Free The Graduate by Charles Webb

her and kicked off his shoes at the same time. Mrs. Robinson put her hands up at the sides of his head and then moved her fingernails up through his hair and finally wrapped both her arms around him and pressed him down against her until he could feel her breasts flattening underneath his chest and the muscles trembling in her arms. She pulled her mouth away from his and pushed it against his neck, then pushed one of her hands down between them to the buckle of his belt.
    “Please,” she said.
    Benjamin raised his head up several inches to look at her face. Her eyes were closed and her mouth was partly open.
    “Please,” she said again.
    Benjamin reached for the lamp on the table beside them. “Inadequate,”
    he said, turning it off. “That’s good. That’s really pretty—”
    “Please!”
    He let her unbuckle his belt and push his pants down around his legs, then climbed on top of her and started the affair.

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Chapter 4
    The date after which Benjamin was no longer eligible for the Frank Halpingham Education Award fell sometime in mid-September. He celebrated the event quietly and by himself. When his parents had gone to bed he carried a bottle of bourbon from the liquor cabinet out to the pool and drank it slowly and smoked cigarettes, grinding the first ones out on the cement beside the pool and then flipping the rest up in the air and watching them fall and sputter out in the bright blue water. It was not till long after midnight that he tossed the empty bottle into the pool, stood from his chair and walked slowly inside and upstairs to bed.
    He spent most of his time at home. He got up late in the morning or early in the afternoon and dressed in his bathing suit. He usually ate breakfast by himself. Sometimes, if she wasn’t shopping or reading in her room, his mother came into the kitchen to sit with him while he ate.
    After breakfast he went out to the pool. He had found anold rubber raft in one of the cupboards of the garage which had not been used since before high school when the family had taken it on weekend trips to the beach. Benjamin inflated it and although the rubber was cracked where it had been folded and stored, it still held air.
    After breakfast Benjamin usually kicked it into the water from the edge of the pool where he had left it the day before, then walked slowly down the steps of the shallow end. Sometimes he carried a can of beer down into the pool with him and sat on the raft while he drank it. Then he tossed the empty can off beside the pool and eased himself down onto the raft to float for the rest of the day. Sometimes he floated on his back with his hands folded across his stomach and sometimes he lay on his stomach with his arms hanging down into the water beside the raft. Unless it rained he floated all afternoon and right up until it was time for dinner, getting off the raft only once every hour or so to inflate it when he felt the water slowly rising up around his chest.

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    He ate dinner each evening with his parents. He put on a shirt and rolled up its sleeves around his elbows after his father insisted he wear more than his bathing suit to the table. After dinner, on the nights he didn’t dress and drive to the Taft Hotel, he took a can of beer with him into the den and watched television. During the early part of the evening he usually drank only beer as he watched television and then when it was later and his parents had gone to bed he usually poured himself a glassful of bourbon to drink as he watched the movies that came on after the shorter plays and comedy programs had ended.
    Sometimes, if his drink was still not finished, he sat a long time after the last movie was over watching one of the test patterns or the photograph of an American flag that one of the channels always put on the screen after they had played the national anthem and signed off the air. Once or twice he fell asleep in his chair and woke up hours later just as it was