murakami, haruki - Norwegian wood

Of course. I told him everything that had happened that day - the kind
of lesbian things she did to me, the way I slapped her in the face. Of
course, I didn't tell him what I had felt. I couldn't have told him that.
So anyway, he was furious and insisted that he was going to go
straight to the girl's family. He said, "You're a married woman, after
all. You're married to me. And you're a mother. There's no way you're
a lesbian. What a joke!'
"But I wouldn't let him go. All he could do was make things worse. I
knew. I knew she was sick. I had seen hundreds of sick people, so I
knew. The girl was rotten inside. Peel off a layer of that beautiful skin,
and you'd find nothing but rotten flesh. I know it's a terrible thing to
say, but it's true. And I knew that ordinary people could never know
the truth about her, that there was no way we could win. She was an
expert at manipulating the emotions of the adults around her, and we
had nothing to prove our case. First of all, who's going to believe that
a 13-year-old girl set a homosexual trap for a woman in her thirties?
No matter what we said, people would believe what they wanted to
believe. The more we struggled, the more vulnerable we'd be.
"There was only one thing for us to do, I said: we had to move. If I
stayed in that neighbourhood any longer, the stress would get to me;
my mind would snap again. It was happening already. We had to get
out of there, go somewhere far away where nobody knew me. My
husband wasn't ready to go, though. It hadn't dawned on him yet how
critical I was. And the timing was terrible: he loved his work, and he
had finally succeeded in getting us settled in our own house (we lived
in a little prefab), and our daughter was comfortable in her
kindergarten. "Wait a minute,' he said, "we can't just up sticks and go.
I can't find a job just like that. We'd have to sell the house, and we'd
have to find another kindergarten. It'll take two months at least."
"I can't wait two months,” I told him. "This is going to finish me off
once and for all. I'm not kidding. Believe me, I know what I'm talking
about.' The symptoms were starting already: my ears were ringing,
192