Five Tuesdays in Winter

by Lily King

“I’ve never ever wanted to talk about Ethan Frome more than I do right now.”

“I know because I’m an empath.

Wes and Mandy had no books. I couldn’t even find a pen. That whole side of him—the awards at boarding school, the plays he wrote and directed in college until he dropped out—he’d buried to be with her.

I remember feeling happy among strangers, people I’d only known for a few weeks, which made me feel like things would be okay in my life after all.

delivering a bottle of wine or the gimlet you forgot about.

We sat on the steps of the library and pretended we went to Harvard. “What’s your major?” I asked him and he said “art history” and I said “me too” and he said “no way” and we tried to figure out if we had any classes together.

as if after sixty seconds you became someone else, wanted something different. I wished that were true. I only kept wanting him.

I hadn’t seen her in thirteen years. I suspect she chose me as maid of honor so she didn’t have to pick a favorite among her real friends.

the light flat and orange across our faces, the way photographers like it.

All the toasts contained words like “foretold” and “fate” and “meant to be.”

They’d changed out of their wedding clothes and looked like they were going off to work in an insurance office.

Someone told me they were catching a flight to Athens.

On the way back to Vermont I thought about words and how, if you put a few of them in the right order, a three-minute story about a girl and her dog can get people to forget all the ways you’ve disappointed them.

I hummed, very low, barely a sound, a few notes of “Psycho Killer.”

“Maybe it’s Ethan,” I said. “Ethan who?” “Ethan Frome.”

Through it all Wes kept talking, as if a certain combination of words spoken in the right tone could make it all better for everyone.

We were best friends because we were roommates. I never deluded myself that he would have chosen me otherwise.

I would have been one of those guys on our hall that got a nod from him in the stairwell, maybe a bit of banter at the sink shaving, but no 2 a.m. arguments about transubstantiation or Bret Easton Ellis.

Proust had his madeleines and I my Doritos.

when he’d gone on too long about his kid’s strep throat, I blurted it out. “By the way, I’m gay.”

Moving, resettling, making new friends, reconfiguring routes to coffee shops, bookstores, restaurants, clubs—all that can delay the end of a relationship indefinitely.

“It’s bad enough to Paul that I’m gay. It ruined our friendship.” “He ruined the friendship.”

I was still angry at him. Whether it was because he had dropped me or because he was no longer a god on earth but a middle-aged salesman, I did not know.

Is this how Gail felt in the morning? Is this what he did to her, or was it what he thought men did to each other, or was it simply what he did to me, to punish me?

“It appears I have grandchildren,” he said, touching a copy of Madeline on Cassie’s unmade bed.

He’d written a letter to that unknown grandchild

in a cursive jagged with pain. It struck her as more poignant now, that letter, than it ever had before. She had been so consumed by her own loss that she’d barely considered his. Though I will never cast an eye on you, he’d written, I will always love you, all your days. He had anticipated the end of his own ability to love anyone.

When you die, she thought now, you can no longer give love. You can...

“What’s in Portland, Maine?”

It was an old sea captain’s house that had been broken up into apartments. Not a very wealthy sea captain, I don’t think, no view of the sea.

“Do you need to take another tranquilizer, Auds?”

Once she had thought there would be a certain amount of grace and mystery in being a parent

We mustn’t become them, Robert, not yet. But he didn’t understand. He had stopped wanting to understand her.

Her whole life is now divided into what came before and what came after the separation.

For weeks she’d written nothing, though she couldn’t break the horrid compulsion to sit there and wait.

“I’m glad you’ve got Beefeater,” the man said over his shoulder. “No need to get any fancier than that.”

She’d never noticed, as a child, the tenderness between a drinker and his drink.

“Oh, Scott. He barely knew how to tie his shoes in the morning let alone write a novel. Max wrote that. He wrote all those books.

“You simply cannot name me a book, a great book, a lasting book, that was written by a woman about a woman.” “Mrs. Dalloway.”

for wasn’t her need to write like her parents’ need to drink? A form of escape, a way to detach? And, like the alcohol, it weakened and often angered her, left her yearning for the kind of rare and extraordinary ability she’d never have.

He was in that state just before drunkenness, when the alcohol makes you more aware of your body and what it is touching.

she’d needed to find something to create distance, to put a wedge between her and that small squeak of joy he’d revealed to her.

“I used to feel ambitious, I think, in college. My professors were so decent and respectful, nothing like the adults I had known before. They made me feel like I could do anything.

After a murder, the murderer is really the murdered, killed by his own lack of humanity.

no one ever recovers from being an only child. Look at Richard Nixon,

She turned to the last chapter. The red cross-outs had faded, and it was, she could easily see now, a fine ending.