| OCR Text |
Show •78 Morgan shook her head impatiently. "Why do you always'S take simple things, facts of life, and make a mystery?" "They're not simple to me." I studied her for a minute and she looked back at me with a half-smile. What was it I found so attractive in hard witchy women, know-it-all broads? What was wrong with the other kind? "They're simple to everybody else but you," she said. "What are you afraid of?" "Being dead." "That's because you're still a little kid inside. Adults accept it. Death is what gives life its meaning." "What? Don't trot out your community college philosophy courses for my benefit. Philosophers are all full of shit and so is everybody else who says they're not afraid to be dead. Including you." She pulled herself up to her full five-foot ten inches and her face flushed. At such times I could see her father in her. Leonard Teller was in the normal run of affairs a mild genial man, poolside drinker of gin and tonics and tennis player, but once or twice I'd seen him crossed on what he took to be a point of personal pride and he turned as bluntly nasty as any Hollywood strongman. I saw the same stubborn fierce look on his daugher's face now. She was quicker to reach that pitch of feeling than her father; I think Morgan was addicted to the high emotions: passion, |
