Sparrow Nights Read Online Free PDF

more?”
    “Yes,” she said again.
    “These are terrible words, Emma.”
    “Yes.”
    “Is there anyone else?” I asked. “Or did I lose you all on my own?”
    “All on your own,” she said with a smile.
    She offered me a sexual favour, which I accepted, but I had just begun a new medical prescription and I could not see it to completion. She stayed a while longer, although I can’t imagine what we talked about.
    “I shan’t walk you downstairs,” I said as she hovered in the bedroom doorway. Those were my last words to her. I lay in bed, looking down on the park, and I heard the front door close and then creak open. She came back and pulled it to firmly. I fancied, a few moments later, that I heard the rattle of her bicycle chain as she unlocked it and pulled it through her spokes, circling her saddle with it and locking it again. Yes, the window was open, I must have heard it. Then absolute silence, a parking lot reaching all the way to the horizon.

C H A P T E R         4
    F or the first few days I wandered about in a state of relief. At least I knew . But then it started up again, waking in the morning too early, imagining her in bed with her boss, spread-eagled in ecstatic, name-calling abandon. I knew enough about bodies and their predictability to know that no matter how much a woman adores you, she will invariably end up repeating her favourite repertoire in the bed of the man who replaces you. A thought that, when it struck, made me want to sit down in the street.
    I went to the doctor and got a dose of stronger sleeping pills. My appetite was gone and I continued to lose weight. Students began to comment on it. I told them I had taken up jogging. I began to worry that lack of sleep and weakness were going to cost me my job. At a spring book sale a chap from the Department of Semiotics took a photograph of me and pinned it up in the faculty lounge. With uncharacteristically high cheekbones and sunken eyes, my horror dwelt in plain sight.
    Women were strangely drawn to me. On the subway one evening I noticed a dark-haired woman staring at me. Normally I’m very shy, but I struck up a conversation with her. It didn’t matter what she thought of me. When we arrived at my platform, I invited her with breathtaking nonchalance to take a coffee with me. Of course she accepted. We talked for an hour, she came back to my house and we went to bed. It went quite well. Aha, I thought, this is how to do it: cure a sexual wound sexually. But when I saw her a second time a few days later, I didn’t like her face when she laughed, her prominent pink gums. I wondered how I’d missed them in the first place.
    Soon afterwards a high school teacher solicited my attention in the corner grocery store. I’d seen her many times before, a narrow-shouldered woman with skin so pale it was almost blue. Living with Emma, I’d often watched her wander up the street after school, always dressed in black, and I’d entertained some rather guilty daydreams about her. There was a particular thing I wanted to do to her. En tout cas , I took her to dinner at an Italian restaurant on Baldwin Street. We had a bottle of wine, then another. I drank most of it. It went splendidly, and near eleven, the wine glowing on my face, she drove me back to my house and parked her car in the driveway. We came in the side door, and something about the way I moved, the series of habitual movements from sticking my key in the doorknob and turning it simultaneously to pushing open the door, which made a very particular squeak, to clicking on the hall light with my right hand, the keys making the same jingle they always made, suggested to me, to my body, rather, that I was coming home with Emma after another night at our local restaurant. And suddenly the notion that I was taking another woman through this sacred ritual struck me as obscene and indecent. But I was too frightened to be left alone with my own thoughts, so I offered her a drink