Separate Flights Read Online Free PDF Page A

the first mile.’
    â€˜You’re my lovely what.’
    â€˜Good old Jack, just part of the family.’
    â€˜Sure. You make me a good wife. If I didn’t love you I’d have to love someone else. We married too young—’
    â€˜We all did.’
    Once at a party Terry was in the kitchen with Edith and two other wives. They came out grinning at the husbands: their own, the others. They had all admitted to shotgun weddings. That was four years ago and now one couple is divorced, another has made a separate peace, fishing and hunting for him and pottery and college for her; and there are the Allisons and the Linharts. A deck-stacking example, but the only one I know.
    â€˜He needs us, Sharon and me, but he can’t really love anyone, only his work, and the rest is surface.’
    â€˜I don’t believe that.’
    â€˜I don’t mean his friendship with you. Of course it’s deep, he doesn’t live with you, and best of all you’re a man, you don’t have those needs he can’t be bothered with. He’d give you a kidney if you needed one.’
    â€˜He’d give it to you too.’
    â€˜Of course he would. But he wouldn’t go to a marriage counselor.’
    â€˜You funny girl. After a long carnivorous fuck you talk about a marriage counselor. Who are you, sweetheart?’
    â€˜My name is Edith Allison and I’m the leader of the band. I wanted to go to a marriage counselor so he’d talk. Because he wouldn’t talk just to me. He wanted everything simple: he’d been screwing Jeanne, now he’d stopped, and that was that.’
    â€˜What more did you want?’
    â€˜You know what I wanted. Remember me back in May? I still believed in things. I wanted to know where we were, what Jeanne meant. Now that I have you I know what she meant: that he doesn’t love me. You love the person you’re having the affair with. But it doesn’t matter now, I can live with him like that, on the surface. He’ll be busting out again soon. He’s been hibernating with that novel since he broke off with Jeanne. Before long he’ll look around and blink and screw the first thing that walks into his office.’
    â€˜Jesus. I hope somebody goes in before I do.’
    â€˜He’d probably do that too.’
    â€˜Now, now: bitchy bitchy.’
    â€˜Well, he screws his wife once in a while, so why not another man.’
    â€˜He screws you? Frigid like you are?’
    â€˜I try hard.’
    â€˜I hear you can go to St. Louis and screw for that man and woman who wrote the book. The one about coming.’
    â€˜Really?’
    â€˜Sure. They watch you and straighten out your hang-ups.’
    â€˜Let’s you and I go. I’d like them to watch us. We’d make them hot.’
    â€˜You might get rid of your guilt. Do you good.’
    â€˜Why spoil my fun? Maybe you’d learn to come more.’
    â€˜What would a wee dirty lass like you have told a marriage counselor?’
    â€˜I was trying to keep from being a wee dirty lass. I’m glad now I didn’t. What are you doing?’
    â€˜Touching you.’
    â€˜Isn’t it getting late?’
    â€˜I don’t know.’
    â€˜Can you again?’
    â€˜I don’t know.’
    We left our shirts on, a wrong move: they reminded us that time was running out. My back hurt but I kept trying; Edith didn’t make it either, and finally she said: ‘Let’s stop.’ Our shirts were wet. We gathered up the bottles, the cigarettes, the blanket. In the car she made up her face.
    â€˜What’ll you do with the bottles?’ I said.
    â€˜I think I’ll burn candles in them at dinner. And if he notices—which he wouldn’t—I’ll tell him they’re souvenirs from this afternoon. Along with my sore pussy.’
    â€˜He’ll see them in the garbage. You know, when he empties it or something.’
    She started