OCR Text |
Show -192 going to get serious with any woman again?" "I changed my mind. Don't ask me why." "I didn't." She crumpled the wrapper and sank it in the trash barrel in the far corner, a fine hook shot. "Someday you'll decide to throw me out because you don't like me any more. I want a place to go back to when that happens." "Why would I do that?" The work bell rang. "Because that's the way the world is," she said over her shoulder. One night, when I was supposed to be waiting for Fancy at the apartment, I found myself making a speech in a bar instead. On the wall in front of me a plastic scene representing a stream and a patch of woods shifted rapidly by a trick of inner illumination from summer to fall to winter to spring and back again. One season on the heels of another, mortality at a dead gallop. "Everybody in my life has always been after me to get ahead," I said to the bartender and one drunk dozing in the corner. "My ex-boss, my ex-wife, her aunt, my father, my neighbor down the hall. They all want me to be a man of consequence and wear suits that really button at the sleeves. I take it back-not my father-he understands failure because he's one himself. But I'll tell you what I_ want-" I stopped, The drunk raised himself on one elbow. "What?" |