Read Online The Pull of the Moon by Elizabeth Berg - Free Book Online Page A

one of the suits you’d just bought—a very nice Italian silk, I remember it was a wonderful taupe color with a minute pattern, your cologne was fabulous—and I was sitting in the chair in my bathrobe with my terrible coffee breath and I said to you, Martin, I’m too lonely. And you said, Oh Jesus, Nan, not now. I said, Martin, I need romance. And you said, So have an affair. I looked up at you and I said, You bastard, I want a divorce. And you looked at your watch, and I really think if I’d had a gun I would have shot you. You said you had to go, you were late, we’d talk that night, but we didn’t.
    You never knew this, but the reason we didn’t talk is that I went to lunch with one of my old girlfriends that day and she told me how much trouble she was having with her husband. By comparison, we seemed great. I remember that after that lunch I went to the grocery store and bought a fancy cut of beef, made a wine/mushroom sauce for it that was quite good. And that night, when we were watching television in our pajamas, you covered me with a blanket. We’d forgiven each other, and we lay comfortable in the groove of our life together.
    We’ve become quite good at forgiving each other by now, have you noticed? Sometimes I want to say to people considering divorce from a marriage that’s only vaguely bad, Oh, just wait. It just takes a lot of time, that’s all. You’ll see. Later, you’ll be sitting together and you’ll see the small lines starting in each other’s faces, and though your hands may be in your laps they will also be reaching out to touch those lines with a tenderness you weren’t sure was in you. You’ll think, Oh well, all right. You’ll have come to a certain kind of appreciation that moves beyond all the definitions of love you’ve ever had. It’s like the way you have to be at least forty before a red pepper sliced in half can take your breath away. Do you know what I mean, Martin? A certain richness happens only later in life, I guess it’s a kind of mellowing. And now when I think of dying I think, Oh not now, not when I’m just starting to see. And I also think, don’t let it be from something where I have to get my throat radiated. Don’t let it be from something that makes me have a lot of pain. Don’t let it be from something where I become a vegetable, or a burden in some other way. Let it be this way: Let me be eighty-eight. Let me have just returned from the hairdresser. Let me be sitting in a lawn chair beside my garden, a large-print book of poetry in my hands. Let me hear the whistle of a cardinal and look up to find him and feel a sudden flutter in my chest and then—nothing. And, as long as I’m asking, let me rise up over my own self, saying, “Oh. Ah.”
    Fifty years old. It is an impossible age in many ways. Not old. Not young. Not old, no. But oh, not young. What it is, is being in the sticky middle, setting one gigantic thing aside in order to make room for the next gigantic thing, and in between, feeling the rush of air down the unprotected back of the neck. I know that the transition is scary and full of awkwardness and pain—mental and physical. These dropping levels of hormones leave damage behind, like bad tenants on moving day who wreck the walls carrying things out. But once I get to the other side, I think I might be better than ever before. That’s what I keep hearing. And when I think of it, that’s what I’ve seen.
    Have you ever sat by a group of older women out together at a restaurant, Martin, who are so obviously enjoying each other, who seem so oblivious to what used to weigh down so heavily on them? All of them wearing glasses to look at the menu, all ordering for themselves and then checking to see what the rest got. It is a formidable camaraderie I’ve seen among older women; I do look forward to that. I just wish I could cross over a little faster, I wish that this part of watching things go would not be so hard. Although maybe their