Temple of My Familiar Read Online Free PDF

they hate each other? These two best friends of hers who, she thought, had loved each other on sight.
    When they picked up the children, after weeks of absence, Arveyda hardly bothered to thank Zedé. He barely glanced at her. Zedé, for so dark a person, looked extremely pale.
    At dinner one night in a restaurant Carlotta finally spoke up. They’d sat like sticks the whole meal.
    “What have I done to deserve the exquisite torture you two are inflicting on me?” she said in what she hoped was a joking tone.
    “What do you mean?” her mother said quickly.
    Carlotta looked at Arveyda.
    “You never talk to, or even look at, each other anymore. It’s hell for me. What is the matter? Come on, look at each other at least.”
    She thought she saw panic in her mother’s eyes. But Zedé raised her head and looked at Arveyda. Arveyda, however, excused himself, got up from the table with a frown and left.
    She watched them struggle until she, too, was worn out, and one day she forced the whole story out of her shockingly young-looking, vulnerable, inexperienced, terrified, and pale-as-ashes mother.
    When she confronted a weary Arveyda, too listless now to think of creating new work and looking about, Carlotta suspected, for drugs, he said only: “The Greeks would know how to handle this. I don’t. Zedé and I are guilty of falling in love.”
    “But she’s my mother,” she hissed.
    “Tell me about it,” he said.
    “She’s older than you!”
    “ No! ” he said, mockingly.
    “But she’s a grandmother,” Carlotta said.
    “She is also an artist,” said Arveyda.
    “How can you love her?” she cried.
    “Don’t you?” he asked.
    They could manage, she thought, if Arveyda and her mother had never made love. But when she asked him, he was direct.
    “We made love once,” he said. “We have no intention of doing it again.” He paused. “To ask your understanding and forgiveness seems corniness personified.”
    But what of her dignity?
    Zedé came to see her, wrapping her arms around Carlotta’s legs, face pressed against her knees, her tears so profuse they soaked Carlotta’s skirt.
    “I date now. Soon, I promise, I will marry someone I love. We will go away. To Mexico, maybe. I will try to get out of your hair.”
    Carlotta’s heart was breaking. She felt it swell with tears and then crack. What does anyone know about anything? she thought. The scene with her mother emptied her of knowledge. Once again, as when she was a small child, she felt she knew nothing. That if the chair on which she sat suddenly became a canoe that floated out the window on the river of Zedé’s tears, she would not be surprised.

A CURIOUS FEATURE OF Suwelo’s face was his eyebrows. They were exaggerated crescents over his bold black eyes, and they were prematurely graying, which gave him at times an owlish look. He had this look now as he sat by the window of a train on his way to Baltimore, his tall, slightly overweight body hunched to take advantage of the last of the afternoon light coming over his shoulder. He tugged absentmindedly at his full and shapely bottom lip, while attempting to read a new novel by a former acquaintance of his:
    “Forcing back Jackie’s head, he rammed his ... into her waiting ... Half an hour later he was on top of her, making her moan with pleasure, as he galloped his horses to a heavenly finish.”
    Impatiently he flipped the pages, looking for more news of Jackie, some word on the development of this unappealing relationship, but there was nothing. At other points in the novel she was seen dressing, gossiping with her girlfriends, and going out to do the grocery shopping. Although she was the main love interest of the book, she was not even made love to again, probably much to her relief, Suwelo thought, as he scanned the hero’s chilling seduction scene with a schoolgirl a third his age, in which drugs figured prominently.
    His generation of men had failed women—and themselves—he mused,