Read The Year of Pleasures for Free Online Page B

beautiful feathery foliage that I’d wanted the name of. Once she came home with a ridiculous number of grocery bags, I didn’t know why, and I’d stood at the window watching her carry them in and had made no move to help her. I was shy, but this did not absolve me. Sheila was right; it would have been nice to have a really good friend now, someone I could be completely and utterly myself around. But I was out of the habit. I’d met John right after I finished school and moved back home, and I’d given myself over completely to him without regret. People deeply in love almost always do that at first—abandon the rest of their friends in favor of being with each other—but John and I just never really stopped. It was the downside of having such a good relationship; we were so compatible that we were lazy about starting and maintaining outside friendships. My housemates in college had been as close to me as I imagine sisters might have been—closer, probably—but I had lost touch with all three of them soon after we graduated. It was a pity I’d let that happen, but there was no sense brooding about it now.
    I went over to the sofa, picked up the present, and opened it. Inside the cigar box were more slips of paper with mysterious phrases written on them.
Eclipse,
I read.
Old CDs.
It looked like there were hundreds of them.
Mists. Split rail.
What did these mean? Nothing. I began to grow angry—why would he have left these things for me without making it clear what I was meant to do with them? And then it occurred to me that he had not been lucid to the end after all, as I’d told so many people, as I’d told myself. His last gift to me had been only precious bits of nonsense.
    I stashed the papers in a deep drawer of the Chinese chest we kept up against one end of the living room. It was the piece of furniture John and I had always loved best of anything we owned, for its elegance and mystery, for its beautifully painted birds and flowers. Sometimes we’d hidden things in there to be found later as surprises—either to ourselves or to each other. I’d found a polished amethyst once, and hadn’t remembered putting it there, nor had John. I’d put a tiny wren’s nest in one drawer that John hadn’t discovered for months, and a watch I’d meant for a Christmas gift that he’d found minutes after I’d hid it there. John had put in a jade necklace he’d bought for me, a poem he’d liked and torn out of
The New Yorker,
and once, tickets for us to go to a play, which he’d forgotten about and that I almost hadn’t found in time. I looked now for something new, but there was only a feather, tucked so far inside a drawer I figured it had been there when we first bought the chest.
    I turned out all the lights but one and headed upstairs. I felt my aloneness like a coat. You think you get used to death in the dying. But after the dying is done, you see how the end is the beginning.
    I bathed, listening to Mozart, and wept briefly, the bathtub being a convenient place for tears. I climbed into bed and tried to read for a while, though I found it difficult to concentrate. Finally, I turned out the light, folded my hands over my chest, drew in a deep breath, and exhaled. And it came to me.
    One Sunday, when John and I were browsing in an antiques store, I’d found a small green bowl I liked very much. It was just the right size for making scrambled eggs, and I told John this as I held it up before him. “Buy it,” he said, and I said no. I had a great fondness for bowls, and I’d collected far too many already. Among those wrapped in newspaper in the attic were a tiny black-and-white-striped bowl, a butter-yellow antique mixing bowl, one that had been hand-painted with violets, and more than a few sets of nesting bowls. I put the green bowl back on the shelf, but I kept looking at it. “Buy it!” he said, but again I said no. He picked it up, ready to get it for me, but I told him not to. The next day, I