The Summer Soldier Read Online Free PDF

pressure of his thumb. They
would sit together—he would seem a million miles away, in some
private existence of his own—and her heart would pound like a tom
tom.
    Of course he never did it. She had never seen
him harm any living thing—probably he never had, never would; but
not perhaps because it had never occurred to him that he could.
Somehow, in his very insistence that his life be uneventful, he
managed to suggest that it might have been different had he
chosen.
    Once, to celebrate the publication of one of
his papers, they had gone out to dinner in San Francisco, to a fish
place on the Wharf, where the little square tables at which they
seated couples were so close together that you couldn’t have slid a
book of matches between them. The man at the next table had left
his cigarette untended—apparently he had forgotten about it
completely—in a little tin ashtray, and the smoke was drifting
remorselessly into Ray’s eyes.
    He had only just recently given up cigarettes
himself and tended to be a little touchy on the subject, as if
sensitive to the injustice of anyone being allowed what he was not.
Finally he turned to his right and, very politely, asked if the
gentleman would mind putting the damn thing out.
    The gentleman was about ten years older, at
least twenty pounds heavier, and none the better for a number of
vodka and tonics consumed while waiting for his lobster claws. And
just to make everything perfect, he was there with a woman quite
obviously not his wife.
    One gathered from the expression on his face
that he did mind, but he stubbed out the cigarette anyway. Ray
thanked him and went back to his Manhattan chowder.
    The matter seemed closed.
    But it wasn’t; a second later, apparently
having thought the thing over, the gentleman at the next table
started to flick Ray noisily on the sleeve of his jacket with the
first two fingers of a pink, fleshy hand. It seemed there was a
point of etiquette that it was imperative to have settled.
    “Listen, Mac. When somebody does you a favor
you should smile when you say thank you. That was a favor I just
did you, so why don’t you smile?”
    Louise wasn’t perfect, and she knew it. She
shared with most women a morbid curiosity to see how her husband
would behave under fire, what he would do when the bully at the
beach kicked sand in his face. So she sat very quietly, torn
between a certain guilty excitement and her dread over the prospect
of a scene. She tried very hard, however, not to give the
impression that she believed he had anything to live up to.
    Her husband did, in fact, smile—a friendly,
open, relaxed sort of smile—but it was directed at her. He covered
her hand lightly with his own and for a moment she thought he was
simply going to ignore the whole stupid incident. But, of course,
it wasn’t something he could ignore. Drunks don’t often allow
themselves to be ignored.
    “I think, pal,” he said finally, turning only
very slightly in that direction, “that I’ve already expressed my
gratitude. I’d settle for that if I were you—I really would.”
    She didn’t know—there was something in the
very calmness of his voice, something not precisely of menace, that
Louise, at least, found far more intimidating than any implied
threat in the words themselves.
    It amounted, almost, to a hope that offense
would be taken, taken and acted upon. It almost seemed as if Ray
wanted the man to pick a fight, as if that prospect somehow
appealed to him. But of course that was impossible.
    Fortunately, just at that moment the waitress
came and brought the slob his dinner, and he took it as an excuse
to let the matter drop. Of course the evening was ruined; they were
all miserably uncomfortable together at those two little tables,
silent and humiliated.
    Except for Ray—he went on talking and eating
as if he had forgotten the whole thing the moment it ended. Perhaps
he had.
    It wasn’t until they got home that the
reaction set in.
    He sat up in bed