Diary of a Yuppie Read Online Free Page B

kept."
    She visibly shuddered. "You mean you might let me read them? After all these years? I wonder if I want to. Now."
    "Because they might show you had married the wrong man?"
    Our eyes met. "Maybe. Maybe that
is
what I'm afraid of."
    If she had only burst into tears! There is nothing I would not have done for a weeping Alice. I have a recurring dream of Alice suffering some cruel and undeserved punishment, writhing, bewildered, clutching a rag about her exposed limbs as a savage tormentor strikes blow after blow upon her bare back. Alice hurt, terrified, pleading, desperate...; I wake up and cry out aloud at this picture, as vivid as some nineteenth-century academic painting of a tortured Christian slave girl. At such moments I love Alice so passionately that I can imagine myself, like the Roman officer in
The Sign of the Cross
, tearing off my insignia and leaping into the arena to meet the lion's gory mane at the side of my love. A happy death!
    But no. Alice always has to be above me. She has to be the angel of light. She seems almost able to divine the rush of my inner sympathy and anxious to head it off. I suppose she spurns it as sentimentality. But love is love, in all its forms. It is not to be lightly rebuffed.

4
    A LICE THINKS we have been drawing apart. We haven't. She has been drawing apart from me. And she thinks that we are becoming disillusioned with each other. We aren't. She is becoming disillusioned with me. I have the same opinion of her that I had when I married her, and I believe that my opinion is still a correct one. This is not because I am more perceptive than Alice. It is simply that I am not burdened with the astigmatism of her need to idealize people. She is not unlike Mr. Blakelock in this. As a matter of fact, she is not unlike many of our middle class in this. Her parents had the same failing and taught it to her. My parents also tried, but they were inept teachers. Any child could have seen through them.

    When Alice and I enter a cocktail party, we tend to give the impression of a fine young American couple who will probably go to the top of their ladders, or fairly high up anyway, and who will grace those ladders in doing so. "What a fine pair!" people exclaim. We are both of a good size, well made, with little fat; Alice has rich dark hair, a squarish face, perfect skin, and her eyes, wide apart, bear an expression that combines, charmingly, a warm sincerity with a faint, pleased surprise that she is so continually being confronted with such wonderful things. And I, of course, as I have so often confided to these pages, am the all-American kid (the kid in his early thirties, however), who looks as if he would like nothing better than to bound out of the house and pass a football with his host's sons and who was probably freckled when he was their age. The great difference between us is that Alice supposes that the impression we give bears some relation to the actuality. I know that it's just an act, like other people's acts. That does not necessarily make it sinister. Are other people sinister?
    If I were to tell Alice that I love her as much as I did on the day we were married she would probably retort that in that case I have never really loved her. But would it be true? What is love? She has never ceased to be physically attractive to me, and I delight in her sense of humor and respect her intellect when it is not clouded by illusions about love and duty. If she were a little more honest with herself, she would be almost perfect. It is a fact, as she complains, that I do not miss her when I go off on business trips, but then I never miss anybody when I know I shall see them again in due course. This is true of all but the neurotically dependent, but it does not make one popular to say it. Alice likes to make a great deal of missing me, but then she wants to miss me. She does not think she would be a deep person if she did not miss the man she loved. Or ought to love.
    For love to