Eighty Days Red Read Online Free PDF Page A

had helped him banish the ghost of Summer.
He was alone in the vast house again, left to his own devices.
It was just him and the blank document on the computer screen. He knew, with a wave of self-loathing, that as the day progressed he would studiously align a thousand words or so there but would in all probability end up deleting most of them by evening.
Dominik missed his lecturing and teaching. He now thought it could have been a bad mistake to renounce his tenure on the back of the unexpected success of the Paris novel in which the tragic heroine had been so clearly inspired by Summer.
He had signed a contract for a follow-up book, but he was already several months late and well behind on the schedule he had pinned on his study wall.
On one hand there was the inevitable pressure of coming up with something that might match the inspired romanticism of Summer’s book, as he now thought of it, but there was also the sad fact he had no proper ideas, and whatever came to mind he quickly dismissed as superficial or uninteresting. He needed a hook. A story. Characters. Surely he couldn’t recycle the emotions that Summer evoked over and over again. If only because it hurt so much.
Following the break with Summer and his rushed return from New York, he’d completed the first novel in a rush of white heat, pounding away at the keyboard with music blaring around the room: a studied blend of the classical repertoire he had often heard her perform and the French chansons and American jazz of the early 1950s that formed the background to his unfolding story. Now, he even had the luxury of playing some of the former music in recordings that Summer had released in the intervening months as her own career had taken off, but it was of no help. It even had the contrary effect – most days putting him in a blue funk hearing the soaring crystal-clear sounds of the Bailly in full flight which unavoidably evoked the shades of her skin, the dark colour of her nipples and, deep down in the well of his memory, the taste of her sex. Once it had inspired him, now all it could achieve was to deepen his depression, his sorrow.
He had acquired the CDs she had released, the first of which was a scintillating recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons , in which he could sense all her passion, her wild, wanton moods, but also her delicate sensitivity. He had read in a gossip column she was now shacked up with Simón Lobo, which had come as no surprise as he was the orchestra conductor on all of her recordings, and she had already been working with him in New York during the few short months Dominik and Summer had lived together in the Manhattan loft. The other CDs covered, respectively, the Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn violin concertos, while the final one, which he had only come across in a store window the previous month, was devoted to improvisations on South American native themes, again a far from unexpected connection.
The CD box for the latter album was sitting open on the far left of his desk, next to a pile of research-related books and folders full of magazine cuttings and assorted notes, most of which he could no longer even decipher as his handwriting was all over the place and hurried. A photograph of Summer was spread across its cover, her face in soft focus and a hint of bare shoulders, the red flames of her hair like a deafening explosion of colour against a snow-white background and the thin black strap of a dress which he couldn’t avoid recognising. The one he had bought her at the street fair on Waverly Place.
A wry thought passed his mind that in some stores where both books and records were available, some unknown buyer might accidentally purchase both his words and Summer’s music as part of the same transaction, unaware of the ties that had once held them together.
Dominik sighed heavily, as if for an audience, and knew his mood was unlikely to improve if he played music right now.
Silence it would have to be.
The cursor on his