Belinda Read Online Free PDF Page B

as sexy when I first saw her in the Catholic school uniform.
    "Why don't you sleep with me in the four-poster?" she asked. Same simple and earnest voice she had used in the hotel suite.
    I didn't say anything. I reached into the refrigerator and took out a beer and opened it. I took a long drink. There goes painting anymore tonight, I thought, rather stupidly since I knew I wasn't going to paint. But I could still photograph her.
    "How have you managed to stay alive this long?" I asked. "Do you only pick up famous writers?"
    She studied me for a long moment. She blotted her lips very fastidiously with the napkin. She made a little cast-off gesture with her right hand, ripple of slender fingers. "Don't worry about it."
    "Somebody ought to worry about it," I said.
    I sat down opposite her. She was almost finished with the steak. The paint on her eyes made it very dramatic when she looked down, then up. Head like a tulip.
    "I have pretty good judgment," she said, carefully trimming the fat from the meat. "I have to. I mean I'm on the street, room or no room. I'm ... you know .... drifting."
    "Doesn't sound like you like it."
    "I don't," she said. Uneasy. "It's limbo. It's nothing-" She stopped. "It's a big waste of everything, drifting like this."
    "So how do you actually make it? Where does the rent come from ?"
    She didn't answer. She laid her fork and knife carefully across the empty plate and lighted another cigarette. She didn't do the matchbook trick. She used a small gold lighter. She sat back with one arm across her chest, the other raised, curved hand holding the cigarette between two fingers. Little lady with pink streaked hair, blood red mouth. But her face was absolutely opaque.
    "If you need money, you can have it," I said. "You could have asked me this afternoon. I would have given it to you."
    "And you think I live dangerously'." she said.
    "Remember what I said about photographing you," I said. I took one of the cigarettes out of her pack. I used her lighter. "Strictly proper stuff. I'm not talking about nude shots. I'm talking about modeling for my books. I can pay you for that-"
    She didn't answer. The stillness of her face was a little unnerving.
    "I photograph little girls all the time that way for my work. They're always paid. They come from reputable agencies. I take pictures of them in old-fashioned clothes. And I work with these photographs when I make my paintings upstairs. A lot of artists work this way now. It doesn't exactly fit the romantic idea of the artist painting from scratch but the fact is artists have always-"
    "I know all that," she said softly. "I've lived around artists all my life. Well, sort of artists. And, of course, you can photograph me and you can pay me what you pay the models. But that's not what I want from you."
    "What do you want?"
    "You. To make love to you, of course." I looked at her for a long moment. "Somebody's going to hurt you," I said.
    "Not you," she said. "You're just what I always thought you'd be. Only you're better. You're actually crazier."
    "I'm the dullest guy in the world," I said. "All I do is paint and write and collect junk."
    She smiled, a very long smile this time. Bordering on an ironic laugh.
    "All those pictures," she said, "of all those little girls wandering through dark mansions and overgrown gardens, all those secret doors-"
    "You've been reading the critics. They love to go to town on a hairy-chested man who does books full of little girls."
    "Do they talk about that, too? How sinister it all is, how erotic-"
    "It's not erotic."
    "Yes, it is," she said. "You know it is. When I was little, it used to put me in a spell to read your books. I felt like I was leaving the world."
    "Good. What's erotic about that?"
    "It's got to be erotic. Sometimes I didn't even want to start, you know-didn't want to slip into Charlotte's house. It would give me these funny feelings just looking at Charlotte creeping up the stairs in that nightgown with the candle in her