Stolen Pleasures Read Online Free PDF Page A

off
by early bus to his mountain across the bay, there to climb his trails, staff in hand and knapsack on his back. And I still love you.
    That evening he was jovial again. He drank his blackberry wine at supper; sat with her on the sofa and read aloud from his collected essays, Religion and Science in the Light of Psychoanalysis, often closing the small, red leather book to repudiate the theories of his youth; gave her, as gifts, Kierkegaard’s Purity of Heart and three novels of Conrad in leather bindings; and appeared again, briefly, at her door, his chest bare.
    She went out again, a few nights later, to visit a friend, and he escorted her graciously to the door. “Come back any time you need to see me,” he called after her. Puzzled, she turned on the path. The light from within the house shone around his dark figure in the rectangle of the open door. “But I live here for now,” she called back, flapping her coat out on both sides to make herself more evident to him. “Of course! Of course! I forgot!” he laughed, stamping his foot, dismayed with himself. And she knew that her presence was not so intense a presence as they thought. It would not matter to him as the days went by, as the years left to him went by, that she had not come into his bed.
    On the last night, before they went upstairs and after switching off the lamps, he stood at a distance from her, gazing down. “I am senile now, I think,” he said. “I see signs of it. Landslides go on in there.” The declaration in the dark, the shifting feet, the gazing down, all were disclosures of his fear that she might, on this last night, come to him at last.
    The girl left the house early, before the woman and her son appeared. She looked for him through the house and found him at a
window downstairs, almost obscured at first sight by the swath of morning light in which he stood. With shaving brush in hand and a white linen hand towel around his neck, he was watching a flock of birds in branches close to the pane, birds so tiny she mistook them for fluttering leaves. He told her their name, speaking in a whisper toward the birds, his profile entranced as if by his whole life.
    The girl never entered the house again, and she did not see him for a year. In that year she got along by remembering his words of wisdom, lifting her head again and again above deep waters to hear his voice. When she could not hear him anymore, she phoned him and they arranged to meet on the beach below his house. The only difference she could see, watching him from below, was that he descended the long stairs with more care, as if time were now underfoot. Other than that, he seemed the same. But as they talked, seated side by side on a rock, she saw that he had drawn back unto himself his life’s expectations. They were way inside, and they required, now, no other person for their fulfillment.

Nights in the Gardens of Spain

    T HE BOY BESIDE him was full of gin and beer and wine and the pleasant memory of himself at the party, the great guitarist at seventeen, and he had no idea where he was until he was told to get out. His profile with that heavy chin that he liked to remind everybody was Hapsburg hung openmouthed against the blowing fog and the cold jet-black ocean of night.
    Berger had no intention of forcing him out, but to command him to get out was the next best way of impressing his disgust on his passenger. “I asked you when you got in, friend, if you had money for the bridge toll and you haven’t answered me yet. You want to get over this bridge tonight and into your little trundle bed, you look for that two bits because I’m sick of paying your way wherever we go and getting kicked in the fact for a thank-you. What the hell did I hear you say to Van Grundy? That you got bored by musicians because all they could talk about was music?” His breath smelled of cheese and garlic from all the mounds of crackers and spread