Make Your Way 7, Schulbuch mit Audio-CD und CD-ROM

now we need time to be alone and work things out. But don’t worry about us. You just go up there and have a good summer and work hard and save your money. Consider it a vacation, too. Get in all the shing you can. ere’s good shing around there.’ ‘Waterskiing, too,’ he said. ‘I want to learn to waterski.’ ‘I’ve never been waterskiing,’ I said. ‘Do some of that for me too, will you?’ We sat in the bus station. He looked through his yearbook while I held a newspaper in my lap. en his bus was called and we stood up. I embraced him and said again, ‘Don’t worry, don’t worry. Where’s your ticket?’ He patted his coat pocket and then picked up his suitcase. I walked him over to where the line was forming in the terminal, then I embraced him again and kissed him on the cheek and said goodbye. ‘Goodbye, Dad,’ he said and turned from me so that I wouldn’t see his tears. I drove home to where our boxes and suitcases were waiting in the living room. Nancy was in the kitchen drinking co ee with the young couple she’d found to take our house for the summer. I’d met the couple, Jerry and Liz, graduate students in math, for the rst time a few days before, but we shook hands again, and I drank a cup of co ee that Nancy poured. We sat around the table and drank co ee while Nancy nished her list of things they should look out for or do at certain times of the month, the rst and last of each month, where they should send any mail, and the like. Nancy’s face was tight. Sun fell through the curtain on to the table as it got later in the morning. Finally, things seemed to be in order and I le the three of them in the kitchen and began loading the car. It was a furnished house we were going to, furnished right down to plates and cooking utensils, so we wouldn’t need to take much with us from this house, only the essentials. I’d driven up to Eureka, 350 miles north of Palo Alto, on the north coast of California, three weeks before and rented us the furnished house. I went with Susan, the woman I’d been seeing. We stayed in a motel at the edge of town for three nights while I looked in the newspaper and visited realtors. She watched me as I wrote out a cheque for the three months’ rent. Later, back at the motel, in bed, she lay with her hand on her forehead and said, ‘I envy your wife. I envy Nancy. You hear people talk about “the other woman” always and how the incumbent wife has the privileges and the real power, but I never really understood or cared about those things before. Now I see. I envy her. I envy her the life she will have with you in that house this summer. I wish it were me. I wish it were us. Oh, how I wish it were us. I feel so crummy’, she said. I stroked her hair. Nancy was a tall, long-legged woman with brown hair and eyes and a generous spirit. But lately we had been coming up short on generosity and spirit. e man she had been seeing was one of my colleagues, a divorced, dapper, three-piece- suit-and-tie fellow with greying hair who drank too much and whose hands, some of my students told me, sometimes shook in the classroom. He and Nancy had dri ed into their a air at a party during the holidays, not too long a er Nancy had discovered my own a air. It all sounds boring and tacky now – it is boring and tacky – but during that spring it was what it was, and it consumed all of our energies and concentration to the exclusion of everything else. Sometime in late April we began to make plans to rent our house and go away for the summer, just the two of us, and try to put things back together, if they could be put back together. We each agreed we would not call or write or otherwise be in touch with the other parties. So we made arrangements for Richard, found the couple to look a er our house, and I had looked at a map and driven north from San Francisco and found Eureka, and a realtor who was willing to rent a furnished house to a respectable middle-aged married couple for the summer. I think I even used the phrase second honeymoon to the realtor, in my lap: auf meinem Schoß the woman I’d been seeing: mit der ich ein Verhältnis hatte realtor (Æ) [ }rçWltW ]: Immobilienmakler/in incumbent: offiziell crummy: mies dapper: geschniegelt tacky: schäbig 133 1 Compact unit 1: Stories stories tell Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv