Banquo's Ghosts Read Online Free PDF Page A

part of the liter vanished down the toilet and into the Euphrates River as Crocodile Cocktails. Cheers.
    An hour of pacing, of looking at his sad reflection, jowls and drinker’s veins, in the glass window, of wishing he could find a woman here to share his loneliness with, if just for one night, of finally imagining the incredible piece he’d really write if ever given the chance, about what was really going on now. All the ice had melted, the second glass long finished, and the bed found him.
    As he lay there with the lights dimmed, love handles spilling over his boxers, something nagged him. Nagged him like the embarrassing regrets that usually splintered through his drunken hazes back home, over a rude pass at a woman too young for him, or a cruel remark to some slovenly sot as liquored up as himself in a forgotten dinner table debate. Something the clever Sheik had said, something knocking at the back door of his brain.
    “Do you know why we are going to win, Mr. Johnson, ‘daring reporter’? I shall tell you. The Jews and weaklings of the West love life. So that is what we shall take away from them.”
    It wasn’t the fact that the imperious snob had actually said it—the sentiment was common enough out here—but because Johnson had heard it before, in other terms. Something much like it . . . long ago at a fancy New York dinner party. Dinner hosted by Jo von H. Years had passed between that party and tonight’s meeting, as he methodically
drank so many of his old memories out of his mind. But that night stood out. As clear and cool a September evening as you could ask for, the lights going on in all the apartment buildings, the traffic moving elegantly along the trees of Central Park, and Tavern on the Green bejeweled in white lights against the growing darkness of the park.
    Josephine Parker von Hildebrand’s apartment overlooked Central Park West, Number 151, The Kenilworth, a French Second Empire- style building with a magisterial entrance flanked by banded columns. Past the liveried doorman, he met Neville Poore, former theater critic at the Times , in the marble lobby, and they took the elevator together. Poore had recently strayed from the Great White Way, haughtily gliding onto the national scene.
    Lately, he had written three straight columns about a Republican embroiled in a sex scandal after getting caught having affairs with both young men and women staffers in his congressional office. “I’m a bi American,” the politician declared at an August press conference, at the end of which a cameraman accidentally knocked him over in the media crush. Neville Poore excoriated the country for its supposed fixation with the flap, even though he had written about nothing else since it happened and read the broadest possible meanings into it, like in today’s number: “Democrats were quick to maneuver for advantage in the scandal, making it truly an exercise in bi partisanship. But the real story is Red State America’s repressed obsession with sex that lashes out at any departure from an Ozzie and Harriet dream world at the same time it forces the desires of its own representatives into the shattering contortions entailed by the closet. Perhaps the nation will finally wake up: polymorphous perversity now, polymorphous perversity forever—for the sake of our emotional, political, and spiritual health, if nothing else.”
    And so it went. Neville lived the editorialist’s dream, gassing on in blissful ignorance, seemingly unable to learn from the spectacularly extensive corrections buried near the front of the paper days after his columns ran.
    “CORRECTION: Spiro Agnew was governor of Maryland, not Mississippi, prior to becoming the vice president of the United States.
He resigned in a scandal related to bribes taken as governor, not over the outrage after the bombing of Cambodia. He was Greek, not Italian.”
    Details, details.
    “Nice bi-line today,” Johnson said, relishing his pun, though