Asa, as I Knew Him Read Online Free

and I ran to you.” I paused. “I ran up to you and right into your arms.” I said this softly. I didn’t look at him.
    When I did look up he was still staring at me with his “tender, loving” look. We sat like that, staring, until Sally passed by my door on the way to her adjacent office. Asa heaved himself out of my chair and slinked into the hall.
    “Goo, goo, goo,” said Sally. I could hear her through the wall. Asa was halfway to his office, and as he’s somewhat deaf he couldn’t have heard her. Nevertheless it worried me. Now that the moment was over, it took on the slippery feel of fantasy. His desire seemed like something I had conjured up or talked him into. Sally’s teasing heightened my sense of having manipulated the situation, making me believe I had something to hide from him and worried that he would “find out.” If he thought I was plotting love attacks and, worse, checking my strategy with Sally, he might resist me to teach me a lesson. “Shut up,” I said, loud enough for her to hear. I put my head into her office. “He’s still walking down the hall.”
    “Oh, he’s deaf,” she said. Then she laughed. “What was all that goo about?”
    “Erotic dreams. We were trading erotic dreams.”
    “Terrific. What was his?”
    “No details. It was full of ‘warm feelings.’ ”
    “He’ll say anything to you.”
    At first this pleased me; yes, he would say anything to getmy attention. But Sally had meant it dismissively, and, as I sat at my desk and pretended to work, I decided that he was just flirting with me. He would say anything because nothing mattered; it was all fantasy. Whereas for me it was real, a concrete advance. I was one yard closer to the ramparts. I jumped up and went into Sally’s office.
    “But I love him,” I said. I was standing in the middle of the room and staring at her. She was the only person to whom I could say it. She had been that for so many months that some of my love had rubbed off onto her and I saw her as beautiful and precious. I wanted her to say, “I know,” or “Of course you do,” or anything that would make me feel my love was accepted. She had become a figurehead to whom I offered my gifts. But she wasn’t one, she was Sally who’d been at the magazine for too many years, who was trying to get her work done, who was tired because her job was harder than mine and she had a child at home.
    Simultaneously she was a Jewish woman who ought to be sympathetic. She’d married a Yankee rather late in her life, a man named Dickie Dana, and had thereby become a cousin of Asa’s. They socialized a little; the Thayers invited the Danas to the Cape for a weekend every summer and the Danas had the Thayers to dinner once or twice during the winter. Asa borrowed tools from Dickie, who had a collection of saws, chisels, plumb lines, routers, even a miter box left to him by a black-sheep carpenter uncle who had built himself a cabin in Vermont in the twenties and died there in the sixties, during a winter so cold his body was frozen—wrapped in frozen sheets and blankets—by the time he was missed in town, which was only overnight. This uncle’s habit (his name was, I think, Faneuil Dana) had been to ride his tractor into town every morning and take coffee with three other old farmers in the donut shop. They missed him. They finished theircoffee and took somebody’s truck into the woods to look for him, a few boards in the back in case they needed to make a coffin. They didn’t bother to bring a Band-Aid, or even some brandy. Arrogance, or a morbid acquiescence? They used his tools to put the nails in.
    Dickie had told me this story the night I met him, and it was obvious that he relished it, as a story. As I came to know him better, I began to understand some of its appeal—the studied eccentricity and need for solitude were qualities he had also inherited from his uncle. More important was the element of foresight, which I labeled acquiescence. For