The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up Read Online Free Page A

on his celebrity,” answered Bonnie. “He has a moral obligation to denounce the mob.”
    “Celebrity,” scoffed Judy. She held a tureen of homemade couscous. “This will all blow over. In a couple of days, nobody will remember.”
    “Do you think so?” asked Arnold.
    “I hope so,” said Judy.
    “Me too,” Arnold agreed. “I wasn’t destined to be remembered.”
    “A toast,” proposed Gilbert. They all raised their wine glasses. “To not remembering.”
    “Not remembering,” Judith chimed in. “The national pastime.”
    And they drank.

CHAPTER 3
    They stayed up with the Cards until well past midnight, talking politics and neighbourhood gossip, polishing off a second bottle of wine, but Arnold was out of bed before the sun rose above the mansard roof of the community playhouse. The morning glories around the drainpipe still kept their blossoms clenched shut against the dew. On the fire escape, sparrows flitted among the terracotta pots. Otherwise, the predawn was grey and still and silent, punctuated only by the periodic rumbling of sanitation trucks. Arnold
loved
the first hour of a spring morning in Greenwich Village. Wandering through the rows of antebellum townhouses—on their second date, Judith had taught him the difference between federalist-style and Greek revival architecture—Arnold could fool himself into believing he’d stepped back into the previous century. One could easily imagine running into Edith Wharton on a street corner, or exchanging greetings with Walt Whitman, or sharing a stroll with that pioneering American botanist, Nathaniel Lord Britton, who’d live on West 11 th Street while he taught at Columbia. Even Britton would have admired the all-indigenous community gardens tucked into the numerous hidden courtyards. What the great naturalist would have thought of the recent horticultural efforts of the block association, the oversizedmarigolds and snapdragons suffocating the hawthorn roots along the avenues, was another matter entirely—but one couldn’t deny these rings of floral invaders
were
beautiful.
    Arnold retrieved his
New York Times
from the front steps. He flipped through the Sports pages, then the Metro section. Nothing about tongue-thrusting. Not a word. The incident didn’t even make the article about the game itself, which the Yankees had won on a grand slam in the fifteenth inning. Arnold dabbed his forehead with his sleeve. He wasn’t famous! What a wonderful way to start off the work week! There’d been a small story on the local television news the previous evening—he knew because Guillermo had phoned him—but mercifully Arnold’s social circle did not watch the local news. Most of their friends didn’t even own television sets. If he were lucky, a few weeks would pass before anyone actually made a positive ID on him; by then, some other fool would have lit a match during a gas leak, or bathed his children at an automated car wash, or stuck his penis in an electric citrus peeler, and nobody would care that Arnold had ever been born. His sister-in-law would also be home by then, and Ray would be back in Connecticut, and life would have returned to normal. Or at least to baseline. Normal might be pushing it.
    That morning, Arnold lost half an hour clearing crushed beer cans out of his newly-planted caladium. His neighbour’s son—recently expelled from Binghamton—had been discarding his trash over the fence. The neighbour was Ira Taylor and he had some foggy connection to Taylor & Taylor Securities, the bond firm, but it didn’t appear to involve much in the way of office work, because the man answered his own doorbell at all hours of the day. Arnold found his neighbour abrasive and overbearing. When he complained about the litter, Taylor told him not to “blow his doughnuts.” It would be taken care of, the securities trader assured him. But you had to cut the kid some slack. “Tell me you never tossed an apple core out a car window or put out a