Reading Aloud

A psychologist

Quiet reputation

He was fifty and tired in a way sleep did not fix. The birthday had come and gone quietly, and now he sat on the porch with a beer sweating in his hand, watching the light go orange over the yard.

He thought about the meetings. The spreadsheets. The younger men in the office who looked at him the way you look at something that's already gone. Thirty years of that. But thirty years also of structure. Of knowing what the day required. Of being needed, even if it was only because someone had to sit in that chair and sign the papers. The job had made a discipline of him. It had kept him from floating away entirely.

The plane had leveled off an hour ago, and outside the window there was nothing but grey, the clouds going by close and fast, and below them somewhere the ocean they could not see. She had the window seat. He was beside her with a book open on his tray, not reading it.

“Do you ever think about going back,” she said, watching the grey go by.

“Back where.”

“Not anywhere. Just back. In time.”

A conversation

The rain had stopped. She lay on her back and watched the ceiling fan not moving.

“You cold?” he said.

“No.”

He put his arm behind his head. The room smelled like her perfume and the cigarette he hadn’t lit yet.

She thought about her sister’s wedding, how her sister had cried, and whether she would ever stand in a white dress and mean it. She thought about the apartment lease, six months left, and whether he’d still be here when it ended. She thought about asking him what they were. She had asked before. It never went well.

The sun was hot on the beach. They had been there since morning, and the light off the water hurt your eyes if you looked directly at it. He lay on the towel and watched her work with the sand.

The man stood in the marble foyer of the boutique, a place that smelled of money and ambition, and watched his wife. She held the shoulder bag as if it were a living thing—fingers tracing the stitchwork, the soft Italian leather, the discreet gold hardware that cost more than a month’s salary for most of the men he had once commanded.

He could not see it.

They sat side by side in the narrow seats. The plane hummed steadily. Outside the window the sky was a flat grey.

She held a paperback open. The cover showed a man and a woman in an embrace. She turned the pages slowly.

Once, in a tall glass building full of busy people, there worked a man and a woman who were both lawyers. They did not know each other well. But every day, at the very same time, they stood in the very same coffee line.