Clemmie Read Free Page A

had been taken out. The skeletal steelwork of a new shopping section had already been erected. The block their house was in had recently been re-zoned to Commercial A. He’d heard that many of the people in the next block had gotten handsome prices for ancient, ugly houses such as this one.
    And that, he thought, might be the answer. There wasless than two thousand left on the mortgage. Should the shopping center prosper—and the men behind it were hardly fools—the commercial value of this block might go up.
    It would be good to get out of here. The kids in that school were rough. And sometimes you could have bad dreams about what might happen to a pretty, blonde, little girl caught out after dusk in such a neighborhood.
    Yet the orderly ostentation of River Wood was not appealing. Not tonight at least. Not while he felt so restless. He turned on the light in the archaic kitchen and opened the refrigerator to get milk before he remembered there would be no milk. There were two cans of beer in the nearly empty refrigerator. He opened one and stood leaning against the sink and drank it. The refrigerator choked, stammered, and began to hum loudly. Turn the damn thing off when that next beer is gone.
    And he went up the narrow stairs to the empty bed.

CHAPTER TWO
    On the night he had too much to drink at the Burneys, he went to sleep very quickly. When the alarm went off he found he felt as bad as he had expected. Maybe a little bit worse. After he had breakfast in a diner, he left the car off at the garage and took a taxi out to the plant on the other side of the river.
    It was a day when every possible thing went wrong. When he left at six-thirty, the other offices were empty, and he had forgotten he didn’t have a car. The bus was nearly empty. He ate a tasteless dinner six blocks from home and walked back through the lingering summer twilight, back to the empty house.
    It always seemed far emptier by daylight. There were dust motes in the last flat rays of the sun. With his fingertip he made an X in the dust on the top of the gateleg table. “X marks the spot,” he said aloud, and his voice had an empty, eerie sound in the house. All hermits end up talking to themselves, he thought.
    He wrote a letter to Maura. He had intended to make it a long letter, but at the end of the second page there didn’t seem to be anything left to say. He told her about the Burneys and managed to make it sound like a pleasant evening. He tried a humorous account of the evil day at the plant, but when he reread it, the humor sounded forced and flat. He was tempted to destroy the letter and try again, but he suspected that the second attempt would be no better. He rolled the envelope into the battered portable he had owned ever since the Wharton School and typed her address:
    Mrs. Craig A. Fitz
    The Vinelands
    Long Melford, West Suffolk
    England
    It was a damn long way away, and half an hour before midnight there—she and the kids would be asleep. He propped the letter where he would see it in the morning.
    For a half hour he read a magazine that had come in the mail. Then he tried the five available television channels and found nothing that seemed worth looking at. Five minutes of nine seemed a strange time to go to bed, but there was no one to chide—or care. He made one stiff highball and realized that if he wanted to keep on having ice through the summer, he would have to keep the refrigerator on.
    After he was in bed, he found himself thinking again of the Burneys. He imagined they had been glad when he had finally left. And, judging from Alice’s heavy-headed look, the air of dragging languor that had come over her late in the evening, it had not taken them long to hurry to bed after he left. He thought of them and speculated on how she would be, quite idly at first, and suddenly, with both self-disgust and coarse amusement, he realized that he had all the physiological symptoms of strong and immediate physical need.
    He turned on