Summer Lies Read Online Free PDF

would stay with her and keep her company. But he couldn’t think of the right thing. “I love you,” he said over and over again. “I love you.”
11
    He would have liked to see the house and the beach one more time from the plane. But they lay to the north, and the flight was headed southwest. He looked down at sea and islands, then Long Island, and finally Manhattan. The plane flew in a big turn as far as the Hudson and he recognized the church that stood only a few steps from his apartment.
    It had been hard to get used to his neighborhood. It was noisy,and at the beginning when he came home past the cool, tough kids sitting out on the stoops in front of the houses or leaning on the railings drinking and smoking and playing loud music, he hadn’t felt safe. Sometimes they said things to him and he didn’t understand what they wanted and why they looked at him so truculently and laughed at him mockingly once he’d passed them by. Once they blocked his path and wanted his flute case—he thought they wanted to steal the flute, but they just wanted to see it and hear it. They switched off the music and were suddenly ill at ease in the ensuing silence. He was ill at ease too and still anxious on top of it, and first the flute sounded thin, but then he got braver and more at ease and the kids hummed the melody and clapped to the rhythm. Afterward he drank a beer with them. Since then they always hailed him with “Hey, pipe,” or “Hola, flauta,” and he greeted them back and gradually learned their names.
    His apartment was noisy too. He heard his neighbors fighting, hitting one another, and having sex, and he knew their favorite programs on TV and the radio. One night he heard a shot fired in the building and for the next few days he eyed everyone he passed on the staircase suspiciously. When a neighbor invited him to a party, he tried to match up the people to the noises: the thin-lipped woman to the bickering voice, the man with the tattoos to the blows, the large daughter and her boyfriend to the sounds of sex. Once a year he repaid the invitations by giving a party himself, at which those neighbors, who hated one another, managed to behave well for his sake. He was never given any grief for his flute playing; he could practice early in the mornings and late at night, and wouldn’t have disturbed anyone even at midnight. He always slept with earplugs.
    The neighborhood changed over the years. Young couplesrenovated run-down houses and transformed empty stores into restaurants. Richard met neighbors who were doctors, lawyers, and bankers, and could take his visitors out to a proper dinner. His building was one of the ones that remained as they were; the heirs who owned it were too conflicted among themselves to sell it or work on it. But he liked it that way. He liked the noises. They gave him the feeling that he was living in the real world, not just a rich enclave.
    He became aware that when he’d described the next days and weeks to Susan, he’d left out the second oboe. They met weekly for dinner at the Italian restaurant on the corner, talked about life as Europeans in America, their professional hopes and disappointments, orchestra gossip, women—the oboist came from Vienna and found American women as difficult as Richard had up to now. He had also left out the old man who lived on the top floor of his building and sometimes came down in the evening for a game of chess with him and played so imaginatively and profoundly that Richard never minded always losing. He hadn’t told her about Maria, one of the kids from the street, who had somehow got hold of a flute, had him show her how to hold it and put it to her mouth and read the music and kissed him on the lips and gave him a full-body hug when she said goodbye. Nor had he told her about Spanish lessons with the exiled Salvadoran teacher who lived on the next street over, nor about the decrepit fitness center where he felt comfortable. All he had