Bag of Bones 16 страница

“Who was the guy at the game? ” I panted. “Who was he, Jo? ”

“No one in particular, Irish. Just another bag of bones. ”

She laughed, then leaned back on her haunches and stared at me. Her navel was a tiny black cup. There was something queerly, attractively snakelike in her posture. “Everything down there is death, ” she said, and pressed her cold palms and white, pruney fingers to my cheeks. She turned my head and then bent it so I was looking into the lake. Under the water I saw decomposing bodies slipping by, pulled by some deep current. Their wet eyes stared. Their fish-nibbled noses gaped. Their tongues lolled between white lips like tendrils of waterweed. Some of the dead trailed pallid balloons of jellyfish guts; some were little more than bone. Yet not even the sight of this floating charnel parade could divert me from what I wanted. I shrugged my head free of her hands, pushed her down on the boards, and finally cooled what was so hard and contentious, sinking it deep. Her moon-silvered eyes stared up at me, through me, and I saw that one pupil was larger than the other.

That was how her eyes had looked on the TV monitor when I had identified her in the Derry County Morgue. She was dead. My wife was dead and I was fucking her corpse. Nor could even that realization stop me. “Who was he? ” I cried at her, covering her cold flesh as it lay on the wet boards. “Who was he, Jo, for Christ’s sake tell me who he was! ” In the north bedroom I pulled Mattie on top of me, relishing the feel of those small breasts against my chest and the length of her entwining legs.

Then I rolled her over on the far side of the bed. I felt her hand reaching for me, and slapped it away—if she touched me where she meant to touch me, I would come in an instant. “Spread your legs, hurry, ” I said, and she did. I closed my eyes, shutting out all other sensory input in favor of this. I pressed forward, then stopped. I made one little adjustment, pushing at my engorged penis with the side of my hand, then rolled my hips and slipped into her like a finger in a silk-lined glove. She looked up at me, wide-eyed, then put a hand on my cheek and turned my head. “Everything out there is death, ” she said, as if only explaining the obvious. In the window I saw Fifth Avenue between Fiftieth and Sixtieth—all those trendy shops, Bijan and Bally, Tiffany and Bergdortts and Steuben Glass. And here came Harold Oblowski, northbound and swinging his pigskin briefcase (the one Jo and I had given him for Christmas the year before she died). Beside him, carrying a Barnes and Noble bag by the handles, was the bountiful, beauteous Nola, his secretary. Except her bounty was gone. This was a grinning, yellow-jawed skeleton in a Donna Karan suit and alligator pumps; scrawny, beringed bones instead of fingers gripped the bag-handles.

Harold’s teeth jutted in his usual agent’s grin, now extended to the point of obscenity. His favorite suit, the doublebreasted charcoal-gray from Paul Stuart, flapped on him like a sail in a fresh breeze. All around them, on both sides of the street, walked the living dead—mommy mummies leading baby corpses by the hands or wheeling them in expensive prams, zombie doormen, reanimated skateboarders. Here a tall black man with a last few strips of flesh hanging from his face like cured deer-hide walked his skeletal Alsatian. The cab-drivers were rotting to raga music. The faces looking down from the passing buses were skulls, each wearing its own version of Harold’s grin—Hey, how are ya, how’s the wij, how’s the kids, writing any good books lately? The peanut vendors were putrefying. Yet none of it could quench me. I was on fire.

I slipped my hands under her buttocks, lifting her, biting at the sheet (the pattern, I saw with no surprise, was blue roses) until I pulled it free of the mattress to keep from biting her on the neck, the shoulder, the breasts, anywhere my teeth could reach. “Tell me who he was! ” I shouted at her. “You know, I know you do! ” My voice was so muffled by my mouthful of bed-linen that I doubted if anyone but me could have understood it. “Tell me, you bitch! ” On the path between Jo’s studio and the house I stood in the dark with the typewriter in my arms and that dream-spanning erection quivering below its metal bulk—all that ready and nothing willing. Except maybe for the night breeze. Then I became aware I was no longer alone. The shroud-thing was behind me, called like the moths to the party lights. It laughed-a brazen, smoke-broken laugh that could belong to only one woman. I didn’t see the hand that reached around my hip to grip me—the typewriter was in the way—but I didn’t need to see it to know its color was brown. It squeezed, slowly tightening, the fingers wriggling. “What do you want to know, sugar? ”

she asked from behind me. Still laughing. Still teasing. “Do you really want to know at all? Do you want to know or do you want to feel? ”

