Passion and Affect Read Online Free PDF

frosting was a kind of cherry-flavored whipped gum. He had never seen anything like it. At the first bite, he reeled back with astonishment: it was sublime. The next week he bought several frozen cakes and some candy bars made chiefly of preservatives and artificial coloring. He tried a frozen Mexican dinner, but whatever was sleeping in those little tin trays tasted like hot spiced mud and looked like primal slime. He discovered frozen orange juice, AM radio, ladies’ magazines, electric toothbrushes, and thrillers. But it was the discovery of television he loved best of all. He sat before it, beginning with the early evening news, a glass of milk and a slab of frozen cake on a plate, and watched. Often he would turn the sound off and make up lines for the newsmen. He became all the voices on the ads: the hysterical mother anxious about household odor, the bumbling father banished to the garage, the teenage bride with detergent worries. It kept him vastly amused for several weeks, and then he began to get somewhat depressed.
    Once at his office, he was useless for an hour every morning, his eyes wincing at the memory of a dark room, sharp gray glare, and dazzling white shirts. He would stare out the window and lean over his drawing board. These days it took quite a while to wake up. When Charlotte was around, he woke up as fast and clean as a freshly snapped twig. Now he crawled out of sleep, like a wounded fly climbing out of a sticky cup. For that hour at work when he was not quite awake, he was the emotional equivalent of a hyperfertile field: everything took instant bloom. Stories in the newspapers touched him. Secretly in the men’s room, he wept about the war, the lost and found columns, the return of the wounded soldiers, the brides on the society page. Gradually he became fond of that hour, and savored it like ambrosia.
    It was high summer and the streets shimmered out waves of heat that fluttered like lingerie. Dry, parched leaves shriveled on the trees. The office was as cold as a meat locker, and Benno, braised by the pavement, roasted in the subway, and boiled in the elevator, stood in his office basking in the exquisite cool relief. On very hot mornings, he felt as if he were being remorphized into a human as the air-conditioner gradually evaporated his hot, tortured animal sweat. He felt very well, but he was lonesome.
    The girl who brought him his coffee every morning was a fat, high-waisted married girl called Sylvia. She interested him only insofar as that her breasts appeared to be perfectly conical. At the moment she was on vacation with her husband, whom Benno imagined to have dents in either side of his chest gouged by his wife’s sharp bosom. The girl who brought him his coffee this morning was therefore not Sylvia. Whatever her name was, she was tall and thin with a wide mouth and a row of squat, even teeth. Her hair was an unnatural red and she was wearing a slick little dress made from a plastic fiber that looked slightly musty and wet. On her feet were thin shoes the color of mirrors. “What’s your name?” asked Benno, not knowing on which word to put the emphasis.
    â€œGreenie,” said the girl, setting the cup on the drawing board.
    â€œGreenie?” asked Benno.
    â€œYeah,” said the girl, looking around the office. It had a drawing board, a wooden work table, and walls of cork for sticking up designs and plans.
    â€œWhat kind of a name is Greenie?” asked Benno. “Is it really Greenie?”
    â€œYeah,” said the girl. “I swear to God. I don’t know what kind of name it is. It’s my name. It isn’t short for anything.” Then she vanished after looking Benno in the eyes for several seconds.
    Benno considered her. On the one hand, she was very ugly. On the other hand, she was very beautiful. She had those squat teeth, and squat hands that didn’t seem to belong to her tall, thin body. Her technicolor hair was tied back