This All Happened Read Online Free PDF Page A

Lydia they cut it short. Josh says, So are you two married or what?
    Lydia: No, we’re not married.
    Me: We’re entertaining the prospect.
    You guys should get married and come out and live here. Lydia: We’ll think about it.
    24      I’m telling Lydia about the novel, how Max Wareham will be the model for Rockwell Kent, how I’m stuffing the novel with facts from the present, stuffing garlic and sage into a leg of lamb, when her body suddenly tenses, her leg lifts off the couch. She wants to interrupt. But rests again. As if her entire body is full of the words she wants to say, have coursed through her and stalled before sputtering out.
    Me: What is it.
    Lydia: Nothing. It’s unrelated.
    Me: You may as well say it.
    She releases her censor. She says, Do you call Max a friend of yours?
    Why.
    He was talking about you. He had questions, but the questions were leading.
    What did he ask?
    He asked what I thought of you. If I thought you were aloof.
    And you said.
    That I loved you, and yes, you are aloof.
    And he said.
    That youre obviously attracted to me. He said that I’m too good for you.
    He’s said that about all my girlfriends.
    He wanted to take on Wilf in the basement. He wanted to wrestle. He wanted to wrestle naked.
    Was serene Daphne Yarn there for that?
    They left together.
    You got them together?
    I introduced them.
    Max has been single a long time.
    It was the kind of party where everyone was hitting off everyone else.
    I won’t even ask.
    Wouldnt it be fun to have a party like that? Everyone naked except for trenchcoats.
    Me: I think it would be silly.
    You think it would.
    I think it’s funny to think about, but not to go ahead with. It’s fun to laugh, dont you think?
    Yes, it’s fun to laugh.
    25     We load up the cars. I pull the plug on the fridge, prop the freezer door open with a piece of cardboard. I fill the toilet with antifreeze. I stoke up the woodstove one last time, then lock the front door. The boys are in school. I look back to see a puff of pure blue smoke. I follow Lydia as we drive back to town. We pass a harbour seal lying in the snow by the side of the road. His skin is so full of meat, like a forced sausage. I can see the instinct behind clubbing and sculping.
    Lydia says her father thinks we’re getting married. She had asked him what he thought of me. And then she had to tell him that we’re still thinking about it.
    26      Back home on Long’s Hill. Helmut Rehm is studying the plans of the racer, Sailsoft. He says he will lose about fifteen pounds on the final leg of the race. They will begin in Boston in June and sail to a small port near Sao Paulo. The next leg has them cross to Namibia. This is the toughest section. Some racers like to veer to an extreme southern latitude, where higher winds exist and therefore greater sailing speed. But there’s the danger of shoals, hurricanes, ice, and brutally cold temperatures. They’ll lay up in Africa for a month and begin again around the cape to Bombay. Head southeast to Sydney and north again to Hawaii and over to San Francisco. Thread the needle at Panama and then boot it to Boston. A five-month race. Their boat is sponsored by a software company.
    Helmut says he can sit in our living room all day and be entertained by the fronts combining to make weather. He has never seen weather like it.
    27      Lydia’s cousin is getting married to a man who studies geology. He has shown me a series of maps that shave plates of rock off the island, as though it were an anatomy lesson, revealing pockets of magma and oil and natural gas, seams of coal. A network of veins stripped away to expose muscle groups, then these lifted to display skeletal structure. You understand, from the rock, that the island is chunks of three continents fused together.
    In the church, an aunt two pews ahead turns around and mouths to me,