Read Online Best Friends by Thomas Berger - Free Book Online Page B

wife. Despite her formalistic profession of friendship, she owed him nothing beyond routine courtesy, certainly not approval, perhaps not even sympathy.
    â€œI really appreciate this, Kristin,” he said, not to her but looking out his window. “You’ve got better things to do with your lunch hour than hearing me bare my soul. Is that Clear Brook Park? Let me out at the corner there, if you will. It’s only a mile or two from home, and I could use the walk.”
    Her tone had an edge he had never heard before. “But that’s just what you haven’t done, Roy. You haven’t bared your soul.”
    He felt an infusion of blood in his cheeks, as if, absurdly, he was blushing. He turned to her immaculate profile. “I thought I was going on too much about myself. I guess it was just gibberish. I can’t stop thinking about the what-ifs, useless as that is. I should have followed her home, should have known if the guy would attack her right in front of me, he’d do it when she was alone, do it all the worse after I stopped him the first time.”
    â€œWere you really in love with her?”
    â€œSam’s been talking to you.”
    â€œWell,” Kristin said, “we’re married, and we have normal conversations.” She pulled up at the designated corner and braked.
    â€œI didn’t love her,” said Roy. “As for the ‘in love,’ I guess I thought I was early on…actually, I probably wasn’t even then. It was just exciting. I know women never understand what men are attracted to in other women. Even when they say they do, they don’t. But I do believe they know what attracts men to themselves. Francine certainly did. Not all men, of course.” He smiled at Kristin. “Sam has much better taste than I—in human beings, not just the female sort. He has a bigger heart.”
    She accepted the statement with a little shrug, perhaps not of indifference but modesty. She had gotten no easier to read. She asked, “Is that what it takes?”
    It was just the right thing for her to say, whether she realized it or not. “I don’t know,” said he. “I don’t usually know what I’m talking about unless the subject is vintage cars. That should be obvious.”
    She looked at him with her cool blue eyes. “I don’t think that’s true at all. I don’t doubt your knowledge of your profession, but I don’t think that’s all you know by any means.”
    â€œYou haven’t ever approved of me, have you?” He surprised himself with the question; asking it would have been unthinkable had he been in command of himself. He did not, however, regret asking it. It gave him some substance in this time of confusion.
    Kristin continued to stare at him. “It’s not a matter of approval,” she said at last. “I simply didn’t like you.”
    Once again he was actually relieved by what she said, to the degree that he could, awful as he felt, produce a kind of grin. “That’s what I thought.”
    She did not join him in wryness. “What I didn’t begin to distinguish between, until lately, was you, the living individual, and Sam’s idea of you, which is really different—maybe more different than you suspect.”
    Not sure quite how to take her interpretation of his best friend’s opinion of him—which could be designed more to provoke than inform—Roy said seriously, “He might know me better than I know myself. We’ve been pals since we were kids, and his memory is sometimes better than mine.” Then, jokingly, “And he’s bigger than me.”
    â€œI’ll bet you’re really scared of him.”
    Roy refused to join in any implied derision of Sam, if such this was. “He was not only always a lot taller, but in my early teens I was underweight and scrawny. I wouldn’t eat. I couldn’t. Food was like