The Forty Rules of Love: a novel of Rumi

parts of the globe when even the suburbs in America weren’t safe anymore?
Ella found it puzzling that an unpredictable and impenetrable world could drive people like her back
into their houses but had almost the opposite effect on someone like Aziz, inspiring him to embark on
adventures far off the beaten track.
The Rubinsteins sat at a picture-perfect table at 7:30 
P.M.
, the burning candles giving the dining room a
sacred air. An outsider watching them might assume they were a perfect family, as graceful as the wisps
of smoke slowly dissolving in the air. Even Jeannette’s absence didn’t tarnish the picture. They ate while
Orly and Avi prattled on about the day’s events at school. For once Ella felt grateful to them for being so
chatty and noisy and covering up the silence that would otherwise have rested heavily between her and
her husband.

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Out of the corner of her eye, Ella watched David jab his fork into a cauliflower and chew slowly. Her
gaze dropped to his thin, pale lips and pearl-white teeth—the mouth she knew so well and had kissed so
many times. She visualized him kissing another woman. For some reason the rival who appeared in her
mind’s eye was not David’s young secretary but a big-bosomed version of Susan Sarandon. Athletic and
confident, she showed off her breasts in a tight dress and wore high-heeled, knee-high red leather boots,
her face shiny, almost iridescent with too much makeup. Ella imagined David kissing this woman with
haste and hunger, not at all the way he chewed his cauliflower at the family table.
It was then and there, while having her Culinary Artistry Made Plain and Easy dinner and imagining
the woman her husband was having an affair with, that something inside Ella snapped. She understood
with chilling clarity and calm that despite her inexperience and timidity, one day she would abandon it
all: her kitchen, her dog, her children, her neighbors, her husband, her cookbooks and homemade-bread
recipes.… She would simply walk out into the world where dangerous things happened all the time.

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