Burning the Days Read Online Free PDF

necessary, the doctor continued, was a sort of kick to get the process started. He asked me if I knew what delivered this kick. He waited but I had no answer. The rooster, he explained.
    With this, for me, improbable picture now in place he proceeded, with great discretion, wearing surgical gloves, as it were, to describe the principle of the kick as it related to humans. I more or less understood but did not find it intriguing.
    I don’t recall what my father said as we left. He may have asked me if I had any questions I hadn’t wanted to ask in the office. I am certain my reply would have been no. With that, my father would have felt he had done what was expected of him.
    At birthday parties, sitting in a circle, we played spin the bottle. A boy spun it and the girl it pointed to he kissed, usually with embarrassment. I bent awkwardly across towards Regina, the dark-haired daughter of the Greek florist, or Gisela, frail and blonde. The kisses meant nothing. The girls were of an age when only their long hair and instincts distinguished them from us.
    In the last year of grammar school, a bright, curly-haired friend one afternoon asked me the same introductory question the family doctor had. This time I lied.
    “How many times?” he asked.
    Oh, I couldn’t count them, I said, and gave the first figure thatcame to me, modest but not, I felt, inconsequential, “Twelve or thirteen.” I was rewarded with a stunning revelation. “You know Faith?” he said.
    “Yes.”
    “I did it with her.”
    “You did?”
    “In her parents’ apartment,” he said. He added an indelible line, “She spread her legs so nice.”
    The brazen courage of it. It was unimaginable. He lived over near Third Avenue. She lived in a great, respectable building on Madison, a fortress. To this day it remains to me a kind of landmark. Over the years the city becomes filled with them, certain side streets, apartment houses on corners, hotels.
    What he had done with Faith, though I was amazed at the audacity, did not make me envious. I had no real appreciation of it. I saw its daring but I was unable to imagine its pleasure or even to fill the blank of what had led up to it. How did he happen to be in her apartment? In her room? What had he said to lead her—I could picture only abrupt refusal—to the act?
    Months later one noon, looking through the magazines in a cigar store, I came across a pamphlet with blue paper covers. Someone had placed it there, concealed behind a magazine; it was not part of the stock. The provocative title I have forgotten, but as I began to read I underwent a conversion. Within, described straightforwardly, was everything the doctor and my friend had failed to clarify, the method, the exact details, the physical sensation. The door had suddenly opened, barely, to be sure, but my involvement was intense. Holding the booklet down where no one could see it I read the pages again and again, and fairly trembling with discovery, like someone who has found a secret letter, I hid the precious thing where I had found it and left the store. I was going to try certain things, and all that I had read, in time, I found to be true.
    Years afterwards, at a luncheon, I sat next to a green-eyed young woman, a poet, who declared loftily that you learned nothing from books, it was life you learned from, passion, experience. The host, a fine old man in his seventies, heard her and disagreed. His hair was white. His voice had the faint shrillness of age. “No, everything I’ve ever learned,” he said, “has come from books. I’d be in darkness without them.”
    I didn’t know if he was speaking of Balzac or Strindberg or even John O’Hara, to whom his sister had been married and from whose books one can learn a great deal, much of it unsettling, but in no particular order I tried to think of books that had instructed me, and among them, not insignificant, was the anonymous twenty-page booklet in blue covers that had described the real