Free Summer Crossing by Truman Capote

the dangers involved had been his most effective way of retaliating against boredom; in the army, and for rather similar reasons, he’d once stolen an electric razor. He felt an impulse to do something of the sort now. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he exploded; then, more quietly: “There’s a Bob Hope picture at Loews.” With a fork Grady speared the misplaced egg yolk. “We might as well,” she said.
    It was wilting out on Lexington Avenue, and especially so since they’d just left an air-conditioned theater; with every step heat’s stale breath yawned in their faces. Starless nightfallsky had closed down like a coffin lid, and the avenue, with its newsstands of disaster and flickering fly-buzz sounds of neon, seemed an elongated, stagnant corpse. The pavement was wet with a rain of electric color; passersby, stained by these humid glares, changed color with chameleon alacrity: Grady’s lips turned green, then purple. Murder! Their faces hidden behind tabloid masks, a group, steaming under a streetlamp and waiting for a bus, gazed into the printed eyes of a youthful killer. Clyde bought a paper, too.
    Grady had never spent a summer in New York, and so had never known a night like this. Hot weather opens the skull of a city, exposing its white brain, and its heart of nerves, which sizzle like the wires inside a lightbulb. And there exudes a sour extra-human smell that makes the very stone seem flesh-alive, webbed and pulsing. It wasn’t that Grady was unfamiliar with the kind of accelerated desperation a city can conjure, for on Broadway she’d seen all the elements of it. Only there it was something she’d known vicariously, and she had not, as it were, taken part. But now for her there was nowhere an exit: she was a member.
    She stopped to straighten her socks, which had crawled down into her shoes; and she decided then to wait a moment, wondering how long it would take Clyde to realize he’d left her behind. On the corner was an open-air store, and thesidewalk there was like an amazing garden where fountains are fruit and the flowers are arranged in bunches of large parasols. Clyde stood an instant there, then walked rapidly back to meet her. And she wanted to hurry him through the streets, hide with him in the dark of the apartment. But: “Go across the street,” he said, “and wait for me in front of that drugstore.”
    A curious tension thinned his face; because of it, she did not ask him why he wanted her to wait there. Her view of him was confined to glimpses grabbed between bursts of traffic; presently she caught sight of him revolving around the fruit and flower store. It was at this moment, too, that she recognized coming toward her a girl who had been in her class at Miss Risdale’s: so she turned and, looking into the blazing windows of the drugstore, studied a display of athletic supporters. A roar from underground echoed through her, for she was standing on top of a subway grating: deep in the hollows below she could hear a screeching of iron wheels, and then, nearer by, there came a fiercer noise: car-horns clashed, fenders bumped, tires careened! and she whirled around to see a driver cursing at Clyde, who was jayhopping across the street as fast as his legs would go.
    Snatching her hand, he pulled her along with him, and they ran until they reached a side street muffled and sweetwith trees. As they leaned together, panting, he put into her hand a bunch of violets, and she knew, quite as though she’d seen it done, that they were stolen. Summer that is shade and moss traced itself in the veins of the violet leaves, and she crushed their coolness against her cheek.
    When she got home she called Apple to say she would not be coming to East Hampton after all. Instead, she drove with Clyde to Red Bank, New Jersey, and they were married there around two o’clock in the morning.

Chapter 5

    Clyde’s mother was an ample, olive-dark woman with the worn and disappointed look of someone