An American Dream Read Online Free PDF Page A

more feet above the East River Drive, and every vertical surface within was covered with flock, which must have gone for twenty-five dollars a yard; a hot-house of flat velvet flowers, royal, sinister, cultivated in their twinings, breathed at one from all four walls, upstairs and down. It had the specific density of a jungle conceived by Rousseau, and Deborah liked it the best of her purloined pads. “I feel warm in here,” she would say, “nice and
warm
.”
    The maid let me in. “Madame is upstairs in the bedroom,” she said with a smile. She was a young German maid who must have had an interesting life in the ruins of Berlin from the age of five, for nothing missed her attention. She had taken lately to smiling at me with a droll mocking compassionate and very wound-up spite which promised portfolios of detail if I were ever rich enough to turn her tongue just once. I was sometimes tempted to start, to grab her in the hall and take her spiced mouth, lay my tongue on hers and rustle up with a stroke those overtones of malicious music she could sing. What Madame did with me she knew too well because I might still spend a night with Deborah from time to time, but what Madame did with others … that would have to be bought.
    I ascended the stairway, a padded perfumed aisle up a wall of flowers. Deborah was in bed. Her body was not only large but lazy and she hopped into bed whenever she did not know what else to do.
    “My God,” she said, “you look awful.” Her mouth turned fond at the corners. She never disliked me so much as when I came to see her looking my best. “You really are a contemptible-looking creature this evening.”
    Did she know about the balcony? Sometimes I was convinced I was mad, because it seemed not at all exceptional to me that Deborah had been in touch with the moon and now had the word. She had powers, my Deborah, she was psychic to the worst degree, and she had the power to lay a curse. Once after a fight with her, I had been given traffic tickets three times in fifteen minutes, once for going down a one-way street, once for jumping a red light, and once because the policeman in the last car did not like my eye and decided I was drunk. That had all been in the form of a warning from Deborah, I was certain of that. I could see her waiting alone in bed, waving her long fingers languidly to spark the obedient diabolisms and traffic officers at her command.
    “It was a bad party,” I said.
    “How is Philippe?”
    “Looking well.”
    “He’s a
very
attractive man. Don’t you think so?” said Deborah.
    “Everyone we know is attractive,” I said to annoy her.
    “Except you, pet. You look as if you’ve used up your liver for keeps this time.”
    “I’m not very happy,” I said.
    “Well, come
here
and live. There’s no reason why you can’t move back with me.”
    Her invitation was open. She wanted me to dispose of my apartment, sell our furniture, move in with her. After a month she would move out again, leaving me with the velvet flock.
    “If you’d come this afternoon,” she went on, “you could have seen Deirdre. Now she’s off to school. You are a swine not to have seen her.” Deirdre was her daughter, my step-daughter. Deborah’s first husband had been a French count. He had died of a lingering illness after a year of marriage, and Deirdre, so far as I knew, had been the child of that marriage, a delicate haunted girl with eyes which contained a promise she would learn everything about you ifshe looked too long, and so chose not to look. I adored her, I had realized for years that being step-father to Deirdre was the most agreeable part of our marriage; for that reason I tried to see her as little as possible now.
    “Is she pleased at going back to school this trip?”
    “She would have been more pleased if you had come by.” Deborah’s complexion was mottling with red. When she became angry a red flush, raw as a rash, spotted her neck. “You pretended to love