Idiots First Read Online Free PDF Page A

own.”
    I went that night in a cab to her brother’s house to see her. He was a quiet man with a thin mustache. “She gone,” he said, “left for a long visit to some close relatives in the South. She said to tell you she appreciate your intentions but didn’t think it will work out.”
    â€œThank you kindly,” I said.
    Don’t ask me how I got home.
    Once on Eighth Avenue, a couple of blocks from my store, I saw a blind man with a white cane tapping on the sidewalk. I figured we were going in the same direction so I took his arm.
    â€œI can tell you’re white,” he said.
    A heavy colored woman with a full shopping bag rushed after us.
    â€œNever mind,” she said, “I know where he live.”
    She pushed me with her shoulder and I hurt my leg on the fire hydrant.
    That’s how it is. I give my heart and they kick me in my teeth.
    â€œCharity Sweetness—you hear me?—come out of that goddamn toilet!”

STILL LIFE
    Months after vainly seeking a studio on the vie Margutta, del Babuino, della Croce, and elsewhere in that neighborhood, Arthur Fidelman settled for part of a crowded, windowy, attic-like atelier on a cobblestone street in the Trastevere, strung high with sheets and underwear. He had, a week before, in “personal notices” in the American language newspaper in Rome, read: “Studio to share, cheap, many advantages, etc., A. Oliovino,” and after much serious anguish (the curt advertisement having recalled dreams he had dreamed were dead), many indecisions, enunciations and renunciations, Fidelman had, one very cold late-December morning, hurried to the address
given, a worn four-story building with a yellowish façade stained brown along the edges. On the top floor, in a thickly cluttered artist’s studio smelling aromatically of turpentine and oil paints, the inspiring sight of an easel lit in unwavering light from the three large windows setting the former art student on fire once more to paint, he had dealt not with a pittore, as expected, but with a pittrice, Annamaria Oliovino.
    The pittrice, a thin, almost gaunt, high-voiced, restless type, with short black uncombed hair, violet mouth, distracted eyes and tense neck, a woman with narrow buttocks and piercing breasts, was in her way attractive if not in truth beautiful. She had on a thick black woolen sweater, eroded black velveteen culottes, black socks, and leather sandals spotted with drops of paint. Fidelman and she eyed each other stealthily and he realized at once she was, as a woman, indifferent to him or his type, who or which made no difference. But after ten minutes, despite the turmoil she exuded even as she dispassionately answered his hesitant questions, the art student, ever a sucker for strange beauty and all sorts of experiences, felt himself involved with and falling for her. Not my deep dish, he warned himself, aware of all the dangers to him and his renewed desire to create art; yet he was already half in love with her. It can’t be, he thought in desperation; but it could. It had happened to him before. In her presence he tightly shut both eyes and wholeheartedly wished against what might be. Really he trembled, and though he labored to extricate his fate from hers, he was already a plucked bird, greased, and ready for frying. Fidelman protested within—cried out severely against the weak
self, called himself ferocious names but could do not much, a victim of his familiar response, a too passionate fondness for strangers. So Annamaria, who had advertised a twenty thousand lire monthly rental, in the end doubled the sum, and Fidelman paid through both nostrils, cash for first and last months (should he attempt to fly by night) plus a deposit of ten thousand for possible damages. An hour later he moved in with his imitation leather suitcase. This happened in the dead of winter. Below the cold sunlit windows stood two frozen umbrella pines and