Women with Men Read Online Free PDF Page B

to ache from the receiver being pressed into it with his shoulder.
    “Good,” Barbara said. “Go to sleep loving me.”
    “I don't want to argue.”
    “Then don't argue,” Barbara said. “Maybe I'm just in a bad mood. I'm sorry.”
    “Why are you mad?” Austin said.
    “Sometimes,” Barbara said. Then she stopped. “I don't know. Sometimes you just piss me off.”
    “Well, shit,” Austin said.
    “Shit is right. Shit,” Barbara said. “It's nothing. Go to sleep.”
    “Fine. I will,” Austin said.
    “I'll see you tomorrow, sweetheart.”
    “Sure,” Austin said, wanting to sound casual. He started to say something else. To tell her he loved her, again in the casual voice. But Barbara had hung up the phone.
    Austin sat in bed in his pajamas, staring at himself in the smoky mirror. It was a different picture from before. He looked grainy, displeased, the light beside his bed harsh, intrusive, his champagne glass empty, the night he'd just spent unsuccessful, unpromising, vaguely humiliating. He looked like he was on drugs. That was the true picture, he thought. Later, he knew, he would think differently, would see events in a kinder, more flattering light. His spirits would rise as they always did and he would feel very, very encouraged by something, anything. But now was the time to take a true reading, he thought, when the tide was out and everything exposed—including himself—as it really, truly was.
There
was the real life, and he wasn't deluded about it. It was this picture you had to act on.
    He sat in bed and felt gloomy, drank the rest of his champagne and thought about Barbara in the house alone, probably doing something to prepare for his arrival the next afternoon—arranging some fresh flowers or preparing to cook something he especially liked. Maybe that's what she was doing when they were talking, in which case he was certainly wrong to have been annoyed. After thinking along these lines for a while, he reached over and began to dial Joséphine's number. It was two a.m. He would wake her up, but that was all right. She'd be glad he had. He would tell her the truth—that he couldn't keep from calling her, that she was on his mind, that he wished she was here with him, that he already missed her, that there was more to this than seemed. But when he'd dialed her number the line was busy. And it was busy in five minutes. And in fifteen. And in thirty. So that after a while he dispiritedly turned off the light beside the bed, put his head on the crisp pillow and passed quickly into sleep.

4
    In the small suburban community of Oak Grove, Illinois, Austin meant to take straight aim on his regular existence—driving to and from the Lilienthal office in nearby Winnetka; helping coach a Little League team sponsored by a friend's Oak Grove linoleum company; spending evenings at home with Barbara, who was a broker for a big firm that sold commercial real estate and who was herself having an excellent selling season.
    Austin, however, could sense that something was wrong, which bewildered him. Although Barbara had decided to continue everyday life as if that were not true, or as if whatever was bothering him was simply outside her control and because she loved him, eventually his problem would either be solved privately or be carried away by the flow of ordinary happy life. Barbara's was a systematically optimistic view: that with the right attitude, everything works out for the best. She possessed this view, she said, because her family had all been Scottish Presbyterians. And it was a view Austin admired, though it was not always the way he saw things. He thought ordinary life had the potential to grind you into dust—his parents’ life in Peoria, for instance, a life he couldn't have stood—and sometimes unusual measures were called for. Barbara said this point of view was typically shanty Irish.
    On the day Austin returned—into a hot, springy airport sunshine, jet-lagged and forcibly