Inflating a Dog (The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy) by Eric Kraft (novels to read for beginners .txt) 📗

or snugly people were dressed. I saw that the area in front of our building was cordoned off by yellow police tape. A small crowd of spectators had lined up along the tape, and a few cops were inside the cordoned area. A body was sprawled face down on the sidewalk directly below me. Some people were looking at the body. Others were looking up in my direction. Some of those looking up were pointing, and after a moment I realized that they were pointing to some floor above ours. I went back inside.

“What’s it like?” Albertine asked.

“It’s chilly,” I said, “and there’s a body on the sidewalk below us.”

“What?”

“I think that at some time earlier in the day, while we were reading the paper, someone on a floor above ours must have fallen, jumped, or been pushed from a balcony or window. He — at least I think it’s ‘he’ — is lying on the pavement — ”

“Dead?”

“It looks that way to me.”

She went out onto the balcony and looked down. After a while, she came back in, shaking her head.

We dressed in silence, and we left the building and walked through the crowd in silence, but in the subway station, when we were standing on the platform, waiting for the train, Albertine said, “He must have fallen right past our balcony.”

“While we were reading the paper,” I repeated.

We looked at each other and burst out laughing. We began making wisecracks about death, about suicide by lethal leap. We were shaken, and we were frightened. We were laughing at the edge of the abyss, trying to be brave, trying to pretend that death held no terrors for us, as if we did not expect to meet the fate that all fledglings eventually must. Nothing we said was funny enough to be worth recording here. When we came up out of the subway, we sobered up, and neither of us said a word about the dead man during our lunch (chicken for Albertine and swordfish paillard for me). Then, after we had left the warmth of Café des Artistes, with her arm through mine, huddling against me in the cold January wind on Central Park West, Albertine asked, “Do you remember the fledglings in Kew Gardens?”

“I’ve been thinking about them all afternoon,” I admitted.

THAT NIGHT, while we were lying in bed reading, at about midnight, when the man who lives directly above us began throwing his furniture around, as he seems to do every night at that time, Albertine gesticulated toward the ceiling and said, “Of course, he wouldn’t be the one to jump.”

Chapter 24

Testing the Hypothesis, Part 2

I WAS SITTING IN DUDLEY’S CHAIR, looking into the fire, waiting for a visit from Patti. The night was warm enough not to require a fire; it might even have been warm enough to make a fire ridiculous; but I required a fire for atmosphere. I was Dudlifying myself, putting myself through a course of Beakerization to prepare myself for Patti’s visit and the resumption of our experimental investigation into the matter of my paternity. The transformation seemed to require my sitting in Dudley’s chair before the fireplace, and it seemed to require a fire in the fireplace. The fire hadn’t lit right away, so I’d torn pages from the magazines in the rack beside Dudley’s chair to keep it going. A haze of smoke still filled the room, even though I’d opened the windows. I had begun reading a story in one of the magazines, but when I followed the “continued” line, I found that the page on which the story concluded had been one of those I’d burned to get the fire going. I was sucking on one of Dudley’s pipes and trying to decide whether the struggling young painter in the story would manage to persuade the pretty young waitress — actually a struggling young actress — to pose for him, and, if so, how he would manage to do it, when the phone rang.

“Hello?” I said.

“Dudley?” asked a sweet voice at the other end of the line.

“No,” I said without thinking, “this is — ”

“Dudley, it’s Ella.”

“Huh? Oh. ‘Ella.’ Um, good evening, ‘Ella.’ How are you?”

“I’m fine, Dud. I was wondering if I could come over and visit you for a while.”

“More homework, I suppose?”

“Homework? Oh, yeah, that’s it. More homework.”

“Of course. I’d be glad to help you. Come right over, my dear.”

“I have to change my clothes first.”

“Oh.”

“I won’t be long. I’m just going to go up to my room and change my clothes.”

“Okay.”

“Just going to run up to my room” — a giggle — “and change my clothes.”

“Oh. Your room. I see.”

“I’ll bet. Here I go — up to my room. See you later.”

I went upstairs to Dudley’s study. With the light out, I looked across the way at the window of the room in my grandparents’ house that had been my mother’s bedroom. Had I understood Patti correctly? Was I, as Dudley, actually going to see the light go on in the room and then see Patti, playing the part of my mother, begin undressing, like the shy girl in the young painter’s unheated studio, assuming that he had found the words to persuade her to accompany him there and then had found the words to persuade her to begin unbuttoning her blouse? I stood in the dark wondering what those words would be, when the light did indeed go on in the room across the way, and there was Patti in the doorway with my grandmother by her side, the two of them performing a pantomime, Patti in the role of a distraught young girl bespattered by a passing car, and my grandmother playing a kindly grandmother more than willing to help her. Patti pouted, plucked at her skirt, wrinkled her brow, slumped in exasperation, gesticulated to indicate the madcap driver careering along oblivious to the puddles and to her, and reinacted her leap backward, too late, alas, to avoid the wave of muddy