Read Dusk and Other Stories for Free Online

pushed off the wall without much enthusiasm. He watched her walk into the kitchen and heard the refrigerator door open.
    “So, what do you think, Alan?” he said. “What are you going to do?”
    “Me?”
    “Where’s Louise?” Frank called.
    “Asleep,” Brenda said.
    “Did she really go home?”
    “She goes to work in the morning.”
    “So does Alan.”
    Brenda came out of the kitchen with the drinks.
    “I’m sorry we’re late,” he said. He was looking in the glass. “Was it a good party?” He stirred the contents with one finger. “This is the ice?”
    “Jane Harrah got fired,” Brenda said.
    “That’s too bad. Who is she?”
    “She does big campaigns. Ross wants me to take her place.”
    “Great.”
    “I’m not sure if I want to,” she said lazily.
    “Why not?”
    “She was sleeping with him.”
    “And she got fired?”
    “Doesn’t say much for him, does it?”
    “It doesn’t say much for her.”
    “That’s just like a man. God.”
    “What does she look like? Does she look like Louise?”
    The smile of the thirteen-year-old came across Brenda’s face. “No one looks like Louise,” she said. Her voice squeezed the name whose legs Alan dreamed of. “Jane has these thin lips.”
    “Is that all?”
    “Thin-lipped women are always cold.”
    “Let me see yours,” he said.
    “Burn up.”
    “Yours aren’t thin. Alan, these aren’t thin, are they? Hey, Brenda, don’t cover them up.”
    “Where were you? You weren’t really working.”
    He’d pulled down her hand. “Come on, let them be natural,” he said. “They’re not thin, they’re nice. I just never noticed them before.” He leaned back. “Alan, how’re you doing? You getting sleepy?”
    “I was thinking. How much the city has changed,” Alan said. “In five years?”
    “I’ve been here almost six years.”
    “Sure, it’s changing. They’re coming down, we’re going up.”
    Alan was thinking of the vanished Louise who had left him only a jolting ride home through the endless streets. “I know.”
    That year they sat in the steam room on limp towels, breathing the eucalyptus and talking about Hardmann Roe. They walked to the showers like champions. Their flesh still had firmness. Their haunches were solid and young.
    Hardmann Roe was a small drug company in Connecticut that had strayed slightly outside of its field and found itself suing a large manufacturer for infringement of an obscure patent. The case was highly technical with little chance of success. The opposing lawyers had thrown up a barricade of motions and delays and the case had made its way downwards, to Frik and Frak whose offices were near the copying machines, who had time for such things, and whopondered it amid the hiss of steam. No one else wanted it and this also made it appealing.
    So they worked. They were students again, sitting around in polo shirts with their feet on the desk, throwing off hopeless ideas, crumpling wads of paper, staying late in the library and having the words blur in books.
    They stayed on through vacations and weekends sometimes sleeping in the office and making coffee long before anyone came to work. After a late dinner they were still talking about it, its complexities, where elements somehow fit in, the sequence of letters, articles in journals, meetings, the limits of meaning. Brenda met a handsome Dutchman who worked for a bank. Alan met Hopie. Still there was this infinite forest, the trunks and vines blocking out the light, the roots of distant things joined. With every month that passed they were deeper into it, less certain of where they had been or if it could end. They had become like the old partners whose existence had been slowly sealed off, fewer calls, fewer consultations, lives that had become lunch. It was known they were swallowed up by the case with knowledge of little else. The opposite was true—no one else understood its details. Three years had passed. The length of time alone made it