Goodbye Without Leaving Read Online Free PDF

me.
    â€œOh,” I said. “I get it. You’re one of those music industry lawyers.” Around Ruby and Vernon, the term “music industry lawyer” was said as one might say “psychotic ax murderer who eats live babies.”
    â€œI am not,” Johnny said. “I work for what you would call a prestige firm. I work very long hours and I feel entitled to a little entertainment once in a while. I’ve been watching you since you first started. What’s your story, anyway?”
    â€œI’m a failed graduate student and a successful Shakette. That’s all there is.”
    â€œWhy don’t you get dressed,” Johnny said. “You look like you’re starving.”

8
    It turned out I was starving for everything. Lately we had eaten at some pretty terrible places. Most nights we were so tired that we didn’t even have the energy to make our motel-room cabbage salad. Johnny took me to an expensive steak house and talked to me while I consumed a steak with pommes soufflées , buttered embryonic string beans and delicious bread. With this we had a bottle of red wine from California. The wine I was used to seeing was the mint-flavored kind that in many states can be bought in drugstores and is favored by young girls and skid row alcoholics.
    I devoured everything with single-minded ravenousness. By the end of the meal, I wanted to devour Johnny, too. He was undeniably attractive and he knew more about rock and roll than most people.
    He knew the B side of every record ever made, it seemed, including “Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide,” the flip side of Jackie Lee’s immortal “The Duck,” and “Can’t Stay Away” by Don Covay and the Goodtimers, the flip side of “Mercy, Mercy,” a song that had caused some of my old friends to leave the room.
    I looked into Johnny’s nice blue eyes and saw myself married to him. It was clear I was what he was looking for. I sighed inwardly and thought to myself that here, doubtless, was one of my “own people,” and that I ought to give up and surrender to my fate. But then what would happen to me? Being married to a lawyer and being a Shakette were mutually exclusive, as they say in college.
    For dessert we had cherry tart. Johnny said, “Will you eventually go back to graduate school?”
    â€œNever. I will always be a Shakette.”
    â€œOh, yeah, really?” said Johnny. “Even when you’re fifty?”
    â€œI don’t like to think about the future,” I said. “I’m happy in my present.”
    â€œYes, but soon your present will be your past, and your unused present is your future.” I stared at him. This was the way people usually talked when they were stoned. I felt my heart open slightly, as when you play a weak note on an accordion. “But,” he continued, “how about thinking about the next couple of hours? What would you like to do after dinner?”
    Most of the time after a show there was no dinner. We flopped our exhausted selves into bed and lay like stones or zombies until the next morning. Curiously, with Johnny, I felt amazingly energetic, due, perhaps, to all that steak. I thought it was unwise to say to this person, whom I had just met, “I’d like to go to your house and take all our clothes off.” I said nothing.
    â€œWhere do you stay in New York?” Johnny said. He looked as if he were paying a good deal of attention to tallying up the bill.
    â€œI share an apartment with my old college roommate,” I said. “Actually, last night was the first night I’ve spent in it in nearly a year.”
    â€œIs she expecting you?” Johnny said.
    â€œWell, she’s in Connecticut this weekend,” I said. “So she’s not expecting anything in that way.”
    â€œI have a very nice apartment,” Johnny said. “Surprisingly enough for a straight guy who wears a suit,