Michael Malone - Weebly

flowers. He was unaccustomed to behaving with public
facetiousness, however, dignified, and he attributed the
desire now to joke with Elizabeth Circle to this odd
light-headedness of his. His neighbors, he knew, would
attribute it to the peculiar effects of grief on the
unsuspecting.
But what was so peculiar was that the collapse of
his marriage, while presumably unsuspected, had not,
honestly (once he had been forced to take time to
assess honestly his state of mind), seemed sudden at all.
And more remarkably, had not seemed cause for grief.
And most remarkably (unless his roughest digging had
not been strong enough to pry loose hidden ore of
suffering), his predominant emotion about the entire
matter was that he was very proud and a little bit
envious of Beanie for so clearly grasping the truth and
acting upon it. This response to the abrupt adultery of
his wife and her termination of their marriage after thirty
quiescent years was, he thought, marvelously bizarre,
but so absurd, even to himself, that he felt shy about
sharing it, even with the wryest of his acquaintances,
A.A. Hayes (who was too committed to the