Read Dale Loves Sophie to Death for Free Online

unawares, contemplating Ellen’s brown legs, muscular and supple in her brief red shorts. Dinah had looked at those legs, too, with a cool eye—his conspirator—until Ellen turned from the sink and the moment was over. When he thought about Dinah’s detached and aloof assessment, Martin decided her new and private disenchantment could not be due entirely to jealousy, after all.
    During those long evening conversations, over glasses of beer, about what America really meant, or the particular sort of world view that must be brought to the writing of great literature, Dinah began to grow more silent. When Ellen leaned her elbows onto the table, with her hair swinging forward in its long, curly triangles against her forearms, and spoke in her soft, intense, persuasive voice, he had begun to notice more and more that Dinah retreated into the haven of her bentwood chair. And one day his suspicions of Dinah’s inexplicable disdain had been absolutely confirmed. They had all been working in the Hofstatters’ garden, and Martin looked in the direction of the two women to see if it was almost time to stop. Ellen had bounced on her haunches as she stooped to gather beans from their intricate vines, and she began to sing some song in a gentle voice, but Martin saw a look cross Dinah’s face which pronounced it all artifice—the entire enterprise. There were the four of them working in this rural garden while the sun went down, and Dinah’s expression proclaimed it all artifice. And so, gradually, their association with Vic and Ellen had waned.
    But Martin didn’t see artifice in the lives of his two friends; alone, he took pleasure in their company in the summers. And he knew Ellen had a special interest in him, just as Vic did. An unusual intimacy had come about over the years; he felt more than ordinarily included in their lives. He would arrive, for instance, just as Ellen had lost her bra in the pond while she and Vic swam, and she would sit in the rowboat glimmering and topless, her breasts drooping a bit and touchingly vulnerable to scrutiny, while Vic dove and searched through the muddy weeds. She and Martin would chat quite naturally, but always for some reason—the flash of her white, white teeth in a small smile, a raised eyebrow—he understood that he was meant to know this was not just common friendship. Vic would emerge nude, guileless, and dripping, with the sodden brassiere held aloft in triumph, and Ellen would turn her back while he fastened it for her. Martin enjoyed this special informality, and it fascinated him, because he knew that Dinah would view it with scorn, but he couldn’t think why.
    In his own house, however, he still longed for his family. He would dream of his wife and wake to find she wasn’t there. Her clothes hanging in the closet made him sad with yearning. He thought and thought about her, and her incredible energy seemed to have remained behind her, like thwarted intentions. He found her bedraggled winter night-gown on a hook on the back of the bathroom door, over the hot-water bottles suspended from their plastic tops, and it made him intolerably melancholy. It was as personal to him as her skin.
    Martin wasn’t a man who noticed buildings or paintings or clothes, and he had not even been aware that, day after day, Dinah had washed her flannel gown and worn it again that night. He hadn’t known until he woke up one morning to find the bed empty of Dinah, and the house, too, he had thought after looking. He finally came upon her enclosed in her bathroom. When he called her name, she didn’t answer, and so he rattled the door and called her again.
    “It’s all right, Martin,” she finally answered him, but her voice was full and tight in her throat, so he knew she was crying. He had only been able to stand at the door, sleepy and irritated and puzzled, not knowing how to proceed. But she opened the door and leaned against the doorjamb in that ragged flannel gown printed with little