Sweet Talk Read Online Free PDF

squinted into the flatness of the expressway and would not talk to me. I put my blue-eyed lover behind the wheel. He rested a hand on my knee and smiled as he drove. He was driving me west, away from the Vista View Apartments, across the thin spine of mountains that separated our suburb from the sea. At the shore there would be seals frolicking among the rocks and starfish resting in tidal pools.
    “How come you never take me to the ocean?” I said.“How come every time I want to go to the beach I have to call up a woman friend?”
    “If you think you’re going to Virginia with me,” he said, “you’re dreaming.” He eased the car into our numbered space and put his head against the wheel. “Why did you have to do it?”
    “I do not like cars,” I said. “You know I have always been afraid of cars.”
    “Why did you have to sleep with that fag tennis player?” His head was still against the wheel. I moved closer and put my arm around his shoulders.
    “Sam, I didn’t. I made it up.”
    “Don’t try to get out of it.”
    “I didn’t, Sam. I made it up.” I tried to kiss him. He let me put my mouth against his, but his lips were unyielding. They felt like the skin of an orange. “I didn’t, Sam. I made it up to hurt you.” I kissed him again and his mouth warmed against mine. “I love you, Sam. Please let me go to Virginia.”
    “ ‘George Donner,’ ” I read from the guidebook, “ ‘was sixty-one years old and rich when he packed up his family and left Illinois to cross the Great Plains, the desert, and the mountains into California.’ ” We were driving through the Sierras, past steep slopes and the deep shade of an evergreen forest, toward the Donner Pass, where in 1846 the Donner family had beentrapped by an early snowfall. Some of them died and the rest ate the corpses of their relatives and their Indian guides to survive.
    “Where are the bones?” Sam said, as we strolled past glass cases at the Donner Pass Museum. The cases were full of wagon wheels and harnesses. Above us a recorded voice described the courageous and enterprising spirit of American pioneers. A man standing nearby with a young boy turned to scowl at Sam. Sam looked at him and said in a loud voice, “Where are the bones of the people they ate?” The man took the boy by the hand and started for the door. Sam said, “You call this American history?” and the man turned and said, “Listen, mister, I can get your license number.” We laughed about that as we descended into the plain of the Great Basin desert in Nevada. Every few miles one of us would say the line and the other one would chuckle, and I felt as if we had been married fifty years instead of five, and that everything had turned out okay.
    Ten miles east of Reno I began to sneeze. My nose ran and my eyes watered, and I had to stop reading the guidebook.
    “I can’t do this anymore. I think I’ve got an allergy.”
    “You never had an allergy in your life.” Sam’s tone implied that I had purposefully got the allergy so that I could not read the guidebook. We were riding in asecondhand van, a lusterless, black shoebox of a vehicle, which Sam had bought for the trip with the money he got from the stereo, the TV, and his own beautifully overhauled and rebuilt little sports car.
    “Turn on the radio,” I said.
    “The radio is broken.”
    It was a hot day, dry and gritty. On either side of the freeway, a sagebrush desert stretched toward the hunched profiles of brown mountains. The mountains were so far away—the only landmarks within three hundred miles—that they did not whap by the windows like signposts, they floated above the plain of dusty sage and gave us the sense that we were not going anywhere.
    “Are you trying to kill us?” I said when the speedometer slid past ninety.
    Sam looked at the dash surprised and, I think, a little pleased that the van could do that much. “I’m getting hypnotized,” he said. He thought about it for