Résumé With Monsters Read Online Free PDF Page A

than usual. When Philip had come to the door that day she had said, "I believe I am dying. You'll have to get another therapist. Just as well. You're one of those heartbreaker clients, I can tell." But she let him in. She drank some tea, and appeared to rally, launching into her speech about novel writing.
     
    Now she shouted from the kitchen, "Tell me about Amelia."
     
    "Amelia's beautiful," Philip said. "She's sort of hard to describe, because she likes to experiment with cosmetics, and she can look different on different days, but she has got this really wonderful heart. I mean—"
     
    Lily came back into the room and lay full length on the couch. She interrupted with a wave of her hand. "Tell me about your father."
     
    "What's to tell?" Philip said, suddenly wary and listening for the footfalls of some monstrous beast. "He killed himself."
     
    Lily sat up. Her sharp, blue eyes studied Philip. "That's something to tell," she said.
     
    Philip felt queasy. His insides had turned to hot, prickly flannel.
     
    "Excuse me," he said. He got up and walked down the tiny hall to the bathroom. He ran cold water and splashed it on his face. His image in the mirror looked a little like his father, if only in the fatalism written there, the way the brown eyes held caution and disbelief, the way the mouth turned ruefully upward.
     
    "Philip, are you okay?" Lily shouted through the door.
     
    "I'm okay," Philip shouted back. The bathroom was as full of sunlight as the rest of the house, with more old-fashioned prints on the walls and a shelf full of organic shampoos and soaps and a peeling Happy Face sticker on the mirror. A copy of Prevention magazine lay on the sink. The magazine had fallen into water—the tub, no doubt—and was now swollen and curled. Philip absently turned its pages, encountered an article about the health benefits of zinc and read it while standing up. "Philip?"
     
    Philip finished the article and came out. "I was feeling sort of sick," he said. "I'm okay now.
     
    Gosh. Look at the time. I've got to run."
     

     
    #
     

     
    He canceled his next appointment with Lily. He said he would get back with her to schedule a new one. He didn't call back. When she called, he let the answering machine catch her no- nonsense voice, although he was in the room on the bed, feverish from reading the long sentences of Henry James.
     
    She called twice more that week. Both times Philip was there, and the second time he almost answered the phone when she said, “I know you are there," but he was still reading James, and so he moved in a twilight lethargy, hobbled by fine delineations of thought. By the time he reached the phone, she had uttered the last of her message, "What if I really am dying. How would you feel if I died and you hadn't said good-bye?"
     
    Pretty cheap for a therapist , Philip thought.
     

     
    #
     

     
    Ralph's One-Day Résumés was a circus—worse than usual. Typesetter Monica was wearing a soft collar, one of those bulky, neck-brace things that whiplash victims wear prior to litigation. A paste-up artist named Helga had attempted to throttle Monica over a disagreement on the kerning of a typeface.
     
    Helga, a silent, gloomy employee with no friends and uncertain mental health, had been fired immediately, but she was still an ominous presence. She would drive into the parking lot where Philip could see her through the lobby's plate-glass window. She would rev the engine of her old Ford pickup and glower at the building. She would stare for half an hour or so and then abruptly accelerate in a scream of tortured rubber and race, heedless of traffic, back onto the highway. Her behavior was unpleasantly similar to accounts Philip read in those follow-up articles to tragedies (TWELVE GUNNED DOWN BY IRATE POSTAL EMPLOYEE, for instance). These articles would always begin with a survivor saying something like, “I guess we should have seen it coming when..."
     
    Ralph Pederson did not wish to call