Comfort and Joy Read Online Free PDF

inhis house he beganto do so.
    Already he had aimed at Emory medical school, from which his father and grandfather had graduated to their cool, ordered lives among the Savannah elite. Ford's choice of Emory aimed in part at family tradition and in part at a desire to appease his father, who had strongly disapproved Ford's decision to attend the Chapel Hill university rather than its perfectly good counterpart in Athens, Georgia. Ford had never doubted he would achieve admission to Emory, and, indeed, had never before doubted that he would go on from medical school to the requisite residency at Grady and the eventual ascent to the throne of his father: the house off Calhoun Square and the carefullyestablished medicalpractice whose patrons included the best and oldest families.
    But in the wake of McKenzie, in the flood-tide of feeling the man stirred in him, he understood that he might never have a wife. Further, he understood that without the wife, the whole studied and perfect life that his family—that he—had envisioned became suddenlyat risk.
At the same time, the honeymoon with McKenzie ended, and the youngman's self-destructiveness resurfaced.
    McKenzie drank. At first this seemed reasonable enough, and Ford took up the sport, too. He had nothing to lose, after all, being in the last weeks of his senior year in college, his grades earned, his admission to medical school assured. He allowed McKenzie to lead him, and drinking became part of his general infatuation. But Ford soon tired of it. Waking into a cottonheaded stupor each morning wearied him to the point that he headed stupor each morning wearied him to the point that he began to quarrel with the need for the stuff, at first intermittently and thenallthe time.
McKenzie reacted bydescendingmore deeplyinto haze.
    When the quarrels between thembegan in earnest, McKenzie retreated, as he had always done. He went to bars and stayed out all night, stumbling home toward dawn or after, drunken and wrecked, falling over furniture and cursing Hammond's attempts at affection. Some mornings he had himself delivered to the door bywhatever pickup had sheltered himfor the few hours between bar-closing and morning light. At the first such incident, Ford withdrew from him in cool shock. After some weeks of this, Ford moved McKenzie into the second bedroom of the house. The quarrels ceased. The physicalheat that had dictated their life together turned to frost.
    This cooling had not disturbed McKenzie while he was with other men; with Ford, he became terrified, flaunting his night encounters more openly. Taunting Ford, ridiculing him, doing anything to provoke response. But no response came. The arctic chill of the house reached even to Hammond, who wandered fromone manto the other, utterlyconfused.
    When McKenzie brought one of his pickups home from the gay bar in Durham, a final, savage argument began. Ford, alone in the roomhe had reserved for himself, heard voices in his living room, one he recognized and one he did not. Instant anger flooded him, and he rushed out of bed wearing only loose pajama bottoms.
    In the living room he found McKenzie and a boy wrapped round each other on the same carpet where McKenzie and Ford had begun their tryst, what now seemed a lifetime ago. At the sight of Ford, the stranger leapt to his feet, backing toward the kitchen as he rearranged his clothing—later, Ford would wonder just how palpable his anger had been that the boy should feel it before Ford said a word. Ford gazed down at McKenzie, trembling, and said, "Not here."
McKenzie, drunk, gestured beatificallytoward the rug. "Come on, come joinus."
     
on, come joinus."
     
"Fuck you,"Ford said. "Get himout ofhere."
     
"But I can't," McKenzie said, still smiling the drunken smile.
    "He doesn't have anywhere to go. Do you?" Turning from the frightened figure huddling in the kitchen doorway to Ford. "His parents won't let us go to his house."
"I said, get himout ofhere, I don't care where