The Waters & the Wild by DeSales Harrison

Author:DeSales Harrison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2018-04-03T04:00:00+00:00

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The whole duration of Clementine’s childhood occupies what feels like a stilled instant. That span of years was (I now believe) a sort of monasticism in its own right, where the seasons, the years, turned around a single, motionless point.

This is not to say that my solitude weathered no assault. Sometimes it was an advance made by one or another of the mothers I’d met in the school yard, the divorcées lean and illusionless and, God knew, some of them beautiful. The fiercest battering, however, came from my own desire for another’s body, for the sheer banality of shared life, for a companion to wake beside at three in morning because she has turned on the light to read, glasses perched on her nose, because she wakes often at this time of night and cannot get back to sleep, because we both wake easily now, because neither of us is young any longer or even, as Reggie had said, youngish.

Such companionship, however, never seemed even remotely possible, though Clementine herself, by the time she was thirteen or fourteen, took to enumerating possible wives: Ms. Strang, the vice principal; or the mother of Clem’s friend Dylan, a woman who was, according to Clem, “not only smoking hot but an architect.” Not now, I would say to myself. Later. When Clementine is older, we will see. But now it is later, and the solitude has become a kind of hunger in its own right. Now it is not only easy but in some way irresistible to retreat from the warmth of a flirtatious exchange, from the shudder of possibility. “Daniel, it’s Denise again. Really, think about it. It is only Hadlyme, and only for a weekend. I don’t bite. Er, unless asked. Joking. So call me.” I did not call Denise. Or Ms. Strang. Or Dylan’s mother. “Jesus, doesn’t Dan ever get lonely?” Clementine asked. “Maybe when I go to France you’ll become one of those swinging empty nesters, the hot tubs, the key parties, the sleaze-wad medallion nestled in the chest hair. I can see it. Dan can’t see it, but I can.”

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