“Oh, you’re killing me! ” I cried. The typewriter—thirty or so pounds of IBM Selectric—was shaking back and forth in my arms. I could feel my muscles twanging like guitar strings. “Do you want to know who he was, sugar? That nasty man? ” ’just do me, you bitch! ” I screamed. She laughed again—that harsh laughter that was almost like a cough—and squeezed me where the squeezing was best. “You hold still, now, ” she said. “You hold still, pretty boy, ’less you want me to take fright and yank this thing of yours right out by the. . . ” I lost the rest as the whole world exploded in an orgasm so deep and strong that I thought it would simply tear me apart. I snapped my head back like a man being hung and ejaculated looking up at the stars. I screamed—I had to—and on the lake, two loons screamed back. At the same time I was on the float. Jo was gone, but I could faintly hear the sound of the band—Sara and Sonny and the Red-Top Boys tearing through “Black Mountain Rag. ” I sat up, dazed and spent, fucked hollow. I couldn’t see the path leading up to the house, but I could discern its switchback course by the Japanese lanterns. My underpants lay beside me in a little wet heap. I picked them up and started to put them on, only because I didn’t want to swim back to shore with them in my hand. I stopped with them stretched between my knees, looking at my fingers. They were slimed with decaying flesh. Puffing out from beneath several of the nails were clumps of torn-out hair. Corpsehair. “Oh Jesus, ” I moaned. The strength went out of me. I flopped into wetness. I was in the north-wing bedroom. What I had landed in was hot, and at first I thought it was come. The dim glow of the nightlight showed darker stuff, however. Mattie was gone and the bed was full of blood.

Lying in the middle of that soaking pool was something I at first glance took to be a clump of flesh or a piece of organ. I looked more closely and saw it was a stuffed animal, a black-furred object matted red with blood. I lay on my side looking at it, wanting to bolt out of the bed and flee from the room but unable to do it. My muscles were in a dead swoon. Who had I really been having sex with in this bed? And what had I done to her? In God’s name, what? “I don’t believe these lies, ” I heard myself say, and as though it were an incantation, I was slapped back together. That isn’t exactly what happened, bur it’s the only way of saying that seems to come close to whatever did. There were three of me—one on the float, one in the north bedroom, one on the path—and each one felt that hard slap, as if the wind had grown a fist. There was rushing blackness, and in it the steady silver shaking of Bunter’s bell.

Then it faded, and I faded with it. For a little while I was nowhere at all.

I came back to the casual chatter of birds on summer vacation and to that peculiar red darkness that means the sun is shining through your closed eyelids. My neck was stiff, my head was canted at a weird angle, my legs were folded awkwardly beneath me, and I was hot. I lifted my head with a wince, knowing even as I opened my eyes that I was no longer in bed, no longer on the swimming float, no longer on the path between the house and the studio. It was floorboards under me, hard and uncompromising.

The light was dazzling. I squinched my eyes closed again and groaned like a man with a hangover. I eased them back open behind my cupped hands, gave them time to adjust, then cautiously uncovered them, sat all the way up, and looked around. I was in the upstairs hall, lying under the broken air conditioner. Mrs. Meserve’s note still hung from it.

Sitting outside my office door was the green IBM with a piece of paper rolled into it. I looked down at my feet and saw that they were dirty.

