The Promised World Read Online Free

Pearl, said their goodbyes and gotten in Patrick’s Volkswagen to head back to Princeton, that Patrick realized no one had asked Lila about her work: not Ashley, who didn’t seem to care about any of it but good-naturedly put up with what she called Billy’s “hobbies,” but not Billy, either.
    He didn’t broach the topic until they were almost home. He was worried she’d be upset with him, but she laughed. “Billy doesn’t need to ask me about that. He taught me everything I know.”
    “Now there’s a ringing endorsement of grad school.”
    “Okay, I don’t mean literally everything. But he’s the reason I decided to study literature. It all goes back to when we were kids, when he…“ She glanced out the window. “It’s hard to explain. Let’s just say that without him, I wouldn’t have the stories anymore.”
    Patrick didn’t understand, but he didn’t push her. It was part of the unspoken agreement he’d had with Lila from the moment their relationship became serious: he would never really question her about her past. It didn’t occur to him that there was anything wrong with this—honestly, quite the opposite: he considered it another stroke of luck that he’d managed to fall in love with a woman who didn’t want to share everything in her life. With other women he’d dated, what started out as a moment of sharing had usually turned into an accusation when he didn’t get whatever he was supposed to out of it. Then, too, his father had been spilling his feelings all over Patrick for as long as Patrick could remember. He was frankly relieved to be with Lila, who made so few emotional demands. Their life together could be based on reason and thought, which sounded like happiness to him.
    After they were married, they saw Billy’s family at all the usual occasions: birthday parties for Billy and Ashley’s kids, Thanksgiving dinners, Christmas Eve to swap presents, picnics on Memorial Day and the Fourth of July. When he and Lila finally had some money—and tenure—they rented a house at the Jersey Shore for a month one summer and invited Billy’s family to join them. Billy couldn’t get off work that long, but he agreed to come with Ashley and the kids for the first two weeks.
    Patrick was desperate for this vacation. The last year had been a constant struggle to deal with the demands of teaching and thedemands of his research, not to mention the never-ending drama of the political squabbles in his department. How Lila was able to keep her distance from everything unsavory about academia was something he never really understood, though he admired her for it. She kept up with the paperwork, taught her students, and went to the necessary committee meetings—all while remaining passionately engaged in her own work in American literature. One time she told him that she could read these books a thousand times and still see new meanings in them.
    Did it ever bother him that Lila was so into her books? Both of them had always worked constantly, but over the last year or so he’d been struck by the fact that they weren’t even having sex much anymore. To be fair, whenever he made his interest clear, she’d put aside her books and papers, take his hand, and lead him into their bedroom, but he felt vaguely uneasy that she never seemed to initiate sex or particularly miss it. But he put this out of his mind by reminding himself that his wife was good to him in so many other ways: from offering a sympathetic ear for his problems with his department to keeping in touch with his father whenever he was too busy or stressed to do it himself. After all the years they’d lived together, she still woke him up nearly every morning with a smile and a kiss and the coffee made. He continued to consider himself lucky.
    And her devotion to literature was one of the things he’d never stopped loving about her. It was also one of the reasons she was so popular with her students and colleagues. Her enthusiasm was