Adultery & Other Choices Read Online Free PDF

started the Goddamn thing! Why do you want to quit ?’
    Paul shrugged and looked down, then raised his eyes to his father; his father’s face was blurred. He blinked and it was clear again and he was too ashamed of the tears on his cheeks to wipe them.
    â€˜Goddamnit what are you cry ing for. What’s he cry ing for.’ His father stood between them, his fierce clenched jaws now turned to her. ‘ Why is he crying! Okay, he wants to quit the Goddamn horn. Okay . I can’t make him play it. He stands there crying. I’m the one who borrowed the Goddamn hundred dollars. What’ll I do with that horn now, huh?’ He looked at Paul. ‘Huh? Can you tell me that?’
    â€˜We can sell it,’ his mother said.
    â€˜We can sell it.’ His father looked at her. ‘That’s not even the point. Why in the hell did he ever think he wanted to play the Goddamn thing to begin with? He didn’t ever want to. It’s just something he and the other one, Eddie, dreamed up. When did Eddie quit?’
    â€˜I don’t know,’ his mother said. ‘Yesterday. Brother Eugene shouldn’t have—’
    â€˜The hell with Brother Eugene. What’s he got to do with it? I pity the poor bastard for wasting his time. With what ?’ Looking at her, he pointed a finger at Paul. ‘What’s he good for? Not a Goddamn thing. He doesn’t do one Goddamn thing but mope around the house, he’s not good for one Goddamn thing but to go to cowboy shows and shoot Japs and Indians in the back yard. What the hell else does he do? Huh? What else?—’ Paul would not remember the rest. In the explosion of his father’s voice he stood with the tears he would not wipe. Once he felt he was kneeling with his head bowed. Finally the sound ended and he left the room and his father’s face. He went to his room and lay face-down on his bed and wiped his eyes. Then he lay on his back and looked at the ceiling. Barbara came in and sat on the bed and held his hand. She looked as though she might cry.
    â€˜He’s terrible,’ she said.
    In her pink cheeks and blue eyes he saw himself, saw the narrow breadth of his soul which in ten years had learned nothing of courage and so much of lies; to her face and the clasp of her hand he silently asked his father’s question— What’s he good for? —and he could not accept the answer of her gaze and touch, that he was a little brother she loved. Closing his eyes he found no answer there either, in the dark of his mind where memories of himself swam: he saw the day of snow when he was five, the only time in his life he had seen snow and that night it melted; in the afternoon his father came home and threw snowballs at them and one hit Paul in the eye and he cried and his mother said: You’re too rough with him, he’s only a little boy ; and he saw the night when he was two and after supper his father picked him up and held him laughing and tossed him in the air and caught him, then again, both of them laughing as his father tossed and tossed while his mother’s voice cut through the blur of ceiling and walls and his father’s arms and laughing upturned face: You’ll make him sick , and then he was, in the air, and on the rug as his father lowered him to the floor and her voice started again. Opening his eyes to look at Barbara he murmured: ‘No he isn’t.’

The Bully
    H E DID NOT tell even Eddie about the cat. It was in summer, in August. The Clements were renting a strange house then. It had been built by the owner and a Negro; it was two stories and its brick and cement walls were a foot thick. It was shaped like a box. For some reason no one had ever explained, the owner had dug a basement under the house after it was built; perhaps he could not stop building. A mule had dragged the dirt away, climbing up the steep ramp which later became the driveway. After that the mule died.