Pine needles were stuck to my soles, and one toe was scratched. I got up, staggered a little (my right leg had gone to sleep), then braced a hand against the wall and stood steady. I looked down at myself. I was wearing the Jockeys I’d gone to bed in, and I didn’t look as if I’d had an accident in them. I pulled out the waistband and peeked inside. My cock looked as it usually did; small and soft, curled up and asleep in its thatch of hair. If Noonan’s Folly had been adventuring in the night, there was no sign of it now. “It sure felt like an adventure, ” I croaked. I armed sweat off my forehead. It was stifling up here. “Not the kind I ever read about in The Hardy Boys, though. ” Then I remembered the blood-soaked sheet in the north bedroom, and the stuffed animal lying on its side in the middle of it. There was no sense of relief attached to the memory, that thank-God-it-was-only-a-dream feeling you get after a particularly nasty nightmare. It felt as real as any of the things I’d experienced in my measles fever-delirium. . . and all those things had been real, just distorted by my overheated brain. I staggered to the stairs and limped down them, holding tight to the bannister in case my tingling leg should buckle. At the foot I looked dazedly around the living room, as if seeing it for the first time, and then limped down the north-wing corridor. The bedroom door was ajar and for a moment I couldn’t bring myself to push it all the way open and go in. I was very badly scared, and my mind kept trying to replay an old episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the one about the man who strangles his wife during an alcoholic blackout. He spends the whole half hour looking for her, and finally finds her in the pantry, bloated and open-eyed. Kyra Devore was the only kid of stuffed-animal age I’d met recently, but she had been sleeping peacefully under her cabbage-rose coverlet when I left her mother and headed home. It was stupid to think I had driven all the way back to Wasp Hill Road, probably wearing nothing but my Jockeys, that I had-Il/hat? Raped the woman? Brought the child here? In my sleep? I got the typewriter, in my sleep, didn’t I? It’s sitting right upstairs in the god-dam hallway. Big difference between going thirty yards through the woods and five miles down the road to-I wasn’t going to stand out here listening to those quarrelling voices in my head. If I wasn’t crazy—and I didn’t think I was—listening to those contentious assholes would probably send me there, and by the express. I reached out and pushed the bedroom door open. For a moment I actually saw a spreading octopus-pattern of blood soaking into the sheet, that’s how real and focused my terror was. Then I closed my eyes tight, opened them, and looked again. The sheets were rumpled, the bottom one mostly pulled free. I could see the quilted satin hide of the mattress. One pillow lay on the far edge of the bed.

The other was scrunched down at the foot. The throw rug—a piece of Jo’s work—was askew, and my water-glass lay overturned on the nighttable.

The bedroom looked as if it might have been the site of a brawl or an orgy, but not a murder. There was no blood and no little stuffed animal with black fur. I dropped to my knees and looked under the bed. Nothing there—not even dust-kitties, thanks to Brenda Meserve. I looked at the ground-sheet again, first passing a hand over its rumpled topography, then pulling it back down and resecuring the elasticized corners. Great invention, those sheets; if women gave out the Medal of Freedom instead of a bunch of white politicians who never made a bed or washed a load of clothes in their lives, the guy who thought up fitted sheets would undoubtedly have gotten a piece of that tin by now. In a Rose Garden ceremony. With the sheet pulled taut, I looked again. No blood, not a single drop. There was no stiffening patch of semen, either. The former I hadn’t really expected (or so I was already telling myself), but what about the latter? At the very least, I’d had the world’s most creative wet-dream—a triptych in which I had screwed two women and gotten a handjob from a third, all at the same time. I thought I had that morning-after feeling, too, the one you get when the previous night’s sex has been of the headbusting variety. But if there had been fireworks, where was the burnt gunpowder? “In Jo’s studio, most likely, ” I told the empty, sunny room. “Or on the path between here and there. Just be glad you didn’t leave it in Mattie Devore, bucko. An affair with a post-adolescent widow you don’t need. ” A part of me disagreed; a part of me thought Mattie Devore was exactly what I did need. But I hadn’t had sex with her last night, any more than I had had sex with my dead wife out on the swimming float or gotten a handjob from Sara Tidwell. Now that I saw I hadn’t killed a nice little kid either, my thoughts turned back to the typewriter. Why had I gotten it? Why bother? Oh man. What a silly question. My wife might have been keeping secrets from me, maybe even having an affair; there might be ghosts in the house; there might be a rich old man halfa mile south who wanted to put a sharp stick into me and then break it off; there might be a few toys in my own humble attic, for that matter. But as I stood there in a bright shaft of sunlight, looking at my shadow on the far wall, only one thought seemed to matter: I had gone out to my wife’s studio and gotten my old typewriter, and there was only one reason to do something like that. I went into the bathroom, wanting to get rid of the sweat on my body and the dirt on my feet before doing anything else. I reached for the shower-handle, then stopped. The tub was full of water. Either I had for some reason filled it during my sleepwalk. . . or something else had. I reached for the drain-lever, then stopped again, remembering that moment on the shoulder of Route 68 when my mouth had filled up with the taste of cold water. I realized I was waiting for it to happen again. When it didn’t, I opened the bathtub drain to let out the standing water and started the shower.

I could have brought the Selectric downstairs, perhaps even lugged it out onto the deck where there was a little breeze coming over the surface of the lake, but I didn’t. I had brought it all the way to the door of my office, and my office was where I’d work. . . if I could work.

