Sleepwalking

Sleepwalking Read Online Free PDF

Book: Sleepwalking Read Online Free PDF
Author: Meg Wolitzer
Tags: Fiction, Contemporary Women
all people in her life who had died; she could not visualize any of them—not her brother, her favorite grandmother or her Aunt Sybil, who had been killed by lightning in Montana just six months earlier. So she could not tell if Julian actually looked like Seth, but, like Seth, he gave off an aura of fragility. She did not know if she trusted this quality in him. He almost seemed proud of it, the way he did nothing to hide his vulnerability fromher—looking away and blushing slightly whenever they made eye contact, stammering as he stood under her window. Since Seth died five years earlier, Claire’s family had become oriented toward strength. Her mother spooned heaping doses of lecithin and brewer’s yeast into glasses of orange juice every morning and talked on and on about endurance and will.
    Claire looked down at Julian, and he seemed small to her. His upturned face was hopeful, almost pleading. “Do you want to come up?” she asked.
    He bounded up the stairs, and she could hear his clogs clattering all the way up to her floor. Julian was the first male she had known who wore clogs, and she thought they looked good. He tapped his fingers lightly on the door. She opened it, and he seemed about to bow as he came into the room. The two of them sat in silence for a while—she smoking, he picking at some loose threads in a small tear in his jeans, as if it were a scab. She was thinking about how close to each other they were sitting. Usually she backed away, almost automatically, when anyone came too close to her. She didn’t mind Julian sitting there, though. He wasn’t demanding anything of her; he seemed to want just to sit in her room.
    “Are you taking Intro. Philosophy?” he asked her. “I saw you carrying the book.”
    “Yes,” she said.
    “Do you have Parnesi? I had him last year and he’s great.”
    “No,” Claire answered. “I have Stein.”
    “Oh,” he said. “Did you get past the
Republic
yet? It seemed like we spent an eternity on it. God, the parable of the cave—I still have dreams about it. And all that ‘Oh tell me, Glaucon,’stuff. It really starts to swamp you—you know what I mean? Wait until you reach the middle of the course and start reading about the nature of good and evil. I’ll let you look at my old papers if you want, not that they’re masterpieces.”
    She realized how hard Julian was trying to have a real rapport with her. She knew that if she was at all cold to him he would be shaken. He was handsome—slim and fair. He had that rural look, she thought: he seemed to be the type of person who would be content sitting on the front porch of a farmhouse all day, plucking a guitar and taking swigs of wine. Men who looked like that were always frightened of her, completely put off. They thought she was too abrasive, and so they stayed away. Julian, on the contrary, appeared to be fascinated, and this in turn fascinated her.
    He left after an hour of halting, broken conversation. He asked, leaning against the doorframe as if, she thought, to make it look like an afterthought, whether he could come back and study with her the following day. She nodded and could tell he was elated. Claire returned to the window as he clattered back down the stairs. She let herself fantasize for a moment about putting her arms around someone like Julian. She had not had a lover in almost two years, and the prospect of touch suddenly interested her. She watched him as he walked away from her dormitory. Even from the back he looked like Seth.
    For a week after Seth’s funeral, Claire had sat up nights with her parents and her older sister, the four of them hunching over the round kitchen table, as frazzled and grubby as Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters.
    “In death there is a sharing,” Rabbi Krinsky said at thefuneral. Claire wondered if her parents believed him. He was a sullen, brooding man who had been with the congregation only a few months.
    “All I want to do,” Seth said the day he came
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