Don't Move Read Online Free PDF Page A

door, took the gum out of her mouth, stuck it to the key, and pressed the whole wad back into place over the door. While she was stretched out like that, I looked at her exposed armpit—not shaved, but not bushy, either. Just a tuft of long, fine hairs, plastered together by sweat.
    A diagonal beam of sunlight cut through the air inside the room. That was the first thing that struck me, together with a mixture of odors that reminded me of a house in the country: the smell of soot, overlaid by the sour tang of bleach and rat poison. The room was square, with a coffee-colored stone floor. On the far wall was a fireplace like a big sorry black mouth. The interior of the room was dignified and orderly, though somewhat indistinct because the light came from a single window. The shutters were set ajar, and one of the columns of the viaduct showed through the opening. Three Swedish-style chairs were pushed under a table covered by a patterned oilcloth. Next to this was an open door, through which I could glimpse a kitchen cupboard with an imitation-cork veneer. She said, “I’ll put the milk in the refrigerator,” and stepped into the kitchen.
    She had claimed to have a telephone. I looked for it in vain on a low table with an ashtray in the shape of a seashell, on a lacquered chest of drawers littered with knickknacks, on an old couch rejuvenated by a cloth covering with a floral design. I noticed a poster hanging on the wall. It was a studio photograph, artificially lit and decorated with little plastic umbrellas, and it captured for posterity a monkey wearing a baby’s cap and holding a baby’s bottle.
    She came back quickly. “The telephone’s over there, in the bedroom,” she said, gesturing at a curtain made of plastic strips right behind my back.
    “Thanks,” I murmured, looking at this bit of barroom decor and once again fearing an ambush. She smiled, revealing a row of small defective teeth.
    On the other side of the curtain was a narrow room almost entirely occupied by a double bed with no headboard and a tobacco-colored bedspread. A crucifix, slightly askew, hung against the wallpaper. The telephone was on the floor, sitting next to its baseboard jack. I picked up the receiver, sat on the bed, and dialed Elsa’s number. In my mind, I followed the ringing of the phone as it penetrated the beach house. It ran over the coconut-fiber rug in the living room, climbed up the bright stairs to the second floor, entered the large bathroom with the mirror fragments set into the indigo blue plaster, brushed over the linen sheets of the still-unmade bed, over the desk piled high with books, drifted through the gauze curtains into the garden and over to the pergola, which was overgrown with white jasmine blossoms, then to the hammock, and then to my old pith helmet with the rusty eyelets; but there was no response. Maybe Elsa was swimming, or maybe she’d already come out of the water. I thought about her body, stretched out on the beach, and about the water licking at her legs. The telephone was ringing away, unheard. I ran my hand over the chenille bedspread, and at the same time I spotted a pair of worn fuchsia slippers tucked under a cheap-looking dresser. Leaning on the mirror was the photograph of a young man, obviously taken long ago. I felt uncomfortable in that room, sitting on a stranger’s bed, in the sleeping quarters of the deranged clown who was waiting for me a few feet away. One of the dresser drawers was partly open, revealing a swatch of red satin. Almost without noticing it, I slipped a hand into the crack and touched the slippery fabric. The clown’s face poked through the plastic strips.
    “Would you like some coffee?”
    I sat down on the sofa in front of the monkey poster. Something in my throat was bothering me; it felt dry and grainy. I gazed around me, and that modest setting seemed to augment my physical discomfort. On a bookshelf, a porcelain doll holding a sheer parasol pressed her frightened