I’d work in there even if the temperature beneath the roofpeak built to a hundred and twenty degrees. . . which, by three in the afternoon, it just might.

The paper rolled into the machine was an old pink-carbon receipt from Click!, the photo shop in Castle Rock where Jo had bought her supplies when we were down here. I’d put it in so that the blank side faced the Courier type-ball. On it I had typed the names of my little harem, as if I had tried in some struggling way to report on my three-faceted dream even while it was going on:

Jo Sara Mattie Jo Sara Mattie Mattie Mattie Sara Sara Jo Johanna Sara Jo Mattiesarajo.

Below this, in lower case: normal sperm count sperm norm all’s rosy I opened the office door, carried the typewriter in, and put it in its old place beneath the poster of Richard Nixon. I pulled the pink slip out of the roller, balled it up, and tossed it into the wastebasket.

Then I picked up the Selectric’s plug and stuck it in the baseboard socket. My heart was beating hard and fast, the way it had when I was thirteen and climbing the ladder to the high board at the Y-pool. I had climbed that ladder three times when I was twelve and then slunk back down it again; once I turned thirteen, there could be no chickening out—I really had to do it.

I thought I’d seen a fan hiding in the far corner of the closet, behind the box marked GADGETS. I started in that direction, then turned around again with a ragged little laugh. I’d had moments of confidence before, hadn’t I? Yes. And then the iron bands had clamped around my chest. It would be stupid to get out the fan and then discover I had no business in this room after all.

“Take it easy, ” I said, “take it easy. ” But I couldn’t, no more than that narrow-chested boy in the ridiculous purple bathing suit had been able to take it easy when he walked to the end of the diving board, the pool so green below him, the upraised faces of the boys and girls in it so small, so small.

I bent to one of the drawers on the right side of the desk and pulled so hard it came all the way out. I got my bare foot out of its landing zone just in time and barked a gust of loud, humorless laughter. There was halfa ream of paper in the drawer. The edges had that faintly crispy look paper gets when it’s been sitting for a long time. I no more than saw it before remembering I had brought my own supply—stuff a good deal fresher than this. I left it where it was and put the drawer back in its hole. It took several tries to get it on its tracks; my hands were shaking.

At last I sat down in my desk chair, hearing the same old creaks as it took my weight and the same old rumble of the casters as I rolled it forward, snugging my legs into the kneehole. Then I sat facing the keyboard, sweating hard, still remembering the high board at the Y, how springy it had been under my bare feet as I walked its length, remembering the echoing quality of the voices below me, remembering the smell of chlorine and the steady low throb of the air-exchangers: fwung-fwung-fwung-fwung, as if the water had its own secret heartbeat. I had stood at the end of the board wondering (and not for the first time! ) if you could be paralyzed if you hit the water wrong. Probably not, but you could die of fear. There were documented cases of that in Ripley’s Believe It or Not, which served me as science between the ages of eight and fourteen.

Go on/Jo’s voice cried. My version of her voice was usually calm and collected; this time it was shrill. Stop dithering andgo on!

I reached for the IBM’s rocker-switch, now remembering the day I had dropped my Word Six program into the Powerbook’s trash. Goodbye, oldpal, I had thought.

“Please let this work, ” I said. “Please. ”

I lowered my hand and flicked the switch. The machine came on. The Courier ball did a preliminary twirl, like a ballet dancer standing in the wings, waiting to go on. I picked up a piece of paper, saw my sweaty fingers were leaving marks, and didn’t care. I rolled it into the machine, centered it, then wrote Chapter One and waited for the storm to break.

CHAPTER 4

The ringing of the phone—or, more accurately, the way I received the ringing of the phone—was as familiar as the creaks of my chair or the hum of the old IBM Selectric. It seemed to come from far away at first, then to approach like a whistling train coming down on a crossing.

There was no extension in my office or Jo’s; the upstairs phone, an old-fashioned rotary-dial, was on a table in the hall between them—in what Jo used to call “no-man’s-land. ” The temperature out there must have been at least ninety degrees, but the air still felt cool on my skin after the office. I was so oiled with sweat that I looked like a slightly pot-bellied version of the muscle-boys I sometimes saw when I was working out.

