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

of having one. And with this idea, my earlier sense of lightness returned, and though my face was burning and my chest hurt and sharp pains were rocketing up my shins, I wanted to run again. I wanted to get there fast. For I knew now exactly where I was going.

I knew, too, what I was going to tell him. Why I had come, a stranger running down the road, and knocked on his door. Doubled over on the threshold of his old house, beneath the black-leaded lights, breathless and red-faced, dark stains growing on the legs of my pants. And it wasn’t completely untrue. It had been true only two months before, but then I had been in the restroom on the third floor of my department, inside a stall where the metal was beginning to show through the gray-green paint, as a slender graduate student I had once taught was energetically brushing her teeth at the sink. She had probably just finished eating one of the frugal, grainy meals she brought with her to campus in a cloudy plastic container.

So I ran as best as I could until at last the white house appeared before me; I climbed the steps at the base of the slope, followed the flagstone path, passed beneath the branches of the magnificent tree, all the while ushered along by the profound sense of permission that the word crisis had given me. In fact I’d come to feel that I was seeking help for someone other than myself. As if under a spell, I lifted the knocker, and when the brass hammer dropped down on its plate, the force of its fall eased open the door, which was, of course, unlocked. Jerry Roth shared none of his neighbors’ suspicions. No bolts, no barbed wire, just a half-lit entryway with a good Turkish carpet and a bowl of summer roses, and beyond that a bright kitchen smelling of coffee and slightly burnt toast. And the table! The table was even better than I’d imagined: huge, rough-hewn, radiant with age, practically seaworthy; surely salvaged from a tumbledown farm nearby and then refurbished at some expense. The kitchen chairs looked rescued too, mismatched as they were, some with spindles, others slatted, one with a little painting of grapes and fruits fading on its back, all of them gathered in expectation around the table, as charming and different as children. The chair I sat in had narrow armrests, and I could feel the shallow dip in the wood where hundreds of other elbows had rested, or maybe only a few chosen elbows repeatedly over the course of a hundred years. The newspaper was close at hand, not the local paper but the Times, whose presence I so missed that I almost started crying again, already opened to the film section, my favorite, and a review of an Iranian movie that my friend and I planned to see together.

The review was admiring, not to anyone’s surprise, and full of the sort of empty reverential phrases—a master of world cinema, etc.—that made my friend particularly impatient. My friend had little patience with a number of things: dog owners, pigeons, overcooked food, fatuous reviews, ATM fees, antiques, and people’s mispronunciation of his name. Yet he had been unfailingly patient with me. Opening the windows wide, reading to me from William James, walking my dog, taking my clothes and sheets to the laundromat. Why something that not only ended but began in an accident should have so undone me—but, well, it did. And he had been undone too, which moved me. It made me realize that he’d been serious all along.

As I was finishing the review, an orange cat wandered into the kitchen and promptly jumped up onto the table, and for the first time I experienced a pang of disapproval: Jerry Roth was not a great disciplinarian with his animals, and the cat settled itself right on top of the newspapers. I moved a dish out of the way so the cat wouldn’t lick the butter from the toast, deciding as I did so that I might as well eat the rest of the toast myself, since it was already cold.

Did I call out at any point? Make myself known? I think I said hello when I stepped inside his house; I must have done that. But I felt quite sure, quite quickly, that no one was home, despite the cups and dishes still scattered on the table, despite the smell of breakfast in the air. The house had the quality of being recently and hurriedly evacuated, but not for any sinister reason—maybe the kids were late for swim practice, or the milk had run out. They had left the house in a rush; they would be back soon; but for now, it was mine.

All my senses opened in recognition. The mixed scent of newsprint and butter, the muted ticking of the modern cuckoo clock on the wall, the enamel teakettle gleaming atop the immense stove, the marmalade still sharp in my mouth: home. Here it was. Or something like it. Something homelike. Heimlich. How would the Germans say it? Gemütlich. Touchingly, where the soul or spirit belongs. To put it another way, cozy. Which did not describe my overheated apartment in the city, or the dim, chaotic ranch house I’d grown up in, places that were home but not home, not the home I wished to have, might one day have, if time or means or aptitude ever allowed it. A home I’d have to make. Sitting at Jerry Roth’s table, I felt suddenly that I’d spent my adult life engaged in the most impoverished kind of making. What did I have to show but lecture notes, a short book on other books, comments in the margins of seminar papers, an occasional terrarium? It occurred to me then that to make a kitchen like this required a breadth of imagination I might not be able to summon.

Back at the farmhouse