Rock Island Line by David Rhodes (most life changing books txt) 📗

of him from the start. Though they didn’t of course tell him their reasons, they made them plain enough to Mal, and she had occasion to tell him some of them. They drove July crazy. First, it seemed that the objections were well founded and in a way typified all his own fears. Then there was the fact that, no matter what he thought, they should be the ones who knew best and were solely concerned with Mal’s welfare.

And, finally, it seemed a losing battle to keep getting to know a person who in the end is bound to turn out like her parents—whom he didn’t particularly like.

Through their putting pressure on Mal to stay away from him, she was naturally driven closer . . . closer, he thought, than she would otherwise have been. She was being shoved. He feared there was nothing more solid behind her attraction to him than filial rebellion, which hadn’t anything to do with him at all.

Finally, he told her, “You just like me because I flatter you.”

“But you do,” she said, and laughed.

“I know. I can’t help it.”

Also, he didn’t like continually thinking about himself in relation to someone else. In the many years before, he’d gotten accustomed to thinking about himself alone. A part of him resented all the time she took up. If he wasn’t talking to her on the phone or going over to see her, he was thinking about doing one or the other. At work sorting mail he thought about her all the time.

But these thoughts were in his weaker moments. Like most people, he had better times too, and then he was ecstatic. It was as though he’d been born into another person. Before, there’d seemed little to connect him with anything other than the daily pattern of his routine. Now he had the key, and everything wasin some way concerned with him. Every novel was concerned with emotions identical to his own. Every painting attempted to portray his own feelings. Advertisements on billboards made sense. Where there had been no reasons, now there were. All the self-knowledge he’d believed he had before was comparable to a grammar lesson in understanding language—so intense and clear had his inner psychic forces become since he’d decided with the file cards in favor of not living alone. A purposeful direction seemed to have come into his life, where before there’d been only abandonment. Every week he spent all the money he made. He read as many books as he felt like, one a day even, why not? Sometimes he and Mal would spend the evening reading quietly two feet apart.

With all these revolutionary things going on, it might be imagined that July found little time to think back on his previous life: that he would be completely occupied with the present. But such was not the case (nor was it likely ever to be). Each new emotion that he encountered seemed to be let loose from his past, and the more expansive he became on the one hand, the more groundless he felt on the other, as in flying a kite, the brisker the wind, the easier to get up, but the harder to get down and the more likely to break a stick. Or so it seemed to him. And when a problem would arise between him and Mal, he would think how his parents might have dealt with it in their own lives. He imagined he felt about Mal exactly the way his father had felt about his mother when they first met. His joy they’d had before. His despair they had suffered, as though drinking from the same glass.

His new life was not altogether new. It reminded him of how he used to be in Sharon Center, before the accident, when he’d trusted to his destiny without question. He wasn’t so carefree now, not by any estimation, but for the first time since 1953 he had a taste of it—a confident belief in his own well-being: a promise from some silent place outside him said that each week would get better, each year be more than the year before. He felthimself fitting back into a natural current where all people were intended to be, except for those unfortunates who run into such catastrophes that they never recover and at sixty years old can think of nothing but of how they were on the first team in high-school basketball—before it all got bad.

Simply stated, the more he got out of life, the more he demanded of it, and the more intolerable became any conflicts. And as time went on, all the rough spots related directly to one issue: sex. The desire he felt pounding through him and surging up into his throat, and the vibrant quality of Mal’s skin when they were alone in his room lying on his bed wrapped in each other’s arms, were for all their power, never enough to offset his sense of foreboding about the final naked act.

“Because,” he told her, “I’ve reasoned it out. I asked myself—”

“How can you reason about such a thing! Sometimes I think your heart is made of stone.” And with that she turned her face to the wall.

“Be reasonable, Mal.”

“I’m not reasonable. That’s the difference between you and me. You have reason, I have none. I have feelings, you don’t give a nickel for anything.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is.”

“It isn’t.”

“I’m not talking any more. . . . What’s wrong with it anyway?”

“Well, nothing really . . . but there sort of is. See, I was thinking, and I decided that everything would be better if the only person I slept with was the person I was married to.”

“Well, I like that! Have you got someone else in mind?”

“No, but then the only way I could really be sure it was the right person was if I was already married. Don’t you see what I mean?”

“No. And I don’t think I want to. You make everything too complicated. Don’t