The Book of You: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

weren’t your smells.
    “Are you better, Clarissa?”
    Fairness is not something you understand. It is not something you deserve. But I will be fair by talking to you one final time before refusing ever to talk to you again. This morning will be very different from Monday.
    I speak calmly to you, in a polite voice. It is far from the first time I say it. “I don’t want you near me. I don’t want to see you. I don’t want anything to do with you. No form of contact. No letters. No gifts. No calls. No visits. Don’t come to my house again.”
    My speech is perfect. Just as I rehearsed. I move away quickly, not looking at you, though you are clear enough in my head to provide an exact witness description.
    You are six feet tall and large boned. Your belly used to be flat, but you must be drinking more because it isn’t now. Your hips have widened, too, over the last month. Your nose is ordinary in the blur of your puffy round face, which has lost its definition.
    More than anything else, you are pale. Pale in mind. Pale in soul. Pale in body. Your skin is so pale you flush easily, going from white to ruddy in a flash. Your pale-brown hair is straight and short, not at all thinning. It is unusually soft and silky for a man’s. Your brows are pale brown. Your eyes are pale, watery blue. They are small. Your lips are thin. They are pale too.
    You touch my arm and I shake you off, walking down the path to the waiting taxi.
    “I was coming to check on you,” you say, as if I haven’t spoken at all. “Your phone’s still not on,” you say. “I worry when I can’t get hold of you,” you say.
    With you beside me it seems a long walk through the path of Miss Norton’s wintering rosebushes, but I am at the taxi and must have reached it quickly.
    I open the rear door and get in, trying to pull it closed behind me, but you catch it before I can.
    “Move over, Clarissa. I’ll come with you.” You are bending over. Your head and torso are inside. I can smell your toothpaste. The mint is strong. You’ve probably used mouthwash, too.
    The composure I have practiced so carefully dissolves. “This man isn’t with me,” I say to the driver, the same one who picked me up yesterday morning. “I don’t want him getting in.”
    “Stop bothering her. Get the fuck out of my car or I’m calling the police,” the driver says.
    My mother has told me all of my adult life that taxi drivers see it as part of their job to be protective; they know that’s why women pay for taxis. My mother is often right, and I am lucky with this driver. In my mother’s visions of taxi drivers as heroic saviors, they are always big and burly men.
    This one is a woman, middle-aged and short, but stout and tough and fearless-seeming, with beautiful cropped spiky gray hair that I am certain she would never dream of dyeing. She wears jeans and a fuzzy orange wool sweater. She does not show you the warmth and joviality that filled her car during yesterday’s brief journey. She is opening her own door, showing you she’s prepared to enforce her words.
    You withdraw your head and torso and stand just inches from the door as I slam it closed and the driver slams hers.
    You bang a fist on the roof. “How can you treat me like this, Clarissa?”
    The driver presses the button to lower the front passenger window, shouts threateningly at you, and moves off.
“Clarissa? Clarissa! I don’t deserve this, Clarissa.”
    I still refuse to look at you. I’m trying so hard to stick to the advice, to do this right. I can see in my peripheral vision that you are running beside the taxi to the end of the street, slapping the trees and lampposts as you pass them. I can hear you calling my name. The driver is muttering under her breath about what a fucking crazy idiot you are. She is apologizing for her language, and I am apologizing for being so troublesome. We each tell the other that no apology is needed, though I know she is just being nice and mine is. I