“Hello? ”

“Mike? Did I wake you? Were you sleeping? ” It was Mattie, but a different one from last night. This one wasn’t afraid or even tentative; this one sounded so happy she was almost bubbling over. It was almost cer tainly the Mattie who had attracted Lance Devore. “Not sleeping, ” I said. “Writing a little. ”

“Get out! I thought you were retired. ”

“I thought so, too, ” I said, “but maybe I was a little hasty. What’s going on? You sound over the moon. ”

“I just got off the phone with John Storrow—”

Really? How long had I been on the second floor, anyway? I looked at my wrist and saw nothing but a pale circle. It was half-past freckles and skin o’clock, as we used to say when we were kids; my watch was downstairs in the north bedroom, probably lying in a puddle of water from my overturned night-glass.

“—his age, and that he can subpoena the other son! ”

“Whoa, ” I said. “You lost me. Go back and slow down. ”

She did. Telling the hard news didn’t take long (it rarely does):

Stor-row was coming up tomorrow. He would land at County Airport and stay at the Lookout Rock Hotel in Castle View. The two of them would spend most of Friday discussing the case. “Oh, and he found a lawyer for you, ” she said. “To go with you to your deposition. I think he’s from Lewiston. ”

It all sounded good, but what mattered a lot more than the bare facts was that Mattie had recovered her will to fight. Until this morning (if it was still morning; the light coming in the window above the broken air conditioner suggested that if it was, it wouldn’t be much longer) I hadn’t realized how gloomy the young woman in the red sundress and tidy white sneakers had been. How far down the road to believing she would lose her child.

“This is great. I’m so glad, Mattie. ”

“And you did it. If you were here, I’d give you the biggest kiss you ever had. ”

“He told you you could win, didn’t he? ”

“Yes. ”

“And you believe him. ”

“Yes! ” Then her voice dropped a little. “He wasn’t exactly thrilled when I told him I’d had you over to dinner last night, though. ”

“No, ” I said. “I didn’t think he would be. ”

“I told him we ate in the yard and he said we only had to be inside together for sixty seconds to start the gossip. ”

“I’d say he’s got an insultingly low opinion of Yankee lovin, ” I said, “but of course he’s from New York. ” She laughed harder than my little joke warranted, I thought. Out of semi-hysterical relief that she now had a couple of protectors? Because the whole subject of sex was a tender one for her just now? Best not to speculate. “He didn’t paddle me too hard about it, but he made it clear that he would if we did it again. When this is over, though, I’m having you for a real meal. We’ll have everything you like, just the way you like it. ” Everything you like, just the way you like it. And she was, by God and Sonny Jesus, completely unaware that what she was saying might have another meaning—I would have bet on it. I closed my eyes for a moment, smiling.

Why not smile? Everything she was saying sounded absolutely great, especially once you cleared the confines of Michael Noonan’s dirty mind.

It sounded like we might have the expected fairy-tale ending, if we could keep our courage and hold our course. And if I could restrain myself from making a pass at a girl young enough to be my daughter. . . outside of my dreams, that was. If I couldn’t, I probably deserved whatever I got. But Kyra wouldn’t. She was the hood ornament in all this, doomed to go wherever the car took her. If I got any of the wrong ideas, I’d do well to remember that. “If the judge sends Devore home empty-handed, I’ll take you out to Renoir Nights in Portland and buy you nine courses of French chow, ” I said. “Storrow, too. I’ll even spring for the legal beagle I’m dating on Friday. So who’s better than me, huh? ”

“No one I know, ” she said, sounding serious. “I’ll pay you back for this, Mike. I’m down now, but I won’t always be down. If it takes me the rest of my life, I’ll pay you back. ”

“Mattie, you don’t have to—”

“I do, ” she said with quiet vehemence. “I do. And I have to do something else today, too. ”

“What’s that? ” I loved hearing her sound the way she did this morn-ing—so happy and free, like a prisoner who has just been pardoned and let out of jail—but already I was looking longingly at the door to my office. I couldn’t do much more today, I’d end up baked like an apple if I tried, but I wanted another page or two, at least. Do what you want, both women had said in my dreams. Do what you want. “I have to buy Kyra the big teddybear they have at the Castle Rock Wal-Mart, ” she said. “I’ll tell her it’s for being a good girl because I can’t tell her it’s for walking in the middle of the road when you were coming the other way. ”

“Just not a black one, ” I said. The words were out of my mouth before I knew they were even in my head. “Huh? ” Sounding startled and doubtful. “I said bring me back one, ” I said, the words once again out and down the wire before I even knew they were there. “Maybe I will, ” she said, sounding amused. Then her tone grew serious again. “And if I said anything last night that made you unhappy, even for a minute, I’m sorry. I never for the world—”

