The Golden Calves Read Online Free PDF Page A

vile—and she knew that he knew this. He seemed to be counting on her being attracted to his very repulsiveness, and was he counting altogether in vain? She could not be sure. And there was another thing: she suffered from a sense of having beguiled him under false pretenses. For she was not, as she had half-implied, a virgin.
    In graduate school she had had an affair that lasted a month with a fellow student, a pale, scrawny, oily-haired young man with a bad complexion and a desperate intensity, who had been distressingly open about wanting to prove to himself that he was not homosexual. They had confided everything about their unhappy childhoods to each other during sandwich lunches on park benches, and he had pounced on the idea that she too needed reassurance—reassurance that her feeling of rejection by her adoptive parents had not permanently frozen her in the conviction that she was impossible to love. Might they not each gain emotional emancipation by burning away the husk of a paralyzing neurosis in the deliberately kindled fire of sexual intercourse? And who was to say? Maybe they would find love, “true love,” whatever that might be, while they were at it.
    It was not a success for either, and they ended on a sorry note of mutual recrimination. Anita could not avoid considering the possible deduction that her suspicion of her own unlovableness might be more than a suspicion, as his, of his homosexuality, soon proved an exact prognostication. Was it not safer, was it not happier, was it not even nobler to relegate all thoughts of romance to the iron cupboard of fantasy, where, no matter how lurid, how throbbing with the unmentionable, the almost unthinkable, they could still be kept mysteriously un-contaminating and clean?
    Carol embarked at length on a new tack. He urged her to introduce him to her family. For a while she resisted the idea, but at last, before a weekend that she was to spend with her mother, now married to a real estate broker in Rye, she agreed to let him come up on Sunday and drive her back to town. Supposing he found the family atmosphere as Babbitty as he undoubtedly expected he would? Would it not solve her problem? When she told her mother, the latter, delighted, insisted that Carol come for Sunday lunch.
    The Tudor dormered house, the stepfather full of political and baseball chatter, the married stepbrothers and their spouses, so clean, immaculate, beaming, indifferent and unread, the spoiled, shouting children, seemed to be having the effect on the smiling and affable Carol that she had expected. Oh, she knew how to read behind his laughing eyes! But her mother seemed almost too tacky; it was a case of overkill. Her red hair was too red, her laugh too eager, her desire to show off her thin sprinkle of culture to a “real” museum curator too painfully evident. Obviously, she was intent on making up for three decades of benign neglect by charming "dear Dr. Sweeters" into marrying her waif.
    Only when Carol had taken the family cat onto his lap and was stroking it did her mother sound a genuine note.
    â€œOh, you like cats, Dr. Sweeters? I can tell that by the way you stroke Dido. I always think it a sigh of sensitivity and intelligence in a man to like cats. I suppose you have one at home?”
    â€œI had one with me last summer for my vacation. In Newport.”
    "In Newport? Really? You go there? It must be so lovely. And I suppose you swim at Bailey’s Beach and watch the tennis at the Casino?”
    â€œMy dear lady, I do no such things. I scamper like a mouse at the first approach of a member of what I call the leper colony. No, no, I rent for my scant month of freedom a tiny box of a house in the charming eighteenth-century section of Newport. There I and my cat dream of Rochambeau and Lafayette and walk to the old stone tower and pretend that the Vikings really built it, after all."
    Anita glanced at her stepbrothers; of course they weren’t