The Myth of You and Me Read Online Free PDF

style.” He didn’t look up when I walked in, so I hesitated just inside the doorway. “I’m sorry,” I said.
    “Have I ever told you this house survived the Civil War?” Now he did look up, though his eyes slid off my face. He made a sweeping arm gesture, like a tour guide. “It survived, even though General Smith burned much of the town.”
    “Oh,” I said.
    “It was briefly a boarding house for university students.” He frowned. “I’m afraid I’ve forgotten the dates.”
    “I’m sorry,” I said again.
    “No matter,” he said. “It’s only one among the many things I know.”
    “No,” I said. “I mean, I’m sorry about before.”
    He looked at me. I must have looked upset, because he held out his arms to me, as though I were not a six-foot-two woman but a child who could crawl into his lap. I perched on the arm of his chair. He took one of my hands in both of his. He sighed. “Whenever you don’t know what you’re feeling, you reach for anger.”
    “I know.” He had told me this many times before.
    “There are other emotions.”
    “I know.” I tried a smile. “But they’re so much harder to express.”
    “Perhaps I shouldn’t have latched on to the letter the way I did,” he said. “It was this idea of her marriage, of the turning point . . .” He stopped. “Did I ever tell you I got married in this house?”
    I shook my head. He rarely spoke of his wife, and in this I sensed judgment held in polite reserve, and perhaps regret as well.
    “I remember that feeling, the one your friend Sonia is trying to describe,” he said. “I remember standing at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for my bride, and on this momentous occasion being more aware of the people I’d lost than of the people who were there. Those lost people passed in front of me like a parade. My parents. My best friend growing up, a boy named Tommy. I don’t even know what happened to him. Sometimes, even now, I see these people, all the ones I lost because of choices I made. Some of them I haven’t seen in sixty years, and still they show up and ask me, ‘Where did you go?’ ” He stopped and shook his head. “Especially Billie.”
    “Another friend?”
    “No,” he said. “Billie was my girl. The girl in the picture you showed me.”
    A few months before, I’d found in the attic an old tinted photograph of a girl, about sixteen, in a scoop-neck dress, a pendant at the hollow of her throat. She was smiling, and her cheeks were painted pink, her pendant gold, but her gaze was inward and her eyes were sad, as though, at the moment the photograph was snapped, she had a painful vision of the future. The day I found her I brought her down to show Oliver. He adjusted his glasses for a long time before he said, “Now there’s a story, but I don’t want to tell it.” He gave me back the photo without appearing to see me, his eyes as sad as hers. For weeks I longed to hear the story, but I couldn’t bear to see that sorrow cross his face again.
    “What happened?” I asked him now.
    “Oh, Cameron,” he said. “I did what you have done. I left her behind.” He said this as if he judged me for leaving Sonia behind, as if he knew just how I’d done it. He couldn’t know, of course, but I bristled anyway.
    “Sonia wasn’t my lover,” I said.
    “No,” he said. “But she was someone you loved. And you could go back for her now. That’s something I can no longer do.”
    “I can’t do it, either,” I said. “She’s not there anymore. She can’t possibly still be the girl I knew. She’s a stranger.”
    “But she matters to you still,” he said. “Or you wouldn’t be so upset.”
    “She shouldn’t matter,” I said. “She was a long time ago.”
    “So was Billie,” he said. “A much longer time. I don’t know what I’ve taught you, if not that time is meaningless.”
    “When something is over it’s over.”
    “But she still dreams about you.”
    I knew what he meant by this. He’d read