Some Can Whistle Read Online Free

girlfriends to have as many boyfriends as they want, bespeaks an unhealthy complaisance.”
    “That’s what I think too, and I come down with complaisance once and know exactly what I’m talking about,” Gladys informed me.
    “You came down with
complaisance?”
I asked, twirling my finger around my ear in the universally accepted sign of insanity.
    “Yeah, it was right after I had that bad bladder infection,” Gladys said. “Antibiotics didn’t do no good because it’s a virus.”
    Shortly after that the conversation stalled. There were mornings when Godwin and I could team-tackle Gladys and force her back a few yards, and then there were mornings when it seemed pointless to try. If she wanted to believe she had once suffered from viral complaisance, why not let her?
    I was more irritated with Godwin, anyway. In the twenty and more years I’d known him, his own girlfriends
and
boyfriends must have accumulated thousands of lovers—a Breughelian triptych would hardly have been sufficient to catalogue the writhings and squirmings he had been witness to. How dare he sit there and accuse me of complaisance!
    Meanwhile the sun was well up, the day’s heat was coming, and I had missed my daughter’s call.

7
    “There’s nothin’ I hate worse than waiting for the phone to ring,” Gladys said. She stood up as if to clear the table, and then sat back down and stared into space.
    “How old would she be?” Godwin asked.
    “Who?”
    “Your daughter,” he said. “The young nymph with the two cherubs.”
    “She’s twenty-two,” I said. “Twenty-three her next birthday. I just hope my agent doesn’t call. It won’t matter to him if I have fifty daughters—I’ll never be able to get him off the phone.”
    The phone rang. I grabbed it so quickly it squirted out of my hand and popped up in the air, like a frog. Godwin began to gargle. I caught the receiver on its descent; to my immense relief it was the operator, asking if I would accept another collect call from T.R.
    “Certainly, of course,” I said.
    “Howdy,” my daughter said. She sounded slightly amused.
    “Hi,” I said.
    “I’m gettin’ the hang of this collect calling,” she said. “Shoot, if I’d known it was this easy I’d have been calling people all over the place and making them pay for it.”
    “I’m sorry if that was you who called a minute ago,” I said. “Two jet fighters were going over and I didn’t hear the phone until it was too late.”
    She didn’t reply. A pause lengthened, during which I became nervous. She might be getting ready to hang up on me again.
    “Is something wrong?” I asked. “Did I offend you?”
    “Un-uh,” she said. “I was just watching Bo.”
    “What’s he doing?”
    “He’s trying to pee on a cat,” she said. “He’s at that tender age where he tries to pee on things. I feel a little sorry for the cat, but then a cat that can’t outrun Bo don’t stand much of a chance, in this part of town anyway. Bo ain’t quite three.”
    Then her mood darkened.
    “If them fighter planes you mentioned ain’t got nothing else to do they could come down here and bomb this part of town, for all I care,” she said. “I hate it.”
    “Can I just make one request?” I asked.
    “I guess, it’s your nickel,” she said.
    I was beginning to love her voice. If I’m a connoisseur of anything, it’s the female voice. Through the years—fifty-one ofthem now—the voices of women have been my wine: my claret, my Chardonnay, my Chablis. And now I had found a new wine, one with depth and color, bite, clarity, body. I was lapping it up, ready to get drunk on it.
    “Just tell me your name and what town you’re in,” I asked.
    “My name’s T.R.,” she said.
    “Which stands for what?”
    “It stands for Tyler Rose,” she said. “What else would it stand for?”
    “Well, it could stand for Teddy Roosevelt,” I said.
    There was another pause. I had the sense that I didn’t quite have her