Redhead by the Side of the Road - Anne Tyler Page 0,43

spider.

He left the living room and drifted into the bedroom. His bed was made up neatly, because he always saw to that as soon as he’d put on his running clothes. But the running clothes themselves were heaped on the ladderback chair, and his left top bureau drawer hung half open and his sneakers lay askew on the rug. He crossed to the bureau and closed the drawer. Then he opened the drawer next to it and studied its contents: a folded white nightgown, a hairbrush, two pairs of cotton underpants, and an olive-green sweater. Cass’s store of supplies that she kept here for when she slept over.

The sweater matched her eyes exactly, but when he’d once pointed that out she had said it was the other way around; her eyes matched the sweater. “Whatever color I wear, my eyes just go along with it,” she’d told him, and then, nudging him playfully in the ribs, “You should see me when I wear red!” Remembering that now, he smiled. He had liked how she never took her own good looks too seriously.

It was true that he had come close to marrying a few times. He hadn’t always thought marriage was messy. But each new girlfriend had been a kind of negative learning experience. Zara, for instance: only in hindsight did he see what a mismatch Zara had been. She was so sharp-edged, both literally and figuratively—a shrill, vivacious mosquito of a girl, all elbows and darting movements, and it was a wonder she’d given a glance at a stick-in-the-mud like Micah. But they had hung on for nearly two years, sharing a rambling apartment next to his old campus. Then one day he picked up their phone and hit Redial, planning to continue an argument he’d started with Deuce the night before. It wasn’t Deuce who answered, though, but Charlie Atwick, a dancer friend of Zara’s whose booming bass voice Micah instantly recognized. “Is he gone?” Charlie had asked. “Can I come over now? I’m horny as hell.”

Micah had hung up and stared at his own stunned face in the mirror.

The fact that it hit him so hard had come as a surprise, because he’d been half aware for some time of the general irritation he’d started feeling in Zara’s presence. She was exhausting, to tell the truth. He should have been grateful to Charlie Atwick for giving him a reason to move on. But to be dropped so abruptly, so underhandedly, by two women in a row! He couldn’t understand it. For months afterward he brooded and scowled, refusing his friends’ offers to fix him up with somebody new. He didn’t really have the patience, he told them, for all that meeting-and-getting-to-know. He didn’t have the energy. Even after he met Adele, some part of him held back. Some part said, “Do I really want the…just, the complications of it all?” And when in the end she had sat him down and told him, in a sorrowful tone, that she was leaving him to go off and spend the rest of her life saving wolves, he had felt almost relieved. Free again! Free of all that fuss and bother.

As for Cass: well, by the time he met Cass he was forty years old, and she was not much younger. He’d figured they had nothing to prove; they were grown-ups, fully formed, at ease in their own separate lives. Whenever he thought about the two of them, he’d pictured them riding somewhere in the Kia, he intent on his driving while she gazed out her side window and hummed a little tune to herself.

What if he had told her, “Please don’t give up on me. Please think twice about it.”

Well, no.

He supposed she would disappear from his world now. Out of sight and forgotten, never to be seen again, the same as Lorna and the others.

Although he did chance to see Lorna once, he recalled, shortly after they broke up. He caught sight of her from a distance, hanging on to some boy’s arm and laughing in a loopy, exaggerated way. Later a friend of Deuce’s told him that she seemed to be “kind of flitting about these days”—that was how he had worded it—and Micah had asked, puzzled, “Flitting about?”