Читать книгу Tamed By a Bear - Priscilla Stuckey - Страница 7

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Sparkling waves rolled up the gentle slope and melted away beneath an undulating line of bubbly sand. One wave. Then another. Two more. Another.

I tried to enjoy their steady calm. It was eighty degrees in Santa Monica on a cloudless day in February. The breeze was slight, just right. In the distance surfers raced to catch each fresh inviting swell. Two dolphins pursued a small motorboat, leaping in unison, gliding below, then leaping again. I sat in the sand with my jeans and sleeves rolled up to bare sun-starved winter skin to this deliciously warm air. Swimsuits of every shape and size paraded past, legs and arms and bellies swaying between me and the blue waves.

I should have been happy. I was living the last, and most elusive, of my big dreams. Five months earlier my first book had been published—a memoir showing my deepening connection with nature—and I was having the time of my life doing readings in cities across the country and crashing for the night in the homes of friends. Here in Los Angeles, a last-minute scramble for a place to stay had landed me in a stately Mediterranean house of cool wooden floors and smooth white archways, its windows thrown open to mourning doves cooing at dawn among the eaves and palm trees waving high over birds-of-paradise in the garden below. And now—a perfect day with a perfectly hot sun, made for lolling on the beach.

The trouble was, I couldn’t enjoy it. Even worse, I didn’t exactly know why. It wasn’t the readings. Last night’s bookstore event had gone well as usual, a magic taking hold as people listened. Tomorrow I would read at a hip new literary series in a Hollywood bar, a once-a-month soiree where emerging writers tried out edgy or heartwarming lines in front of an enthusiastic crowd. No, the readings felt wonderful. Then what was it?

There was, of course, the realization I’d had that morning. Lying in bed, with doves murmuring inches from the window, I’d felt a weight descend: trips like this just weren’t worth it—certainly not in terms of book sales, and maybe not by any kind of reckoning. I was late to this truth; others had been saying it for years.

But did that really explain it—this feeling of something nibbling away at my middle, and going on nibbling, oblivious to my squirming? It was a gnawing that left me restless, edgy, irritable—what writers of an earlier age called the fantods, though I didn’t know this word at the time. I just knew something was out of place, not quite adding up. I felt awful. And I hated it.

From my spot on the sun-drenched sand, I called a friend who used to live in LA. We’d walked this beach together many times, and I wanted her to know I was thinking of her, and of all those blustery days we’d watched the sea roll gray and green under a dense and foggy sky.

“You wouldn’t believe how gorgeous it is today!” I said. “Wish you were here.” Then I told her about the edgy feeling eating away at my middle, the sense that all was not well.

“It sounds like at this point you were expecting something more,” she said quietly.

I hung up the phone feeling even more discontent.