Passion and Affect Read Online Free Page A

they’ll survive a thaw.”
    â€œI don’t know how to fight you on this,” Mary said, “when I don’t know what I’m fighting.”
    â€œTime,” said Roddy. “I’ve never seen a life arranged like yours. It’s organized for a kind of comfort. Mine isn’t.”
    Her eyes were very grave. “You said I was a good arranger,” she said. “Time is the easiest thing in the world to arrange.”
    â€œI want to be with you,” Roddy said into her hair. “But I don’t see how. All I see is a messy world nibbling at the corners of this.”
    â€œYou’re not talking about the world. You’re talking about yourself. The world is outside us. This is an inside job.”
    â€œLook, life has a lot of holes in it. This is going to get worse, not better. That’s why all this time was so beautiful—because nothing got in the way of it.”
    She spoke very slowly. “I didn’t want to say this to you, Roddy, but you know I love you. I can’t get to the bottom of what’s bothering you, but if it’s something you have to go through by yourself, I’ll stand by you. You go off and take care of Sara Justina, and when that’s finished we can sort it out. I don’t want to live in unreal time with you.”
    â€œYou’re making this very hard for me,” he said.
    â€œI’m trying to make it easy. I’m trying to clear a way for you so you can see us,” said Mary. “But don’t make me hang too long.”
    â€œI’ll figure it out,” Roddy said wildly. “I’ll figure it out.”
    The first week they were apart, Mary worked on a chart on the song patterns of the thrush. She made tapes of canary songs and wrote them down in musical notation, sitting in her tiny office with a set of headphones clamped to her ears. They blotted out the sound of footsteps, but they did not blot out what she replayed over and over in her mind: Roddy talking to her. When Ethel Reddicker went to lunch or lectures, Mary took off her earphones, locked the door, and wept. She stayed away from Roddy’s office, but the thought that he was in the building, walking the corridors, using the elevator, made her feel bonded to him.
    At night, she ran their moments together through her mind until, with a sense of loss, she realized that she was thinking in the past tense. There was no one she could talk to—she and Roddy had sealed themselves up, keeping their time to themselves.
    Then for a month she kept busy, knowing that he was in Westchester with Sara Justina, but when the month was out she found that she was prone to tears that caught her off guard. She walked through the museum in a glazed and headachy state until she came down with a cold that kept her home for three days, watching the rain clouds low over the spires of the museum.
    In the beginning of September, she went to the greenhouse when she was certain Roddy would not be there, to speak to José Jacinto Flores. She found him feeding Roddy’s finches. His hand was extended into the cage and the birds perched on his sleeve, picking millet from his palm. He greeted her in soft, courtly Spanish.
    â€œWhy are you feeding the finches, Mr. Flores?”
    â€œBecause he”—José Jacinto nodded toward the empty table—“went to a conference in Bermuda for two weeks, so I have to take care of them.”
    This information filled Mary with hope and despair in equal parts: he was back—he had gone away without telling her, but he was away. And how could she hear from him if he was in Bermuda?
    Mary knew when he came back—she felt it. Then she saw him in the back of a lecture room as she walked by. He was writing on a blackboard, talking to one of the ornithologists. His shoulders were hunched in the old familiar way. Everything about him was familiar, but she couldn’t call to him. She had given him her form of