The Cavanaugh Quest Read Online Free

and padded out to watch the storm coming across the western suburbs. The purple clouds reflected darkly in the face of the IDS building and the downtown lights glowed yellow. It was still hot but I could see the rain like a frail curtain hanging on the outskirts of the city.
    I was thinking about Larry Blankenship and his wife, Kim, the sad little pile of lifeless flesh which had been the sum of what he’d left behind. Hubbard Anthony had called him a natural victim, a man determined to be a victim, and his wife had called him a loser. That was all I knew about Larry Blankenship and even that clung like a scab on the side of my consciousness. It was seeing the body that did it; take away the body and it would have bothered me no more than any of a thousand other sad stories you’re always hearing somewhere.
    Lightning walked across the horizon like a regiment of stick soldiers and I flinched at the crack of thunder. Then the rain began to swish past the balcony and I took a deep swallow of Pimm’s Cup. Headlamps probed at the swirling rain below me and I went inside and put an old Freddy Gardner saxophone record on and went back to my chair hearing the lonely, elegant, sad music. I suppose the music was a stupid idea because it only deepened the mood which had grown so steadily since the sunshiny afternoon of tennis.
    But what the hell. I was giving up to it, the sense of reflection, more and more lately. Closing in on forty, I’d decided that life was no longer quite the endless parade of possibilities it once had seemed. Every time I turned around I caught sight of another option being shot to pieces. Still, I was better off than Larry Blankenship. As far as options went, Larry Blankenship was fresh out.
    Unhappy marriages are all alike. I wondered if all marriages are unhappy. Probably not, but then you never knew. Kim and Larry, in their upwardly mobile way, had tried to make it on their own. She’d made herself useful at Norway Creek, where no one was upwardly mobile because no one in Minneapolis had found anything higher to aspire to. They must have served as wonderful models for Kim Roderick as she made her move from waitress to tennis instructor. How many passes had the rich made, how many by the sons of the rich? How many tennis lessons had turned into something else?
    I’d finished the pitcher and I was thinking like Scott Fitzgerald in his “Winter Dreams” period. Freddy Gardner kept playing, now “Roses of Picardy,” and I was withstanding a mixed-media assault. A woman on another balcony was laughing, a woman who sounded like Anne, from whom I’d stolen the wedding-present pitcher. I hadn’t seen her in several weeks but the laugh was like hers and she had hated my Freddy Gardner saxophone records. Thank God, we’d had no children. Maybe I was lucky, not a victim; Larry and Kim had had a child and naturally there’d been something wrong with it. Naturally. And it had been stuck away somewhere. And his wife had called him a loser and had left him and a while later he blew his brains out in my lobby. It was the saddest story I’d ever heard and the wind had changed, shifting to blow across the park toward me. I was getting wet so I went back inside and left the sliding door wide open to keep me in touch with nature. I was a romantic; Anne had hated romantics. But then she was one of those from the Norway Creek Club who had nowhere left to go, at least not upward. Those people, by and large, are not romantics, are not so afflicted with what is clearly a condition of the middle classes. Kim and Larry probably had had fairly advanced cases. I’d have bet on it.
    I didn’t much like the way my mind was running. The thunder was smashing steadily at the city like artillery trained on the enemy campfires and lightning kept going off like rocket fire. I went down the dark hallway, hung a left, took off my clothes, switched off the telephone, turned on the old wicker lamp by the bed, opened the windows,