Cold and Pure and Very Dead Read Online Free PDF

responsibilities and deprivations that had focused the energies of their older brothers and sisters on the great public interests of the international community. For this new cohort, the concerns of private life and personal freedom had a heady allure, and Deakin’s populist sympathies and graphic sexual honesty appealed to a wider public than she could possibly have reached in any earlier decade of the twentieth century, a far-wider public certainly than the critically acclaimed Beat poets and novelists of the same era. That
Oblivion Falls
should, in our own era of widespread prosperity and narcissism, once again find a popular audience is not surprising.…”
    He paused to tear a tender chunk of pink meat from the rib with which he was gesturing. There went the other cheek.
    “Enough, George. Enough.” I laughed. “When I asked for some background on the popularity of
Oblivion Falls
, I didn’t mean to turn party time into work time for you.”
    “Work? Heck—this is
fun,”
enthused my little colleague, sucking the final shreds of meat from the rib, then wiping his fingers on his jeans. I offered him a napkin, but he waved it off. “If God didn’t mean us to wipe our hands on our jeans, Karen, he wouldn’t have made denim. You want another beer?” I nodded, and George set off on a booze run.
    From my vantage point on the bench, I had a good view of the swirling activity in the pool. Kids cannon-balled into the water, teenagers deployed gigantic splash-guns, parents dandled babies. “Wheeee.” Jill Greenberg hoisted the flame-haired Eloise above her head, then zoomed her down.
Spp-lash!
The baby shrieked with delight. Jill laughed her bubbling laugh and hoisted Eloise into the air again. In a green-and-white-polka-dot bikini, nine months after Eloise’s birth, my young friend was as slim and radiant as ever.
    “She’s so beautiful.” George had returned with two sweating beer bottles, and was watching Jill over my shoulder. He handed me a bottle and sighed. “But … she’d never look at me.”
    Jill was a stunner, mid-twenties, red-haired, stylish with a big-city edge. George was none of those things. In his early forties, he looked something like a garden gnome, small of stature, thin of hair, pale of skin, and decidedly lacking in fashion sense. This afternoon, in spite of the August heat, he wore a short-sleeved white dress shirt and jeans, the stiff, heavy kind more likely to be found on the sales racks at Agway than at any mall. George was right. Jill would never look at him more than the once it took to put a name to the face, and assign the face to the fatal category of Nice Guys to Pal Around With.
    She was at the party with Kenny Halvorsen, her constant companion, six-foot-two of hunky soccer coach. When Jill passed Eloise off to the teen-aged daughter of a colleague, Kenny scooped Jill up, hoisted her over his head, dive-bombed her into the pool.
Spp-lash!
    George sighed again. “She is just so
lovely.”
He was on his third beer and beginning to loosen up. I was on my second, and already a little too loose.
    “Have you ever been married, George?” I usually don’t ask questions like that, because I usually don’t want to hear the answers.
    He shook his head. “The book …” George was the author of a massive and acclaimed study of twentieth-century developments in the history of the book. “…  took ten years to research and write. When I was working on it, I was obsessed. It was all I could think about. I would have made a lousy husband. And then, it just seemed too late. But … you know what I miss the most about not being married? It’s the children. I’d love to have children.” His tone was wistful.
    “It’s
not
too late,” I said, always the optimist. “You might find someone yet, and—there’s always adoption.”
    “I’ve thought about that; I was adopted myself, you know.” He glugged down beer.
    “Really?”
    “Yeah. But it’s almost impossible for a