Stolen Pleasures by Gina Berriault Read Free Book Online

substance of himself, and anxiety was left like a fissure where the amount was taken away. But then why phone her a quarter to six in the morning, rushing his voice at her with its big, benevolent question? “Send him an extra fifty for me,” he said, “and I’ll drop you a check in the mail to cover it.” Overcome by a great weariness, he hung up.
    He lay down on the sofa. His shirt stung his nostrils with the night’s nervous sweat and he tried not to breathe it. In the Nogales Western Union the boy would pick up the check, the total drawn from the days of his mother’s captivity behind the counter, drawn from the hours of Berger’s teaching, but since it had come to him, this money, then was it not his due because he was David Hagemeister? Poor Davy H! Maybe the boy would be always on borders, always on the border of acclaim, waiting for something to come through and get him there. But once in a while, as he grew older and envious of those who had got across the border, he would hear somebody great and lose all envy. It might be, he thought, that this Rivas woman wasn’t as great as he thought she was, but he had needed, this night, to think that she was great.
    His crossed arms weighting down his eyes, he fell asleep to the sound of someone running lightly down the carpeted interior stairs, some clean-shaven and showered clerk running down into the day.

Death of a Lesser Man

    I N THE MIDST of several friends drinking Danish beer from tall Mexican glasses, in an apartment of red Naugahyde furniture and black shag rugs, right at the moment when the hostess, who had been a Las Vegas showgirl, was leaning over to laugh something in his ear, right at that moment he threw himself off the couch and onto the rug. The others, his wife among them, thought that he was faking a fit to comically demonstrate the effect of the hostess’s bosomy proximity or her words in his ear, although that sort of fakery was utterly foreign to his shy, gracious, reflective person. Then, because it was foreign, they realized it was an act beyond his control. Those who were sitting near him got out of his way and stood back with the others, who had also risen, and his wife fell to her knees at his side.
    For several seconds he lay rigid, eyes up, a froth along the lower edge of his neat, blond mustache, while his wife stroked his face and fondled his hands. The others walked around in a state of shock, conversing with mourners’ voices. Someone asked her if he had ever
done that before, and she said, “No, never” and repeated it to the first question asked by the young doctor who, summoned by the hostess from an apartment upstairs, knelt down at the other side of the now limp man.
    Claudia, the wife, stood away while the doctor with encouraging hands and Ah ups assisted her husband to the couch and laid him out, long and weak. She refused a chair, feeling called upon to stand in deference to unpredictable blows. The hostess embraced her waist, but she offered no yielding to this comfort and was left alone. She watched the shocked face of her husband watching abjectly the doctor’s face above his, and watched the stethoscope move over the exposed broad chest. The young doctor glanced up to ask her which arm had jerked, which leg, and replying that she had been too alarmed to notice, she saw his fleeting response to her person, the same response in the eyes of men and women seeing her for the first time—a struggle to conceal from her the emotion that a woman’s beauty aroused, whatever that emotion was, whether envy or desire or even fear. It lasted half a second, this consciousness of her effect, and was followed by devotion, which came over her with such force that she was again the girl she had been for him at the beginning of their nine years together.
    When he stood up, shakily, joking weakly with dry lips, someone said the pickled mushrooms were hallucinatory and someone else