Read Online Middle Age by Joyce Carol Oates - Free Book Online Page A

life. Not in death but in life . Standing before her, here in this room as he’d done in life. Smiling.
    Reaching out to her. Was he teasing her? About what? The hills are still there, Marina! But he’d laughed at her, too. He’d laughed at all of Salthill, yet without meanness. Marina began to tremble, seeing the man so clearly.
    Hearing his voice. Yet, fumbling with the charcoal stick, as unable to express what she saw as a young child. “Oh, Adam.” It was true: by any crite-ria, he’d had an ugly mug. His skin had looked singed, and his nose had been broken, and there was a startlingly white barbed-wire scar through his right eyebrow. Yet, why wasn’t he ugly? On the contrary, Adam seemed to Marina beautiful . . .
    In Plato’s Phaedo Socrates assures us Our soul is imperishable and immortal and existed before we were born .
    “Oh, Adam. Is this true? I don’t think this is true.”
    It was :8 .. Marina’s hand faltered. The charcoal stick that had been so inept fell to the floor. The drawings were crude, hopeless. The man had gone. Adam had departed. How to endure this night? Marina should have torn up the drawings, these testaments to her loss, but even this act of defiance was beyond her.
    
    How death enters life. And life is altered . She knew that Roger Cavanagh, who was Adam’s lawyer, and had been his friend, would call her soon, and within minutes of her replacing the phone on the hook, cautiously, with dread, the phone rang, and it was Roger. Instructing her to please come to his office in town, if she was free. He had private, urgent business with her. “Is it—Adam’s will?” Marina asked, and Roger said, “Yes. Adam’s will.”
    Marina had wakened in a state of suspended emotion. She’d slept poorly the previous night. Struggling not to drown as Thwaite Thwaite entered her dreams with nightmare logic. Thwaite that was a foul licorice substance pushing down her throat. In an overly bright daylight she moved like a sleepwalker. Or like a woman suffering a classic hangover.
    Thinking how, under normal circumstances, she’d have been irritated with Middle Age: A Romance
    
    Roger Cavanagh, so absorbed in his lawyer-mode that he hadn’t even commiserated with Marina about Adam’s death.
    Roger Cavanagh, whose wife had divorced him, and won custody of their daughter. How often Marina had been seated beside this man, at Salthill dinner parties, as if, somehow, in their friends’ eyes, Marina and Roger must be “fated”; yet neither seemed to feel much for the other except wariness, a vague sexual unease. Roger rarely came into the Salthill Bookstore. He was a man who acknowledged almost boastfully that he
    “hadn’t time” for serious reading; newspapers, TV, and professional jour-nals were all he “had time” for. How Adam had tolerated him, Marina couldn’t imagine. Roger put her in mind of sharp, dark things: shark fins, spikes of wrought-iron fences, painful jolts in the darkness as you stumbled from bed. Years ago, he’d called her several times to ask her—what, Marina couldn’t recall. The essence of an unmarried man telephoning an unmarried woman in such circumstances must mean, to be blunt about it, Will you have sex with me? Marina laughed aloud, blindly coiling a braid around her head, not caring to observe herself very closely in the mirror.
    Yes, a hangover! Why not think of grief that way.
    A dog was barking somewhere close by. In the churchyard?
    Apollo?
    Adam had brought the dog to visit with Marina numerous times, could Apollo have found his way to her?
    But when Marina hurried from the house calling, “Apollo? Apollo?”
    the barking had ceased.
    She drove to Roger Cavanagh’s office on Shaker Square. And there was Roger waiting for her, on the front steps, smoking a cigarette. That air of barely restrained impatience. It was late morning, Sunday: Fourth of July weekend. The Square was empty. Roger’s firm, Abercrombie, Cavanagh, Kruller & Hook