Read Online Spirit of the Place (9781101617021) by Samuel Shem - Free Book Online

little—as you put it—lethal town.”
    â€œI thought you said it had changed.”
    â€œWell, it’s still
kind
of lethal, but c’mon, kid. Stop angst-ing around. Try it.”
    â€œDream on.”
    â€œI don’t, that well,” Penny said sadly. “You were always our dreamer.”
    â€œIf I stay, she wins.”
    â€œYou’ve got it ass-backwards.”
    â€œIf I stay, she loses?”
    â€œIf you run, she wins. You confirm her idea that you’re a bad son, so she wins. And so do Milt and I, financially.”
    He stared at her. “You’d rather have the money, wouldn’t you?”
    â€œMilt would. I would not, no.”
    â€œYeah, I believe that.” He got up to go. “Celestina has your phone number. If she calls, please don’t tell her anything about any of this. Just get her number and tell her to call me at Selma’s.”
    â€œOkay.”
    â€œThanks.” He walked across the street and into the house.
    Between the jet lag and the bourbon he was asleep on the couch by seven that evening. Sometime around two in the morning, he sat bolt upright, sure that someone was there. Not seeing anyone, he tiptoed through each bare, clean room. Nothing.
    He found himself in the seven-sided turret overlooking the square, his childhood bedroom. The room was empty, the floor freshly urethaned. Looking around, Orville was overwhelmed by a sense of barrenness, a sense of all that had happened in this room that had been lonely and sad and crazy. He backed up against a wall as if for protection, but felt dizzy, as though he were balancing on tilting planes of a recurrent childhood nightmare. He closed his eyes and slid down the wall to the floor, grabbing his knees and pulling them up to his chest. He thought of all the hours, all the years he’d spent alone in this room in this town.
    What a waste. What a damn waste.
    A desperate sadness filled his chest and rose in his throat. His heart beat fast and his mind went shallow, like a lake at night or a field in winter. The shallowness ran to the horizon. Blinking, he looked again around the empty room, recalled the lonely effort to understand without being understood. He felt the losses, the loss of the possibility of being brave and daring rather than shy, of being a believer instead of a cynic, of being loving rather than being—at those key moments of closest approach to anyone—awash in dread.
    â€œBarren,” he whispered, and in the empty urethaned heptagon a faint echo overlapped his whispering “barren” again.
    â€œWho’s barren, honey-bunny?”
    He jumped, looked around. She was hovering outside at the level of the second-story turret window, one hand resting on the golden ball on top of the flagpole. Once again wearing the cobalt-blue gown with hair and makeup in the style of the early ’50s: black eyebrow pencil, blue mascara, red rouge, and lipstick the scarlet of those pesky little bleeders you get in scalp lacerations. And her face was beautiful! Unmutilated. It was Selma before the operation. She hovered, an expectant look on her face, waiting for an answer.
    He blinked, shook himself, looked away, then looked back. Still there. He walked closer to the window. She let go of her hold on the flagpole and floated up and down slightly, as if on ripples of the breeze. Had he gone crazy? He knew from his doctoring that the bereaved often have visions of the dead in the weeks and months following the death—not only visions but conversations, as if they were really present. “Presences,” they sometimes called them. Should I talk to her? Why not? Maybe, dead, she’ll be nicer?
    â€œ
This
is barren,” he said, gesturing around the room, and in as conversational a tone as he could muster. “All of this. My life here.”
    â€œNow wait a sec, Mr. Big Shot.
We
weren’t barren. Sol and I raised two kids, one very successful, and