For you, I was a chapter - a good chapter maybe, or even
your favorite chapter, but, still, just a chapter - and for me, you
were the book.'' Judith Whitman believes in the sort of love that
''picks you up in Akron, Ohio, and sets you down in Rio de Janeiro''.
But she married more pragmatically. Before her marriage to a
banker, before her career as a film editor in Los Angeles, Judith
was 17 and living in Nebraska, where she met Willy Blunt, a
carpenter whose pale blue eyes and easy smile awakened in Judith
the reckless girl he alone imagined her to be. Marrying Willy
seemed a natural thing to promise. But a violent episode followed
by acceptance to a prestigious university carried Judith away.
Twenty years later, Judith''s sturdy-seeming marriage is suddenly
hazy with secrets, and her thoughts drift back to the time when she
and Willy had escaped to a small world where sunlight seemed always
to fall from a softer angle. What happens now when she holds in her
hand the number for the man who believed it, long ago, when she
declared her love?
關於作者:
Tom McNeal grew up in California. He has been a Wallace
Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University. His
debut novel Goodnight, Nebraska was published in the UK in
1998.