Peter Straub - 1975 - Julia(aka Full Circle) by Peter Straub

Author:Peter Straub [Straub, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

7

Mark came awake in darkness, the dirty sheet twisted about his hips. He had been dreaming about Julia, a variation on a dream he had been having regularly for the past three or four years. Usually the dream began with his entering a classroom, perching on the desk, and suddenly realizing that he was totally unprepared. Not only had he no lecture or plan for this particular class, he could not even recall which course he was supposed to be teaching. Students from various years and classes regarded him quizzically, already bored: if he could not think of something to say, soon the whole hour, an hour he hadn’t the barest idea of how to fill, would be lost. Was this Working Class Movements in England, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, 9:30-10:20? New Trends in Socialist Thought, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, 1:30-2:20? Crowd Theory, Monday and Wednesday, 4:00-5:25? He would realize with growing desperation that he did not know what day it was. Last night, the dream had progressed to this point, and then Julia had risen from one of the chairs and, pulling a sheaf of notes from her bag, began to lecture brilliantly on the London Corresponding Society and its Secretary, Thomas Hardy. He had resented her usurping his class at the same time as he had listened dazzled to her initial summary of information and the cascade of her ideas, which defined exactly what he had been struggling to express to this class over the past year. He had been certain he would remember everything she said so that he could use it in the first chapter of the book he wanted to write, but all of it had vanished in the first second of wakefulness. Instead of her ideas, he would remember how she had looked—dressed in a white blouse and yellow skirt, her hair hanging softly about her shoulders, she was the Julia he had seen that first morning at Magnus9 house. She looked enchanted, like a woman who conversed with fairies: a woman to whom clung the last bewitching traces of childhood. Mark stared up at the low ceiling of his room, realizing that the dream had caused in him a terrific sexual arousal. He wanted Julia very badly. She could not consider herself married to Magnus after his brutal appearance at her home yesterday afternoon; the thought gave him energy to roll over and punch the light switch beside the mattress. Magnus seemed to have at last exploded. Both Julia and Lily-had described the incident to him, each of them advising him to stay away from Magnus for the time being. Well, when hadn’t he avoided Magnus? One of the first utterly clear impressions of Mark’s life was that his adoptive brother detested him.

Maybe loathing was more the word for it, he considered, and giggled.

Still grinning, Mark untangled his legs from the sheet and stood up beside the mattress, carefully avoiding the stacks of plates and half-empty tins strewn over the floor. He had

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