Dogfight Read Online Free

do when the conversation turned to actual procedure. I pictured myself placing the male copy on top of the female copy, between my hands, and rubbing my palms together. I broke out in a humiliated sweat. I jerked the car over to the curb and slipped the pages into a gutter. X probably knows the basics already. What he doesn’t know, the smooth way morning light looks on a woman’s skin, the way her hair can play between bare shoulder blades, Grace across the way, with her potted daisies on the windowsill, will surely teach him.
    * * *
    To the uninitiated, it would appear that Grace Poole has renounced clothing altogether. She has dark curly hair, all of it, and wild eyebrows and is so pale as to be distracting. It’s true that she walks from room to room naked. Sleeps and feeds her dog, watches television, and eats breakfast without clothes. Grace spends almost all of her time at home, clothesless. These things I have learned in the four days since I discovered my son’s little secret. And his homework fetish began almost two weeks ago, just about the time our new neighbor arrived.
    When she does go out, Grace makes the act of getting dressed something almost unbearably alluring. The slow taking away of my guilty pleasure. She makes her body a secret again, dressing slowly, as if she regretted having to do it at all. A reverse striptease; I imagine balloons inflating around her as she pulls pins out of them. The sight of her rolling panty hose over lightly muscled calves and dimpled knees, tugging them over the crescent folds where her supple thighs meet her bottom, shifting her hips side to side, or standing in the middle of the room, slipping her arms into the sleeves of a clean shirt, buttoning it over her breasts, breaks my heart. I have not seen a naked woman since my wife was alive.
    Now, Grace is talking on the telephone. She has six phones, each one a different color, lined up on a card table against her downstairs window. My first thought was phone sex, but that would be too perfect. She is standing behind the table, arms crossed beneath her breasts, lifting her brown nipples, pinning the phone against her shoulder with her cheek. I can just make out the blue earpiece in all that hair. The wall behind her is lined with cardboard boxes, stacked three high, each one imprinted with the same logo—a rust-colored rooster—and writing in Spanish. I hear my son trotting down the stairwell and just have time to drop the shade in my study and stash the binoculars between the chair and my lower back before he opens the door. I can’t get my hands on any documents to look busy, so I stare at the ceiling and pretend that I was daydreaming. Watching Grace seems like daydreaming sometimes, languorous as jasmine.
    â€œShouldn’t you be working, Dad?” X says. “Somebody’s got to put food on the table around here.” He is standing just inside the room, still in his school uniform, gray slacks and blue shirt, now untucked. X is blond and tan and brown-eyed. He looks exactly like his mother. I try to find traces of myself in him when he doesn’t know I’m watching. While he sleeps, his cheeks flushed with dreaming. At dinner, sitting in front of the television, holding his plate near his chin, his eyes half closing when he lifts a mouthful. Usually, I don’t find anything, and when I do, those things are fleeting, an expression, a gesture, gone almost as soon as I’ve seen them. The sight of him, of his mother in him, makes me feel guilty about watching Grace. He is smiling strangely, and I can’t tell if he is on to me.
    â€œI thought maybe we could do something together after school,” I lie. “I didn’t know you’d have so much
homework”
.
    I say homework in italics, hoping to catch him off guard, to put him on the defensive for a change. He leans into the door frame, shoves a hand into his pocket. I can hear the muffled thump of a tennis