Death Wish Read Online Free Page B

Jack—because there was nothing else to do, because Carol seemed content, and because he began to realize it was lucky she hadn’t taken up with a long-haired radical or a freaked-out group of commune crazies. She had the temperament for it: she was bright, quick, pert, impatient, and she subscribed to a good deal of anti-Establishment sentiment. Probably she had tried various drugs in college during her two years of student activism; she had never volunteered a confession and Paul had never asked. She had a good mind but her weakness was a tendency to be sold by the last person who talked to her: sometimes she was too eager to be agreeable. Jack Tobey probably exercised exactly the kind of steadying influence she required. It would be silly to hold out for more than that.
    Jack wore glasses with heavy black frames across his beaky nose; he was dark and shaggy and he dressed with vast indifference—most of the time you found him in the jacket he was wearing now, a hairy tweed the color of cigarette ashes. Scuffed brown shoes and a bland tie at half-mast with his shirt open at the collar. Paul had seen him in action in the courtroom and it had been one of the few times he recalled seeing the kid in a business suit; afterward Carol had explained that Jack made the concession to decorum only because he had got to know the judges and their habit of exercising their prejudicial sarcasms on unkempt young defense attorneys.
    â€¦ A plump young man in white appeared at the door and it made Jack stiffen with evident recognition. The doctor located him and came forward. “Your wife will be all right.” He was talking to Jack.
    Paul stood up slowly and Jack said, “How’s my mother-in-law, Doctor?” in a voice that presupposed the answer.
    Paul cleared his throat. “May I see her?”
    The doctor’s head skewed around. “You’re Mr. Benjamin? Sorry, I didn’t know.” It was an apology without contrition. The doctor seemed jaded; his voice was rusty, tired beyond any expression of emotion. He seemed to need to ration his feelings.
    â€œI don’t——” The doctor’s round young face tipped down. “Mrs. Benjamin is dead. I’m sorry.”

4

    At the funeral he was still in a dark fugue, a dulled pervading unreality.
    It was the wrong day for a funeral. The heat had dissipated, the inversion layer had gone somewhere; it was a mild day filled with sunshine and comfort. Funerals had a rainy association for Paul and the chiseled clarity of Friday’s air made the incidents even less real.
    That first night—Esther had died Tuesday—they had sedated him and he only vaguely remembered the taxi ride to Jack’s apartment. Jack had given him the bed and in the morning Paul had found him in the living room on the couch, smoking, drinking coffee; Jack hadn’t slept at all.
    Paul had emerged from his drugged sleep neither rested nor alert. The unfamiliar surroundings heightened his sense of existential surrealism: it was as if he had been born fully grown half an hour before, into an alien world of meaningless artifice. He had forgotten nothing; but when he found Jack in the living room and they began to talk, it was as if they were actors who had sat in these same places and said the same lines so many times that the words had lost all intrinsic meaning.
    The city coroners had sent someone around to obtain Jack’s signature on an autopsy-permission form which Jack disagreeably pointed out was a senseless absurdity since in crimes of violence that resulted in death it was automatic to perform a postmortem examination. The Medical Examiner had announced that the body would be released on Thursday; to which funeral home should it be sent?
    Trivial mechanical details. Decisions to make. Should there be a religious service? If not, how did you go about conducting a burial ceremony?
    She had not been religious; neither was Paul. They both came