All the Time in the World Read Online Free Page A

coffee at Starbucks. Pretending to be mute, I pointed to what I wanted.
    I regarded these expeditions to the town center as daring escapades. I needed to prove to myself that I could take risks. While I carried no I.D., there was always the possibility that someone, even Diana herself, if back early from her vacation, might come by and recognize me. I almost wished that she would.
    But after a while the novelty of these trips wore off and I reclaimed my residential solitude. I embraced my dereliction as a religious discipline; it was as if I were a monk sworn to an order devoted to affirming God’s original world.
    Squirrels traveled along the telephone wires, their tails rippling like signal pulses. Raccoons lifted the lids off the garbage pails left at the curb for the morning pickup. If I had preceded them at a pail, they knew immediately that there was nothing there for them. A skunk each night made its rounds like a watchman, taking the same route past the garage and through the stand of bambooand diagonally across Dr. Sondervan’s backyard, and disappearing down his driveway. At the preserve pond, my occasional swim was observed by a slick, slime-covered rat-tailed muskrat. His dark eyes glowed in the moonlight. Only when I had climbed out of the pond did he dive into it, silently, with no apparent disturbance of the water. Most mornings, invader crows arrived, twenty or thirty of them at a time coming out of the sky and cawing away. It was as if loudspeakers were strung in the trees. Sometimes the crows would go quiet and send out reconnaissance, one or two of them circling and landing in the street to examine a candy wrapper or the dregs of a garbage can that the sanitation men had emptied incompletely. A dead squirrel was occasion for a feast, a great black mass of fluttering feathers and bobbing heads stripping the carcass down to its bones. Altogether they were a kind of crow state, and if there were any dissidents I could not find them. I did dislike it that they drove away the smaller birds—a pair of cardinals, for example, who nested in the backyard, and didn’t have the range of these ravenous black birds who would be off as quickly as they had come, in powerful flight to the next block or the next town.
    There were house cats always on the prowl, of course, and dogs barking late at night in one house or another, but I did not see them as legitimate. They were sheltered; they lived at the behest of human beings.
    One night in early autumn, with the swampy ground of the Nature Preserve papered with fallen leaves, I was hunkered down to examine a dead snake about a foot in length whose color I thought might in life have been green, when, as I stood, I felt something brush the top of my head. As I looked up I saw the wings of a ghostly pale owl fold into his body as he disappeared into a tree. The feathery touch of the owl wing on my scalp left me shivering.
    These creatures and I either were food to one another or werenot. That was all there was to it. I was presumptive from my loneliness, an unrequited lover as incidental to all of them as they had once been to me.
    DIANA WAS ALWAYS comfortable in her body and was careless about covering herself in front of our girls. She didn’t mind being seen in the nude, and when I suggested that it might not be the best thing for them she replied that, on the contrary, it was instructive for them to see how naturally accepting and unself-conscious a woman could be about her physical being. Well, then, how about a man, if they were to see me walking around in the altogether? I said. And Diana said, Really, Howard, Mr. Prude in the nude? Not a chance.
    In our bedroom, Diana seemed not to care if the blinds were open when she was dressing or undressing. I was always the one to close them. Who are you trying to attract? I would say to her, and she’d say, That very good-looking fellow out there in the apple tree. But she seemed as oblivious of her effect nude in a bedroom