Read Online If You Could See Me Now by Peter Straub - Free Book Online Page A

conversation seemed to be concluded. With an air which suggested that she would stay in that position for life, Alison had returned to the television set. Gregory Peck andAva Gardner were strolling across a field arm in arm, looking as if they too thought the end of the world was a neat idea. She spoke again before I could rise and leave the room.
    “You’re not married, are you?”
    “No.”
    “Didn’t you get married? Didn’t you used to be married?”
    I reminded her that she had been at my wedding.
    Now she was staring at me again, ignoring Gregory Peck’s twitching jaw and Ava Gardner’s trembling breast. “You got divorced? Why?”
    “My wife died.”
    “Holy cow, she died? Were you upset? Was it suicide?”
    “She died by accident,” I said. “Yes, I was upset, but not for the reasons you’re imagining. We hadn’t lived together for some time. I was upset that another human being, one to whom I had been close, had died senselessly.”
    She was reacting to me strongly, in an almost sexual way—I could almost see her temperature rising and I thought I could smell blood. “Did you leave her or did she leave you?” She had curled one leg beneath herself and straightened her back on the couch so that she was sitting up and staring at me with those flat seawater eyes. I was better than the movie.
    “I’m not sure that’s important. I’m not sure it’s any of your business either.”
    “She left you.” Accent on both pronouns.
    “Maybe we left each other.”
    “Did you think she got what she deserved?”
    “Of course not,” I said.
    “My father would. He’d think that.” I saw the point of these odd questions finally, and felt an unexpected twinge of pity for her. She had lived all her life within her father’s suspicion of womankind. “So would Zack.”
    “Well, people can surprise you sometimes.”
    “Hah,” she grunted. It was a proper rejection of my cliché; then she twisted herself back around, almost flouncing on the couch, to watch the movie again. Now my audience was truly over, and this complicated little warrior queen was bidding me leave.
    “You needn’t bother to show me the way out,” I said, and left the room. On the other side of the kitchen, in the little vestibule before the door, was the entrance to the basement. I opened this second door and fumbled for the light. When I found the switch and flicked it up, the bulb illuminated only the wooden staircase and a pool of packed earth at its foot. I began carefully to descend.
    —
    It still bothers me that I did not go to Duane to discuss his daughter’s loony theories. But I have heard proposals more bizarre from my students—many of them my female students. And as I navigated Duane’s basement, stooping over, hands extended, going to what I hoped was the west wall, I considered that he had surely heard it all by now, his daughter’s ventriloquial act: he had said this Zack was a weirdo, and I was inclined to agree. We had presumably judged on the same evidence. And their family problems were secondary to me, or tertiary, or quaternary, if I counted Alison Greening, my work and my well-being as my interlocking priorities.
Mea culpa
. Also, I would not have given Alison Updahl more problems than daughterhood had.
    The pad of my bandage bumped a clean flat surface and sent it rocking. With my right hand I reached to steady it, and grasped by accident a smooth long wooden handle. It too was swinging. The object, I realized after a moment’s further groping, was an ax. I saw that I could have jostled it off its peg andsevered my foot. I swore aloud, and felt gently around for more axes in the air. My hand brushed another long depending handle, then another, and after it a fourth. By this time my eyes had begun to adjust to the cellar’s darkness, and I could discern the four shadowy handles hanging down in a row from one of the ceiling supports; rakes and garden hoes hung beside them. I worked my way around them,