Read Online Burning Down George Orwell's House by Andrew Ervin - Free Book Online Page B

again. The splash caught him dead in the face. His eyes stung. He cried red tears that he tried to blot with a sleeve. The woman—a few years older than him and lovely despite the hideous stain—was laughing so hard she had to cram her shawl into her mouth. Neither of them could contain their laughter.
    â€œI’m Ray,” he said.
    â€œHelen.”
    â€œDo you work here, Helen?”
    â€œNo, I came with one of your colleagues, but she seems to have disappeared.”
    â€œI want to show you something.”
    They shared a bottle of scotch on the roof and watched the falling snow, then warmed each other up in a cubicle over in Billing. She was an English professor at Chicago’s most prestigious public university. Her PhD dissertation, as Ray understood it, had reevaluated Romantic-era conceptions of feminine identity and tied them to poetry’s apparent origins in ancient mythology and goddess worship. Something like that. She recited from memory “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” and by the time she got to:
    While here I stand, not only with the sense
    Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
    That in this moment there is life and food
    For future years. And so I dare to hope
    Ray recognized something in himself that he could only think of as love. When, her stained party dress half-zipped and her underpants missing in action, she breathed
    To blow against thee: and, in after years
,
    When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
    Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind
    Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms
    he knew that he wanted to marry her. She moved in a few days later.
    Originally from the Virginia side of the Washington, DC, suburbs, Helen Bedford was the warmest, most viscerally kindhearted woman Ray had ever met. She was also the smartest person who had ever been nice to him. Being close to her felt good. She had maintained the lithe figure of her days as a competitive tennis player, but the angles of her face and shoulders and hips had softened ever so slightly over the years. She kept her hair cut short to better show off the premature but, she had said, well-earned grey strands. Ray never wanted to stop looking at her.
    Every night after work during the following week Ray drove up to her place in Evanston to help her box all her books up. Her teacups and their attendant saucers matched the plates and bowls and serving dishes. The set had been in her family for two generations. She owned a gravy boat. The two of them sat on her living room floor and wrapped each piece in a pillow of bubble wrap and packing tape. Helen was absolutely gorgeous, but didn’t seem to be aware of it. Ray couldn’t keep his hands off her. “Stop it—I’m filthy,” she said and pulled him to the rug by his belt. He kissed every curve, every plane, every follicle he could find on her body, and he could find them all. The plastic sheets beneath them went
pop pop pop pop
.
    They got married the following summer in a small service down at the parish his parents and sister belonged to and Rayhad to pretend that the mass was something other than a bald-faced farce masked in medieval superstition. Helen’s family flew in to the nearest airport and took over an entire floor of a chain hotel next to the interstate. One of her wedding presents for him was a first edition of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
ordered from a bookseller in London. The gift was made even more remarkable by the fact that she had been secreting away small amounts of money—twenty dollars here, fifty there—since the week they met. Instead of a honeymoon, the happy couple stayed put in Chicago. Ray used some vacation days from Logos and they spent a week building forts out of sofa cushions and watching
The Red Shoes
and
I Know Where I’m Going!
    In the fall, she became the acting chair of the Department of English, where she filled in for a sick colleague. Her new responsibilities often kept