Selling Out Read Online Free Page A

coming out with the line about her breast development exercises, that one of Perry’s freshman comp students noticed his Jefferson Airplane sweatshirt and asked, with a kind of remote, antiquarian interest, “Were they around the same time as Elvis?”
    Perry went home and stared at himself in the mirror before lunch, trying to see himself objectively, the way others saw him. His light brown curly hair had begun to go gray, and the boyish freckles now seemed out of place. Would those marks of youth, those happy daubs of Huck Finn innocence, soon be mistaken for liver spots?
    He was, to his amazement, forty-three years old.
    He had a sense of time slipping past, faster than intended, like water spilling from a jug that no one notices has tipped on its side.
    Now —that was the word that kept popping into his mind—and then Now is the time , almost like a voice speaking, and then he would ask aloud, “For what?” But there was no answer, only the rushing of the leaves, of the hours and days.
    Stretched out in front of the fireplace at the Cohens’ after the other guests had gone home from one of Rachel’s fabulous chili and strudel bashes, Perry felt a welcome respite from the nagging, gnatlike doubts that lately were assailing him. This was his home away from home, was in fact the only place he had thought of as home before Jane came along and made one he felt was his own.
    The evening had been especially gratifying, for the Cohens had brought together in the warmth of their hospitality the newest member of the department, a brightly idealistic young man named Ed Branscom and his pregnant wife, Eileen, who were still so new to the place they had not until now met old Professor Bryant, who lived alone in a room at the Faculty Club and was too often taken as a fixture of the place rather than as the honored colleague emeritus and friend he was treated as tonight. In bringing those guests together with Perry and Jane (who was now curled peacefully asleep on the couch) the Cohens had created a sense of a continuum as well as a circle, a feeling of everyone’s being a part of an ordered progression within a harmonious community.
    â€œThis is the way it s’pose to be,” said Perry, sipping his brandy.
    â€œWe’re all very fortunate,” Rachel said, lifting her feet up toward the fire.
    â€œThe most,” Perry agreed. “So why can’t I do my work and be grateful? Why can’t I stop worrying I ought to be somewhere else, doing something different?”
    Al loomed up to put another log on the fire, looking like a big friendly sheepdog in the shadowy light.
    â€œMaybe you’ve ‘had too much of apple-picking,’” he said.
    â€œWhat’s that supposed to mean?” Perry asked.
    â€œIt’s Frost,” Rachel explained. “Don’t you know ‘After Apple-Picking’?”
    â€œWhat the hell has Robert Frost got to do with anything?” Perry shouted, suddenly feeling on the verge of tears and wanting to strike out at someone or something, anything, as he scrambled to his feet and yelled, “We’re practically in the year two thousand and you people are quoting me Frost , on apples , for God sake?”
    The next morning he called to apologize profusely to both Al and Rachel. He went to the room where he did his writing to try to think, to try to figure out what was happening to him. From his window he saw distant hills, tall pines, and a rutted dirt road. Sun and shadow, land and sky, were focused and held in the order of rectangular glass framed with wood. This quiet place was more than his study, in fact he sometimes thought of it as the closest thing he had to a soul, if such a thing existed, or had a tangible look. It was, at least, his chosen view of the world—or view of the world he had chosen.
    Jane could be seen in it on her way to or from her expeditions to photograph the plants and trees, birds and