Likes by Sarah Bynum (e novels to read online .TXT) 📗

wonder if they’re discussing the gate repair, because in the midst of their back-and-forth I hear my own name, but soon I think that the scope of their conversation is wider than that, because occasionally I catch Amy’s name too. Listening to them talk about us but not understanding what they’re saying doesn’t feel as bad as you might think; in fact it feels like pulling a blanket up to your chin and resting underneath it.

Betti says something that makes the two of them laugh. “He’s being nice to me. I can barely put a sentence together.” She gives Manuel another wave. “But we agree. The gate doesn’t really make a difference, bunny.”

Her chair scrapes against the pavers as she scoots closer.

“According to him, a gate doesn’t do shit!” she says gaily. “I get it. The little man’s just trying to handle his business. Just doing what he’s got to do.” She leans across and pokes me in the arm. “I bet he likes eggs.”

She winks at me. Now she looks perfectly herself again: immaculate, ironclad, ready for anything.

THE YOUNG WIFE’S TALE

There once was a king who came to his throne only after a long period of trouble. Everyone, everywhere, felt relief that he had at last returned to them, but no one felt it more keenly than the young wives of the men whom he led. What possessed them was more than relief; it was a deep, mysterious joy. Their husbands would no longer be leaving for war, they told themselves. Their children would grow old under the eyes of their fathers, and the land would prosper, and life would be restored to the rhythms they could not even recall. So they said to one another as they bent their heads and pounded clothes in the cold streams.

In truth, the young wives were stirred by the king’s bravery, and his extraordinary beauty. Never before had they seen a man as beautiful as he. They wondered whether it was the years in exile, his time spent wandering disguised and alone, that had given him his grace. His eyes said he understood all the sadness in the world, and his worn face said that he would do everything in his power to defeat it. These qualities, combined with his dark, lank hair and his roughened hands, made the young wives almost frantic with a longing they couldn’t describe. But they would see it reflected in each other’s flushed, stricken faces, and know that they were not alone in what they felt.

The women’s hunger caused them to act in strange ways. Some small, some not. One wife awoke in the morning, climbed from the bed, went about her tasks, and heated the water, without once opening her eyes. She was reluctant to enter out of her dream. Another, in the early days of winter, would slip behind her house, take off her clothes, and stand turned to the sun, unmoving as stone. Among the youngest of the wives was a girl who disappeared for long spells into the forest. Each time she would eat a little less and roam a little farther, in the belief that she might faint at just the moment the king was striding past, and he would stoop down to the ground, lift her up in his arms, and revive her. Why she believed this was a mystery—the king did not hunt in these woods, nor did he travel alone anymore, nor did he travel on foot. Maybe she was searching for the exiled king, the sorrowful king, and believed she would find him in this forest. But he would be at once the king adrift and the king redeemed, because look, in her dream, how he lifts her from the ground.

In time, the king died and passed into legend. He was remembered in songs and paintings and books, and then for a long while he was forgotten, as the paintings blackened and the books moldered and other, shorter songs came into fashion. Such a very long time went by, it seemed possible that the king and his hard struggles, the peace that followed, would be forever lost, as if his beauty had never existed, and he had never walked this earth or looked up at this sky. But there was an old university where, one night, a scholar discovered the king, either in a trance or in the stacks of the library, and once again his story came to light. First, he appeared in sketches and drafts, then in a book so long it required multiple volumes, followed by rock-and-roll albums and animated cartoons, underground fanzines and doctoral dissertations, and, finally, a film.

In this latest incarnation, the king began again to disturb the young wives of the world. There were so many pleasures to be had as a young wife—the new towels and sheets, the espresso machine, the warm, receptive body waiting in the bed—and at first this seemed merely one of them. Two women together, confessing the terrible love they felt for their husbands, so much deeper and sharper than they had ever expected to feel, could then pour fresh cups of coffee, pick up crumbs off the new yellow dishes with the moistened tips of their fingers, and proceed to speak gravely of their feelings for the king without suffering the slightest twinge of foolishness or betrayal. They took it as one of the privileges of marriage. They laughed when other women, their still-unmarried friends, suggested it was a movie actor who provoked in them their peculiar hunger. Because hadn’t they seen him a hundred times before, as a cowboy drifter, an army sergeant, a sidekick, a painter having an affair? It was not an actor who stirred them. Their thoughts belonged wholly to the brave, ravaged, beautiful king.

Eva believed in the beginning that the king reminded her of her husband, and she told him so. He smiled at her in such a way to show he