Boys and Girls Together Read Online Free PDF

much.’ She pushed the bowl across the table, and he finished what was in it before he spoke again.
    â€˜It’s good food. Especially now that it comes in cans. Is there any beer?’
    The woman fetched a can of beer from the refrigerator and he slapped her bottom when she moved past him so she’d know he was still thinking about how she had it. She poured beer into a glass and then she said, ‘It’s too late.’
    â€˜Shut up.’
    â€˜It really
is
too late. Don’t think I don’t appreciate your letting me sleep in the morning while you get the kids out into the yard. I just can’t get up in the mornings. You need all the sleep you can get.’
    The man got up and finished the beer and walked into the dark living-room.
    â€˜Just shut up. And come here.’
    â€˜No. In the bedroom.’
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜I’ve got it all fixed up. It’s nice and clean in there.’
    â€˜O.K.’
    â€˜Will you tell me about Kharkov?’
    â€˜Sure.’
    â€˜All the time?’
    â€˜Sure.’
    â€˜Every minute of the time. Tell me all about it.’

Chapter 7
    When a man is too near his pleasure, he thought, the food and drink of his heart and hide, too near the satisfying of the gross and grand appetite—but there was never a time like this before, an appetite or a feast like this—when that is how it is with a man, then the luck of children is greater, the luck of art less, though work is best, art is best, the insatiable appetite denied is best, or so they say, they say, but whenever she’s there with eyes, hair, mouth, moisture, they don’t say it.
    â€˜I do this for children,’ he said.
    â€˜You dog. I do it for you.’
    â€˜You do it for you, I do it for me, and to hell with lies.’
    â€˜Well, it’s not my fault I’ve got to lie.’
    â€˜Whose fault is it?’
    â€˜Johnny’s. He started the whole thing.’
    Maybe it was the sleeping boy’s fault at that, because if Johnny hadn’t come along, it would have been another story: the hard dark man, dark the day he was born, darker every day, but the skin fair, the eyes bright with light, not bright with colour, dark with colour, bright with light, with the light that was his mother’s own light, the light of the bawling girl, the little girl stamping her feet for love, for the right to belong somewhere specific and not be loose all over the place, the right to mean everything to one man, it was her own fire that put the light in him, it was the light of the bawling girl no longer bawling but thinking: ‘I made it. I bawled for it and got it.’
    â€˜Isn’t it time to tell me about Kharkov?’
    â€˜Kharkov, if you say it right, is like clearing the throat, but there are those who call it Harkov.’
    â€˜That’s nice.’
    â€˜Yes, it is, because hark is a fair word, as words go in English.’
    â€˜Hark, hark the lark. Do you feel the fluttering of the lark?’
    â€˜That I do.’
    â€˜It’s his fault. When he comes in here in the morning spank him. What would I be doing now except for him? You know you can’t say you don’t love me
now
.’
    â€˜No, I can’t.’

Chapter 8
    They listened to the streetcar banging down the street to the ocean, knowing it had no passengers at that hour of the night, or only one drunk, or an old woman who’d gone across the bay to Berkeley to visit a married daughter, the conductor up front beside the motorman, the two of them talking above the noise of the downhill banging, and smoking cigarettes.
    â€˜Shall I stick it up the way the little girl does?’
    â€˜Yes, I’d like to see that.’
    â€˜But don’t look until I’m ready, all right?’
    â€˜All right.’
    This is what we do, the man thought, and out of it the earth is peopled.
    â€˜Ready.’
    He turned and saw her stuck up the way the little