Expensive People Read Online Free PDF

four—that precocious hypocrite! But I think you'll agree there isn't much. A photostat of a lithograph by a seventeenth-century Spaniard is on its way to me—with the promise of flagrant, fragrant hints of corruption that could be nurtured only in a warm, masculine climate—but all this is beside the point, merefluff, mere airy, bubbly frosting of the kind that evaporates on cake overnight and disappoints children in the morning.
    In modern times these incidents have become more popular: I have compiled an alphabetical list of child criminals, beginning with Ajax, Arnold, and proceeding through Mossman, Billie, and ending with Watt, Samuel, all of them decently enough treated by society despite their obvious depravities. Oh, yes, I should mention Lilloburo, Anjette, the only girl on my list: she put insecticide in the grape drink she was selling on the sidewalk before her parents' modest frame house, a child of only seven but already corrupt and damned; two of her little friends died. I have purposefully omitted mention of Bobbie Hutter, who burned up four classmates in a tree house in West Bend, Indiana, so don't bother sending me this information. That child was mentally retarded and hadn't much idea what he was doing and—don't you see?— I have no patience with accidents. I don't want whimsy or lies, blunders, trivia. I want the real thing. The real thing: a crime of murder committed with all premeditation by a child in full possession of his own wits, with a certain minimal level of intelligence. Yes, we child murderers are snobs.

3
    One morning in January a yellow Cadillac pulled up to a curb. And let's freeze that scene so I can sketch it all in. You see the Cadillac? Good. See if you can smell its new leathery odor. Yellow is a funny color for so dignified a car, you're thinking? Yes, but yellow was my mother's favorite color, or she liked to say or pretend that it was, for reasons of her own. So the car was yellow because my mother demanded yellow, and yellow it had to be, though my father wanted black. His own car was yellow too, and her car was yellow. They could never decide which of the cars belonged to which one of them—this Cadillac or the other car, the Lincoln. (They had friends in more than one automobile company.) The yellow Cadillac pulled up to a curb. It's January, you notice, and the street is a little icy, and the sidewalks, though constantly cleaned, have a cold, hard, bare look that they have only in winter. The grass is partly covered with snow and partly bare,old dried-up brown tufts you wouldn't waste a second glance at, and in the car are four interesting people:
    The driver, a sharp-featured, pale man with a look of restraint, as if he finds it difficult to hold back his smiles of enthusiasm and good cheer. (He is the real-estate salesman.)
    The woman sitting beside him, with a dark mink collar lifting up about her throat, her skin pale and glowing with the winter light and her lips pursed after a morning of disappointments and her eyes (those lovely eyes!) hidden at this moment by sunglasses. (This is my mother, Natashya Romanov Everett. She is thirty but looks twenty-five, twenty, eighteen! Any age!)
    The man sitting behind her, leaning forward, smoking a cigar thoughtfully. He has a broad, round face, tanned from a recent and excellent Bermuda holiday, and there are bulges of flesh under his eyes that look as if he or someone else has been tugging down at them, and he has a nose with veins too close to the surface (tough luck, you people who have this trouble!), and yet he is an attractive man. No one could say why, but he is considered an “attractive” man. He is wearing a new winter overcoat—handsome and expensive in the store but rumpled and bargain-basement once he has it on—and it is unbuttoned even in winter because he sweats a lot, this man, this noisy, blustering, pathetic, attractive man, my father. He says, “Uh-huh, not bad. How does it look to you, Tashya?”
    And