Gould by Stephen Dixon Read Free Book Online Page B

they go for these days? You might not know this, but I had one—Monty and I—right when we were starting grad school, and before it turned out we couldn’t have children, and it cost us a then-walloping two hundred,” and he said “No, I didn’t know; I’m sorry. She didn’t give me the exact figure, but I managed to scrounge up three-fifty for her, which I think covered it completely and with maybe a few bucks to spare,” and she said “Wow, unbelievable, unbelievable; can you imagine that, Monty?” and Monty said “If she had one, then at that price I suspect it was done by a real physician,” and he said “I believe so.” He called her roommate when he got home and she said “It’s late, my new roommate has super hearing so can hear my talking through the walls, but besides all that I don’t want to talk about it on the phone. It’s too disturbing. If you want to discuss it, come here,” and he went to see her the next night. She said “I was devastated; she was my closest friend. There’s nothing I can tell you to add to anything, nor do I want to; you have no right to know,” and he said “So thanks, but why’d I come down here then?” and she said “I asked you here so I could say to your face what I’ve been hoping to since even before she died and that’s that you’re a rotten stinking scumbag. She was in trouble and asked you for help and you wouldn’t give it. You even hung up on her,” and he said “I didn’t hang up. I told her I’d call the next day with my decision and I thought it over and decided to help her as much as I could, financially and every other way—personally—but your line was busy and busy and busy, and same for the next day and the one after that. I gave up, thinking something was wrong with your phone—the operator didn’t think so; I called one and she checked your line—and that Lynette would call me, knowing something might be wrong with the phone, but she didn’t. When that happened I thought ‘Well, she wants to do it all herself; so let her.’ And then I got a letter from her a few weeks later saying everything was okay and the abortion a success and she had no bad feelings toward me anymore, and that was it, so why are you letting me have it like this?” and she said “Lynette never lied and I’m sure our phone was fine then. And that when you hung up on her you in effect kissed her off. And she was right, because you never came through with a red cent, not then nor when she later asked you in a letter to help cover it. It hurt her tremendously. To the point where I thought she was even thinking of harming herself because of it,” and he said “Oh, come on. What are you going to accuse me of next, the overdose?” and she said “I’m not. She was foolish that way, took too many chances. But I also know she was broken up over having to lose the fetus the way she did, and your fetus, for she told me it was yours. And also that she had to borrow from her parents to pay for it, and all that didn’t help her to not take chances at parties the months after or not to carry out her experiments on herself, I’ll call them, too far. But that’s all I wanted to say to you.” She closed her eyes, for a few seconds was silent in thought it seemed, and then said “Yes, that’s all. I don’t want to tell you anything else; you don’t deserve it. What she felt about you—she felt a lot. How you hurt her by taking her to certain places and not others and only seeing her in the evening or here, and so on, because she wasn’t the right color. I couldn’t understand why she continued dating you once she knew all this, and sleeping with you too?—she must have been out of her mind. But that was another problem she had, a psychological one with white guys—the