Image of the Beast and Blown Read Online Free PDF Page B

no prior-
ity. He did not intend to leave Sybil's number with the
police operator or Sergeant Bruin while he was with her.
She would get unreasonably angry about this. She did not
like to be interrupted by calls while she was with him, at
least, not by business calls. That had been one of the
things bugging her when they were man and wife. Theo-
retically, she should not be bothered by such matters
now. In practice, which operates more on emotion than
logic, she was as enraged as ever. He well knew how
enraged. The last time he had been at her apartment, the
exchange had interrupted them at a crucial moment, and
she had run him out. Since then, he had called several
times but had been cooled off. The last time he'd phoned
had been two weeks ago.
    She was right in one guess. He was hard up. But he
did not expect to be any less so after seeing her. He
intended to talk, to talk only, to soothe some troublings
and to scare away the loneliness that had come more
strongly after seeing the film of Colben.
    It was strange, or, if not so strange, indicative. He had
lived twenty of his thirty-five years in Los Angeles
County. Yet he knew only one woman to whom he could
really unburden himself and feel relaxed and certain of
complete understanding. No. He was wrong. There was
not even one woman, because Sybil did not completely
understand him, that is, sympathize with him. If she did,
she would not now be his ex-wife.
    But Sybil had said the same thing about men in
general and about him in particular. It was the human
situation —whatever that phrase meant.
    He parked the car in front of her apartment—no
trouble finding parking space now—and went into the lit-
tle lobby. He rang her bell; she buzzed; he went up the
steps through the inner door and down the hall to the
    end. Her door was on the right. He knocked; the door
swung open. Sybil was dressed in a floor-length morning
robe with large red and black diamond shapes. The black
diamonds contained white ankhs, the looped cross of the
ancient Egyptians. Her feet were bare.
    Sybil was thirty-four and five feet five inches tall. She
had long black hair, sharp black eyebrows, large green-
ish eyes, a slender straight nose perhaps a little bit too
long, a full mouth, a pale skin. She was pretty, and the
body under the kimono was well built, although she may
have been just a little too hippy for some tastes.
    Her apartment was light, like his, with much white
on the walls and ceilings, and creamy woodwork and
light and airy furniture. But a tall gloomy El Greco re-
production hung incongruously on the wall; it hovered
over everything said and done in the one room. Childe
always felt as if the elongated man on the cross was de-
livering judgment upon him as well as upon the city on
the plain.
    The painting was not as visible as usual. There was al-
most always a blue haze of tobacco—which accounted
for the walls and ceiling not being as white as those of
his apartment—and today the blue had become gray-
green. Sybil coughed as she lit another cigarette, and
then she went into a spasm of coughing and her face
became blue. He was not upset by this, no more than
usual, anyway. She had incipient emphysema and had
been advised by her doctor to chop off the smoking two
years ago. Certainly, the smog was accelerating her dis-
ease, but he could do nothing about it. Still, it was one
more cause for quarreling.
    She finally went into the kitchen for water and came
out several minutes later. Her expression was challenging,
but he kept his face smooth. He waited until she sat
down on the sofa across the room from his easy chair.
She ground the freshly lit cigarette out on an ash tray
and said, "Oh God! I can't breathe!"
    By which she meant that she could not smoke.
    "Tell me about Colben," she said, and then, "first,
could I get you ... ?"
    Her voice decayed. She was always forgetting that he
had quit drinking four years ago.
    "I need to relax," he said. "I'm all out of pot and no
chance to get