The Blonde Read Online Free PDF Page B

think precisely that: Her father, whom she plainly adored . It was a sign—though not the first, last, or most salient—that if he took her home (or rather, allowed her to take him home) he would regret it.
    Walls (Douglass Everett Walls on his passport; Dougie to his mother; D.W. to his father; Doug to the world; but always to himself simply and purely Walls) was not in general so unromantic as the part of him thatwanted to flee this girl, this bed. At New Haven he had been known as a ladies’ man, and in secret he thought of himself as the one true romantic of his acquaintance. Women were to him so delicate and lovely, and he held a strong belief that they should be treated right. He lived in fear of doing anything that might suggest he was falsely promising them the happy futures they so obviously desired—he doubted that he would ever be fully capable of promising any such thing—and this was the crux of the carnal paradox that kept him rather lonely most evenings since he’d joined the Bureau.
    Except on the occasions when he couldn’t help it anymore, and called up the elusive charm bequeathed by his father. Almost always it worked, a little too easily to be fully satisfying. Most of the girls these days would let you use your hand, and if you did that part right, they were almost certain to submit to the rest. Then he’d find himself heaving over some debutante with silken hair, grinning like an ape as he listened for her dishonest sighs to yield to the real, unpretty moans, before ejaculating on her rosy, flat belly. That was more or less last night’s order of events; and so he couldn’t really be surprised by his current state of remorse.
    Expertly, stealthily, he removed himself from the bed. The mattress barely registered its lightened load. Luckily he’d put on his underwear before falling asleep, and his under and dress shirts were on his side of the bed. The sleeves of the latter were over his arms by the time he was across the floor, and his pants were waiting for him by the door—as though they had been awake with the first light, and had been urging him to get on with it since. In the living room he found shoes, socks, and tie on the zebra-skin rug, near the glass coffee table where their half-drunk glasses of bourbon remained from the night before. His jacket, helpfully, was hanging on the brass coat tree by the front door. He almost couldn’t believe how nicely his escape was going.
    Already he was in the hallway, stuffing his tie into his pocket, summoning the elevator. He leaned against the wall opposite, as though the casualness of his pose might exonerate him for fleeing. The elevator was mirrored, andas he waited he regarded himself—the fair hair bluntly cut, the arms still muscular from Quantico, if not quite so lean as in his tennis-playing days, the deep-set hazel eyes that (as one of the more self-consciously intellectual girls he’d known once said) were “difficult to read,” the serious, handsome features which appeared suddenly goofy and boyish when he smiled. He wasn’t smiling now. The odor of the girl was still on him, her Chanel perfume and the smell of her body it was meant to mask. On mornings like these, he saw how like his father he was, and disliked himself. To distract himself from this knowledge he quoted Chekhov in his mind—“And he judged of others by himself, not believing in what he saw, and always believing that every man had his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy and under the cover of night”—a favorite from his undergraduate days. But really he was still thinking of his father, and in the next moment, with a surge of dread, he realized the flaw in his getaway.
    The hat. It was the same hat his father wore the year he came back from Spain with the limp, and went to work for Uncle Edward’s firm doing something mysterious and financial. (One night around Christmastime a few years ago, his father had explained that he had been in