Last Night Read Online Free PDF

touched one.
    — I have money, he said. His hand remained where it was, cupping her. She was too stunned to move. Do you want me to do more of that?
    — No, she managed to say.
    His hand slipped down to her hip. Deems had taken an arm and was drawing him away.
    — Ssh, Brennan whispered to her, don’t say anything. The two of us. Like an oar going into the water, gliding.
    — We have to go, Deems insisted.
    — What are you doing? Is this another of your ruses? Brennan cried. Deems, I shall end up destroying you yet!
    As he was herded to the door, he continued. Deems was the only man he didn’t loathe, he said. He wanted them all to come to his house, he had everything. He had a phonograph, whisky! He had a gold watch!
    At last he was outside. He walked unsteadily across the finely cut grass and got into his car, the side of which was dented in. He backed away in great lurches.
    — He’s headed for Cato’s, Deems guessed. I ought to call and warn them.
    — They won’t serve him. He owes them money, Irene said.
    — Who told you that?
    — The bartender. Are you all right? she asked Ardis.
    — Yes. Is he actually married?
    — He’s been married three or four times, Deems said.
    Later they started dancing, some of the women together. Irene pulled Deems onto the floor. He came unresisting. He danced quite well. She was moving her arms sinuously and singing.
    — Very nice, he said. Have you ever entertained?
    She smiled at him.
    — I do my best, she said.
    At the end she put her hand on Ardis’s arm and said again,
    — I’m so embarrassed at what happened.
    — It was nothing. I’m all right.
    — I should have taken him and thrown him out, her husband said on the way home. Ezra Pound. Do you know about Ezra Pound?
    — No.
    — He was a traitor. He broadcast for the enemy during the war. They should have shot him.
    — What happened to him?
    — They gave him a poetry prize.
    They were going down a long empty stretch where on a corner, half hidden in trees, a small house stood, the gypsy house, Ardis thought of it as, a simple house with a water pump in the yard and occasionally in the daytime a girl in blue shorts, very brief, and high heels, hanging clothes on a line. Tonight there was a light on in the window. One light near the sea. She was driving with Warren and he was talking.
    — The best thing is to just forget about tonight.
    — Yes, she said. It was nothing.
    Brennan went through a fence on Hull Lane and up on to somebody’s lawn at about two that morning. He had missed the curve where the road bent left, probably because his headlights weren’t on, the police thought.
    SHE TOOK THE BOOK and went over to a window that looked out on the garden behind the library. She read a bit of one thing or another and came to a poem some lines of which had been underlined, with pencilled notes in the margin. It was “The River-Merchant’s Wife”; she had never heard of it. Outside, the summer burned, white as chalk.
    At fourteen I married My Lord you, she read.
I never laughed, being bashful . . .
    There were three old men, one of them almost blind, it appeared, reading newspapers in the cold room. The thick glasses of the nearly blind man cast white moons onto his cheeks.
    The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
    She had read poems and perhaps marked them like this, but that was in school. Of the things she had been taught she remembered only a few. There had been one My Lord though she did not marry him. She’d been twenty-one, her first year in the city. She remembered the building of dark brown brick on Fifty-eighth Street, the afternoons with their slitted light, her clothes in a chair or fallen to the floor, and the damp, mindless repetition, to it, or him, or who knew what: oh, God, oh, God, oh, God. The traffic outside so faint, so far away . . .
    She’d called him several