Cain’s Book Read Online Free PDF

the time and the place. The thought of an evening
with her in her present mood was stifling. Tom’s voice, because he had been sensitive to the tone of Moira’s, was apologetic, almost wheedling. “Don’t be so fucking
sorry,” I said to him, watching her overhear. “Where’ll I meet you?” A place at Sheridan Square in half an hour’s time. I put down the telephone. Moira was pouring
coffee.
    I had to say something. I said: “Look, Moira, I know what I’m doing.”
    “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said dully.
    And we didn’t. I wanted to explain and not to explain. At the same time I considered her attitude impertinent. I drank my coffee and left.
    Fay was with Tom. Tom made the run alone and Fay and I walked over together to his place from Sheridan Square. We walked quickly so as to get there by the time he returned with
the heroin.
    “It’s going to be good, baby,” Fay said.
    The room has a low sloping ceiling with two small windows on one side and a fireplace with a raised brick hearth in an opposite corner, at the far end of the adjacent side. Sometimes Tom Tear
burnt a few sticks in the grate and we sat with our knees at the level of the fire which cast shadows on the dirty ceiling and walls and on the bricks of the fireplace, the three of us on a small,
backless couch spread over with a fawn blanket, looking into the fire, Fay in the centre, still wearing her moth-eaten fur coat, her arms folded, her head sunk on her chest, her slightly bulbous,
yellowish eyes closed. We sat there after we had fixed and watched wood burn. The white boxwood burnt quickly. Tom Tear leant forward and added a few sticks to the blaze. He is a tall man in his
late twenties, lean, with a beautiful, pale, lean face expressionless often as porcelain, the nose long, the eyes half-closed and heavily lidded under the drug.
    I also am tall. I was wearing my heavy white seaman’s jersey with a high polo neck, and I sensed that the angularity of my face – big nose, high cheekbones, sunken eyes – was
softened by the shadows and smoothed – the effect of the drug – out of its habitual nervousness. My eyes were closed. My elbows rested on my thighs and my hands were clasped in front of
me. Tom Tear is a Negro who sometimes speaks dreamily of the West Indies.
    At that moment I felt impelled to speak and I said: “My father had false teeth.”
    I was aware that I flashed a quick, intimate glance first at Tom, across Fay’s line of vision, and then, turning my head slightly, I caught the glint of appraisal in her pale protruding
eyes.
    “Yes,” I said, and my face grew radiant, encouraging them to listen, “he had yellow dentures.”
    Tom’s teeth – they are long and yellowish and give his mouth a look of bone – were clenched in a tight smile, the pale lips falling away, exposing them. It was almost a mask of
ecstasy,
part of the game
, I might have said in some contexts, in some rooms.
    Fay’s face was more reserved. Swinish? More like a pug than a pig. Her untidy dark hair tumbled into her big fur collar. A yellow female pigdog, her face in its warm nest beginning to stir
with knowing.
    “He was outside in the hall, spying on the lodgers,” I said. “My father was a born quisling, and he had false teeth.”
    Tom Tear’s face was patient and serene. The flicker of the fire stirred in the sparse black stubble on his lower face, making the hairs glint.
    I went on for the friendly silence: “While he was in the hall his false teeth were squatting like an octopus in a glass of water on the kitchen dresser. The plates were a dark-orange brick
colour and the teeth were like discoloured piano keys. They seemed to breathe at the bottom of the glass. The water was cloudy and tiny bubbles clung to the teeth. That was the kitchen where we
lived, and they sat there like a breathing eye, watching us.”
    Fay’s bluish lips had fallen apart in a smile. She made a grunt of understanding through her