Venus Envy Read Online Free PDF

revealtoo much. Keep it light. But people couldn’t keep it light. They had emotions, even if Frazier didn’t.
    She was having them now. All the pain and even the pleasure she’d sidestepped in her thirty-five years had boomeranged into an anguish more profound than any physical pain. Again, Frazier gasped for breath. Her head pounded. She fumbled for the oxygen tube and managed to turn on the tank. The smooth, pure air clarified her mind as well as her lungs.
    She had never truly loved anyone. Of course, she had never truly hated anyone either, but this lack of passion seemed a further incrimination of her refusal to become engaged, to connect. She sucked in another breath and with it her mind bent under the weight of her sorrows.
    She grabbed for the
Common Service Book
, the gold letters I.H.S. beckoning in the lower right-hand corner. A frayed red silk page marker bore testimony to Libby’s constant use. Frazier gulped in more air, then replaced the tube and turned off the oxygen. She composed herself as she opened the book to page 430, where her mother had placed the marker. It was the “Order for the Burial of the Dead” and Libby had underlined burial.
    Furious, Frazier nearly tossed the book against the wall. The only thing restraining her from this small fit was the realization that the thud would disturb whoever was in the adjoining room, suffering with God knows what. She hoped they suffered merely the pains of their disease and not the pains inflicted by family.
    She dropped the book back into her lap and the pages fluttered to 441. Her eyes fell on “Responsories.”
    V. In
pace in id ipsum dormiam:
I will lay me down in peace and sleep. None of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself.
    Verse: Whether we live therefore or die, we are theLord’s. None of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself.
    The shroud of mortality drew closer around Frazier’s strong shoulders. A blue chill shot down her spine. She closed the book and fumbled in the nightstand for her solid gold Montblanc pen. Billy gave it to her on her last birthday, September 17. He laughed when she turned thirty-five and said that that was the age at which Dante wrote the
Inferno
, for thirty-five was believed to be the beginning of middle age in the Middle Ages. On her birthday card he wrote, “Welcome to the Middle Ages.” The next day she called Fahrney’s, a pen and stationery store in Washington, D.C., and discovered that the pen cost $8,500.
    A phone book would serve as a desk. She yanked the Yellow Pages out of the drawer. When she took out one sheet of Mandy’s paper the tube from the morphine drip swung in the way of her writing. Frazier tore it out of her vein.
    “Goddammit, if I’m going to die I might as well feel it. I might as well feel something before I go!”
    Then she began writing, writing, writing. Mandy suggested one letter per day to Tomorrow but Frazier wrote volumes. She wrote to Billy, to her mother and father, to Carter, to her Auntie Ruru, whom she adored, to Ann, to Kenny Singer, and lastly to Mandy. She was so tired by the time she got to Mandy that she wrote only, “Thank you.”
    By now, midnight beyond thought, she was withdrawing from the morphine. She felt sick to her bones. She put stamps on the envelopes and placed them on the nightstand by her bed.
    She was going to die. She’d never felt so wretched. She shook. Nausea consumed her. She considered jammingthe morphine needle back into her vein but she was determined to feel something, anything, this pain in her last moments. At least she would die knowing she had told the truth to the people she could have been close to—perhaps. Maybe her death or her truth could be a spur to them. Maybe they could change and find a few shards of happiness amidst the rubble of their psyches.
    Frazier, trembling uncontrollably, clicked off the light. She remembered that it was Ash Wednesday. Why she would remember that she didn’t know, but it stuck