Read Online Nightlight by Michael Cadnum - Free Book Online Page B

mentioned things like vaginas and masturbation. And, of course, the phallus.”
    Paul glanced around. One did not, exactly, say “vagina” or “phallus” in a grocery store in Calistoga. A wrinkled man in a straw cowboy hat sniffed the end of a cantaloupe.
    â€œAnd recently working on Donne’s sermons, I’ve read a good deal of the Bible. King James, not that claptrap Revised Standard stuff.”
    She was an amazing countryside of knowledge. He felt ignorant, and hefted a bunch of bananas to recover his self-assurance. Surely he could not ask such an amazing creature to marry him. He wasn’t a total idiot. Far from it. But she had depths. He was a shiny, sparkling stretch of water children could wade in, and sail paper boats. She was a river of unexplored shoals and depths.
    She looked into his eyes, impossibly beautiful. “The Bible is so self-contradictory. I think the most important things are.”
    Paul nodded thoughtfully, and selected a slender bottle of rosé.
    He drove to the edge of a vineyard, and then, carefully, very nearly into it. He turned off the engine, and the rain was loud on the car roof.
    They did not get out of the car, but they opened the doors so that it felt like a picnic. Paul gouged the cork with the corkscrew of his Swiss Army knife. Bits of cork bobbed in the wine by the time he wrestled the bottle open, and he reminded himself never to use that particular corkscrew again.
    The Camembert was barely ripe, but it suited the wine. They sipped from Styrofoam while a blackbird stared at them from the chimney of a smudge pot, then looked away, as if they belonged exactly where they were.
    â€œSee, these sandwiches aren’t so bad,” Lise said, chewing happily.
    Paul swallowed a mass of mucilage, flavored faintly with tuna.
    â€œI love picnics,” she breathed. “I suppose it’s the only speck of romanticism in me.”
    â€œThis is what they call a pointed rebuke.”
    â€œNo, it’s the truth.”
    The wind gusted rain into the car for a moment. The grass among the grapevines was neon green, and a crow crawled slowly across the sky.
    â€œBesides,” Paul said, “there’s a lot of romantic in you.”
    â€œNot as much as you think.”
    â€œNot as little as you think. That’s what I like about you. You’re a little bit of everything, but not in a sloppy, tossed-together way. You’re very accomplished.”
    â€œI took piano lessons once,” she mused. “I hated them.”
    â€œEveryone hates piano lessons. I suppose even great pianists hate actually sitting down and practicing. It’s something they have to do to do what they like.”
    â€œWhich is?”
    Paul chewed his sandwich, and chased it quickly with a gulp of rosé. “Performing, I suppose. What do I know about pianists?”
    Perhaps it was the feeling that she was enjoying herself, or the flush of wine so early in the day, or the fact that he didn’t really mind sitting in a small car in the middle of a vineyard, but he chose that moment to unravel the subject he had been keeping to himself. “We’ve been seeing each other for a couple of years,” he began.
    She rolled the sandwich wrapper into a ball, and sipped her wine.
    â€œOff and on,” he continued.
    â€œMostly on,” she said, in what sounded like an encouraging tone.
    â€œMostly.” Except for a man built like a bear, a bearded astronomer she had gone rafting with once. Paul didn’t think anything significant had passed between the bear and Lise, which is to say he couldn’t imagine them in bed.
    Paul couldn’t talk. It wasn’t going at all well. He should have begun talking about it last night, or much later, before a crackling fire. But he had begun, and he had to continue.
    â€œAnd I’ve decided,” he said in a rush, “that it might be best if after all this time seeing each other we