Vacation Read Online Free PDF Page B

next time, he was there and he followed. She went off. The background blurred in his eye. She stopped, sat on a bench on the loudest corner the earth had ever known. A catastrophe of buses and drillings, the dash of the taxi, the rush and halt, the tamping down of the cement, the suck of air in, the press of it out, the slow sink of the city, the spread of tar, the lifting of it, the footsteps going through, the out and out of breaths. He watched. In front of him two children knocked around a construction cone.
    Who the hell did she think she was, sitting there like that?
    She jumped up and was off again, walking over the invisible shake of the train, through the lines of cars standing at traffic lights. She turned into a restaurant. He followed her in, had to do some sidestepping to get in there around the sizing-up going on. A place as bland as anywhere—some sort of cheap, meaningless theme of boats or vegetables or body parts on the walls, their tin representations glowing and flaking. A tune pumped in. Food descending onto tables. People much like himself and herself in suit get-ups and in various conversational postures—lovey, feigning, shrill. He couldn’t find her. He pushed through the hands reaching and retracting.
    He found her. She was alone at a small round table. She sipped something from a mug. She sat for an hour, doing nothing. Staring.
    If she was meeting someone here, he was late.
    If she was meeting someone here, he wasn’t meeting her.
    She stood up at last. Myers bowed into the bathroom to avoid her. He went out to the street and she was gone.
    This was so early in their marriage that they still had packing materials around, half-empty boxes, silver in sleeves, Styrofoam noodles. The apartment felt huge when she wasn’t there, too white. It was so early in their marriage he still believed he knew her, that he could. He still believed in that—knowing.
    She complained about work. The meetings were long and tedious, she said. She fell asleep in her chair, she said. She nearly fell out the window she was so bored. She nearly leapt, that’s how bad it was, you can’t imagine. She would have welcomed an earthquake.
    All the extra work they were giving her, she said. Unpaid hours, late meetings, she hadn’t eaten dinner, her feet were sore, her eyes, her very head was vacant, depleted of thought, canceled, zeroed out. That’s how tired she was.
    His rage was a saw, going back and forth, cutting through arteries, hers. They had a dinner of steam-table vegetables, ate quietly across from one another. They slept. Or rather, she slept. Or acted like she did.
    Reasons not to confront her: Clearly the woman was not in the mood to tell him the truth about any subject larger than a button. And he himself had no intention of showing his shapes too soon.
    He followed her. For weeks this went on. Sometimes he managed to track her all the way home and then he had to make up excuses, dissimulate (because he never actually lied, he was sure), invent where he’d been. She met no one, spoke to no one, maybe a word to a server or cashier. Her movements were random, jumpy. One minute sitting, staring into a mass of tables, the next rising, heading for the door, a few dollars down for the bill. He couldn’t understand it. She didn’t read or write or eat. She drank tea or coffee. Or just stood outside, often the same nondescript building flung up in front of her, her bag slouching her shoulder. She lied like an adolescent when she came home. What could he say? He knew she was going for walks? He wasn’t saying a thing until he found out just what she thought she was getting away with.
    Was she getting crazy, perhaps? Crazier?
    Reasons not to confront her: who was she now?
    He wrote her letters, rewrote, revised, tore them up.
1stly I saw you exit the building and turn right.
2ndly I saw you go four blocks.
3rdly I saw you on the next corner stop in front of a store window and not look into it, a store you adore. As