The Half Life and Swim Read Online Free PDF

most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. “It’s not natural to swim?”
    “It’s not natural to hide,” she said. Her cheeks were flushed underneath the rouge, and a vein in her neck was fluttering. “Or to pretend you don’t want love.”
    “I’m not hiding,” I said, and shoved my hair behind my ear, off my scarred cheek, to emphasize the point. “And I do want love. Just not right now.”
    “So when, then?” she asked. “Next year? The year after that? Five years? I’m not going to live forever, Ruthie, and”—she reached across the table to grab my chin in her pincer grip— “nobody else is, either. You should know that. You, of all people.”
    I nodded, pulling my head away. “Okay,” I muttered, sounding like a chastened teenager. “Fine.”
    She pretended she didn’t hear me. “Decaf,” she said, lifting her empty cup. “Please.”
    Later that night, I turned on my computer. There was one e-mail in my in-box, one lonely e-mail from Lonelyguy. “Sorry I stood you up,” Gary said. “Something suddenly came up. I could meet you after work any night this week, or if you’re free we could hook up tomorrow.”
    I stared at the message for a while. Maybe Lonelyguy was all there was for girls like me. Girls like Taryn, the gorgeous, confident ones, got the pick of the litter; girls like me got to choose among the also-rans and wannabes, the humor-impaired pistachio-eaters who’d think they were doing us a big favor by dating us and expect a lifetime of gratitude, not to mention oral sex, as recompense.
    I thought of Gary in the coffee shop, all shaving cuts and eagerness, without any of Robert’s edge, his black, cutting humor, and I wrote, “What occurs to me after a careful reading of your profile is that you were right. Sorry to be blunt, but there’s very little here to distinguish you from any other guy your age. Do you have any hobbies? Pets? Passions? Talents? Anything?”
    I sent it before I could reconsider. It was mean, I knew, but I was feeling like my heart had been shredded after my grand-mother had accused me of hiding, of burying myself underwater and failing to make her happy before she died. If inflicting some of my misery onto Lonelyguy meant I’d be able to sleep, I wouldn’t hesitate.
    His reply arrived in my in-box five minutes later. “Can juggle a little. Can bake cookies. Have read every book Raymond Carver and Russell Banks have ever written. No pets, though. Should I get one?”
    Christ. I typed, “I think getting a pet so you can pick up girls online is tantamount to animal abuse. PS: Please add reading stuff to profile. Chicks dig books.”
    “Will do,” he wrote back almost instantly. “Re: pickup pet. I’d give it a good home and feed it that organic stuff they sell at Whole Foods. What do chicks dig? Cats? Dogs? Ferrets?”
    “No idea,” I typed back. I was wondering how much I could pour from Grandma’s dusty bottle of Baileys without her noticing and thinking that, at my age, it was probably time for me to start buying my own nightcaps.
    “Meet me at the valet parking stand at the Beverly Center at three o’clock tomorrow afternoon to discuss,” he wrote. “It can be a consult. I will pay.”
    “Fair enough,” I murmured, clicking on the X in the corner of his message and sending it to electronic oblivion.
    “No. I won’t do it,” I said, and shook my head, refusing to move another inch closer to the pet-shop windows that overlooked the fourth floor of the Beverly Center shopping mall. “No, no, no. I’m not going in there, and you are not buying a pickup pet from a puppy mill.”
    “Lot of p’ s in that sentence,” said Gary, pulling a bag of nuts from a plastic bag looped over his wrist. “Pistachio?”
    I looked in the bag. “Those are cashews.”
    “Yes, but pistachios sounded funnier.” He bent downand peered through the glass. A skinny Chihuahua looked out at us with wet brown eyes and wagged its thin tail hopefully.
    I’d