Institute Read Online Free PDF Page A

neck, in that picture ... that left me ...”
    “Yes? Where?”
    “Shook to the heels.”
    “Give. Say it.”
    “When I was in high school, I was invited for a visit to the home of a girl who lived in Maryland on a farm in the Greenspring Valley where her father raised racehorses. And one morning we hid out in the carriage house next to the stables, to see a stallion serve a mare. It was terribly exciting, more so than I’d have believed. He courted her like a schoolboy, prancing around in front of her, before finally going through with what he was there to do. Once, for a second or two, he was only a few feet from us—where we were peeping through the window—and for that long he arched his neck. We could have reached out and touched it. We could actually see the beat of his heart in the pulse of one of the blood vessels. Lloyd, it actually throbbed. Well, one day in Newark, when Delaware was playing Maryland, this Maryland boy threw a pass, and I could see his neck, which was bare. And it throbbed the way that stallion’s had. Lloyd, when I saw that picture just now, with the same bare neck showing, when I knew I was in the same room with that boy, with that neck, that beautiful neck, I had to sit down. But how did you know? How could you know how I felt?”
    I told her about the sea nettle. “Strange,” she whispered. “You knew just by looking at me?”
    “Let’s say I hoped. Don’t forget, I wanted you bad, from the moment I laid eyes on you.”
    “They told me that your name was Palmer—Brisket Palmer. I memorized it.”
    “Yes, and how that came about was: My football jersey itched. It was wool, and it felt like fleas. So I found a cotton shirt to wear underneath it, and that did it except for the neck. So my mother snipped it out with some buttonhole scissors. That left my neck bare. Every sportswriter decided the idea was to show off a thing of beauty. So one of them called me ‘the Brisket’—and it stuck. Just the media being fair and impartial and scrupulous, as usual.”
    “It was a thing of beauty, and still is. So firm, so round.”
    “Sign of physical strength, which I have.”
    “Did you know it has a mole, a tiny double mole, beside the Adam’s apple? It looks like a little hourglass.”
    “I shave over it every morning.”
    She kissed it, then went on: “Now I’ll really be depraved. You know what? If such a thing were possible, if it could happen again, I’d climb on board once more and—”
    “Well, what’s impossible about it?”
    “You mean it can be done? Three times in one afternoon?”
    “To a studhorse, with something as good-looking as you, all things are possible. Up, pretty creature, and on!”
    “Lloyd, I love you, I love you, I love you.”
    It was the last carefree moment we had for some time.

4
    S HE ROLLED OFF, SNUGGLED close, and lay for a long time without speaking. Then: “Lloyd, I’ve been thinking. I could give a little dinner and ask about six couples and let you do your stuff—talk about biography while your great big chest bulged your puff-bosom shirt—and hope one of the six would take the bait. But a better idea, I think, would be a little dinner for six. You, some dame I’ll think of to round it out nicely, Richard, me, and a couple I know of named Granger who’re not Du Ponts but are filthy rich and are already literary to some extent. They were friends of that pair of Du Ponts who were friends of the Henry Menckens—so they’ll know what you’re talking about. I imagine they might get a kick out of being a part, the main part, of something intellectually important. And I don’t see how Richard could make any trouble. He’d look awfully small, trying to.”
    “But why would he?”
    “I told you why.”
    I thought that over and asked: “You think he’s out? Unless you change your mind?”
    “I won’t change my mind.”
    “I know, but is he out, once and for all?”
    “Why do you ask?”
    “Oh, I don’t know. Just Brisket