Separate Flights Read Online Free PDF

the car and grinned at me, almost laughing.
    â€˜And then what, Charlie Chan?’
    â€˜He’ll wonder why in the hell you drank six bottles of imported beer this afternoon.’
    â€˜Well, he doesn’t deserve honesty, but a few clues might be nice.’
    â€˜Sometimes I think—’
    It was possible she wanted him to catch her; you have to keep that in mind when you’re making love with a man’s wife. But I didn’t want to talk about it.
    â€˜Sometimes you think what?’
    â€˜Sometimes I think I love you even more than I think I do. Which is a lot.’
    â€˜Which is a lot. Impotent as you are, you try hard.’
    She turned the car around and drove slowly and bouncing out of the woods. At the highway she stopped and put on sunglasses.
    â€˜Light me a Lucky,’ she said. ‘My last one till—?’
    I thought of the acting and the lies and, right then, if she had said we must stop seeing each other, I would have been relieved.
    â€˜I don’t know, I’ll call you.’
    As she drove onto the highway both of us pretended we weren’t eyeing the road for friends’ cars. My damp shirt and chest cooled in the air blowing through the window.
    â€˜My pecker aches.’
    â€˜I’m going to keep the sitter another hour and take a nap.’
    â€˜Let me give you some money for her.’
    â€˜Another time. Mother sent me some.’
    â€˜The empties are in the chest.’
    â€˜I’ll go by the dump.’
    Summer school was in session, and walking downtown you’d see college girls licking ice cream cones. Once I was teaching Goodbye, Columbus and a blonde girl with brown eyes like a deer stopped me at the door before class and said: ‘Mr. Linhart, what is oral love?’ She was licking a lollipop. I looked away from her tongue on the lollipop and said fellatio; when she asked what that was I mumbled in the heat of my face that she ought to ask a girl. It took me a couple of hours to know she was having fun with me. After that I tried to talk to her but she had only wanted that fun; she had a boyfriend who waited every day in the hall outside our classroom, and seeing them holding hands and walking down the hall I felt old and foolish. That was three years ago, when I was twenty-seven.
    On summer afternoons there were no classes, and the buildings were empty. Most days when I climbed the three flights of stairs in the old, cool building Hank would be working with his back to the open door; he’d hear me coming and he’d turn smiling, stacking and paper-clipping the manuscript. ‘Hi,’ he’d say, his voice affectionate like he was talking to a woman or a child. There are several men I love and who love me, all of us married, passive misogamists, and if we did not have each other to talk to we would probably in our various ways go mad. But our love embarrasses us; we show our affection in reverse: Where you been, you sonofabitch? Look at that bastard, he wouldn’t buy a round for Jesus Christ —But Hank only did that if it made you feel better.
    â€˜Hi,’ he said.
    â€˜You can’t write, you fucker, so let’s go run.’
    â€˜One Goddamn page.’
    â€˜In four hours?’
    â€˜Three hours and forty-six minutes. Let’s go.’
    I started walking downstairs before he asked what I had done with my day. Walking over to the gym he was quiet. By the flagpole he lit a cigarette, then flung it to the sidewalk, crumpled his pack and threw it hard, like an outfielder; it arched softly, red and white in the sun.
    â€˜You just quit.’
    â€˜Goddamn right.’
    â€˜Which time?’
    â€˜For the last time.’
    â€˜You won’t make it.’
    â€˜You watch. They’re pissing me off. They’re trying to kill me.’
    â€˜They have no souls.’
    â€˜Exactly.’
    â€˜So they’re not trying to kill you.’
    â€˜Not the cigarettes. I mean the