Benchley, Peter - Novel 06 Read Online Free Page A

been denied the joys of
premarital sex, a deprivation for which he would never forgive America. He
would not so torture his children. Let her have her sex fantasies. Let her have
sex, even! At least it was natural. Unlike communism.
                   But no. Her love was not boys but bolshevism.
                   What had gone wrong? Why was she not following
the path cleared by the "me" generation? Sure, a social conscience
was a healthy thing: send money to Save the Children, join the march against
hunger, picket apartheid. But to advocate the violent overthrow of everything?
                   What had he done wrong? (This was the black
thought he sought desperately to escape.) The fault had to lie with him, or at
least with his job at the right hand of the Supreme Imperialist. How else could
he explain pubescent radicalism?
                   His wife called it commitment, and was proud
of it. "She just has a healthy superego," Sarah said. "She sees
right and wrong in everything."
                   Indeed, Burnham thought: She sees wrong in
everything right, and right in everything wrong.
                   He pulled the door to Derry's room closed,
took a pen from the inside pocket of his seersucker jacket and wrote on the
door in large black letters: "Danger—this room is hazardous to living
things."
                   Then he walked downstairs, feeling like an
utter ass.
                   As in many old, unmodernized, skinny Georgetown houses, the kitchen in the Burnhams' house
was small, dark, brick-paved and in the rear of the ground floor. It protruded,
like a wen, from the back of the house, which led Burnham to conclude that it
had once been a separate edifice, the slaves' quarters or the cookhouse or
something else historically colorful. Sarah's only conclusion about the kitchen
was that it was as cold as a penguin's buns in the winter, since the central
heating struggled in vain to reach from the rest of the house into the kitchen,
and hot as cheese fondue in the summer, since the room's jury-rigged wiring
couldn't cope with the load demanded by a window air-conditioner.
                   The entrance to the kitchen was topped by a
six-by-six beam that capped the doorway at exactly six feet. The beam was
decorated with red bicycle reflectors and tufts of hair from several mammals,
meticulously applied by Burnham in celebration of the last times he had
attempted to propel his six-foot-one-inch self erect through the doorway,
pulping a section of his skull and bloodstaining the lemon carpet. He would
have removed the beam and raised the doorway if he had owned the house, but as
a renter he had neither inclination nor permission to make structural
alterations.
                   He reached the bottom of the stairs and folded
his head down to pass beneath the beam and into the kitchen. He must have
unconsciously closed his eyes, or he would have seen the rope of black fur
under his Bass Weejun. He stepped on it, hanj, and the cat it was attached to,
the cat that had been sleeping mostly inside the little bathroom off the
kitchen; that cat screeched like a traffic accident and shot off the floor. Burnham's
head snapped back and slammed into the overhead beam; he crumpled to his knees,
grunting like a gorilla.
                   In the kitchen, nobody moved. Derry yelled,
"You stepped on Lehrer!" and then, as if content at having announced
the day's lead story, returned to the Post's funnies.
                   Christopher glanced up briefly from a National
Lampoon photographic essay on tongues and said, "Swift, Dad."
                   At the sink, Sarah stopped scrubbing scrambled
eggs from a pan long enough to ascertain that Burnham was only stunned, not
bleeding. "The bathroom floor's cool," she said.
                   "Huh?" Burnham shook his head and
lurched to his feet.