After Claude Read Online Free PDF Page A

my throat. Never, not for one second, had it occurred to me that we were battling.
    He took advantage of my physical disability and struck again. “If I presume to like anyone or anything, you go totally out of control. You demand every second of my attention. I am obliged to see nothing, admire nothing, and respond to nothing but you, you and your dazzling insights. I’m sick to death of this aggression that never ends. I want you out.”
    I found my voice, cracked but usable. “Stop saying that. You’ll brainwash yourself. Out where?”
    “I don’t care. It’s not my problem. You have friends, parents, let them help you.”
    “I told you my parents are dead.”
    “One day they’re dead, the next day they’re alive. Harriet, I’ve made up my mind. I hoped we could spend a pleasant evening, a normal evening, and then calmly discuss the separation.”
    “Ha,” I screamed, as the trusting wife always does when she remembers the preposterous will she signed. “You’ve planned this all along. That’s what you’ve been doing, brooding out here, night after night, instead of facing me, like a man, in bed.”
    The full measure of his treachery burst in me like a hurricane.
    “Harriet, please be fair.”
    Fair? How dare men ask you to be fair, before they throw you in the lion pit.
    “There weren’t even any lions in the picture. They were too damn cheap to throw in a few hungry lions. What about the countless Jews who were consumed by lions? They don’t count?”
    “You’re not going to pull your banana act on me, sweetheart. No matter how nuts you get, we’re going to have this settled. I want you out of this apartment. It’s my apartment. I took you in because I felt sorry for you. I found you wrecked on the stoop and brought you up here out of kindness. That was supposed to be for one night, remember?”
    “Well, how do you think people get together in New York? Were we supposed to be introduced at Tricia Nixon’s wedding? Is that what’s bothering you?”
    “What’s bothering me is that six months have passed and you’re still here, like a leech, a parasite, destroying my apartment and my life. How long must I pay for a single act of mercy?”
    His distortions, the lies he was telling himself and me, filled me with a cold fury, because, as an American, my war against injustice knows no bounds.
    “Mercy. So it was mercy that kept me pinned to your mattress until now? What an extraordinary display of mercy. How Christlike of you, Claude. Thanks to seeing your film biography this evening, I suddenly understand it all. But they didn’t go far enough. The schmuck who played you only kissed lepers; you, on the other hand, screwed one.”
    “Stop screaming. It’s one in the morning.”
    “You might have considered the hour before dropping your bomb, my little lamb of peace.”
    “Enough, Harriet. You made your point. I was not trying to deny that I found you attractive.”
    “Nonsense. You weren’t attracted to me. You were attracted to this corpse you found on your doorstep. You were performing a miracle, not a marathon, don’t belittle yourself.”
    “I said you made your point, but whatever I was doing, you didn’t seem to object too much.” He had to throw in the self-congratulations, because like all Frenchmen, he thought he had the patent on sex.
    “You begged me to stay here while you were breaking the world’s all-time mercy record.”
    “I didn’t beg you, ever. This is getting us nowhere. Whatever made me hope you’d be reasonable?” he lamented. “I let you stay here because I was in and out of the city, and it seemed cruel to kick you out. Every time I’d had it up to here,” he drew a line on his forehead where his brain should have been, “I had to leave New York, and then I’d come back and foolishly get involved with you, but we always agreed that it was a temporary arrangement, and now it’s over, no matter how you exaggerate to serve your peculiar