Free Disturbing the Peace (Vintage Classics) by Richard Yates

at that.”
    “Oh?” (Shaking her hair, not quite meeting his eyes.) “Well; thank you.”
    “Live around here?”
    “No; I’m visiting my parents. They have a little …”
    “You in school?”
    “No; I graduated from Holyoke last June; now I work for an ad agency in the city.”
    “Which one? Thing is, you see, I’m in the same business.”
    “Really? Well, it’s …”
    She had executed her three dancer’s steps now, performed her wonderful thigh-flexing and her leap, and his secret dialogue raced ahead.
    “… Maybe we could meet for lunch sometime.”
    “Well, actually, I – yes, that might be nice.”
    And later: “Oh, this has been such fun, John; I mean I’d
heard
of expense-account lunches, but I’ve never really …”
    And later still, after their first brandy-flavored kiss in the taxicab downtown: “
What
street? Varick Street? Is that where you live?”
    “Well, not exactly; just a little place I think you might like …”
    The bubbles had long vanished from her splash, and he waited for the water to break again with her surfacing, but it didn’t. He stood up (Who cared how short he was?) and watched for her on all sides of the raft like an alert, conscientious lifeguard. Only after what seemed a full minute did he see her moving far away, her slender arms stroking as smoothly as Janice’s as she made for the shoreline and the trees, going home. And then, sitting hunched until his heart had slowed down and the ache of disappointment in his clenched jaws relaxed, there was nothing to do but slide into the cold water and fight his way home himself.
    One good thing: there was plenty of bourbon on the kitchen shelf. As soon as he was dressed he got out the ice and made himself a double that was more like a triple.
    “Feel like a drink?” he asked Janice.
    “No thanks.” She was sitting on a tall kitchen stool in her slacks with a colander in her lap, snapping string beans for dinner, and didn’t look up. “It’s a little early, isn’t it?”
    “Seems late enough to me.”
    And not until he’d gone outdoors for the first few greedy swallows did he figure out why he was so angry. It wasn’t because of the girl on the raft (the hell with the girl on the raft), or because Janice had asked if it wasn’t a little early, or because her crisp little snap-snap of string beans had always been an irritating sound; it was because the stool she sat on, with her tennis shoes hooked over its middle rung, was exactly like the cop’s stool at the door in Bellevue.
    “Son of a bitch,” he whispered aloud, and his free hand made a trembling fist in his pocket as he walked around the yard. “Son of a bitch.” Because this was the funny part, the neurotic part, the crazy part: he was still furious. Wasn’t it supposed to be true that if you could isolate the cause of an irrational anger it would go away? Didn’t everybody know that? Then why wasn’t it working? All he wanted now was to go back into the kitchen and say “Janice, get off that stool.”
    “What, dear?”
    “You heard me. Get your ass off that fucking
stool
.”
    She’d look as astonished as if she’d been slapped; the colander might fall from her lap and if it didn’t he’d grab it up and send it clattering against the wall, spraying string beans.
    “I swear to Christ if you don’t get off I’ll
knock
you off ! Is that
clear
?”
    “John,” she’d say, standing up and backing away in fright, “John, what’s the – John, are you—?”
    He’d get the stool then, swing it high and bring it down in so mighty a crash that its splintered legs and rungs would skate across the floor, and as she cowered against the wall the very sight of her would enrich his voice with a thunderous rage: “Whaddya think you are, some cop? Some cop in a mad-house? Huh? You think you’re some broad-assed, bull-dyke cop keeping the lunatics in line? Huh? Huh?”
    By this time Tommy would be crying in the kitchen doorway, helplessly