Isabelle in the Afternoon by Douglas Kennedy

Author:Douglas Kennedy [Kennedy, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448165193
Publisher: Random House

I saw that the telegram had been sent from a Western Union office on Boylston Street, not far from the hotel. Isabelle was covering her tracks, not having this missive of love sent from the Ritz on her husband’s dime.

A ferociously cold night and, after a hiatus, snow was now falling again. Before I left my room, dressed to resist the cold, the local NPR station on my transistor radio said there was a very good chance that, if the snow continued, the airport might be closed tomorrow. My romantic-expectation meter jumped into the red zone. Isabelle’s flight would be grounded. The concert canceled. She would call me or send a telegram. She would make an excuse to go out for a few hours. Tomorrow we would be sprawled across my big bed. I would have time on Friday before Rebecca arrived to change the sheets and practice the art of compartmentalization. Or, if after another few hours in Isabelle’s arms I was convinced that this was truly the destiny I had to follow, I would tell all to Rebecca and withstand her rage and ferocious reproaches and accept that I was a low life who didn’t know the wonderful narrative he was throwing away with a wonderful woman who would be very much there for him no matter what. She would say I was chasing after something that was only meant to be in the arena of two-hour bursts of clandestine passion. She would say that I would last three weeks of domestic life with my French fantasy and her very real child, and when I was simultaneously trying to make my way in a law firm and having to deal with broken sleep on account of a child not my own – ‘Well, the shine will come off your romantic shit very damn fast, Mr Adolescent.’ She would say that I was turning my back on a New York life already in place for me and a woman who understood my quirks and faults, as I did hers; who might not be a wild-eyed sensualist but who liked sex and gave herself to me every night – perhaps fast, but never with disinterest. A woman from my world, speaking my language, who got me.

Yes, indeed … chase after the fantasy of the unobtainable; a woman who kept you at bay, who has now suddenly changed her trajectory, possibly on a whim. Or maybe with the hangover of that unnerving depression she’d just weathered. And do you have any idea whatsoever what day-to-day life with her will become? Unlike with Rebecca, whom you’ve been quasi-living with and with whom you cohabit very nicely.

No, go on, throw it all away for the dream of what, until now, you just couldn’t have. Shoot yourself in the foot with a machine gun, pausing twice to reload …

This entire reverie danced through my head in the time it took me to zip up my down jacket and wrap a scarf around my neck. A moment of uneasy truth.

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