For the love of reading

My first love was books. When I was young, I would disappear into the fantasy worlds created by others for hours and hours, reading up to 3 books a day. It was my only way to escape the drudgery of my real life. Now, I find myself longing for a good read again.. The Mermaid's Chair. I read it last yr and since then, the story has been haunting me, esp excerpts from the book, cos they relate so well to how i was feeling then. It's a story about a married woman, Jessie, who got restless and wanted to search for meaning in her boring married life. She took a temporary separation from him and went to an island to visit her mother and fell in love with a monk there. This monk is not an ordinary monk. His wife had died some time ago, and devastation with that disaster had brought him to the island to seek peace with God. He thought he would never be able to love again, but when he met this woman, he fell for her and they had an affair..

"I stepped toward him, close enough to smell the saltiness coming from his chest, the damp circles under his arms. Light blazed up in the blue of his eyes. He reached out and pulled me to him, wrapping his arms around me...I closed my eyes and put my mouth at the opening of his shirt, let my lips open and close on his skin, tasting the flesh at the hollow of his throat, the taste of heat. I unfastened each small white button and kissed the skin beneath it. The wooden cross dangled over his breastbone, and I had to move it to one side in order to kiss the bone's small arch...When I reached the button tucked inside his belt, I tugged his shirt out of his jeans and kept unbuttoning until he stood with his shirt wide open, a soft wind lifting the edges of it. He leaned over and kissed me. His mouth tasted like wine, left over from mass... He led me into the flecked light of the hermitage,took off his shirt and spread it on the ground, then undressed me, lifting the T-shirt over my head, unsnapping my khakis, pulling them into a puddle around my ankles. I stepped out of them and stood in my light blue panties and matching bra and let him stare at me. He looked first at my indentation of my waist, that curve where it flares out to my hips, then glanced back at my face for a moment before letting his eyes wander to my breasts, then downward toward my thighs... I stood unmoving, but there was an avalanche going on - an entire history sliding away... He said, "I can't believe how beautiful you are. " I started to say , No, no, I'm not, but stopped myself. Instead I unhooked my bra and let it fall down next to his cross..."

But when the husband, Hugh, came to look for her about an incident concerning her mom, he awoke to reality and realised he could not go on .."He wanted to concentrate his distress on how upset Jessie must be over her mother, and yet he stood before the television and could not keep himself from imagining her with Hugh. In the kitchen with a glass of wine, the solacing embrace, telling small jokes to break the agony - the myraid ways Hugh might comfort her. He felt frightened by the lifetime of small, secret rituals that they must've shared at moments like this, the magnitude of such things. The man is her husband, he told himself. For the love of God, he's her husband. "

Now for the husband's perspective (sorry i'm not sympathetic towards him at all) -

"His wife stood in her mother's island home in South Carolina and calmly told him the name of her lover. "His name is Brother Thomas, " she said..
For a moment Hugh stared at the drops of bathwater sliding along the neck toward the opening of her robe. Her hair was wet and plastered back from her face. He watched how she took a deep breath with her mouth open and let her gaze drop.
They were in the doorway of her brother's old room, and he reached out and placed his hands on the doorjamb. He watched her without any pain at all, stood protected and benumbed in the last few seconds of a dying illusion, the truth flying toward him with the speed of an arrow, but not yet there. It allowed him to see her one last time before the tip gashed into him and everything changed. What he thought standing there was how beautiful she looked with the bathwater still netted on her skin, running in drops between her breasts. How beautiful.
His name is Brother Thomas.
She had said it with complete candor and matter-of-factness as if she were telling him the name of her dentist.
Then it slammed into him - more pain than he'd known in his life. It rocked him backward on his heels, as if there had been a blast of wind. He went on holding the sides of the door, wondering if he might be having an attack of angina. The power of the feeling was crushing."