Thy Neighbor's Wife Read Online Free Page A

plates for his 142 trucks, requiring that the men in the garage keep switching the plates from vehicle to vehicle or risk making deliveries without plates. Harold knew that sooner or later this scheme would result in a court case, and then his grandfather would try to bribe his way out of it, and, even if he was lucky enough to do so, it would probably cost him more than if he had paid for the proper number of plates in the beginning.
    Harold vowed that he would never work full-time in the garage. He had tried working there during the summer but had soon quit because he could not tolerate the verbal abuse from his grandfather, who had often called him a “little bum,” and also that of his father, who had remarked sourly one day, “You’ll never amount to anything.” This prediction had not bothered Harold because he knew that the price of appeasing these men was total subjugation, and he was determined that he would not repeat the mistake of his father in becoming subservient to an old man who had sired a son he had not wanted with a woman he had not loved.
    After his father had hung up the telephone, he resumed eating, revealing nothing of what had been said. A cup of coffee was placed in front of him, heavy with cream as he liked it, and he lit up an Old Gold. Harold’s mother mentioned not having seen their neighbors from across the street in several days, and Harold suggested that they might be away on vacation. She stood to clear the table, then went to check the fever of her younger son, who was still sleeping. Harold’s father went into the living room, turned on the television set. Harold later joined him, sitting on the other side of the room. Harold could hear his mother doing the dishes in the kitchen and his father yawning as he listlessly watched television and completed the crossword puzzle in the newspaper. He then stood, yawned again, and said he was going to bed. It was shortly after nine o’clock. Within a half hour, Harold’s mother had come into the living room to say good night, and soon Harold turned off the television and the house wassoundless and still. He walked to his bedroom and closed the door, feeling a quiet exuberance and relief. He was finally alone.
     
    He removed his clothes, hung them in the closet. He reached for the small bottle of hand lotion, Italian Balm, that he kept on the upper shelf of his closet, and he placed it on the bedside table next to a box of Kleenex. He turned on the bedside lamp of low wattage, turned off the overhead light, and the room was bathed in a soft glow.
    He could hear the wind whipping against the storm windows on this freezing Chicago night, and he shivered as he slipped between the cool sheets and pulled the blankets over him. He lay back for a few moments, getting warm, and then he reached for the magazine under his pillow and began to flip through it in a cursory way—he did not want to focus yet on the object of his obsession, Diane Webber, who awaited him on the sand dune, but preferred instead to make an initial pass through the entire fifty-two-page issue, which contained thirty-nine nude pictures of eleven different women, a visual aphrodisiac of blondes and brunets, preliminary stimulants before the main event.
    A lean, dark-eyed woman attracted Harold, but the photographer had posed her awkwardly on the gnarled branch of a tree, and he felt her discomfort. The nude, sitting cross-legged on a studio floor next to an easel, had fine breasts but a bland expression on her face. Harold, still on his back with his knees slightly raised under the blankets, continued to turn the pages past various legs and breasts, hips and buttocks and hair, female fingers and arms reaching out, eyes looking away from him, eyes looking at him as he occasionally paused to lightly stroke his genitals with his left hand, tilting the magazine in his right hand to eliminate the slight glare on the glossy pages.
    Proceeding through the magazine page after page, he