A Darkness in My Soul Read Online Free PDF Page B

lips puckered, as if of their own volition, two separate strips of flesh, entities not a part of her body.
        "Truthfully now," she said, "what do you think of my books? You say you've read them."
        I was thrown off balance. I had known a couple other writers, and I had never known exactly where criticism should stop and praise begin, exactly how much negative vibration they could take about their work. The last thing I wanted to do was insult or enrage this woman. "Well …"
        "Truthfully," she said, signaling me that maybe she was tougher than the other artists I knew.
        "You mean… the ugliness in them?"
        "Yes. Exactly." She turned back to the ocean. "I tried writing beautiful books about sex. I gave that up. It's the ugliness that sells." She shrugged her shoulders. Amber hair danced. "One must eat, mustn't one?" Another shrug.
        Another amber jitterbug.
        I was overly aware of the tightness of her bodice.
        With the soft light on her face, the vista of the pines and ocean framing her refined beauty with their own rugged majesty, I wanted to grasp her, to draw her to me, hold her, kiss her. At the same moment I felt myself gripped by that desire, I experienced a counter-emotion, a disgust and a deep fear. It was connected to The Fear, to the wombs, to the first moments of my conscious life when I first knew what I was-and what I wasn't.
        I brought a hand to that bare shoulder, felt her flesh, resilient and warm, scintillating beneath my fingers.
        I took my hand away, breathless and confused.
        Turning from her, I began to pace the room, holding my wine glass so tightly that it must surely soon snap in my fingers. I examined the original oil paintings on the walls, as if I were looking for something, though I could not guess what. They had hung here so long that I knew their every detail. There was nothing new in them, not for me.
        What did I fear? What about her terrified me so much that I could not bring myself to complete the advance I had made, to draw fingers downwards from her shoulder, to touch the thinly sheathed roundness of her breasts? Was it only what the computerized psychiatrist in the den told me it was-? Was it only that I feared making too many contacts in the world and then discovering that I did not belong? It seemed to me that it ran deeper than that, though I could not find any other motivations that made as much sense.
        She had turned away from the window, and she looked at me curiously. I suppose I looked like a caged animal, prowling that room, sniffing the brilliant canvases for solace and finding no solace.
        I turned and looked at her. But when I tried to speak, there was nothing to say. I thought, perhaps, in some way I could never understand, she realized the nature of my problem more completely than I did.
        She crossed the room, her body doing wonderful things to the clinging black fabric of her dress, and placed a soft hand upon my lips. "It's getting late," she said.
        She took her hand away.
        "When do we start?" I asked.
        "Tomorrow. And we tape all the interviews."
        "Tomorrow, then," I said.
        "Tomorrow, then."
        And she was gone in a whirlwind of efficiency that left me standing with my drink in my hand and my "goodbye" in my mouth like a lump of used lard.
        I went to bed to dream… … and I woke up needing comfort, a strange comfort that I could find but one place:
        IT IS FOUR O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING, the metal headshrinker said as it swallowed me and thrust its ethereal fingers into the pudding of my brain.
        I know.
        
    RELAX AND TALK.
        
        What should I say? Tell me what it is that I could-that I should say to you.
        
    START WITH A DREAM IF YOU'VE HAD ONE.
        
        I always have one.
        
    THEN START.
        
        There are storm clouds in the sky: dark, thick,