Come Destroy Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

across her lap and said, “Now tell me about yourself. You’re going to be a brilliant scholar, are you not?”
    “I don’t know about that,” he said. “I like to study.”
    “Of course you do.”
    “Some fellows are more interested in sports, I guess, but I’ve always liked to study.”
    “Young men of real depth do,” she said. She sipped the drink, watching him with the rim of her glass at her mouth, and she smiled. “It’s nothing to apologize for. I suppose sometimes you find you have to apologize for liking to study.”
    Charlie could have cried. He found himself choked inside, tight and quivering with a warmth he had never realized, and it was like not being awake and imagining everything that was happening. Happening the way he wanted it to happen. He found himself able to talk, to tell her. “And my mom is always saying I should be interested in something else. My sister isn’t like me at all. You know — she’s a girl. Well, I don’t mean that — but I mean she’s always talking about fellows and kidding me about getting girl friends and things. But I don’t pay attention to her. Sometimes I feel like her older brother instead of her younger brother.”
    “You are old for your age. It’s true.” Miss Latham sipped more of her drink. “You are,” she said. “Young men like you usually are. My, yes.”
    “You are too,” he said, and then he blushed scarlet and said, “I didn’t mean — ”
    “I know.”
    “I mean, m-most women, I guess, don’t find themselves interested in Emily Dickinson and A. E. Housman, you know.”
    “They’re too busy raising their families.”
    “I guess so.”
    “Raising their families,” she repeated.
    “Yeah.”
    “The pursuit of knowledge does not often interest women after thirty. Women after thirty have other things to oc-cu-py their minds.”
    “Like my mother. My mother runs the Gazette.”
    “They get mar-ried, and have babies, and they have other things to talk about.”
    “After my father died, she had to raise Evie and me by herself.”
    “Most women
are
married by thirty.”
    “Mom got married when she was twenty-two.”
    “Hmmm?”
    “Mom got married when she was twenty-two.”
    “Did she now. Did she.”
    “Yes.”
    “She must be a love-ly woman.”
    “Oh, you wouldn’t say that. She’s fine, all right, but not much of a looker. She works hard.”
    “Ummm.” Jill Latham finished the ginger ale and stood up and walked around the room. She stopped at the table to take a cigarette from a black box and light it, then stood by the window blowing the smoke out toward the night air. “Charlie Wright,” she said, “would you like me to play some music?”
    “Oh, sure. That’s a swell idea.”
    “Good.”
    She walked over to the phonograph, stooped down, cranked it, and turned to look over her shoulder at Charlie with the cigarette in her mouth. At that instant she did not seem like the same woman. There was a certain hard line to her mouth, and the cigarette dangled between her lips with the smoke spiraling up past her eyes. Her eyes seemed a bright gold color. She said, “Ordinarily I don’t like this kind of music. I prefer the works of Haydn, Bach, Mozart, the more classical music, but this is a record I have had for some time. Blues.”
    She put the needle over to the edge of the black record and stood up, looking down as it spun. It was a scratchy record, a slow scratchy one, and the singer had a deep, husky voice.
    “My coffee’s cold
    Like the heart I gave my man.
    I got no scheme,
    I got no real fine plan.
    Just listen to my boast now —
    I entertain a ghost now.”
    Charlie did not hear all the words. He watched her face, saw the kicked, hurt look come to her eyes. Her hand ground out the cigarette in the ash tray and she seemed to listen very carefully, as though she had never heard the song before. She stood quietly, swaying slightly to the rhythm and nodding her head, but she did not look at him. Charlie