Miss Lonelyhearts Read Free Page B

down on a studio couch with her bare legs
under and her back straight. Behind her a silver tree flowered in the lemon
wall-paper. He remained standing.
    "Betty the Buddha," he
said. "Betty the Buddha. You have the smug smile;
all you need is the pot belly."
    His voice was so full of hatred that
he himself was surprised. He fidgeted for a while in silence and finally sat
down beside her on the couch to take her hand.
    More than two months had passed
since he had sat with her on this same couch and had asked her to marry him.
Then she had accepted him and they had planned their life after marriage, his
job and her gingham apron, his slippers beside the fireplace and her ability to
cook. He had avoided her since. He did not feel guilty; he was merely annoyed
at having been fooled into thinking that such a solution was possible.
    He soon grew tired of holding hands
and began to fidget again. He remembered that towards the end of his last visit
he had put his hand inside her clothes. Unable to think of anything else to do,
he now repeated the gesture. She was naked under her robe and he found her
breast.
    She made no sign to show that she
was aware of his hand. He would have welcomed a slap, but even when he caught
at her nipple, she remained silent.
    "Let me pluck this rose,"
he said, giving a sharp tug. "I want to wear it in my buttonhole."
    Betty reached for his brow.
"What's the matter?" she asked. "Are you sick?"
    He began to shout at her,
accompanying his shouts with gestures that were too appropriate, like those of
an old-fashioned actor.
    "What a kind bitch you are. As
soon as any one acts viciously, you say he's sick. Wife-torturers, rapers of small children, according to you they're all
sick. No morality, only medicine. Well, I'm not sick. I don't need any of your
damned aspirin. I've got a Christ complex. Humanity...I'm a humanity lover. All
the broken bastards..." He finished with a short laugh that was like a
bark.
    She had left the couch for a red
chair that was swollen with padding and tense with live springs. In the lap of
this leather monster, all trace of the serene Buddha disappeared.
    But his anger was not appeased.
"What's the matter, sweetheart?" he asked, patting her shoulder
threateningly. "Didn't you like the performance?"
    Instead of answering, she raised her
arm as though to ward off a blow. She was like a kitten whose soft helplessness
makes one ache to hurt it.
    "What's the matter?" he
demanded over and over again. "What's the matter? What's the matter?"
    Her face took on the expression of
an inexperienced gambler about to venture all on a last throw. He was turning
for his hat, when she spoke.
    "I love you."
    "You
what?"
    The need for repeating flustered
her, yet she managed to keep her manner undramatic .
    "I love you."
    "And I love you," he said.
"You and your damned smiling through tears."
    "Why don't you let me
alone?" She had begun to cry. "I felt swell before you came, and now
I feel lousy. Go away. Please go away."

 
MISS LONELYHEARTS AND THE CLEAN OLD MAN
     
    In the street again, Miss Lonelyhearts wondered what to do next. He was too excited
to eat and afraid to go home. He felt as though his heart were a bomb, a
complicated bomb that would result in a simple explosion, wrecking the world
without rocking it.
    He decided to go to Delehanty's for a drink. In the speakeasy, he discovered a
group of his friends at the bar. They greeted him and went on talking. One of
them was complaining about the number of female writers.
    "And they've all got three
names," he said. "Mary Roberts Wilcox, Ella Wheeler Catheter, Ford
Mary Rinehart..."
    Then some one started a train of
stories by suggesting that what they all needed was a good rape.
    "I knew a gal who was regular
until she fell in with a group and went literary. She began writing for the
little magazines about how much Beauty hurt her and ditched the boy friend who set up pins in a bowling alley. The guys on the block
got sore and took her into