Peaceable Kingdom Read Online Free PDF

nodded at Jerry and Susanna and then stared grimly ahead. Sometimes they whispered to each other. Susanna thought of the couple at Herculaneum. Had she mistaken Eastern European social style for some special intensity?
    All the waiters looked like male models with designer white jackets. Serving, they brushed suspiciously close to Susanna’s bare arms, and the space around her felt charged, a pleasing distraction from the strain of dining with Bulgarians. The dance band, five Malaysian kids, played a kind of modified swing. Susanna pulled Jerry out on the floor, where she pressed herself against him and spread her legs and bent her knees so her skirt rode up on her hips. Jerry jitterbugged well enough, and as he twirled her around, she threw back her head and closed her eyes and felt the eyes of the ecologists warming her arms and legs.
    Outside the conference room they picked up earphones for simultaneous translation. The first speaker was a professor from the University of Milan, who welcomed the participants and expressed his hope that together they could solve their common problems and that this year, unlike last, the discourse would not bog down in petty nationalist grievances. The current crisis was everyone’s fault, no one country’s more than the rest.
    One by one the ecologists made their way to the podium. Each spoke for ten minutes and took questions from the floor. Everyone chain-smoked feverishly in the audience and on stage; after every few speeches they took a coffee break and chain-smoked in the hall. Several of the speakers reported on particular rivers or mountains or forests. Meditating on the depletion of the earth’s resources had lined their faces and made them look brooding, unacademic, and Yves Montandish. The Europeans talked slowly and out of the sides of their mouths. The Americans were suffer, more boyish, and, like Jerry, more nervous.
    Jerry’s speech was too close to lunch and did not go well. It was very different from what he’d told Susanna’s class. Perhaps he should have asked them to look to both sides and imagine their colleagues with cauliflower heads. Instead, he dimmed the lights and projected a map his office had compiled showing nuclear dump sites across the U.S.: tiny death’s-heads speckled the screen like fly spots on a napkin. He said these sites would be uninhabitable for a million years. There were many death’s-heads, and the audience got silent. As Jerry ran through the statistics on radioactive sludge, Susanna fiddled with the headset and listened to him in French and Italian female voices.
    When the house lights came back on, the ecologists blinked grumpily and lit up. “Questions?” said Jerry and someone called out, “What action is being taken?” But Jerry could only stammer and hedge like a White House press corps frontman, like someone who’d work for nuclear dumpers instead of struggling against them. “It’s difficult,” he said. “Mostly our work so far has been to identify sites, inform local residents, and begin to put pressure on the government. Otherwise, it’s hard to know just what action to take…” He smiled the same silly smile with which he asked Susanna if he could pin her hands behind her head.
    A palpable dissatisfaction rose from the audience, mingling with the smoke from their French cigarettes. Susanna wished Jerry had told the stories he’d told in the college bar, the break-ins at his office, the hard disks mysteriously crashed, the secret reports sent through the mail that somehow never got there. That would convince the ecologists that he was already risking all, that what he did was critical and not just academic. And who were these professors to fault him for not doing more? Didn’t they know that what to do was the central question of Jerry’s life?
    A professor from Madrid got up and said, “I’m sorry. You must forgive us if we find this…hesitance…hard to believe. Here in Europe we all grew up watching John