Grifter's Game Read Online Free PDF Page A

I came back up again and my eyes locked with hers.
    No words.
    We walked toward each other until our bodies touched. I wrapped her up in my arms and held the sweetness of her against me. The silly voices of a thousand people drifted down from the Boardwalk like words from a brainless dream. The waves pounded behind us.
    She kissed me.
    And then we sank together to the blanket on the beach and forgot the world.
    I was lying on my side looking over the beach to the sea. Above the water the moon was almost full. Her panties were a wisp of black silk on the sand beside me. I watched the waves and listened to her breathing.
    I felt very strange, very weak and very strong at once. I remembered why I had come to Atlantic City in the first place, and I remembered all the things I had done for so many years, and everything seemed foolish, silly. I remembered, incongruously, Mrs. Ida Lister. I had slept with her, too, in Atlantic City. Not on the beach, but in a plush, air-conditioned hotel room. Not because I wanted to, but because she was picking up the tab.
    It had all been so stupid. Not wrong, not immoral. Merely stupid. And so had the years of skipping hotel bills, and living on the edge of the law, and looking for the one big connection that would make everything all right.
    Now, somehow, the connection had been made. I could see clearly for the first time. Things looked different now.
    “Lennie—”
    “I know,” I said.
    “It was—”
    “I know, Mona. For me, too.”
    I rolled over to look at her. Her body was not the same. Before it had been something to desire, something to break down into its component parts of breasts and hips and thighs and belly and behind, something to assess. Now it was her body. Now it was a body I had known. It was her.
    “I can’t stay much longer.”
    “Why not?”
    “Keith. He’ll wonder where I am. He won’t care, but he’ll wonder.” Her voice was very bitter.
    “Is that his name? Keith?” She nodded.
    “How long have you been married?”
    “Almost two years. I’m twenty-five. We were married two years ago this September. I was twenty-three then.”
    She said it as though she was thinking that she would never be twenty-three again.
    “Why did you marry him?”
    Her smile was not a happy one. “Money,” she said. “And boredom, and because twenty-three isn’t eighteen any more, and all the other reasons. Why do pretty girls marry rich old men? You know the answer as well as I do.”
    I found a pack of cigarettes in my jacket pocket. They were crumpled. I took one out and straightened it out, then offered it to her. She shook her head. I lit it and smoked for a moment or so in silence.
    “Now you go back to him?”
    “I have to.”
    “And then what?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Then we meet here every midnight for a week or two,” I said. “And each night you go back to him. And then the two of you go away and you forget me.”
    She didn’t say anything.
    “Is that how it goes?”
    “I don’t know.”
    I dragged on the cigarette. It didn’t taste right and I buried it in the sand.
    “This hasn’t happened before, Lennie.”
    “This?’
    “Us.”
    “So we let it go?”
    “I don’t know, Lennie. I don’t know anything anymore. I used to know all the answers. Now somebody changed the questions.”
    I knew what she meant.
    Her voice was very distant now. “We have a house in Cheshire Point,” she said. “On a two-acre lot with big old trees and expensive furniture. My clothes cost money. I have a sable coat and an ermine coat and a chinchilla stole. We didn’t even bother with mink. That’s the kind of money Keith has.”
    “How did he make it?”
    She shrugged. “He’s a businessman. An office downtown on Chambers Street. I don’t even know what he does. He goes downtown a few times a week. He never talks about the business, never gets mail at the house or brings work home. He says he buys things and he sells them. That’s all he says.”
    “What