Private Lies Read Online Free PDF Page A

been?"
    "No. But I'd love to," Maggie said, looking
toward Ken.
    "We tent," Eliot said. "Not exactly the
Ritz, but remarkably comfortable. And I've got this fabulous guide. Former
white hunter until they banned it in 1977. Nobody like Jack Meade. Right,
Carol?"
    "The best there is. It's a bit Spartan, very
nineteenth-century, but that's part of the charm."
    "Ken's not much of a rough rider," Maggie
laughed. "He likes his creature comforts."
    Must you. Now she was making him out to be a self-indulgent
weakling.
    "Did the primitiveness bother you, Carol?" Maggie
asked.
    "It took some getting used to," Carol said.
There, for a fleeting moment, was the old Carol, the one that didn't dissemble.
    "Going downhill in a hand basket," Eliot said.
"Unless we do something drastic."
    "We'd better hurry over, then," Ken said, unable
to hide the pique that had been building inside him. Don't, he warned himself,
rolling the pasta on his fork, stuffing his mouth to shut it up.
    "We share our planet with lots of competing forms of
life," Eliot said. "We need a plan to balance it all, but first we
need to decide that we must have a plan. You see..." He was plunging into
it now, offering all that his thinking had wrought on this subject.
    While Eliot spoke, barely pausing between bites and sips,
Ken's thoughts raced along another path.
    Down memory lane.

2
    THIS LOCAL GIRL had won a prize, coming in first in a
ballet competition sponsored by the New York Ballet Company. The prize was five
hundred dollars toward tuition at the ballet school run by the company. There
had been a brief piece in the New York Times announcing the prizes, and
Jack Holmes, the editor of the Mid-Queens Post , had sent Ken to
interview her. Local Forest Hills girl wins ballet prize. Two cents a word and
a byline.
    Holmes liked Ken's stuff. It was a beginning, after all. He
was a senior at City College then, full of himself, borderline arrogant,
cocksure of his talent. Hadn't he mesmerized his fellow student writers when he
read his short story "The Other People" before the creative-writing
class just two days prior to that fateful interview?
    Funny how that juxtaposition of detail had hung on,
appended itself to the recollection as if it were essential to his state of
mind at the time. Stunning, the teacher had said about his story. It had the
rhythm of a clear stream rolling down a mountain in springtime. Even that
hyperbolic image had stuck in his mind. He had his own private analysis,
redolent of Hemingway. It was about a man in crisis alone, not up in Hem's Michigan, but here in the wilderness of New York. He had sent it off to a prestigious
literary magazine and was certain of its acceptance.
    He had been extremely lucky to get these assignments. Hell,
journalism was writing, albeit a notch down on the literary scale, but it had
an element of craft and he was good at it. And the bylines gave him a sense of
authorship and would look impressive in a portfolio.
    Despite literary pretensions, Ken could not escape his
failed father's admonition that one was compelled to scheme toward one's
practical economic future. Of course, he was absolutely certain that he was
programmed for early literary discovery, which didn't mean that he couldn't
hedge his bets.
    "Won't do to get left behind," his father had
warned. "Like me."
    His mother of blessed memory, his most avid reader, had
never faltered in her belief that he could be anything he wished. An amateur
genealogist, she had tracked a literary bent back four generations to a
great-uncle from Kozin, a shtetl not far from Kiev where amusing stories had
appeared in the local paper, scrupulously preserved in cellophane and carried
across in steerage on the U.S.S. St. Louis by Ken's great-grandmother.
He had read them in translation from the Yiddish. They had struck him as
extremely clever, and his mother had impressed upon him that such tendencies
and talent could come down through the blood.
    He took that as one more clue to a