Augusta Played Read Online Free PDF Page A

happened. Sometimes I think I imagined it, the descent and the—the sense of it. I will try to describe this sense. It was as if one hundred percent of the universe contracted to a cone, and I was being sucked down into it, to the very narrow tip where things begin.”
    Now, so far as being a pilot went, Norman rode the subway; he could hardly drive, much less fly. He had never been through anything spectacular. He had never been a soldier or a prisoner, or anything but a student, analysand, and, for a few weeks one summer, a seller of baby pictures door-to-door on Long Island. He had also briefly worked for a firm of financial consultants, dialing people in the Manhattan telephone directory and trying to talk them into setting up a free appointment, at which they would find out from someone else how little it could cost them to save money. For this reason, the exploits of other men nudged Norman discomfitingly, pushed him into the past, where he stopped on the street, stood listening for danger, heard Snowball, the albino with a hard-on, slip and curse behind the fence, and then ran like hell for home. About once a month Snowball and his cohorts caught him, plastered his face in mud, yanked his pants down, foulmouthed his father. While his father was the D.A., they had it in for “Norm the Gorm.” But his father the D.A. never even noticed them; boys like that were mindless microscopic existents, his father said, interesting to a sociologist but of no ethical consequence. “I got bigger fish to fry,” his father said. His father said this until full-scale gang warfare erupted in vicious earnestness in the late fifties, but by that time Sid Gold was busy being a judge. By that time Norman had come into his own, the Julien Sorel of Ocean Parkway with large, suffering, intense, heart-hurting eyes and a young man’s utter lack of scrupulousness about using them.
    Meanwhile, he had learned to walk with his head down, since to shoot glances at Snowball ranked, apparently, as an insult of injurious proportions. He steered clear of dead ends.
    All this caution had delimited Norman’s sense of himself; he felt that he knew himself inside out, and he was ashamed not to be aware of vast unexplored emotional territories. Even if he could discover them, he doubted that he would be brave enough to penetrate very deeply, though perhaps he did himself a disservice here, for he was intellectually aggressive, a prober of tunnels, a ravisher of motive, and if mystery was a woman, shy and sultry as sunlight on a hot, cloudy day, when the wind hung over the sky like seven veils, then he was her best lover, the one who knew how to strip to essence.
    Gus, knowing the pressure of Norman’s arm on her lap, smiled. The Berliner said she was beautiful when she smiled. Norman said she was beautiful even when she didn’t, but that she was more likable when she did. These comments contained messages, but for whom were they meant? If for her, why did both men speak about her and not to her? Warned, she took her hand from Norman’s elbow, as if suddenly she doubted he would be as careful of her person as she would. Suppose she were a book, or a score. Men were lackadaisical about library due dates, the energy that went into any work a woman did, and most of all, sexual loyalties. “Did the war touch your wife too?” she asked, addressing the Berliner. She hadn’t intended for her question to sound so obscene. She felt as though she’d bent over to pick up some idea that they’d left lying around on the wooden floor, like a peanut shell, only to learn that the back of her skirt had pulled up humiliatingly, exposing her most vulnerable parts.
    The man said, “You want me to give you a yes. This would be the easy answer. But my wife is a free spirit; nothing touches her but art.”
    Norman laughed. “You read too much Nietzsche at the Gymnasium.”
    Gus was thinking about the wife