The Big Seven Read Online Free PDF Page A

pleasant, Sunderson was glad when Marion left a few days later because the truth in what he said made Sunderson’s whole being ache. Look where his sloppiness had brought him. The evening after his lecture was the first he didn’t bribe an attendant to bring him a pint of whiskey. It was very hard to go to sleep without the whiskey and he had tortured dreams of Sonia’s bare legs and the visiting pastor braying about the Seven Deadly Sins. In the sixth grade all the boys sat in front and marveled at the teacher’s legs carelessly covered by loose skirts. He knew according to the Bible that could kill him and when he awoke before dawn he tried to sort out what he believed in a religious sense. Not certainly that Sonia’s bare legs were sinful. Everything was assumptions held over from his youth. He meant to read the New Testament again when he got home to see if he actually believed it.
    He and Marion had planned an extensive fishing and camping trip for his recovery. On the fifth week of rehab he was shuffling in the gym. It seemed like a miracle but ultimately all he could feel was disappointment. Diane flew him home in a medical jet. God knows what that cost. A big Finnish girl stayed with him as a full-time attendant to buy groceries, cook, clean, and help him dress in the morning. He had lost all flexibility and despaired of going fishing. The girl walked with him in case he fell. Each day they walked farther. He fell once on a curb but luckily landed on grass. He feared breaking bones again but was okay when he got up with difficulty. The girl screamed when he fell and people came running so it was embarrassing. He knew everybody and explained lamely that he had broken his back in New York. He saw the Finnish girl naked after a shower but was only slightly aroused. As men say it was too much meat on the hoof with an ass an ax-handle wide.
    One morning he walked much more vigorously and was encouraged. He spent hours at the dining room table sorting out his fishing equipment with a fishing song in his heart. He needed an extra pain pill for his exertion. He hated the pills—after all, his problems came from mental fuzziness. But he had to decide that he was lucky not to be dead. He was puzzled by how in the sweep of life we end up where we do. Both our good and bad decisions appear to us in peculiar knots that lack the clarity of our original intentions. He had gone to New York to retrieve Mona which now seemed preposterous. Could he walk around the corner without tripping on a toad? He thought humility could be debilitating but now it was apparent that it wasn’t. It was wisdom if anything.
    Given his condition one day on his walk two months after his return he and Marion reduced their plan for the trip to going to Marion’s cabin for a week to do a little fishing and just hang out. It seemed sensible to reduce their ambitions until he was conclusively okay. Marion was much bigger than he so he could carry most of the gear. When Sunderson gathered his gear for the trip he was upset at its shabbiness, another area of his life he had neglected.
    Diane stopped by. She heard daily from the Finnish girl who had told her that he was going camping. She disagreed strongly but backed down seeing he was adamant. She had tears of worry in her eyes as he stumbled around. The Finnish girl had reported that every morning he sat in his studio, pulling a book from the shelf so he could watch the neighbor woman doing yoga in her leotard. Diane didn’t care. He had been doing this for years. It used to be nude Mona he watched.
    “Marion’s big and strong. He can carry me himself if I fall,” he said.
    Suddenly she hugged him and he shivered.
    “I still love you,” he choked out. Years after the divorce, she was still never out of his thoughts.
    “You have to stop and find a life,” she said. “You’re a mess.”
    “I know it. Marion gave me a lecture in New York and I could see my downfall clearly. I even quit