To See You Again Read Online Free PDF Page B

incident.
    Hope, Josiah’s small, blond and very rich newlywed wife, during the noisy hours of the party has been wondering if she should kill herself. Her mania for Josiah surpasses love—has, really, nothing to do with love; it is more like an insatiable greed, an addiction or perhaps a religious fervor. She has just begun to wonder whether they moved to San Francisco to be near this other woman, with her silly name—Clover. This is Hope’s question: if she killed herself, jumped off one of the bridges, maybe, would Josiah fall in love withClover all over again? marry her? or would her death keep them guiltily apart?
    Clover, a former lover of Josiah’s, of some years back, is a large, dark carelessly beautiful woman, with heavy dark hair, a successfully eccentric taste in clothes. In the intervals between her major love affairs, or marriages, she has minor loves, and spends time with friends, a course that was recommended by Colette, she thinks. This is such an interval, since Josiah who was once a major love is now a friend, and maybe Hope is too; she can’t tell yet.
    Josiah’s very erect posture, as he looks from one woman to the other, and back again, suggests that he is somehow judging between them, or keeping them in balance. He is handsome, in a way, with his drained look of saintliness, his sad pale eyes. His hair and his beard, even his skin and all his clothes, are gray.
    Josiah and Hope have just moved to San Francisco and taken this flat; thus the lack of furniture. Also, one of Josiah’s somewhat eccentric theories about parties is that people should be uncomfortable, like prisoners; they are more apt to reveal themselves.
    This group consisted of some old Berkeley connections of Josiah’s, and a few new friends introduced by Clover. For various reasons many people drank too much, which, along with the physical discomfort of sitting on the floor, led to quite a few of the revealing scenes of which Josiah is so fond. One drunk man announced that he would kill his wife if she didn’t come along home; in fact he might kill her anyway. A drunk woman accused Clover of lusting after her husband, although Clover was welcome to him if she wanted that slob, said the wife. Another man said that he was gay and proud of it but he was goddamned if he was going to come out of any closet.
    Although she laughs, going over all this with Josiah andHope, these episodes really made Clover more than a little unhappy, and she is slightly uncomfortable with them both. She senses that something is going on that she does not quite understand. She would much rather be having an overwhelming love affair, and she wonders if she ever will again.
    Certain conventions, or rules, have been established for this new three-way friendship. One rule is that all Clover’s lovers, past and present, are to be considered hilarious, as fair game for jokes (except of course for Josiah). Their number too is exaggerated. That this picture is not entirely accurate is one of the things that is making Clover uncomfortable, but she enjoys the intimacy of the relationship; the three of them see each other almost every day, and she and Josiah talk for hours on the phone. It almost makes up for the lack of a serious love. Clover has small capacity for being alone, and so for the moment she goes along with the gag; she presents all her lovers as being figures of fun, and herself as being far more promiscuous than she is.
    Explicit sexual details are out; they are all far too fastidious for that, especially Josiah, who sets the tone. However, Clover has been unable to resist telling them that Nicholas, the publicist who brought her to this party, and who, being married to someone else, left early—Nicholas shaves his chest. And now, in an exhausted, end-of-party way, they are laughing over Nicholas.
    “Think how much more time getting dressed must take him than it does most people,” suddenly says Hope, who is a practical person.
    At this Josiah and