Read Online 50 by Avery Corman - Free Book Online Page A

in the rooms.”
    “I know. A couple of years and it starts to go. The steam does it.”
    “So why don’t you get it taken care of?”
    “Because the landlord uses a painter who’ll ruin the place and the estimate for a regular painter was about two thousand dollars and I wasn’t ready to spend it.”
    “I saw on TV, children can eat it, the lead in paint.”
    “They’re big children. They don’t eat paint.”
    “They eat it and they die,” she said, not quite tuned in to his station.
    “That’s not going to happen.”
    “Next weekend your father and I will come and fix the rooms. You buy the paint.”
    “It isn’t necessary.”
    Two roly-polys wearing paint hats arrived the following week, to remove any evidence that could suggest their son was not making Big Money.
    For the past three summers Karen and Andy had gone to a day camp with grounds in New Jersey. Andy, too old to be a camper the previous summer, had worked assisting the counselors. Doug thought they might enjoy being at a sleepaway camp, freed of their continuing home and home series for a while. The day-camp director had a partnership in a camp in the Berkshires where Karen could be a camper and Andy could have a job as a waiter. The children liked the idea, and after researching camps, favored this one. The camp fee for Karen was twenty-five hundred dollars. Susan offered to pay half when she received payment in the fall from a project she was working on for Neiman Marcus in Dallas. Taking Karen and Andy by cab to the bus-departure point near Lincoln Center, Doug was the one nearly carsick from the separation.
    Visiting day was the last Saturday in July. He and Susan were not in touch with each other, and he rented a car and drove up to the camp alone. He parked in a clearing for cars and entered the camp area. In the distance was a girl with a resemblance to his daughter, brown from the sun, hair blowing freely, a towel wrapped around her neck, cruising on a bicycle. “Daddy!” Karen shouted and pedaled toward him. Her movements, the emerging sexual being that she was, startled him. She had been momentarily unrecognizable. They walked arm in arm toward the bunks, and he saw Andy sitting with his back to a tree, reading a book. His hair was unkempt and wild and he, too, for a beat, did not look familiar to Doug. Susan appeared in an antique Victorian lace dress with an antique bonnet, a ribbon down the back, moving elegantly through this background of children, rustic cabins and casually dressed parents like Claudia Cardinale in a Fellini movie. Over the next hours the generally reasoned acceptance about sharing the children with each other, the knowledge that the children needed the other parent, collapsed. She was there everywhere he turned, an intruder, and he was there everywhere she turned. By nightfall they had had enough of each other, and after they said goodbye to Karen and Andy they walked to their separate rented cars without another word.
    As he drove back to the city he thought about the time they decided about the divorce. They had exchanged unpleasant words over nothing, it seemed, over reading habits. On a Saturday night they were sitting with the early edition of the Sunday New York Times scattered on the floor. Susan was looking at a fashion supplement, which Doug would not have bothered to read. He had the sports section and the Week in Review.
    “You still do that. The Week in Review is one of the first things you pick up. Nobody picks that up first.”
    “I also have the sports section. Do you ever bother to look at it? I am in that field, you know.”
    “Would you read the fashions? Do you read Vogue? All your magazines, and you never read it. I am in that field, you know.”
    “It’s a little different. You don’t write for Vogue. I write sports.”
    She glanced at the front page of the sports section. The lead story was about a horse race at Aqueduct.
    “I’d read the sports if I were a jockey. I’m not a