Pigeon Feathers Read Online Free

What are you after?”
    “Son of a bitch, so I’m a bother. I knew it. You’ve just forgotten, all the time I’ve been remembering; you’re so
damn
dense. I come in here a bundle of pain to tell you I’m sorry and I want you to be happy, and all I get is the back of your neck.” Affected by what had happened to his eyes, his tongue had loosened, pouring out impressions; with culminating incoherence he dropped to his knees beside her chair, wondering if the thump would bring Pennypacker. “I must see you again,” he blurted.
    “Shh.”
    “I come back here and the only person who was ever pleasant to me I discover I maltreated so much she hates me.”
    “Clyde,” she said, “you didn’t maltreat me. You were a sweet boy to me.”
    Straightening up on his knees, he fumbled his fingers around the hem of the neck of her dress and pulled it out and looked down into the blurred cavity between her breasts. He had a remembrance of her freckles going down from her shoulders into her bathing suit. His glasses hit her cheek.
    She stabbed the back of his hand with the points of her comb and he got to his feet, rearing high into a new, less sorrowful atmosphere. “When?” he asked, short of breath.
    “No,” she said.
    “What’s your married name?”
    “Clyde, I thought you were successful. I thought you had beautiful children. Aren’t you happy?”
    “I am, I am; but”—the rest was so purely inspired its utterance only grazed his lips—“happiness isn’t everything.”
    Footsteps ticked down the hall, toward their door, past it. Fear emptied his chest, yet with an excellent imitation of his old high-school flippancy he blew her a kiss, waited, opened the door, and whirled through it. His hand had left the knob when the secretary, emerging from the room where he should have been, confronted him in the linoleum-smelling hall. “Where could I get a drink of water?” he asked plaintively, assuming the hunch and whine of a blind beggar. In truth, he had, without knowing it, become thirsty.
    “Once a year I pass through your territory,” Pennypacker intoned as he slipped a growing weight of lenses into the apparatus on Clyde’s nose. He had returned to Clyde more relaxed and chatty, now that all his little rooms were full. Clyde had tried to figure out from the pattern of noise if Janet had been dismissed. He believed she had. The thought made his eyelid throb. He didn’t even know her married name. “Down the Turnpike,” Pennypacker droned on, while his face flickered in and out of focus, “up the New Jersey Pike, over the George Washington Bridge, up the Saw Mill, then Route 7 all the way to Lake Champlain. To hunt the big bass. There’s an experience for you.”
    “I notice you have a new clock in your waiting room.”
    “That’s a Christmas present from the Alton Optical Company. Can you read that line?”
    “H, L, F, Y, T, something that’s either an S or an E—”
    “K,” Pennypacker said without looking. The poor devil, he had all those letters memorized, all that gibberish—abruptly, Clyde wanted to love him. The oculist altered one lens. “Is it better this way? … Or this way?”
    At the end of the examination, Pennypacker said, “Though the man’s equipment was dusty, he gave you a good prescription. In your right eye the axis of astigmatism has rotated several degrees, which is corrected in the lenses. If you have been experiencing a sense of strain, part of the reason, Clyde, is that these heavy tortoiseshell frames are slipping down on your nose and giving you a prismatic effect. For a firm fit you should have metal frames, with adjustable nose pads.”
    “They leave such ugly dents on the sides of your nose.”
    “You should have them. Your bridge, you see”—he tapped his own—“is recessed. It takes a regular face to support unarticulated frames. Do you wear your glasses all the time?”
    “For the movies and reading. When I got them in the third grade you told me that