Found in the Street Read Online Free PDF

suitcase in the bedroom, undid the latches without lifting the lid. His heart was beating with a gentle and pleasant excitement. How’s your work going? Jack had to smile. Half the time she didn’t care, Jack felt. His work was just his way of amusing himself and maybe of earning a little money, he supposed, in Natalia’s eyes. She thought some of his drawings were clever, but she was more interested in painting, needed to look at good art to stay alive, as if art were her vitamins or sunlight. Jack was not a fine artist. And for another thing, she didn’t need his money, he well knew.
    Natalia came out of the bathroom in her yellow terry-cloth robe that had been hanging on the door, blue fluffy houseslippers, her hair darker around her face, as Amelia’s had been yesterday, and Jack averted his eyes, simply because he felt like gazing at her. Natalia detested slavish devotion, he reminded himself, even laughed at it.
    â€œI might help Isabel out a little next week,” Natalia said, recovering her drink from the coffee table. “She’s got a Pinto show coming up.” She sipped. “And he’s a pain in the you-know-what.—You know?”
    â€œUm-m.” Jack recalled Natalia’s tales of the nervous but self­assured Pinto, a newcomer from Brazil with a couple of shows behind him in Amsterdam and Paris. “When is this?”
    â€œThe show? In about a week.—I’ll just help her hang and stuff. And she’ll pay me something—which I can always use. We can, I mean.” She laughed a little on the word “use.”
    â€œSo she’s dumping Pinto on you?” Jack’s voice held contempt, for Pinto.
    â€œTwenty-six years old and thinks he’s it.’’ She lit a cigarette. “Well, he isn’t rotten. It’s—” She shrugged. “He just isn’t good.”
    Jack knew. It was a matter of getting some good reviews and getting his price up, Natalia might have said. Jack remembered Pinto’s stuff, the couple he had seen reproduced in a brochure Natalia had shown him, reddish backgrounds and a lot of gray silvery circles of various sizes daubed on in what looked like heavy paint.
    â€œMight go on into the fall—Isabel,” Natalia added.
    Jack knew, and in a way he was pleased. Natalia had worked at Isabel Katz’s gallery before. She made a good receptionist, and could even sell pictures, and had. Natalia looked nice, she had pleasant manners, and a pushy saleswoman she was not. “Are you possibly hungry?”
    â€œI bet you are. What’ve we got?”
    â€œSliced roast beef? And horseradish?”
    â€œYummy!” She danced on her toes and rubbed her stomach, like a child.
    They laid out the cold things together, and there was also some ham and potato salad left over, and fresh French bread bought this morning. A sweet breeze blew through the open front windows all the way to the back of the apartment where windows were also partly open, and where green tops of trees showed higher than the sills. Jack had poured a glass of Chianti for himself, and Natalia had another scotch. She looked happier now, and a trace of color had come to her rather pale face. Natalia never made an effort to acquire a tan in summer. And she was looking sleepier by the minute.
    Jack buttered a last piece of bread for himself. “I lost my wallet Wednesday evening, and a man returned it to me. Everything there, all the dough, credit cards, everything.”
    Her eyes widened with interest. “Lost it where?”
    â€œRight in front of the house. On the street. I’m sure just after I’d paid off a taxi—about five-thirty in the afternoon. Anyway an hour or so later after I’d missed it and was agonizing, thinking about the credit cards—no, the photos, pictures of you, in fact—the telephone rang, sort of an old guy’s voice, asking if I was so-and-so and had I lost anything.