The Drowning House Read Online Free PDF

when it arrived, was sweet. And I made a real effort to enjoy it without gloating. At the same time, I was hurt—and angry—that the opinions of a group of relative strangers meant so much more to him than mine. If he couldn’t see for himself, make hisown judgment and defend it, if he was going to take it on faith from someone, why not from me?
    The deal bought the two of us, as a couple, some time. There were meetings, there was a contract to be read, considered, signed—this was Michael at his best, lasering through the pages of stultifying prose, offering elegant, subtle changes. There were celebrations. There was backslapping and applause.
    It was like a wave that comes in and covers everything strewn across the beach, all the small items that up until then have been the focus of much attention. The arguments we had been having, the facts we had stockpiled for the sake of having those arguments again, all the details that, a few days before, had preoccupied us, disappeared under the smooth swell of activity.
    I have been tempted to blame what came afterward on Michael, to say he was the one who was ambitious for the kind of street-corner recognition that comes with commercial success. I would like to be able to claim that I had nothing to do with it. But I can’t.
    I wanted to sell the photo as much as he did, maybe more. It wasn’t something I had anticipated. We didn’t need the money, Michael was doing well, and he had never held it against me that my income, when I had any, was sporadic. But when the pieces of the transaction came together into a whole in front of me, it was like the lights going up on a stage. I saw immediately that there was a place for me on it. So Michael and I together traded away a portion of our daughter’s childhood. Our reasons may have been different, but we acted together.
    Don’t misunderstand, Bailey adored it. This is how I defend myself in the conversations I have over and over with no one. I say that Bailey shivered with delight to find herself in window displays and on the pages of magazines. And once as a cardboard cutout, almost life-size, in a shopping mall. The image seemed to be everywhere. Sometimes we’d stop to look at it and a passerby would discover the likeness. Oh my, is that you? It’s you! That was part of it. She was a minor celebrity.
    But she was so young.
    A child spends her first years in a kind of trance, an uninterruptedflow of sensation, from which she wakes into consciousness only now and then. Her sense of self begins as flashes— this is my hair, long enough now to reach my mouth, to grind between my teeth; this is my cheek, creased from the way I slept —realizations that are, for a child, like electric shocks that sizzle along the nerve endings. Too much, too soon is like being struck by lightning.
    Bailey was not, would never be, a professional model, despite both hints and more direct offers. That was not something either Michael or I would have contemplated. The photo, after all, was the point. It was enough. And I had thought it would end there.
    What neither of us had foreseen was how the campaign would change her. Not in a way that would have been apparent to a casual observer. I saw it, though, and I knew Michael did too. Bailey held herself differently. Her movements were purposeful in a way they hadn’t been before. Her headlong grace was gone.
    I told myself it would have happened anyway, Bailey was getting older. She was a little girl, and girls, especially those gifted with an extra measure of charm, like to practice their skills. They may go through a phase where they make up to people, especially to men. Why did I find it so disturbing? I only know that there were times when, watching Bailey pirouetting in front of Michael, trying out sideways glances and theatrical sighs, I felt sick at heart.
    Michael, as the object of her new attentions, was pleased. He didn’t see her looking over her shoulder, seeking an audience, when she