Oh What a Paradise It Seems Read Online Free PDF

deal more money than he had ever had before and he parceled this out to Maria although he was not ungenerous.
    The only other witness to the assassination of Buster had been Betsy Logan, who lived in the house next to the Salazzos. She was a young woman with two small children whose husband worked in the post office. The Salazzos and the Logans were not friendly neighbors, perhaps because the Salazzos’ daughters were too old to play with Betsy Logan’s sons. The only closeness had been with Buster, who came over to the Logans for table scraps; and when Betsy saw Sam murder the old dog she felt nothing for her neighbor but hatred and contempt. She noticed the FOR RENT sign in the barbershop window and saw from her kitchen window the strangers who came to the house each night at dusk. From the rubbish that was dumped into the pond Sam had salvaged a broken overstuffed chair and he sat in this while he collected his fees. Betsy had seen Sam reposing in this as she drove out toward Buy Brite on the interstate. He seemed to be supervising the death of Beasley’s Pond, although Betsy would always think of him as the murderer of an old and friendly dog.

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    I N the next month or so Sears became familiar with a great many parish houses and church basements as well as with the vicinity of the New School for Social Research, where she studied accounting on Friday nights. He was constitutionally a traditional specimen with a traditional and at times benighted concept of a woman’s role in the world, but her unchallengeable good looks seemed, so far as he was concerned, to secure her place in the stream of things. A good-looking woman studying arithmetic seemed to him something of a lark, and the people in her class in accounting presented an earnest, friendly and readily acceptable appearance. However, the other gatherings where she sometimes spent three nights a week continued to disturb him with their violent lack of uniformity. Night after night they looked like the crowd scattered by a thunderstorm on the evening of some holiday in any park in the Western world.
    The janitor had told him that these gatherings aimed at abstinence in sex, food, alcohol and tobacco. He had suffered a good deal of embarrassment from carnal importunacy but he could not imagine tempering this in a drafty parish house. He had never smoked, his weight was constant and he thoroughly enjoyed drinking. As I say, the authority of her good looks—she seemed too friendly to be thought abeauty—made her association with this weird crowd somewhat palatable. She let him kiss her goodnight and he would, for the softness of her lips and the fragrance of her breasts, have waited for her in a condemned mine shaft. She was, as women go, relatively punctual and Sears had come to believe that punctuality in engagements was an infallible gauge of sexual spontaneity. He had observed that, without exception, women who were tardy for dinner engagements were unconsciously delayed in their erotic transports and that women who were early for lunch or dinner would sometimes climax in the taxi on their way home.
    Renée had nothing to do, of course, with the length of these sessions that she attended and Sears knew nothing but pleasure in waiting for her in parish houses and church basements, and watching the crowd with whom she chose to associate had begun to interest him, partly because they were her associates, partly because he was obliged by circumstances to regard them and because they so disconcertingly challenged his common sense. The traditional forces of selection—the clubs, the social register and the professional lists—were all obsolete, he knew, but some traces or hints of caste seemed necessary to him for the comprehension and enjoyment of the world. These people seemed not only to belong to no organized society, they seemed to confound any such possibility. They were a genuine cross-section—something he abhorred.
    But since abstinence, continence, some