Another Marvelous Thing by Laurie Colwin

Author:Laurie Colwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497673786
Publisher: Open Road Media

Imagine, Francis later thought as he sat alone in his own kitchen, getting so upset about a form letter from a snake breeder. After all, it was only one of five million things they did not know about one another. Marriage, of course, was as deep as a well, as rich as the unicorn tapestries and with as many stitches and as much detail. Married people suffered and rejoiced over and over and over and over again. Marriage was a trench dug by time, a straight furrow, the mighty oak that has grown year after year after year from a tiny acorn. Lovers were, by comparison, little scratches in the ground.

Francis stared at the surface of his kitchen table and put his head in his hands. His kitchen, unlike Billy’s drab, industrial-looking, functional space, reminded one that cooking is not mere science. It was agleam with copper pots, French crockery, baskets from New England. The table was over one hundred years old. Thousands of days of family life were etched into its surface. Francis’s wife used those copper pots. He had spent years at this table chatting to Vera while she put together one of her delicious meals. At the moment she was in Chicago consulting on the renovation of something called the Talisman Foundation, whose headquarters were being redesigned.

Francis’s dinner was a ham sandwich he had bought at the local delicatessen and a tall glass of beer. Had Vera been home, he would have been staring at a wonderful-looking plate of something or other.

This sandwich, Francis thought, was rather like Billy: unadornedly what it was. It was without butter or mayonnaise or mustard, anything to dress it up. Unlike Billy it was dry and satisfied his hunger. Sitting alone in the kitchen added gloom to heartache as Francis thought he might take his beer and sandwich and sit before his television set if there was a football game on. He felt he needed some distraction of a rough, traditional masculine sort.

He looked at the clock: it was seven thirty. He had left Billy at five thirty. How heavy the hours seemed! Now he had the long road of an evening before him, a man in his prime, a man who had just spent a few hours on a hard lumpy couch in his mistress’ study with his warm, pliant mistress in his arms, forced to sit alone with a dry ham sandwich for sustenance and a football game for company.

Francis knew he did such a good imitation of a conventional man, a solid family man who might be musing about his investments, or the achievements of his children, that a passing stranger or a close friend might have been fooled. Who would have thought that this man was prey to a fit of longing, and for a woman who was not only not his wife, but who was not tender, did not cajole or pet him, who was loath to put on as much as an earring to cheer him up!

He finished his sandwich.

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