Lion House,The Read Online Free PDF

slightly on the Cheshire side. I supposed he had kissed her goodbye and was dying for me to ask so he could tell me about it. It wasn't simply Brad's pleasure to sow wild oats about the entire social terrain: he had to let me know exactly where they had been strewn and how they were doing. But in all our years together I had learned a warfare of my own: a refusal to reach for the bait, to even notice. So, when he returned from Frannie's farewell (which, at the time, I felt certain must have been distasteful to her) I merely handed him a drink and smiled back.
    But hidden gripes have a way of festering to large angers and in no time at all the evening became intolerable. Though I had been eager for him to come home while Frannie was still there, her departure left a frustrating void in its wake. Her absence, in some strange way, robbed the night of any possible compatibility. Over a pot-luck supper of cold chicken and leftovers I wished we had been invited to the Perloff's. Not that I had expected much come-on from that quarter. The close friends of close friends rarely like each other. Jeri was quite possessive and probably felt her relationship with Frannie and Marc threatened by the deep inroads Brad and I were making.
    At about nine I threw down a book I couldn't concentrate on and went upstairs.
    "Don't go to sleep," Brad said. "I'll be there in a minute."
    "I'm tired," I told him. "Come on, Jo," he pleaded. "Your way..." But even my way, without the awkward burden of his weight, would have been unbearable that night.
    I went up to the other bedroom and took my clothes off. Looking into the long mirror I saw the fullness of my breasts. Unaccountably, I thought of Frannie. I suspected that the loose boys' shirts she wore covered next to nothing. Brad was right: what was she? A little kid with big glasses and bitten nails. The realization of this somehow elated me; and seeing my body once more, I was suddenly filled with desire. I went to the door to call down to Brad. But something stopped me. I don't know what; but it stopped me cold. I turned, got into bed, and fell asleep.
    I rarely remember my dreams. But I did have one that night and for some reason it stays with me: I was walking down a street; a busy street, like Broadway. At the corner I saw a man. He was very tall and very handsome and around his neck he wore a beautiful orange ascot. I didn't recognize the man, but I seemed to recognize the ascot; so I went up to him, and took it off. As I was standing there looking at it in my hands, a girl appeared. She was quite young, almost a child. "Here," I said to her. "This scarf is your color. It belongs to you." At that moment she began to run. I ran after her. "Wait," I kept calling. "You forgot to take this, and it's yours!"

CHAPTER FOUR
    Of all the women I had ever known (or ever will, I would think) Frannie was the most articulate about sex. Having thought in those first few months of our friendship that the subject would interest her little if at all it came as rather a surprise when during one of her daytime visits after school I happened casually and without purpose to toss the sexual ball into our conversation and found that she was quite willing to pick it up and run with it.
    We were talking, I recall, about college. She was telling me that her four years at the exclusive and progressive X —had been entirely serious; that she had been completely infatuated with new ideas and the processes of original thinking. I admitted that I could make no such educational claims; that my own four years at Y—had been one long trek from frat house to frat house; and that before my third, during which I met Brad, I had broken all records with the significant score of seventeen affairs.
    She told me then about a boy she'd been in love with in her Junior and Senior years: a Yale man and brother of a classmate of hers. "We had our first date in New York —blind," she said. "When I put him on the train he asked me up for the