Passion and Affect Read Online Free

tears. Often he looked at her with a tenderness so intense that she had to force herself to make him laugh in order to break it.
    â€œYou are a blessing I don’t deserve,” Roddy said.
    â€œShut up.”
    â€œWhen I think that it’s only chance that you work at the museum, that you might not have come up to the greenhouse …”
    â€œYou think it’s chance that we’re together,” Mary said. She walked under a plane tree, out of the light.
    â€œWhy are we, then?”
    â€œI don’t know about you,” said Mary, almost mumbling. “But some people act out of love.”
    He caught her by the elbow. “Does that mean you love me?”
    â€œThat’s not your business,” Mary said.
    â€œWhat do you mean, it’s not my business?”
    â€œIt isn’t information you really want,” she said. “Don’t go trying to get me to say what you don’t want to hear.”
    The summer seemed reluctant to break. By the middle of July it was still cold and wet, and the stone corridors of the museum were damp. The days spun themselves out in solid grayness. On a rainy Friday in August, Roddy and Mary ambled under an umbrella toward Mary’s apartment. People on the streets moved in slow motion against the downpour, and the trees moved like underwater flora. The front door to Mary’s apartment was swollen with damp and Roddy had to shove it open.
    He sprawled on the couch and shut his eyes. Mary sat on the floor pouring coffee.
    â€œAre you sleepy?” she asked. For a couple of weeks, he had been edgy and occasionally sleepless.
    â€œI’m trying to see what this will look like in memory,” Roddy said. “We’re not living in real time. This isn’t real time at all.”
    â€œIt’s real enough for me,” said Mary. She looked up to find him still lying there, his hands folded on his chest, his eyes shut, like a knight on a medieval coffin.
    â€œIt isn’t real. It’s pleasurable suspension. Real time has nothing to do with chance. It’s loaded with obligations and countercharges and misfires.”
    She put her cup down and wound her arms around her knees. “Is something going to make this change?” she said. “Is that why you’re so restless?”
    He sat beside her on the floor and took the pins out of her hair. “You think life goes in a straight line, Mary. This all seems clear and straightforward to you, because that’s what you’re like, but it isn’t that way for me.”
    â€œIf you mean that you have to go to Westchester with Sara Justina, I knew that a long time ago.”
    â€œLook, Mary. What we have now is a little gift wrapped up in time. It’ll never be this way again. There are things I have to do that will cut me off from you eventually, and you’ll hate me.” He wound her hair around his wrist. Then he let go, and she got up and sat in a hard-backed chair, clutching the cane seating until she could feel it imprint her hand. She had been haunted for a month, expecting some dire interruption between them.
    â€œIf what you’re saying, Roddy, is that we can’t be together any more, say it. Don’t be such a chicken.”
    He kneeled in front of the chair. “I’m used to these lovely free days, and I get sick to think what the world is going to do to them.”
    â€œTalk straight,” Mary said. She collected the coffee cups, and when she reached for the cream pitcher it slipped out of her hand and smashed on the floor. She sat down abruptly, put her head in her hands, and cried for several minutes.
    Roddy put his arms around her. He ran his fingers over the tears on her face and drew a little pattern on her cheekbone. “I want to maintain the time we have,” he said. “But, Mary, the earth spins on its axis and everything changes. You can’t freeze things, not things as delicate as this, and hope