Asa, as I Knew Him Read Online Free Page A

Dickie, this certainty the three old fellows had about what they would find in the cabin was delightful. “They knew!” he kept repeating, leaning across the table in his drafty dining room. “You see, they understood what had happened. And they were prepared.” Dickie was trying to prepare himself for death as well. We must, and he’s past sixty, but he has moved his perspective somehow, as though he’s looking back at life from the other side. He’s healthy, he looks to be in his late forties, and he spends his time “tidying up,” “sorting things out,” stripping himself of unnecessary objects and thoughts. He has some money, some old Yankee money, and Sally works.
    What struck me about this story—and I think of it often, in connection with my research—was the cold. The cold outside, the cold living in the shack when no one else could live in it, the cold old men in the unheated truck bumping through the woods without a word. I hear Asa saying, “Oh, I don’t feel the cold.” They all say that. Do only Jews have skin and nerves? Sally and I spent ten minutes every morning discussing how cold we were, which parts of us were almost frostbitten on the way to work. Dickie stands on the frontporch in January wearing his bathrobe, saluting the gray, rigid day with his naked chest. Are they made of stone?
    That morning, when I stood expectantly beside the file cabinet containing the manuscripts for the previous issue, waiting for Sally to sympathize and tell me Asa’s secrets, she instead put on a very good performance as a stone Yankee.
    “Mmmmmm?” she said, not raising her head from Fowler’s. “Mmmm.” A well-bred invitation to get out.
    So I got out. I shuffled back to my office and I resolved to declare myself to Asa. I wanted to confront him with what he was doing, which was making me fall in love with him. I wanted to move it away from fantasy and into reality. As long as neither of us admitted what was happening, it could continue. I was going to jeopardize everything, possibly, for the sake of flesh. I couldn’t bear all the goo, the sidelong looks, the whispered comments during editorial meetings, the hand on my shoulder as he passed me in the hall, unless I had the substance. What I meant by the substance was the food of his flesh, his arms and face and back to lick and smell and twist myself around. I was willing to give up the flirtation if it didn’t progress.
    I was not. I was not willing to give up anything—but I was sure I would succeed. I felt his heat; he was and remains the only Yankee man who smolders. Maybe it was simply lust, even after these years of him I don’t know, but he was warm with it, flushed from it, and I trusted that. I wanted to make a bonfire, at first. I made one, and then I wanted something else, a well-planned arrangement of kindling and a backlog, that would burn for years. But I am getting ahead of myself.
    Sally, on the day I turned thirty, was past forty. We might have been sisters, and it would have been difficult to say whowas the older. We are both small, dark women with smooth skin that doesn’t wrinkle. Only her laugh reveals her age; it is sad, knowing, and short. I haven’t learned enough about the world to have the sense of sorrow that curtails laughter. I don’t have many clues about what made her sad. Perhaps getting what you want is saddening. Dickie too had been married when she’d met him.
    I miss her and Dickie. Dickie was enthusiastic—ecstatic, actually—about my prospects with Asa. “He needs you to wake him up. You are a goddess, you will drag him into the waters with you,” and so on. Then, gazing into my eyes, which I suppose reminded him of Sally’s eyes ten years before, “I’m jealous of him.” There was much of this while I was plotting my attack. They were my aides-de-camp; they knew the territory better than I did, and spread the maps out for me, and fed me dinners while I raved about my strategy. But when Asa kissed