Read Online Envy by Kathryn Harrison - Free Book Online

going back over it? I just wish the two of us had talked more. Or at all.”
    His father is still shaking his head, as if the very fact of his other son is baffling, unknowable. “I guess nothing else gives him what he gets from swimming,” he says. It’s not unusual for Will’s father to make non sequiturs, voicing only the last in a series of thoughts.
    â€œWhat’s that?” Will asks.
    â€œI don’t know. Beauty, maybe. Excitement. Simultaneous fulfillment of his life and his death wishes.” Will says nothing. His father pulls a credit card from his wallet. “This one’s mine,” he says, and he lays the card on the check, motioning to the waiter. “What’s the word for the death wish?
Thanatos
?
Eros
and
thanatos
? Life and death?”
    Will nods. “What else are you reading, Dad?
Frankenstein
with a little Freud on the side? A dash of Ferenczi?”
    His father smiles as he signs the receipt and slides out from the banquette; he stands and his napkin falls from his lap onto the floor. Will picks it up and lays it on the table. He looks at his watch. “You want to walk a little ways? I’m running early.”
    â€œSure. Samantha still seeing that woman?” his father asks, alluding to Laura, the child psychologist.
    â€œNo, no. She hasn’t gone since last spring.”
    â€œYeah? That’s good, no?”
    â€œI think so. It’s hard to say with kids. It’s, not as if Luke’s death won’t stay with her for all her life. Inform who she becomes. But for all that, she doesn’t appear unhappy. I’m always looking for symptoms, of course, signs of depression, anxiety, but she seems okay. Genuinely okay. I see her in the school yard. She skips, giggles, plays with the other little girls. She’s the president of their jump-rope club. In two years she’s going to set a world record, she says, but she doesn’t have to start practicing until she turns nine.”
    â€œSounds normal to me,” his father says.
    Will points to
Frankenstein.
His father is patting the book through his pocket. “Is this classics thing an attempt to suck up some culture so you have something to talk about with, with—what’s-her-name, Carla?”
    His father grins at him. “Charlotte,” he says, “and we don’t need things to talk about.”
    â€œNothing?”
    â€œNot much.”
    They stand just inside the restaurant door, looking out at the people on the sidewalk, the taxis, the buildings that look like walls of glass. A thick fog swirls down the avenue. “It’s very strange,” Will’s father says, “having sex with someone other than your mother. I hadn’t done that in, well, decades.”
    â€œForty-nine years,” Will says. “Almost fifty. A half-century. Golden anniversary coming up.”
    His father smiles his disarming smile. “I’m not sure if the sex is better,” he says. “Maybe it’s just different. One thing—it’s reacquainted me with my body, sort of yanked me back into it, like I haven’t been for as long as I can remember. Started trimming my toe-nails with attention. Flossing my teeth. Upgraded my underwear.”
    â€œHow’s Mom feel about it?”
    â€œYou know, Will, she’s very happy being a businesswoman. She likes it a great deal.”
    â€œSo much so that she doesn’t care if you’re cheating on her?”
    After Will’s father sold his veterinary practice, and perhaps in response to his having embarked on a new, solitary career as a photographer rather than settling into leisure with her, Will’s mother transformed herself into a dervish of housework, not so much a woman as one of those tornadoes that blew out of a bottle of, what cleanser was it? Mr. Clean?—something advertised in the late sixties, when he and Mitch came home from school on winter afternoons and