Peaceable Kingdom Read Online Free PDF Page A

like to watch him paging through his Michelin Guide, entering the churches with his head in a book. He approached each cathedral like a research problem; once she saw him peering into an empty confessional.
    In Florence, at San Lorenzo, before an altar painting of saints, a British child was asking her parents how the different martyrs died. “That’s all she wants to know,” her father said to Susanna. “What happened to the poor blokes.”
    Jerry pointed to the tray of eyeballs that St. Lucy was carrying. “Know what those are?” he asked the girl. “Marbles,” he answered for her, and the adults giggled nervously.
    Jerry had no patience with martyrs; he said they were deluded and psychotically self-indulgent. He said, “Life is short enough without asking someone to shorten it for you.” His favorite frescoes were of people engaged in ordinary tasks, oblivious to the big moment: fishermen angling peacefully in the Red Sea while Pharaoh’s soldiers are drowning; gamblers dicing in the shadow of the Crucifixion. For Jerry, these had the relevance of the latest news—just transpose the sailors in the sea to the otters in the oil spill. And in fact, like so much of the news, these paintings made Susanna feel guilty.
    She was starting to feel guilty a lot—guilty for being a tourist. How she envied the travelers who fought for their sightseeing pleasure against the fear of missing something and some greater unnamed dread. She even envied the retirees who knew they deserved a vacation. Was that more or less pathetic than envying the adulterous? Jerry said the best cure for guilt was taking positive action, but it was hard, in foreign towns, knowing what action to take. And really, had she ever? She’d known to go up and ask Jerry for a copy of his speech, but she was no longer sure that seducing him was a step toward saving the world.
    There was a new thing Jerry liked in bed: pinning her hands above her head. It made her feel like St. Sebastian waiting for the arrows. Jerry was polite about it. Before he did it he stopped and smiled, embarrassed, asking permission. He didn’t take criticism well, he got quite pouty and sulky, so Susanna didn’t mention that it wasn’t her favorite thing. She just went passive, thinking, I’m the Gandhi of the bedroom, and feeling guilty for thinking of Gandhi in this debasing context. Gandhi was her hero; she and Jerry had that in common.
    Her parents had feared that her worshipping Gandhi might be a warning sign of anorexia, though it should have been obvious how much she liked food. Jerry worried the opposite; sometimes he dissuaded her from a second helping of pasta. He encouraged her to wear clothes that showed off her skinny body, miniskirts and halters in which she looked about twelve. He especially approved of her dressing like that for his colleagues. She knew she was a trophy to him and felt guilty for liking that, too.
    She also liked it and also felt guilty when they got to Milan and checked into the hotel where the conference was being held, and at the first night’s dinner-dance Jerry steered her through the room, and she felt her blond hair and tiny white dress dazzling the famous ecologists. On the street, with Italian girls around, she didn’t feel so dazzling—but most of the ecologists were middle-aged men, even older than Jerry. For them she was all youth and sex rolled up in one female body. This reassured her in a way she’d missed since she and Jerry met. She knew it was unliberated if what you were doing for the planet was making ecologists happy with fleeting moments of fantasy sex. But wasn’t even that better than doing nothing at all?
    It was easy to feel pretty in the hotel dining room, amid the black enamel and chrome and pots of swollen white lilies. She and Jerry sat down and couldn’t very well get up when they found themselves sharing a table with three Politburo members. In fact, they were Bulgarian, or so their name cards said. They