose bumps, hairs stirring at the nape of her neck. Whispering, “Can you hear me, Adam?” Yes, this was ridiculous, but she had to ask, didn’t she? “They think I’m your lover. But who is your lover? I don’t envy her.” Often, Marina was angry with Adam without informing him. She was angry with him now for behaving recklessly. Stupidly. Diving into the Hudson River? “Saving” a child from drowning? Where were the child’s parents?
    Middle Age: A Romance
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    Who will pay? Adam Berendt had died of cardiac arrest in a “boating accident”? Wasn’t it like him: offering aid to total strangers. Bad enough,