Bread Alone Read Online Free

know.”
He almost blushed, but not quite.
I arranged myself sideways on the sofa so I could look at him without turning my head. His face was perfect. Not pretty, but composed of only essentials, nothing extra, nothing wasted. Blake’s fearful symmetry.
“You’re not giving me a lot of encouragement,” he said. “Are you seeing someone?”
“Not at the moment. Are you?”
“No,” he said.
“Why not?” It was totally not my style to conduct an interrogation, but I couldn’t stop myself.
“I’ve been busy.”
“Busy?”
“I work a lot. What about you?”
“I’m picky.”
His laugh was spontaneous, infectious. “I noticed that right out of the gate.”
“So now all of a sudden you’re not busy and you want to spend time with me?”
“If I meet your exacting specifications, yes. Is that so outrageous?”
“It’s not that …”
He leaned forward slightly, resting his elbows on his knees. “You keep saying it’s not that. So what is it?”
“I don’t know what it is.”
He aimed his most potent smile directly at me. “Neither do I. Don’t you think we should find out?”

Two
W e did find out.
We found out that we both liked classical music. Even opera. That we both liked scary movies and we both shut our eyes at the bloody parts. We both loved French food and good wine, particularly when cooked, served, and cleaned up by someone else.
I learned that David was the statistical one man out of every seven million who actually enjoyed shopping. He didn’t seem to mind when I beat him at tennis and he liked it that I wasn’t always fixing my makeup.
Like me, he was an only child, but there the similarities ended. His parents, Martin and Estelle, had retired to Monterey, and he talked about them in a remote way, telling me more about their careers—Martin had been a political science professor and Estelle an education consultant—than about them. When he talked about them, it sounded as if he were reading a curriculum vitae. He listened to my rose-colored stories about my father with a combination of skepticism and envy.
One evening at a bistro in Santa Monica, I got his take on other matters domestic as well—and, more surprisingly, my own. David had just finished besting the waiter in his favorite game of wine-upmanship when a young couple with a toddler and a very new baby came in and were seated at the table next to us.
David’s glance fell on them briefly, but they hardly seemed to register in his consciousness. He looked back at me and we resumed our conversation about a new exhibit of black-and-white photography at LACMA. By the time the waiter reappeared with our wine, the woman had handed off the squirming toddler to her husband, and was shaking drops of milk from a plastic baby bottle onto her wrist. Suddenly David stood up, picked up my jacket, and indicated a table on the other side of the room.
“Lactose intolerant?” I asked as we made our way between the tables, waiter in tow.
“I just know what’s going to happen,” he said when we were settled.
We touched our glasses together and, as if on cue, the newbie across the room started to wail. David stuck his nose over the rim of the glass, inhaled, then took a sip and held it in his mouth for the requisite five seconds before swallowing.
“I’ve tried imagining myself as a father,” he said. “Somehow I can’t see it. Maybe later. After I’ve done everything I really want to do.”
That moment was a modest epiphany for me. I realized that I had never tried imagining myself as a mother. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe it stemmed from teaching school. There were times between classes when I’d find myself standing in the doorway of my room or in the faculty lounge or in the cafeteria when I had lunch duty, watching the barely controlled chaos before me, those children whose brains had yet to catch up with their bodies and some of whose brains never would. As I watched, I tried to pinpoint the stages of development in that awful