Read Man Walks Into a Room for Free Online Page A

him, surprised. “You were—are—” She stumbled. “No one else was like you.”
    Samson was about to ask what he had liked about her, but he stopped himself, realizing how it would sound. He felt the warmth of her against him.
    “Was I any good in bed?”
    The question surprised him as much as it did Anna. She made a funny smile and lifted her chin. Up close her face lost all focus, and her mouth was warm and tasted of oranges.
    Samson lay in bed for a while longer after Anna left for work. The night before, they’d slept together for the third time, and when it wasover an instant coolness had spread through his limbs, and he’d ransacked the dark for his underwear and T-shirt. He had wished to draw a boundary around himself, to make an island of his mortification so that it wouldn’t be sensed by the woman who had just made him groan with pleasure. She had lain still and narrow in the dark, but after a half hour passed in which they said nothing, he hadn’t been able to stop himself from touching her again, easing his fingers across her stomach and up to the swell of her breasts, feeling her body tense and arch beneath his hand.
    He got out of bed to go to the bathroom. He could still smell her on his body. Steam hung in the air from her shower, fogging the mirror. He traced his name with his finger then rubbed it out. His face was slowly beginning to cohere, the various features coming together to form a recognizable whole that no longer disturbed him when he saw it flash past in windows and mirrors. Hair was beginning to grow in around the red welt of scar tissue.
    He opened the closet and fingered the silk ties hanging neatly on pegs, the pressed linen shirts, the fine wool pants. He chose a gray suit and a yellow tie with a pattern of small birds. It took him a few tries but finally he managed a clumsy knot. He had gained back the weight he’d lost, and the clothes fit him perfectly, but he felt uneasy in them, an imposter. He decided to buy himself new clothes as soon as possible. He put on the Las Vegas baseball hat Anna had brought to the hospital. The scar was hideous, stapled like railroad tracks.
    Anna had left the newspaper on the counter. He flipped through it. An article about cloning caught his eye, and he read it in full, mesmerized. They had cloned a sheep, there were two of them now, and the question was, would they soon be able to clone humans?
    The dinner dishes were still on the kitchen table, as was the photo album Anna had brought out after dessert. It was open on the page they’d been looking at the night before—photographs of their honeymoon five years ago in Rio—when Samson had abruptly got up.
    “Where are you going?” Anna had asked.
    “For a walk.”
    “Are you all right? Do you want me to come?”
    “I just need some air,” he’d said.
    Anna nodded. “Take the dog.” Frank was already turning in excited circles at the door. Samson knew she’d said it because she was afraid he’d get lost or mugged.
    He didn’t go far; just around and around the block so many times that even Frank got bored. The pictures—dazzled shots on the beach, the two of them locked in embrace after embrace—kept flitting through his mind. For a minute, waiting for the light to change, he thought about not going back. It was a silly thought, but it was thrilling to think it.
    When he returned Anna was sitting on the couch watching a late-night talk show. She was smoking a cigarette.
    “I didn’t know you smoked.”
    “Once in a while.”
    They watched a lithe, giggly, blond movie star joke with the talk show host about her years in high school as a fat slob.
    “You used to smoke,” she said, an afterthought.
    “I did?”
    “You quit when you started teaching. You were very sexy. You would take these deep drags.” She imitated him, pulling hard on the cigarette, squinting, exhaling out of the corner of her mouth. “There was a faded rectangle on the back right pocket of all your