Belinda Read Online Free PDF Page A

don't really want to get going. Sometimes I do it when I'm afraid.
    This was an example of the latter. I couldn't remember the details of her.
    I just couldn't see the features of her rice. I could not get the "there there" that had made me do it with her. It wasn't just her availability. I am not that morally rotten, that stupid, no, not that contemptible. I mean
    I'm a grown man, I could have fought my way out of there. Cotton panties, lipstick, and sugar. Hmm.
    No good. I had the pyramid of hair all right, thick soft nest of hair. I had the clothes of course. But not Belinda.
    I decided to go back to the big canvas I was doing for my next book a jungle garden in which Angelica roamed searching for a lost cat. Back to the fat glossy green leaves, the bulging branches of the oaks, the moss hanging in streaks to the high grass through which the cat came to reveal its hateful grin-beware Angelica-like Blake's tyger.
    It all looked like clichés to me, my clichés. To fill in the background, the ominous sky, the overhanging trees-it was like setting myself on high-speed automatic pilot.
    When the doorbell rang around midnight, I almost didn't answer. After all, it could have been any one of half a dozen drunken friends, and more than likely a failed artist who wanted to borrow fifty dollars. I wished now I had just left fifty dollars in the mailbox. He would have found it. He was used to finding it.
    The bell rang again, but not hard and long, the way he always did it. So it could be Sheila, my next door neighbor come to tell me her gay roommate was having a fight with his lover and they needed me to come over at once.
    "For what?" I would say. But I'd wind up going if I answered. Or, worse yet, having them in. Getting drunk, listening to them argue. Then Sheila and I would wind up in bed together out of habit, loneliness, compulsion. No, not this time, not after Belinda, out of the question, don't answer.
    Third ring, just as short and polite. Why wasn't Sheila cupping her hands around her mouth and screaming my name by now so that I could hear it all the way up here?
    Then it occurred to me: Belinda, she'd gotten my address from my wallet. That's why it had been lying on top of my pants. I ran down the steps, both flights, and opened the front door, and she was just walking away, that same leather pouch hanging from her shoulder.
    She had her hair up and her eyes were rimmed in kohl and her lips darkly red. If it hadn't been for the mail pouch bag, I wouldn't have immediately known her.
    She looked even younger somehow-it was her long neck and her babycheeks. She looked so vulnerable.
    "It's me, Belinda," she said. "Remember?"
    I FIXED some canned soup for her and put a steak in the broiler. She was in a mess she said, somebody broke the padlock on the door of her room. She was afraid to sleep there tonight. It was scary somebody busting into her room, and it wasn't the first time it had happened. They'd taken her radio, which was the only damn thing worth taking. They almost stole her videotapes.
    She ate the bread and butter with the soup as if she was starving. But she never stopped smoking or drinking the Scotch I'd poured for her. This time it was black cigarettes with gold bands on them. Sobranie Black Russians. And she was looking around all the time. She had loved the toys. Only hunger had got her to the kitchen.
    "So where is this padlocked room?" I asked.
    "In the Haight," she said. "You know, it's a big old flat, a place that could look like this if somebody wanted to save it. But it's just a place where kids rent rooms. Full of roaches. There's no hot water. I have the worst room because I came in last. We share the bath and the kitchen, but you'd have to be crazy to cook in there. I can get another padlock tomorrow."
    "Why are you in a place like that?" I asked. "Where are your parents?" Under the light I could see the pink streaks in her hair. Her nails were done black. Black! And all that since this afternoon.