“Don’t worry, ” I said. “I’m not unhappy. A little confused, that’s all. In fact I’d pretty much forgotten about Jo’s mystery date. ” A lie, but in what seemed to me to be a good cause. “That’s probably for the best. I won’t keep you—go on back to work. It’s what you want to do, isn’t it? ” I was startled. “What makes you say that? ”

“I don’t know, I just. . . ” She stopped. And I suddenly knew two things: What she had been about to say, and that she wouldn’t say it. I dreamed about you last night. I dreamed about us together. were going to make love and one of us said “Do what you want. ”

Or maybe, I don’t know, maybe we both said it. Perhaps sometimes ghosts were alive—minds and desires divorced from their bodies, unlocked impulses floating unseen. Ghosts from the id, spooks from low places.

“Mattie? Still there? ”

“Sure, you bet. Do you want me to stay in touch?

Or will you hear all you need from John Storrow? "

“If you don’t stay in touch, I’ll be pissed at you. Royally. ” She laughed. “I will, then. But not when you’re working. Goodbye, Mike. And thanks again. So much. ” I told her goodbye, then stood there for a moment looking at the old fashioned Bakelite phone handset after she had hung up. She’d call and keep me updated, but not when I was working. How would she know when that was? She just would. As I’d known last night that she was lying when she said Jo and the man with the elbow patches on the sleeves of his sportcoat had walked off toward the parking lot. Mattie had been wearing a pair of white shorts and a halter top when she called me, no dress or skirt required today because it was Wednesday and the library was closed on Wednesday. You don’t know any of that. IOU ’re just making it up. But I wasn’t. If I’d been making it up, I probably would have put her in something a little more suggestive—a Merry Widow from Victoria’s Secret, perhaps. That thought called up another. Do what you want, they had said. Both of them. Do what you want. And that was a line I knew.

While on Key Largo I’d read an Atlantic Monthly essay on pornography by some feminist. I wasn’t sure which one, only that it hadn’t been Naomi Wolf or Camille Paglia. This woman had been of the conservative stripe, and she had used that phrase. Sally Tisdale, maybe? Or was my mind just hearing echo-distortions of Sara Tidwell? Whoever it had been, she’d claimed that “do what I want” was the basis of erotica which appealed to women and “do what you want” was the basis of pornography which appealed to men. Women imagine speaking the former line in sexual situations; men imagine having the latter line spoken to them. And, the writer went on, when real-world sex goes bad—sometimes turning violent, sometimes shaming, sometimes just unsuccessful from the female partner’s point of view—porn is often the unindicted co-conspirator. The man is apt to round on the woman angrily and cry, “You wanted me to! Quit lying and admit it! You wanted me to! ” The writer claimed it was what every man hoped to hear in the bedroom: Do what you want. Bite me, sodomize me, lick between my toes, drink wine out of my navel, give me a hairbrush and raise your ass for me to paddle, it doesn’t matter. Do what you want. The door is closed and we are here, but really onlyyou are here, I am just a willing extension of your fantasies and onlyyou are here. I have no wants of my own, no needs of my own, no taboos. Do what you want to this shadow, this fantasy, this ghost.

I’d thought the essayist at least fifty per cent full of shit; the assumption that a man can find real sexual pleasure only by turning a woman into a kind of jackoff accessory says more about the observer than the participants. This lady had had a lot of jargon and a fair amount of wit, but underneath she was only saying what Somerset Maugham, Jo’s old favorite, had had Sadie Thompson say in “Rain, ” a story written eighty years before: men are pigs, filthy, dirty pigs, all of them. But we are not pigs, as a rule, not beasts, or at least not unless we are pushed to the final extremity. And if we are pushed to it, the issue is rarely sex; it’s usually territory. I’ve heard feminists argue that to men sex and territory are interchangeable, and that is very far from the truth.

I padded back to the office, opened the door, and behind me the telephone rang again. And here was another familiar sensation, back for a return visit after four years: that anger at the telephone, the urge to simply rip it out of the wall and fire it across the room. Why did the whole world have to call while I was writing? Why couldn’t they just. . . well. . . let me do what I wanted? I gave a doubtful laugh and returned to the phone, seeing the wet handprint on it from my last call.

⇐ Предыдущая 12 13 14 15 161718 19 20 21 Следующая ⇒