Terms of Endearment Read Online Free PDF

mugginess of the evening coming through the open window. It was only April, but already so hot at times that the patches of hot air were almost visible. Emma sometimes thought of them as having shapes, like Casper the Ghost, only these were unfriendly little hot ghosts that settled on her shoulders or curled around her neck, making her splotchy with heat.
    After a while she began to try to decide what might make the coolest possible supper. She decided cucumber sandwiches, butit was only an abstract choice. Flap would never eat them and she didn’t have any cucumbers anyway. Unless she cooked something great he would probably read for hours without saying a word; after having sex he almost always read for hours without saying a word.
    “It would have been strange if one of us had married someone who didn’t like to read, wouldn’t it?” she said. “There must be millions of interesting people in the world who just don’t like to read.”
    Flap didn’t answer, and Emma sat looking out the window at the deepening evening, turning supper possibilities over in her mind. “The only thing I don’t like about sex is that it always means the end of a conversation,” she said.
    “Still, I guess it’s what keeps us together,” she added, not really thinking.
    “What?” Flap asked.
    “Sex,” Emma said. “We don’t talk enough for it to be conversation.”
    But Flap hadn’t really heard her. He had just spoken in response to her voice, to be polite. Emma got off the bed and began to gather up her clothes and his, feeling suddenly that she didn’t know quite what to make of things. Her own chance remark disconcerted her. She had no idea why she had said it, and no way of knowing whether she meant it or not. In the whole two years of their marriage she had never said anything similar, anything to indicate that she felt their being together was something less than a part of natural law. She had forgotten how to imagine life apart from Flap, and besides she was pregnant. If there was anything neither of them needed to think about it was the basis of their being together.
    Emma looked at him, and the fact that he still lay sprawled on the bed reading, perfectly content, perfectly solid, and completely oblivious to her, tipped her back from her strange momentary list toward the unreal. She padded off and showered, and when she came back Flap was poking in the chest of drawers looking vainly for a T-shirt.
    “They’re on the couch,” she said. “They’re even folded.”
    She felt inspired to make a Spanish omelette and hurried off to try, but it was one of the fairly frequent occasions when her inspiration didn’t quite carry her through a dish. Flap contributed to what proved a minor debacle by sitting at the table and tapping his foot while he read, something he often did when he was really hungry. When she set the dish before him he looked at it critically. He fancied himself a gourmet. Only the fact that they had no money kept him from being a wine snob as well.
    “That doesn’t look like a Spanish omelette,” he said. “That’s just Tex-Mex scrambled eggs.”
    “Well, my mother was too patrician to teach me to cook,” Emma said. “Eat it anyway.”
    “What a great day this has been,” he said, looking at her with his nice friendly eyes. “Daddy bought a new boat, I got home too late to see your mother, and now I get scrambled eggs. A perfect run of luck.”
    “Yeah, and you also got laid,” Emma said, helping herself to some of the omelette. “It happened so fast you may not remember it, but you did.”
    “Oh, stop pretending you’re neglected,” Flap said. “You aren’t neglected and you couldn’t look bitter if you tried.”
    “I don’t know,” Emma said. “I might learn.”
    It had begun to shower again, heavily. While they were finishing the omelette it stopped, and she could hear the trees dripping. The darkness outside was wet and deep.
    “You’re always saying, ‘I don’t