Punish Me with Kisses by William Bayer Read Free Book Online Page A

the stairs. The cat smell hit her like a blow. Perhaps Dr. Bowles had taken the holiday off, leaving her pets' litter boxes to ferment and overflow.
    Her own flat, one floor up and in the back, consisted of a small living room crammed with books, a windowless kitchenette, a tiny bedroom and a bath. It was a typically over-priced single person's Upper East Side apartment, plagued by seasonal infestations of roaches, with a classic grunting air conditioner stuck in the bedroom window and two dead-bolt locks arrayed on the entry door. But there was something special about it, a three-sided bay in the living room, with a window seat and leaded panes that looked out over the private gardens behind the houses. She'd had a cushion made to fit the seat and had hung some plants above the windows. She liked to sit there reading or staring out at the scraggly trees.
    She peeled off her jogging clothes, took a long, hot shower, and watched the soapy water swirl down the drain. Thinking of Hitchcock's Psycho , the shower-murder scene, she wondered why she so often had the feeling that something terrible was going to happen to her, that she was destined for suffering and pain.
    She dressed and went directly to the window seat where a stack of manuscripts waited to be read. These were her share of the "slush" that poured into Brewster & Angles every week. The sensible thing would have been to return them unread, but sometime in the sixties an ambitious B&A secretary had taken home a slushpile novel for the weekend, sniffed something commercial, and promoted it onto the best-seller list for forty weeks. Though the odds against this happening again were probably no better than a million to one, all trainee editors at B&A were now assigned to read everything sent in. Penny found this part of her job saddening. Her weekends and holidays were consumed by the fantasies of inept people who scribbled away at hopeless books. She longed to find something good—a graceful line, a character who lived, an authentic author with something interesting to say—but instead she found incoherence, private madnesses , stories better left untold.
    Her mother called from Connecticut late in the afternoon, a holiday ritual, to ask her how she was. "I wish you'd come out here for a weekend, dear. We love to see you, you know. We don't see you much at all these days—"
    There was a pause then, the sort of awkward pause that occurred regularly when they spoke. Penny thought her mother didn't sound too badly crocked—just a trace of slur. There was something odd in her voice anyway—beneath the mellowness of her affection something high-strung, almost frenzied, that seemed to have grown in the years since Suzie's death despite the care of paid companions and the dryings-out ("stints," her mother called them) at various expensive clinics up and down the New England coast. Penny loved her mother but couldn't bear contact. The formal, icy arrangement between her parents, the tautness between them which spoke of terrible scenes left unplayed , her mother's looniness and drunkenness, made visits to Greenwich sorrowful and strange.
    "I miss you, dear. I worry so much about you living alone in the city, with all the violence and anger there. I wish you'd move to a safe doorman building. I wish you didn't go off running in the park so early, with all the muggers about, and no one around to help. . . ."
    She'd heard it all a thousand times. "The muggers work at night, mother. By the time I go out they've gone to bed."
    "Yes, I suppose, but still—here's your father, dear. I'm going to put him on."
    She felt tension then, as she imagined the telephone being passed. Her parents would be careful, she knew, not to touch. Her mother would hold out the receiver by the mouthpiece, her father would take it by the earphone, then her mother would slip out of her chair as her father turned and stepped aside.
    "Hi, kiddo—everything OK?"
    "Fine, daddy. Just