Hot Water Music Read Online Free PDF Page A

in this damned room too long. I need to get out.”
    “But it’s raining. It’s been raining for a week. The streets are flooded.”
    “I don’t care. I want to get out. She’s probably fucking some guy right now. She’s probably got her high heels on. I always made her leave her high heels on.”
    I helped Bernard Stachman get into an old brown overcoat. All the buttons were missing off the front. It was stiff with grime. It was hardly an L.A. overcoat, it was heavy and clumsy, it must have come from Chicago or Denver in the thirties.
    Then we got his crutches and we climbed painfully down the YMCA stairway. Bernard had a fifth of muscatel in one of the pockets. We reached the entrance and Bernard assured me he could make it across the sidewalk and into the car. I was parked some distance from the curbing.
    As I ran around to the other side to get in I heard a shout and then a splash. It was raining, and raining hard. I ran back around and Bernard had managed to fall and wedge himself in the gutter between the car and the curbing. The water swept around him, he was sitting up, the water rushed over him, ran down through his pants, lapped against his sides, the crutches floating sluggishly in his lap.
    “It’s all right,” he said, “just drive on and leave me.”
    “Oh hell, Barney.”
    “I mean it. Drive on. Leave me. My wife doesn’t love me.”
    “She’s not your wife, Barney. You’re divorced.”
    “Tell that to the Marines.”
    “Come on, Barney, I’m going to help you up.”
    “No, no. It’s all right. I assure you. Just go ahead. Get drunk without me.”
    I picked him up, got the door open and lifted him into the front seat. He was very, very wet. Streams of water ran across the floorboards. Then I went around to the other side and got in. Barney unscrewed the cap off the bottle of muscatel, took a hit, passed the bottle to me. I took a hit. Then I started the car and drove, looking out through the windshield into the rain for a bar that we might possibly enter and not vomit the first time we got the look and smell of the urinal.

YOU KISSED LILLY
     
     
    It was a Wednesday night. The television hadn’t been much good. Theodore was 56. His wife, Margaret, was 50. They had been married 20 years and had no children. Ted turned off the light. They stretched out in the dark.
    “Well,” said Margy, “aren’t you going to kiss me goodnight?”
    Ted sighed and turned to her. He gave her a light kiss.
    “You call that a kiss?”
    Ted didn’t answer.
    “That woman on the program looked just like Lilly, didn’t she?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You know.”
    “Listen, don’t start anything and there won’t be anything.”
    “You just don’t want to discuss things. You just want to clam up. Be honest now. That woman on the progam looked like Lilly, didn’t she?”
    “All right. There was a similarity.”
    “Did it make you think of Lilly?”
    “Oh Christ…”
    “Don’t be evasive! Did it make you think of her?”
    “For a moment or so, yes…”
    “Did it make you feel good?”
    “No, listen, Marge, that thing happened five years ago!”
    “Does time change what happens?”
    “I told you I was sorry.”
    “ Sorry ! Do you know what you did to me? Suppose I had done that with some man? How would you feel?”
    “I don’t know. Do it and then I’ll know.”
    “Oh, now you’re being flip ! It’s a joke!”
    “Marge, we’ve discussed this thing four or five hundred nights.”
    “When you were making love to Lilly did you kiss her like you kissed me tonight?”
    “No, I guess not…”
    “How then? How?”
    “Jesus, stop it!”
    “ How ?”
    “Well, different.”
    “How was it different?”
    “Well, there was a newness. I got excited…”
    Marge sat up in bed and screamed. Then she stopped.
    “And when you kiss me it’s not exciting, is that it?”
    “We’re used to each other.”
    “But that’s what love is: living and growing