Passion and Affect Read Online Free Page B

trust, and knew, because he had said so, that he trusted her. If he was waiting, it was for a reason—she had taken him on trust and stood by it. In her memory she heard his soft voice say, “You don’t realize that I adore you.” She raced to her office in tears.
    How they contrived to work in the same building, live in the same neighborhood, and never meet amazed her, but they did. She was not the sort of girl to leave notes in his mailbox or letters taped to his office door. When two months had passed, she realized that he was going to do nothing about her and she was filled with a sense of pain so intense it astonished her.
    The last bugs floated lazily on the air currents. The weather was hot and wet, or cold and wet. In Mary’s garden, a row of cats sat on the wall, baring their teeth, chattering at the chickadees, making little rattles in the back of their throats.
    She had got into the habit of using the public entrance to the museum instead of the staff door. It was the third week of public school, and lines of giggling children patrolled by nervous teachers looped around the stone eagles and spilled down the steps, forming rows on the sidewalk.
    One morning before she went to her office, Mary stopped in the gem collection, cutting her way through a sea of beings that reached her waist. She looked down on a mat of bobbing heads. There was a mixed din of shouts and giggles, flattened by the stone walls to a loud hush.
    The room was packed; she could hardly walk. Children were standing four deep in front of each glass case and a teacher was reading to them about star sapphires from a printed card.
    She fled to one of the galleries. A group of quiet children was standing in front of a bronze stork. At the far end of the gallery was a small tapestry behind a glass shield. A brass plaque announced that it had been woven by the nuns of Belley in the sixteenth century. In a lush green field, full of shells and wild flowers, was a heron—pure white and slightly lopsided. Its delicate feet were red, and its wings drooped by its sides. As she walked closer, she saw that on its face was embroidered an expression of almost human mournfulness. The room filled up behind her as she stood. Tears came into her eyes and her mouth twisted. When she turned, the room was swimming with children.
    In late October, Roddy was lying on the table in the finch room. His eyes were open, and he was looking at a half-opened window in the skylight. A bird flew across it. He heard the door open, but didn’t look up. Steps went past him, and through the cages he could see the back of Mary Leibnitz’s head. He heard her walk to where José Jacinto Flores kept his lovebirds and tropical fish. Through the cheeping of the birds he could hear Spanish being spoken. He heard a chair scrape, then footsteps. Mary walked into the finch room, and Roddy sat up on the table. He looked at her through an opening in the cages, and she stared back like a startled animal. He could not imagine what she was reading on his face, but when he focused he could see what was on hers. It was pure grief; if he had ever seen it before, he hadn’t known what it was. He swung his legs around.
    â€œPlease don’t get up,” she said, in a soft voice, and he watched her as she walked slowly past the cages and out the door.

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    B ENNO MORAN sat down to his evening round of television. He thought of this ritual as circular, beginning and ending at the same point—the first and last word of news, or the first and last chirp of the margarine commercial. Now that Charlotte was gone, Benno discovered that he was making some changes in his life. He had not been looking for them especially; he had not expected Charlotte to go away, but she had gotten a fellowship to go to England as part of a two month seminar. The first few days she was gone, the house had seemed strange and uninhabited. Benno felt like a clam reentering its