You Were Wrong Read Online Free PDF Page A

me,” she said. He went, tethered to mistrust, out into a luminous garden behind the gas station, and then into a woods behind that, unremembered pleasure still half-wheeling in his brain. He had drunk of potent wines last night, and perhaps had found himself for an hour among the valiant of voluptuousness. He walked in this small, wild forest, Sylvia strong and thoughtful at his side. A vise clamped down on his own thoughts, and tightened.
    “Cat got your mouth?” she said.
    “Where are you taking me?”
    “To the house.”
    “What about breakfast?”
    “It will be delivered. Jen runs the café today.”
    “Who runs it other days?”
    “Jan, or Rich, or Steve, or me, or—”
    “What is your purpose?”
    “I don’t understand the question.”
    “What is the purpose of you, this group, what are you?”
    “What are you ?”
    “What were you doing in my house?”
    “Man, Floor, would you cut it out? I like you, you’re…odd, and…sad. Look at your hair. Come here a sec.”
    They stood in the dark forest, the sun far away. A little chestnut bird flew by while others, in the trees, sang a melancholy song. Salt air cooled their skin and they shivered. Again her pale face glowed, absent an explicable light source, and her full, soft lips came toward him while staying still. She reached out a hand and he stepped back.
    “Hold still.”
    “What are you doing?”
    “Fixing your hair.”
    “Is it broken?”
    “Karl!”
    “Don’t touch my face.”
    “I won’t.”
    She fixed it, yanked it a little, her unruly boy.
    “Now,” she said, “I’d like to hug you.”
    “Why?”
    “No reason.”
    “No.”
    “How about if I touch your shoulders with my hands?”
    “That would be worse.”
    “Why?”
    “Then you would look at me.”
    “So?”
    “I’m ugly.”
    She hugged him fast and tight, careful to avoid his face. He stood trembling with his arms at his sides.
    “Now hug me back.”
    “I’m scared.”
    “Please.”
    He put his hands on her back. She trembled too. Her cool and salty shirt, her strong and nervous muscles underneath: two humans touching at the bottom of the forest, glued together by the shadows of the trees.
    He did not know how long his eyes had been closed, nor why he opened them then. It appeared first as a white speck, emerging from the green gloom as a vengeful beast might rise up from the bottom of the sea to break apart the most concentrated act of solace he had known to date. “You’ve tensed up again,” she said, and pressed a place inside his shoulder blade that caused him therapeutic pain. The speck became a shirt and pants and shoes, all white. No face yet but the angry and ill-meaning one he gave it, this thing that came toward them with no real body but temporary plasma materializing inside the white clothes with the malevolent seductiveness of visual beauty. “Help me, please,” he thought he heard her say, and the thing that came toward them on the forest floor was Stony, loping up with a breakfast made for Karl himself inside an oblong white styrofoam takeout box that dangled from the crook of this man’s first two fingers in a thin white plastic sack. Thus ended the hug. What could ever be the meaning of Stony for Karl? It worried him. Our friend was on the side of humanity that would always take things hard, and knew that this new lady in his life, though she might keep him for a time, would grow weary of this burden of how he took things. He did not see, or saw but did not know, that she was his kindred and not just in this.
    The three of them walked on. He sensed Stony imagined himself the rearward of two aristocrats carrying a peasant to breakfast on a platform and therefore being given only the peasant’s back to contemplate, enjoying the novelty of voluntary servitude and not enjoying the servitude.
    Emerging from the woods, Karl saw the house in the light for the first time, from the back. It was dug into a steep hill whose lower end the three of them