Men and Dogs Read Online Free Page A

marriage. But that’s not all he’s demanding. Often it seems to her that he wants the very inside of Hannah’s brain.
    “What are you thinking about?” he asks if, even for a moment, she drifts. It’s such an unfair question. Because she is always simultaneously thinking many things. For example:
    What Hannah Is Thinking Right Now
    I’m hungry
    Rusty ladder
    Obama!
    I need to shave my knees
    Three stories, not so high
    We have always been a family very close in spirit
    I’m hungry
    These are her thoughts. Hers! But Jon wants them—he wants everything —and at certain moments it makes her hate him. This is why, she believes, when she is put into tempting situations—drunk at Aqua, say, with an attractive associate, or engaged in the downward dog pose, being aggressively adjusted during a private ashtanga session—it’s suddenly OK to ignore the fact that she has a husband.
    She knows, objectively, that this is not OK. Being innately screwed up is not grounds for cheating. Yet in those moments,
somehow, it has been.
    She can hardly explain this to Jon, of course. It’s not OK to cheat, but it’s sort of even less OK, when your husband demands to know why you are unfaithful again and again (and again), to scream: Because you are a human vortex of need, always there, always the same, and seriously I love you but oh, God, do I hate you, too .
    So she tells him she doesn’t know. I don’t know why I did that. I’m sorry. I’ll never do it again. She lies because she needs him. She knows this, now that she may really have lost him. He is her person. He shields her from her mother, for one thing.
And he holds her when she despairs over the thought of her father wandering through an empty landscape, lost.
    She needs Jon. She cannot live without him. Which is why, though she has majorly screwed up these last few months, she will now climb up into her own window and humiliate herself. It’s not the most brilliant plan. Professor Ellsworth certainly wouldn’t approve of it. But it’s also the only one she has.
    Hannah hesitates. Getting up the fire escape itself will not be a complicated procedure; the only tricky part is climbing the neighbor’s latticework. As she puts her foot up on the thin, flimsy wood, her sandal slips and she falls onto the pavement with a loud smack. She freezes and listens for stirrings inside the first-floor apartment. All remains quiet. Kicking off her shoes to get a better grip, she steps up again. The goal: to scale the lattice, hop up to the fire-escape ladder, and then quietly and quickly climb to her apartment, taking care not to wake the trustafarian couple on the first floor or the perky, permanently running-shoed couple on the second.
    She hates heights, so she avoids looking down. One. Two. Do not look down. Three. Four. Why is she doing this? Oh, right.
To beat out Denise. (Climb.) To find Jon and get him to forgive her and in general make things better. (Climb.) After all, he’s allowed a Denise. (Keep climbing.) In fact, maybe it’s better that he’s with Denise now, because when he sees how superior she is—a wife passionate and loyal enough to climb through his window—she is completely certain that he will immediately expel that boob stick from his life and come back to her.
    Creeping onto the fire-escape landing, she presses up on the window, then rocks perilously back in disbelief. It’s locked.
Since when does Jon lock his windows? She looks in and sees the bed is empty, then looks up at the roof. If she keeps climbing,
taking care not to wake Mrs. Wong (the gold rush–era widow who bangs on the ceiling with a broom when they have sex), she can traverse the roof deck, scale down the emergency ladder that laces the front of the building, and drop onto the front terrace. That door will almost definitely be unlocked, as she broke the lock herself before leaving last time and never told
Jon about it. It’s all very easy, she tells herself. As long as I just keep