Love and Sleep Read Online Free

few. So you picked among the ones you had, and were glad for the safety. I couldn't get a divorce, and couldn't have made a living by myself—anyway I didn't think I could. I guess I'm trying to explain. I won't apologize.
    "It's hard to imagine now, how shocked you could be, now when it seems so ordinary a thing. I mean look at Key West for heaven's sake. But it wasn't ordinary then; it was like—well it was like finding a breach in nature. I couldn't share a bed with him then, could I? And I had to get you away from him; that just seemed self-evident, like snatching you away from a fire.
    "But you know, the sad thing,” Winnie said. She laughed, chagrined. “He really was such a good father, in his way. I'm sorry, Pierce."
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    Two
    It had been fall when Pierce came to Bondieu to live. It happened that about the time he and Winnie settled in, the storm windows were taken out of the garage and piled on the porch to be put up; nobody finished the chore, though, and for a long time the storm windows lay there on the porch in two long rows. For a reason he could not afterward remember (he could only occasionally remember the interesting sensation of it, which was perhaps itself the only reason), Pierce had carefully and deliberately stepped in every pane of these windows, each of which bore his weight for a moment before crashing like thin ice over a dried puddle. When what he had done was discovered, he denied having done it, though it was obvious enough to Sam that it had been he. There was no real proof, though, and Pierce didn't feel he needed to confess without it. He was made to anyway.
    And hadn't he always been a denier of what he had done, a denier too of what had become of him; a liar in fact? Had his mother actually been a denier too, only with the handy quality of actually forgetting the things she had done, and being left only with the reasons, the good reasons, she had done them?
    He thought that what had made it so hard for him to admit what he had done was that Sam's next question would have been Why, as in many later instances it was; Why , not unkindly meant, but leaving Pierce no recourse at all, because he didn't know why. He had no reason. When later on he carried Sam's tools into the woods and left them there to rust, unable to remember that he'd borrowed them; when one winter afternoon he cut the telephone line into Sam's bedroom with his knife; when he took from Sam's bureau drawer his dead wife's engagement ring: he had known (at the time, anyway) why he had done so—crises faced by the Invisible College had demanded it. But his lies in those instances had the same logic as the first instance, the storm windows, that if he confessed to what he'd done he'd be asked why. And he couldn't answer. So he denied he'd done it.
    "What on earth were you thinking of?” Sam asked, holding Pierce's shoulder, pointing his nephew's head down at the shatter and ruin.
    "I didn't."
    "You did ! Don't insult my intelligence. I just want to know why ."
    "I didn't."
    Sam always insisted (and Pierce doubted) that Pierce's offenses bothered him less than Pierce's willingness to outface him. He devised mild but ingenious punishments for Pierce designed to impress on him the unreasonableness of his lying, punishments that Pierce took, though deeply aggrieved that Sam thought he had the right to inflict them. But they didn't change him.
    Had he really thought he could get away with the outrageous lies he told? It was as though he thought he really was invisible, that he left no trail others could follow, that nothing could be pinned on him because he wasn't really there at all.
    "Lives in a world of his own,” Sam said to Winnie; though the opposite always seemed as true to Winnie, who knew him better: that Pierce lived in a world not his at all.
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    The house built on a rise above the town of Bondieu by old man Hazelton (himself a doctor around the time of the First World War,