Adverbs Read Online Free PDF

said, and Helena waited for the thing. “We’re still waiting for your first novel to really catch fire.”
    Helena liked this guy, and the idea of her novel catching fire, like a virgin thrown into a volcano, if one were available, the heat from the center of the earth catching first the pages and then the cardboard cover and the dust jacket until her entire career was in ashes. It was a lovely idea but it didn’t sound like a money-maker. “What’s the problem?” she said. “Why hasn’t it caught on fire?”
    “Just caught fire ,” the editor said, “is the American term. The title might be a problem. You called your novel Glee Club .”
    “I didn’t just call it Glee Club ,” Helena said. Speakers embedded in the ceiling of the restaurant began to announce that they were dreaming of a white Christmas. “It’s called Glee Club . That’s the title .”
    “It’s a British term,” the editor said, “and I think Americans might not know what it means.”
    “The term glee ,” Helena said out loud, “is derived from the Anglo-Saxon gliw or gléo (entertainment, fun) especially as connected with minstrelsy—playing, singing, dancing, and perhaps even acrobatic feats. Until fairly recent times it was in this spiritthat American college glee clubs, with rare exceptions, interpreted the term.” This was from the Harvard Dictionary of Music , second edition, revised and enlarged, by Willi Apel, the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, fourteenth printing, which she threw at David for no particular reason she could think of, even that night in the bath. “See, they know it. They’ve had two hundred years to know it. Britain and America are exactly the same. I’m tired of people saying they don’t understand, and that it’s a British expression. I know what expression it is.”
    David had made some phone calls that afternoon, which again was a miracle. It was a miracle that the American government, in its two hundred plus years of ruthless history, did not have the common sense to shut down Helena’s phone line when there was no way in heaven or on earth that she would be able to come up with the millions of American dollars required to pay the bill. “Do you remember my old girlfriend Andrea?” he asked.
    “Whom you loved,” Helena said, “and, who you told me once in a fit of pique, gave you the best blowjobs of your life?”
    “That’s the one,” David said. “She works for an arts something in San Francisco and thinks she can get you a gig at a school.”
    David had this kindness thing he did which occasionally drove Helena up a wall with jealousy, if that’s the term. She loved him, but arguably this wasn’t enough. She had failed him, because her novel, Glee Club , first edition, St. Martin’s Press, New York, New York, first printing, had failed to catch fire, and there were all these inexplicable things that came out of her mouth. Outside the restaurant she said to her editor, “Whatwould happen if I slept with you?” The editor, to her relief, gave the question the same false consideration he had given the two index cards she had slid his way over dessert. “I’d probably ejaculate,” he said, and got into the waiting taxi. “I’ll speak to you soon, Helena.” And look at her now, saying, “What’s the difference between moving to San Francisco and staying here in New York in utter misery without any money money?”
    “It’s all the same to me,” David said, “but San Francisco is warmer and apparently the people are more something. A credit card could fly us there. Andrea was telling me about a great bar she went to, and an apartment she used to live in, and there’s a rumor that the entire city is resting on an active volcano they just discovered. Everyone’s skittish so the rent is low, and plus, of course they’re afraid of terrorists.”
    “I am,” Helena said, “also afraid of terrorists. And I’m afraid I don’t know what a