Contrary Pleasure Read Online Free PDF

man
spoke about the product which sponsored his services. He spoke with greater
gravity than before. He went away and there were little line drawings of people
knocking on a bar and singing about beer.
    Benjamin sat and sipped his drink. The program made him feel curiously
diffused. One Ben sat there. One contested a robot on Oilman Hill. A naked one
stood inside the bathroom mirror. One still sat in the office silences. And
there was one out on the grass, standing on his land, standing in a circle
painted in white on the grass. He frowned and wondered what in the hell that
circle meant.
     
     

Chapter Two
     
    Brock Delevan was glad when the
dinner hour was over and he could get up from the table and go back to his room
and be away from them. This dinner hour had been bad in a different way. He
could not decide which was worse—the sour silence of other dinner hours, or the
false cheer of this one, with the old man’s conversation sounding as if it had
been lifted, complete and shining, from the fillers in the Reader’s Digest. The conversation could not have been more forced, even if there had been a
microphone suspended over the table, a television camera aimed at them. Dinner
with the happy Delevans . Sorry, folks, Ellen could
not be with you tonight, but turn to channel thirteen tomorrow at this same
time and —
    It made Brock want to bang his fist on the table, bouncing the dishes
into the air. He had guessed at once that his mother had spoken to the old man
about it. During the joyous hour she had looked both pleased and uncertain.
    Brock kept it under control and said that he thought he would read and
went to his room and shut the door. He had not been holding his breath, but
when he heard the click of the door latch he had the feeling that now he could
take a deep breath. He moved mechanically, taking LP records at random from
their cardboard envelopes, stacking them on the spindle of the player. He
turned the record player on and turned out the light over the bed and stretched
out. The volume was low, so low that the bass was like the slow, deep pulse of
someone who lay beside him in darkness. The trumpet sounds were thin, far away,
like summers at the lake when you were little and in bed and they were dancing
across the lake, over at the pavilion. The only light in the room was the tiny
light of the dial on the player. It was good to have the lights off in the
room. When they were on, you could see the kid stuff. Framed high-school
pictures. The football enameled white with the score painted on it in red.
STOCKTON—14, SYRACUSE HIGH—13. A sleek gray model of a PT. A yellow highway
sign that said DEER CROSSING. A lot of kid stuff that some other Brock Delevan,
some smug untroubled kid, had collected and stuck in the room. A punk kid. A
high-school wheel.
    He lay there and waited for it to happen to him, knowing that it would.
It was not pain, but it was like pain. It was like a time long ago, when he had
been little and very sick, and faces had loomed over the bed and gone away, faces
that were too big and sort of twisted looking. It kept coming then, a pain, and
it came like a red light down a track, like a train that made a noise too loud
and then faded away, but was on a circular track so it would come back.
    It came then, as the pain had come long ago, a great wave that made him
tighten his fists and lock his throat. Not me. It didn’t happen to me. Not a
thing like that. I’m Brock. Remember me? They looked at me with pride. Pride
kept me warm. It gave me dignity. So I shamed them and the pride is gone. Why?
That was the thing. Find out why I did it. How could I have done it?
    And so it was necessary to go over it all again. An old ritual. A nightly
searching. A going back and looking for clues. Because you could not accept a
flat statement that it happened because that is the way you are. There are the
good guys and the bad guys. All your life you are sure you are one of the good
guys. And then