Read Online The Remedy for Love: A Novel by Bill Roorbach - Free Book Online

the coffee table and searched out the edges. The soap wrapper said Hotel Myron, Milwaukee. Earlier vintage even than the calendar in the shed. A series of thuds hit the side of the house, like car doors slamming in the driveway, if there’d been a driveway: snow bombs off the high trees all around in the wind. The front window out onto the view of the river was picturesque in the lamplight, a skein of snow stacked in its lower edges and across the bottom occluding a quarter of the big pane of glass, not that there was anything to see in the dark.
    Alison’s body was. It was. It was hers, that’s what it was. She lived in it easily. Sumptuous, full, tending toward plump, bigger toward the bottom, Reubenesque. The sandwich, not the painter, as her unkindly father had once observed, not joking. That next morning, the Boston morning, she standing in the doorway to the minuscule kitchen, her back to him, intent on a phone conversation. Bent to a phone conversation. Back when phones had wires. Something she didn’t understand about young men in love: her body that morning as she talked on the phone was easily the most beautiful vista he had ever encountered. That included all the great wonders of the world—Grand Canyon, Great Wall of China, Costa Rican rain forest, everything. The sight of her naked in that doorway and bent to the phone conversation—it was in his collection for life, one of the small number of visions a person can call up at will and see with the kind of clarity not even the present moment ever offered. And that morning she’d hung up the phone and turned and come to him in her small bed.
    He got the border all built, sky and garden, and was starting on some of the castle turrets when he heard Danielle cough and sigh and stretch. She must be as ready for dinner as he. He left the puzzle as it was (hearing in his head Alison’s voice making fun of him for starting it), found his dough nicely expanded. He gently divided it, caressed it, shaped it into two balls, then back to the puzzle. While the dough rested he got the entire roof outline of the castle—not too difficult, all this pointy architecture against the blue, blue Bavarian sky. Danielle was stirring in her blankets, rustling, sighing, yawning. She wasn’t in any hurry to get up, it seemed. He didn’t think Alison had ever taken a nap, someone who hated vacations unless they involved extreme sports: deepwater scuba, cloud-trekking, kickboxing lessons, breakup sex.
    Hurrying, he added wood to the fire, banked his beautiful coals—very hot in there—then searched the shelves and cabinets and half-broken drawers for candles, which he found, a box of votives. He lined up four of them on the butcher’s block and put a wooden match to them. Still not enough light, which was all he was seeking, certainly not atmosphere, if that was what Danielle was going to accuse him of. In the lambent glow he dredged the eggplant slices in flour, slipped them into the oven in their pie pan, patted out the dough balls with his palms on the floured butcher’s block, the only real work surface. And, oh, it was a good thing he had something to do, Danielle out of her bed now and apparently dressing, subtle zipper sounds, several different pairs of pants coming off and on, soft humming. He twirled the first circle of dough up on his fists, thinning it, not really showing off, as of course she wasn’t paying any attention and would only mock him in any case, twirled the second circle even higher, let it land on the cutting board he’d improvised—just a well-worn piece of plywood he’d floured heavily and that could serve as a peel as well. He spread the brilliant red-pepper sauce thinly on the dough, grated a layer of Parmesan, placed the slices of onion, drew the eggplant out of the oven and apportioned it neatly. One more shower of Parmesan. He floured a peculiar antique cake knife (handle real ivory, it looked like) and used it to loosen the dough on the