Acceptable Losses Read Online Free PDF Page A

time, give me time. I must go back to the fifteenth century. It is not a short subway ride.”
    Gregor greeted Damon with a hug and Ebba with a shy kiss on the cheek. Gregor, who had his own ideas about how an artist should dress, was wearing a checked flannel shirt with a large bright orange wool necktie and baggy corduroy pants. He had on a thick chocolate brown tweed jacket, which he wore in even the hottest weather. It was as though at one time in his life he had been so chilled that he would never be warm enough again.
    Unlike other artists’ studios there were no examples of Gregor’s work on exhibition. Sheila’s portrait on the easel was covered with a cloth and all his other canvases were stacked faces to the wall. “I am afraid,” Gregor had explained, “to look at what I have already done when I am doing something else. If I am tired or in rough passage, there would be great temptation to take easy way out—plagiarize myself. When I am drunk, late at night, all work done for the day, I look at them. I laugh or I cry, then I hide them again.”
    Damon was relieved to see that it was not a large party, just a Mr. and Mrs. James Franklin, whom he had met several times before with Gregor. They were owners of a gallery they ran together on Madison Avenue. Both the Franklins were wearing No Nuke buttons and Damon remembered reading that there had been a demonstration that day against nuclear weapons.
    There was also a pleasant, handsome lady by the name of Bettina Lacey of about sixty who had a divorced husband in her past and ran an antique store. They were all drinking wine, as Gregor had promised, and there were slim slices of hard Hungarian sausage arranged on a large platter, garnished with radishes.
    After the greetings, and they had seated themselves, European fashion, around a large, scrubbed wood circular table, Damon asked, “What’s this about a celebration?”
    “In good time, my friend,” Gregor said. “First you drink.” He poured some wine into a glass for Damon. Damon saw the label. It was Tokay. When he sipped it he tasted neither blood nor sea water.
    “Next,” Gregor said, “Bettina must tell her story. Celebration after that. Bettina …” He made a sweeping gesture, spilling a little of his wine, in the direction of the lady who ran the antique store.
    “Gregor,” Mrs. Lacey protested, “you’ve all just heard it.”
    “Not Roger,” Gregor said. “I want to see what he makes out of it. He is a hard-headed and honest man and I value his opinion on anything I do not understand myself. Commence.”
    “Well,” the woman said, not completely reluctant, “it’s about my daughter. I think I told you, she’s studying in Rome …”
    “Yes,” Damon said.
    “Aside from that, she tries to keep an eye out for any antiques—furniture, old silver, stuff like that that might turn up in Italy that I might be interested in. Last Sunday there was a great antique fair just outside Rome and she told me that she would be going and would write me about what she saw and what was available. I just got a letter from her two days ago explaining why she didn’t go, even though she’d hired a car to drive out to it.” The lady sipped at her wine, as though the story she had to tell was a painful one and she had to reinforce herself to tell it. “When she awoke Sunday morning, even before she got out of bed, she wrote, she had a feeling that she’d never had before—terrible apprehension, fear. In a vacuum, she said, without reason. She found she could hardly get herself together enough to make her breakfast and at the thought that she was going to have to drive a car out of the city, she broke into tears. She was all alone and she felt foolish, but she couldn’t stop crying. And she’s not a girl who cries easily. Even when she was an infant. She was shaking and it took her over an hour to get dressed. The feeling didn’t leave her all that morning, in fact not all day, and she never