The Summer Soldier Read Online Free PDF Page A

working part time as one of the
three assistants to the department secretary. Guinness needed a
voucher signed for moving expenses, and Miss Harrison was the only
person in the office. She took the form, smiled one of those
automatic secretarial smiles, and said she would give it to the
chairman when he made it back from lunch.
    It was hardly love at first sight. Guinness
simply noticed her existence, filed it away for future reference,
and then went about his business for the next several months.
    He got settled into his job and pursued other
passions, and then one day at the beginning of the spring term he
leaned across the vast composition board counter top that separated
off the inner sanctum of the typing pool, into which no member of
the teaching staff was ever supposed to venture, and asked for a
date. It had been as simple as that.
    They had dinner at a little German place in
San Mateo and went to a movie at the Palm Theater and then stopped
back at her place, a little walkup apartment over a jewelry store
about three blocks from the campus. They were lovers before eleven
that evening, there having been only a single feature, and she had
moved in with him within a couple of weeks.
    Toward the middle of the summer they made a
quick trip to Las Vegas, lost two hundred and thirty-two dollars at
the blackjack tables, and got married. In retrospect, they were
both a little astonished at how casually their relationship had
developed. Anyway, within reasonable limits, it had worked well
enough.
    Louise had been twenty-seven at the time,
having returned to school out of boredom with clerking for an
insurance company and making the rounds of balding salesman types
with shiny faces and closets full of checkered sports jackets. Life
seemed to have been leading nowhere, and she had a vague idea that
she might enjoy teaching Jane Austen in some semirural junior
college. So she set about getting the necessary credentials and, at
least in theory, was still a graduate student even up to the time
of her death. In the drawer of her night table the police
discovered the typescript of an unfinished thesis on
Persuasion.
    . . . . .
    Perhaps that had never been what she really
wanted. Perhaps her spiritual destiny all along had been to find an
agreeable, unattached male who didn’t own any checkered sports
jackets, tie the knot, and honorably retire.
    And Ray was agreeable enough. It wasn’t a bad
life. It was steady enough, certainly; he seemed to place a high
value on orderliness and predictability. He liked to be told in the
mornings, before he went to work, what dinner would be; and,
barring an act of God, they went to the movies on Monday
evenings.
    By common consent, the race and chase
adventure flicks were the best. Ray said they had moral
clarity.
    She had married him—oh God—perhaps only
because he had asked without seeming to assume that the suspense
was killing her. Just a contract between two consenting adults who
happened to strike a few sparks for one another, no big deal. Not
quite a simple tax arrangement; there was more to it than that. But
not Tristram and Isolde, not breathless and ethereal passion
either. And it was something to his credit that he had the decency
to refrain from pretending that it was.
    And after all the other men she had known she
was ready to give him a little credit. I’ll be this, baby, or I’ll
give you that—just you wait and see. Promises of excitement or
distinction. The Great Life, oh so very different from this one,
always just perceptibly ahead. A few years, a change of jobs, a
lucky break. Somewhere in the distance. And all the time they knew
and she knew that the future would be precisely like the past, a
reality too insipid even to allow you the privilege of ignoring
it.
    But not with Ray. He had a habit, when he
didn’t seem to be thinking about anything, of taking hold of her
little finger and curling it up so that as he held it he could
easily have crushed the joint under the