Read Online Further Adventures by Jon Stephen Fink - Free Book Online

ribs instead and all the men over there started laughing very big. The bosses they Adored her. I had a picture of us in my mind Annie’s hand holding mine bridalgown & groomal suit with Mr. Silverstein giving her away to me & Mr. Argyll in the pulpit & David Arcash for my Best Man.
    David handed me his handkerchief. “You’re drooling. Wipe your lips.”
    I dabbed around my mouth. It was dry my tongue also a desert in there.
    “You can’t hide anything from me. I’m your pal,” said David. “You live in my apartment. I go through your dirty laundry.”
    My throat closed up. “What’s that mean?”
    “She’s going to some dinner tonight at her sister’s in Far Rockaway.” He encouraged me. “Ambush her. Who can identify you in Far Rockaway?”
    On fast little steps Annie put on the steam to leave the Studio. “Night Ray,” was all she said & with the curtain of rosewater perfume she pulled behind her clinging around my head I knew all of a sudden I had 2 choices.
     
    CHOICE NUMBER 1: Stay true to my Nature & lie down do nothing “Wait & See” if Annie is someday going to admit out loud the same feelings
     
    OR
     
    CHOICE NUMBER 2: Change my character for the better i.e. go on & make my move no matter what comes Heaven or Hell or High Water
     
    I went after her in the next Elevator down to the Lobby. It felt like a month between floors but when the big brass doors opened up there she was buying a pack of Wrigley’s from Stan the Cigar Man.
    “Annie!” I waved at her but I think she did not see me in the crowd that swamped me from behind when another Elevator spilled into thelobby. A thick-necked man bulled in front of her to get in the revolving door and behind his back she showed her teeth her clenched smile mocking Good manners.
    It was nighttime on the street and rain coming down into the bargain. Like a Notre Dame fullback I ran through it and caught up I felt like a masher. I asked her, “Want a hot dog?”
    “Oh Ray it’s only you. Jeez.”
    “Sorry.”
    “I’m going to my sister’s for dinner but don’t let me stop you.” She raised the flat of her hand for a kind of salute. “I go this way. Gotta get to—”
    “Far Rockaway,” I said in unison with her.
    “—by eight…” She squinted her eyes at me trying to figure how I knew where she was going & what it meant if I did.
    I did not want to let her go then & I told her so. I saw the muscles around her mouth go tight & she braced herself to listen to words she did not want to hear. “I see,” Annie sniffed. She did not see half of it but 10 Minutes later she was staring down the snout of the whole snorting buffalo.
    I told her how I thought about her—how deep & regular—I told her how I did not want to lose my feelings by keeping them in I had to let them go loose—I said how I felt scooped out like a Halloween pumpkin when I pictured this place without her in it—I told her you are my Dream Girl what a relief to shout these facts! & be with somebody who knows what I am doing truly & truly WHO I AM because I care so much about her I do not need to force myself to hush my inner thoughts—
    The more I said to Annie the easier it was to tell her more as if Lionel Horvath’s gunsels shoved me down a greasy chute nor I did not worry if it was a tropical lagoon at the bottom or a fiery furnace—“If I don’t come out with it I’d regret it for the rest of my Life,” I toldher—more than I would live to regret telling her come what may & I started to recite the sorry tale of Bernhardt’s ideas on the subject of helping another man button his fly but I stopped myself on Religious grounds also the picture of me pinned under Bernhardt Grym was not going to make me look like a very attractive man in Annie’s eyes—I told her I was sorry if this was a wild ambush out of nowhere nor it did not come out of any Unnatural Urge—I wanted to tell her all the events in my Life that led up to it also made a very Dramatic