Wellness by Nathan Hill EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Nathan Hill
- Language: English
- Genre: Humorous Literary Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 8.8 MB
- Price: Free
HE LIVES ALONE on the fourth floor of an old brick building with no
view of the sky. When he looks out his window, all he can see is her
window—across the alley, an arm’s length away, where she lives alone on
the fourth floor of her own old building. They don’t know each other’s
names. They have never spoken. It is winter in Chicago.
Barely any light enters the narrow alley between them, and barely any
rain either, or snow or sleet or fog or that crackling wet January stuff the
locals call “wintry mix.” The alley is dark and still and without weather. It
seems to have no atmosphere at all, a hollow stitched into the city for the
singular purpose of separating things from things, like outer space.
She first appeared to him on Christmas Eve. He’d gone to bed early that
night feeling horribly sorry for himself—the only soul in his whole raucous
building with nowhere else to be—when a light snapped on across the alley,
and a small warm glow replaced his window’s usual yawning dark. He sat
up, walked to the window, peeked out. There she was, a flurry of
movement, arranging, unpacking, pulling small vibrant dresses from large
matching suitcases.
Her window was so close to him, and she was so close
to him—their apartments separated by the distance of a single ambitious
jump—that he scooted back a few feet to more fully submerge himself in
his darkness. He sat there on his heels and stared for a short while, until the
staring felt improper and indecent and he contritely returned to bed. But he
has, in the weeks since, come back to the theater of this window, and more
often than he’d like to admit. He sometimes sits here, hidden, and, for a few
minutes at a time, he watches.
To say that he finds her beautiful is too simple. Of course he finds her
beautiful—objectively, classically, obviously beautiful. Even just the way
she walks—with a kind of buoyancy, a cheerful jaunty bounce—has him
thoroughly charmed. She glides across the floor of her apartment in thick
socks, occasionally doing an impromptu twirl, the skirt of her dress
billowing briefly around her. In this drab and filthy place, she prefers
dresses—bright flowered sundresses incongruous amid the grit of this
neighborhood, the cold of this winter.
She tucks her legs under them as she
sits in her plush velvet armchair, a few candles glowing nearby, her face
impassive and cool, holding a book in one hand, the other hand idly tracing
the lip of a wineglass. He watches her touch that glass and wonders how a
little fingertip can inspire such a large torment.
Her apartment is decorated with postcards from places he assumes she’s
been—Paris, Venice, Barcelona, Rome—and framed posters of art he
assumes she’s seen in person: the statue of David, the Pietà, The Last
Supper, Guernica. Her tastes are manifold and intimidating; meanwhile,
he’s never even seen an ocean
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