Something to Be Desired Read Online Free PDF Page A

peculiar assortment of left-behind novels in various languages. It was a beautiful old room, andSuzanne already knew that something was wrong. Lucien wanted to put it all off; but the fact that James was sleeping constrained him to say something now. He told Suzanne he wasn’t going back to work. It made absolutely no sense for him to make any such statement, but he could not seem to do otherwise. Suzanne sat down with her hands in her lap. She was very tall, and that somehow made her isolation more clear. She was across the room and so very tall in the wooden chair.
    “Why aren’t you going back to work?”
    He answered her honestly. He said, “I don’t know.”
    “Oh. Huh,” she said. “You can’t even try?”
    “I’ve gone through that. I want to start over. It’s just about that simple. I’m not doing anybody any good. I’m going to be alone for a while. Does that make any sense?”
    “No.”
    “It must, Suzanne. It must make some.”
    “It doesn’t, because you’re going back to see that cunt.”
    “That’s not what she is.”
    “You’re right. She’s something worse than that. I just can’t find the words.”
    “Please, Suzanne.”
    “I just thought the whores around the embassy would have gotten this out of your system by now.” She said this in a small voice.
    “Suzanne.”
    “I never complained about that.”
    “I know.”
    She sat quietly for a moment, looking pale. “It wasn’t easy for me to not complain. You see, I’m not an up-to-date girl. Your whores got on my nerves. But I saw it as a form of insurance. Evidently it was not sufficient insurance. Because you’re on the track of the queen of themall, aren’t you? A lot of good it did me. I suppose I should have fucked myself a wide swath, but my heart wasn’t in it, despite the fact that you don’t have a single friend who didn’t try. I guess that should make me feel stupid, but somehow it doesn’t. It fills me with awe to see you throw away everything you have that’s any good.”
    “You’ve been storing this up, darling.”
    “Will you be going straight back to Montana?”
    All Lucien had for this was a long, feckless sigh, like an addict asked why he was killing himself with drugs. When Suzanne started crying, he stared at her as if across a state line. She shook and shook as she cried, sitting straight up in the wooden chair; she didn’t make a sound. She doesn’t want to wake up James, Lucien thought; but why can’t I stop myself? I have the soul of a lab rat.
    Lucien was alone for one day on the slave-breeding farm. He was in a kind of shock, but he hoped that shock would be one merely of transition rather than injury. If I’m so bad, he thought, they are better off without me and I have done them a good turn. With that, his spirits began to rise minutely. Sexually speaking, he thought, haven’t I been a real success? I’ve spent thousands of hours with my ass flying and sweat spraying off me. In almost every case my partner pumped and sprayed with comparable ardor, sometimes when paid to do so. I’ve been the real article. He looked around himself with fear, confusion and dismay: God almighty!
    That day too, he sat on the toilet daydreaming of Emily, when his half-erect penis aligned itself between the porcelain rim and the seat, and fired urine halfway across the room before he could clamp off his sphincter.It’s a monster, he thought, I know that much. Poor Old Dick, he called it. Me and Poor Old Dick are going home. Lucien was running absolutely blind. He had wanted to be in the country he loved once more. He wanted to paint, though he set only a modest store by that; he just wanted to get a few things down, like the Indians who traced the red ocher elk on the walls of the old hobo caves outside of town. He felt that his life had transformed him into a functionary. He felt lost, and he knew with absolute sincerity that Emily was certainly no cunt.
    While he waited for his plane, he read the only