Sparrow Nights Read Online Free PDF Page B

and we settled in the living room, on the same couch where Emma had read Anna Karenina . But when I kissed her, the high school teacher, when she leaned forward and closed her eyes in a manner I thought a trifle theatrical, she smelt funny. I don’t mean bad. I just mean odd. Different. The French get most things wrong, but they’re right about love: it really is a question of smell. And when I did that thing to her that I had daydreamed about doing, I was shocked at how extraordinarily different women’s bodies are, one from another.
    She left shortly after that, but we stayed friends. We even had a drink together every so often until she got a boyfriend, and then things dried up and blew away the way they do.
    It was the strangest thing, though; it was as if women could see the pain on my face and were drawn to it. I think they felt safe with me. Whereas men, men I avoided. They meant well, but in showing me they understood, they said terrible things. I know they were trying to lighten things up, but they did more harm. Once, at the end of an evening of cards, the host walked me to the door and, just as I was about to set off up the street, stopped me.
    “How are things with Emma?” he asked.
    I spluttered, I made light of it. I felt myself growing smaller and tighter with each sentence. Picking up on my mood, my host scrutinized my features with wide-eyed delight.
    “One does move on,” I said finally, with a certain successful elegance, but even as the words issued from my mouth, I saw the image of her boss’s quivering bottom, complete, of course, with Emma’s ghastly “you’re-just-a-bad-boy-with-a-big-hard-cock” soundtrack.
    I walked home double time, as if the motion of my body might stop the images from coming into too clear a focus.
    It seemed as if I were radiating some peculiar kind of pollen. I went to New York to see an opera and came home with the stewardess from the airplane. Never in my life had I had such extraordinary luck with women. I can’t remember her name, I never saw her again, but when she left my bed, I lay in the dark in the unfamiliar smell of her perfume and felt a shiver of excitement, like a prisoner granted a new trial.
    I slept like a dreamless dead weight that night, and in the morning I was famished. I hurried down the street and took breakfast in a new restaurant. I chatted happily to the owner, offered insights into the neighbourhood. In the middle of a sentence I looked out the window and saw a bicycle locked to a fire hydrant and thought to myself, Look, look at this, I’m looking at a bicycle locked to a hydrant, I’m not thinking about that other thing at all.
    They were so kind to me, those women. How I would miss them later when the horror was gone from my face and they no longer saw me.
    There were oddballs too, a hippie girl who followed me home from a lawn sale and after only the barest preliminaries asked me to spank her.
    “How old are you?” I asked.
    “Twenty-eight,” she said.
    “Don’t you think this is, well, a little much for a first date?” She looked baffled. I went on. “Perhaps this is more like fifth- or sixth-date stuff.”
    “All my friends do it,” she said.
    “Is this a sort of generational thing?”
    Her laughter spilt richly into the air. “How do you mean?”
    “It’s a damn curious thing, that’s all. When I was your age …” But I stopped there. Just those words, this groaning overture, drained me, and I could feel myself fading, right in front of her eyes, like an old sign on an inn.
    “That must have been some time ago,” she said. “No offence.”
    I took none and obliged her, securing her feet to the bedpost with a Cambridge necktie, the rationale being that I might find in this unfamiliar landscape a distraction from Emma, the sensation of whose absence had returned like a toothache. Even as I lowered the young lady’s panties, even as I raised my hand to her backside, I was aware of Emma’s heart beating somewhere