Epitaph For A Tramp Read Online Free PDF

before tonight,” I told him. “Maybe you better get that over with first.”
    He got with it quickly enough then. I let him go and he edged away a step or two, his eyes going toward a closed door that would be a bedroom and then back to me. He was pushing six-one which made him almost as tall as I am but I had him in all the other ways and he knew that. He was about as thick through the chest as a breakfast lox. He swallowed once, scared.
    “Look,” he said then, “if you’re her husband, honest, I didn’t know. I never did see her before, really. She said she was divorced and she—”
    “You got a can?”
    “What? Yes, sure, right over there—”
    “Get in it,” I said. “Get in it and lock the door and scrub the bowl or something until you hear us leave.”
    He didn’t argue. He wasn’t going to write home about the experience but he went. I waited until he closed the door and then I walked across and opened the other one.
    The candy-striped skirt and the white blouse and her underclothes were thrown over a straight-backed chair. She was lying across a rumpled spread with her back toward me, looking at a magazine. One small shaded bulb threw a tarnished circle of light over the bed, and if I’d been Leonardo da Vinci I probably would have started fumbling around in a panic for paper and crayons.
    She thought I was the kid. “Aren’t you lucky,” she said. “People bringing you surprises in the middle of the night.”
    “What was it, a race?” I said. “Do you get a trophy for it?”
    She hadn’t moved, not consciously. I saw the muscles tighten beneath the flesh of her shoulders as her arms went rigid to the elbows beneath her. Then her head came around slowly. Her face was the color of ice cubes.
    “You had to go marry a cop,” I said.
    She came apart then. Her lower lip quivered and her eyes filled. I had never seen her cry before. It broke me up real bad. “Wrap it up,” I told her. I shut the door on her and went back into the other room.
    I stood there, feeling the whisky in my stomach and seeing the place for the first time. She’d found herself an adult one. He collected things. There were lanterns from construction barriers, signs that said No Parking 8 AM. to 6 P.M. Near the door there was a cross-wired Department of Sanitation street-corner trash basket big enough to turn over and cage a walrus in. He didn’t have the walrus but it wouldn’t have taken more than a word. The kid’s jacket was hanging over a chair and the label said Whitehouse and Hardy, Fifth Avenue, so good old Dad had paid for that the same way he was paying for the graduate school. There were enough books to repave the Jersey Turnpike.
    There was a typewriter with a sheet of paper in it. G P. Cranley, it said at the top, Comp. Lit. 207, Page 4, and under that it said:
And thus it is my conclusion that The Recognitions by William Gaddis is not merely the best American first novel of our time, but perhaps the most significant single volume in all American fiction since Moby Dick, a book so broad in scope, so rich in comedy and so profound in symbolic inference that—
    She was dressed. She went straight to the door and out without saying anything and I followed her down. When we got to the street she turned the wrong way and I said, “This way.” I said, “Here,” when we got to the car. I ran a red light on Hudson Street and said, “Nuts,” when some guy yelled at me. So I won. That made four more words than she had said.
    Coming out of Central Park I had to wait for a light at 66th. “He didn’t even know my name,” she said then.
    “That’s all right,” I told her. “I didn’t once either. Maybe something lovely will grow out of it for you both.”
    She sucked in her breath. I found a parking slot directly in front of the apartment and she went in ahead of me with her own keys while I was locking the car. I wondered why I was bothering to do that with a rented job. She was in the good chair with