Blue City Read Online Free PDF Page B

me. I’m naturally interested in my father’s last wife.”
    “That’s not a very chivalrous thing to say.”
    “My chivalry is my weakest point.”
    “That’s true of your whole generation, isn’t it? Or maybe you’ve been reading Hemingway or something.”
    “Don’t start talking down like a stepmother. You haven’t got much of a drop on me where age is concerned.”
    Her laugh came strangely out of her unmoving face. “Maybe I was wrong about your chivalry. But don’t kid yourself. I belong to the lost generation. Which reminds me, I promised you a drink.”
    I said: “Who’s been reading Hemingway now?” and looked around the room while she went to the bar in the corner. The bar had been J.D.’s idea, but the rest of the room had been remade. Thick, bright curtains at the windows, low, square-cut furniture placed in complicated geometric patterns on a desert expanse of polished floor, chaste walls and soft indirect lighting, which made the ceiling seem high and airy. The only old-fashioned survival was the pair of sliding doors which closed off the dining room. It was a beautiful room but it lacked life. Time and change had tiptoed away and left it breathless and still. I wondered if the rich, widowed body of the woman who had invented the room spent lonely nights.
    She gave me a bourbon with a little soda and a lot of ice. Then she raised her glass and said: “Here’s to chivalry.” Her hands were white and well kept, but there was a little gathering and puckering of the flesh at the wrist. Perhaps I had been wrong about her age, but it couldn’t be more than thirty-five.
    “Here’s to women that aren’t dependent on it.”
    She looked at me for a moment and said slowly: “You’re rather a nice boy.”
    “You’re not exactly a typical stepmother. Or did I read too much Grimm in my formative years?”
    “I doubt it. What are your plans, John?”
    “It’s a funny thing. I came here with the idea of askingJ.D. for a job. I’ve been at a loose end since I got out of the army—”
    “Didn’t you know he was dead?”
    “Not until today. You see, after my mother left him we never heard from him. I almost forgot I had a father. But I’ve been thinking about him the last couple of years in the army. I didn’t try to get in touch with him, but I thought about him. So I finally decided to come and see him. I was a little late.”
    “You should have come before.” She leaned forward to touch my knee, and I could see the single young line made by the separation of her breasts in the V of her neckline. “He often talked about you. You should have written, anyway.”
    “What did he say about me?”
    She made the removal of her hand from my knee as definite a gesture as placing it there. “He loved you, and he wondered what had happened to you. He was afraid your mother would teach you to hate him.”
    “She did her best, but in the long run it didn’t take. I can’t say I blame her entirely.”
    “Don’t you, really?”
    “Why should I? He hated her for leaving him. He never tried to get in touch with us.”
    “Why did she leave him, Johnny?” Her way of speaking to me was moving through gradual stages of intimacy, and I felt a little crowded. “He never told me,” she said.
    So far, the conversation had gone all her way, and she had chosen the reminiscent and sentimental vein. I chose another: “Because he couldn’t keep his hands off women.”
    She seemed neither shocked nor displeased. She leaned back in her low chair and stretched her arms over her head. Her live, stirring body in that still room was like a snake in a sealed tomb, fed by unhealthy meat. She said in a soft and questioning voice: “You must have known your way around when you were twelve.”
    She leaned her head against the back of the chair and looked at the ceiling. Her body, stretched out before me, seemed lost in a dream of its own power and beauty. I could have reached out and taken it, I thought, like a