Why not?
Everything is sick and doomed.
Including me—now, I thought jeeringly.
My plate came—the toast-brown fish, the green-speckled potato, a salad I hadn't ordered, tartar sauce in a dish, and the applesauce in another.
I pushed Congress out of my mind.
More accurately, the girl did.
She cleared her throat. A little sound, with faint annoyance clinging to it.
I had been sitting there, smoking two cigarettes, oblivious to her for ten minutes. She must have assumed that I had chosen to sit beside her because she was attractive—which was true. But now, owing to the absence of sidewise glances, of self-conscious bread-buttering, of any aura of awareness, she had irritatedly cleared her throat. If I had spoken to her forthwith she would, perhaps, have made a short, polite, but discouraging reply. Since, however, I had broken off even the peripheral touching of consciousness, she coughed vexedly, exploringly.
So I glanced at her book. I had already noticed the jacket. It was Ape and Essence by Aldous Huxley. She had been reading with a slight frown. But now I saw that the jacket did not fit the book, which was thicker than Mr. Huxley's post-atomic predictions. The jacket, then, was camouflage—for a larger book with maroon binding. What sort of reading, I wondered, would a glamorous young woman hide behind Aldous Huxley? And, abruptly, I knew: the Kinsey Report.
I leaned back and verified it.