Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

there were things one could do on a first date and other things one could do on a third date and still other things one could do only when one was truly in love. We all of us have different levels, different cutoff places. Some women with a far lower threshold than our Fran would find it impossible to sleep with two men at the same time. Others would find it possible to engage in the act, but could only achieve orgasm with one of the two partners. Others might manage intercourse with both lover and husband, while withholding fellatory delights from the latter. But this adorable girl has yet another set of standards. Her lips were never sealed, just her esophagus.
    Why am I telling you all this? I’m sure you can guess my baser motives, but there is one altruistic impulse involved as well, old buddy. If you two are going to live together, you ought to know as much as possible about one another. And you also ought to be able to know when someone has begun to replace you in her affections.
    The day she spits you out, old buddy, is the day you’ve been replaced.
    This typewriter is really chockfull of surprises. I honestly never meant to write you any of this. I didn’t mean to write you at all, as I said. I was going to write Fran and tell her how I spent the weekend. When one has been jilted, one wants to get a little of one’s own back, ignoble as that may be, and this was a sensational weekend, and writing to Fran about it would constitute a symphonic chorus of “I can get along without you very well, believe me….” Believe me.
    I left the Kettle when they closed it, since there didn’t seem to be any alternative. By then I had drifted in and out of perhaps a half-dozen conversations and twice as many private reveries and was having a high old time, in all senses. And I had very nearly managed to drink myself sober all over again. To wit, my memory of some of those hours in the Kettle was sketchy, but when I walked out into the stale air of MacDougal Street I was in full possession of what faculties Providence gave me.
    Not that I was sober. I could walk straight and talk straight and think straight—well, almost—but I was nevertheless looped.
    If drinking always worked that way, I swear I’d do it every night. There’d be no earthly reason not to.
    So I walked up MacDougal Street singing something. I think it was “Big Yellow Taxi,” the Joni Mitchell thing. There are some difficult notes in the chorus and I was missing some of them, and aware of it, but I still sounded pretty good to me. I crossed MacDougal at Third Street. I don’t recall having any special destination in mind. There was a station wagon waiting for the light to change. I crossed behind it (which I suppose constitutes jaywalking, which you can add to the list of my sins) and I paused at the end of a line of the song, suddenly unable to remember what came next, and through the open rear window of the station wagon two voices supplied the next line in unison. Two clear, fresh, youthful, soprano voices, and they got all the notes right.
    I leaned an elbow on the back of the wagon and peered owlishly in at them. The car was full of girls. There was one in front driving and one sitting next to her, and there were two more in the back seat, and there were another two—the songbirds—sitting cross-legged in the luggage compartment. The ones that I could see were all very pretty. So, I learned later, were the others. A total of six pretty girls sitting two and two and two in a station wagon at the corner of MacDougal and West Third at something like three-thirty on a Saturday morning.
    “Why, hello,” I said. “I certainly want to thank you for helping me out with the song.”
    “It’s a beautiful song,” one of them said.
    “It’s a beautiful evening,” I said.
    “It was raining earlier.”
    “Earlier it was the winter of my discontent. Now it’s made glorious summer.”
    “And are we the sons of York?”
    “I doubt it,” I said,