Thomas M. Disck - Descending

VIP免费

2024-11-23 0 0 20.69KB 10 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Descending

by Thomas M. Disch

Catsup, mustard, pickle, relish, mayonnaise, two kinds of salad dressing,

bacon grease, and a lemon. Oh yes, two trays of ice cubes. In the cupboard it

wasn't much better: jars and boxes of spices, flour, sugar, salt—and a box of

raisins!

An empty box of raisins.

Not even any coffee. Not even tea, which he hated. Nothing in the mailbox but

a bill from Underwood's: Unless we receive the arrears on your account.…

$4.75 in change jingled in his coat pocket—the plunder of the Chianti bottle

he had promised himself never to break open. He was spared the unpleasantness

of having to sell his books. They had all been sold. The letter to Graham had

gone out a week ago. If his brother intended to send something this time, it

would have come by now.

—I should be desperate, he thought. —Perhaps I am.

He might have looked in the Times. But, no, that was too depressing—applying

for jobs at $50 a week and being turned down. Not that he blamed them; he

wouldn't have hired himself himself. He had been a grasshopper for years. The

ants were on to his tricks.

He shaved without soap and brushed his shoes to a high polish. He whitened the

sepulchre of his unwashed torso with a fresh, starched shirt and chose his

somberest tie from the rack. He began to feel excited and expressed it,

characteristically, by appearing statuesquely, icily calm.

Descending the stairway to the first floor, he encountered Mrs. Beale, who was

pretending to sweep the well-swept floor of the entrance.

"Good afternoon—or I s'pose it's good morning for you, eh?"

"Good afternoon, Mrs. Beale."

"Your letter come?"

"Not yet."

"The first of the month isn't far off."

"Yes indeed, Mrs. Beale."

At the subway station he considered a moment before answering the attendant:

one token or two? Two, he decided. After all, he had no choice but to return

to his apartment. The first of the month was still a long way off.

—If Jean Valjean had had a charge account, he would have never gone to

prison.

Having thus cheered himself, he settled down to enjoy the ads in the subway

car. Smoke. Try. Eat. Give. See. Drink. Use. Buy. He thought of Alice with her

mushrooms: Eat me.

At 34th Street he got off and entered Underwood's Department Store directly

from the train platform. On the main floor he stopped at the cigar stand and

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Thomas M. Disck - Descending.pdf

共10页,预览1页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Thomas M. Disck - Descending

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: