Adverbs by Daniel Handler Read Free Book Online

snitched rum in the good glasses while she lay out and waited. By agreement, on these rare afternoons without the club I was changing in the shack and then would swim alone at the deeper end, while the boyfriend would stray at the shallow where my older sister dangled herself, and cup handfuls of the pool and let them run down her legs until dusk, while I treaded the surface of nine feet of water and pulled myself out on the shaky ladder when my skin couldn’t wrinkle any longer. Four steps on the ladder, three steps on the ladder, five steps, I could not tell you now. That ladder has abandoned me, some maybe moment when I could have pulled myself out. That was the last time, when I emerged myself out of the pool and went to the shack to change forever, the moment before I fell, if fallen is what I am feeling, if fallen is what I am.
    Show me the man who would not love the man who stepped out of the shower and put on his briefs, because I would lovethat man too. Yes yes yes, oh baby yes. Soaking wet the shoulders, the hair spiked with water, pushed back with his hand which had a hippie ring on it of thick pewter, silver, some girlfriend gift, some souvenir of a place he went before he walked into my path forever once. Hair the color of the hills surrounding the club when the droughts hit, but nothing would get me to the club again. His breathing chest rising carelessly from the rest of him, but the desire here like nothing I can type: grant me this. Yes yes yes, oh baby yes. Five years older, arms from the shoulders with the careless towel hiding nothing, the chest swelled and flat with impressing my sister, hair I had yet to grow trailing toward me like warm smoke from someone’s mouth. Down to the legs, down to the penis, thick with sitting all day near something he wanted but showered calm, never something I had seen before. Oh, certainly: in locker rooms, textbook something, but to no avail. Yes yes yes, oh baby yes. There was no one I loved before Keith and his arms, his face scarcely glancing at me, the thin line of not smiling as he shook off water without fear. Where do they come from who can do that, step out wet and share a small nude space with someone’s brother, cup his own penis for nothing, sit on the redwood bench and dry his feet where I would never walk, wreck my life like a pop song can wreck your brain? At fourteen I couldn’t tell you “swoon” and now I cannot remember any love but the swoon of him until he picked through the scrabble of his clothes and stepped into his underwear, and there was that little stumble into my path. He nudged me on the spot on the side of myself below my armpit oh my God. He nudged me and I occurred to him, and Keith, Keith, Keith looked up and said it, said the thing I heard myself say right now as the bird did its last thing and got slain.
    “Hey.”
    The rum on his breath and then the blue shirt ate his chest and he zipped up and he walked out carrying his shoes away from me like I was fired. Briefly that door swung open and briefly that door closed. There was a song playing from a portable thing my sister must have owned, or maybe blaring through the open windows into the air. The song is “Come and Get My Heart” by The L Club, from their first album Introducing The L Club on L Club Records, and Keith put his briefs on during the part of the second verse that goes “Yes yes yes, oh baby yes,” while the bass line gurgles a thing I could recite note for note. It got louder as the shack door opened and then quieter as he went home, but I never got his tune out of my little head. Never never saw him again. If I called my older sister she would say, “Keith who, and why are you calling?” My wife would say the same thing, like the chorus of a stupid song. It is only on mornings like this, the birds just out living life, that out of view, privately, briefly, you can lose your head. All alone, unwitnessed, there is no one else to believe it, the way paths cross in