In Between Days Read Online Free PDF

especially when her friends were over, and she’d laughed. To have her body laid out like that for everyone to see, he’d said, what would they think? She had told him that they were all artists and that they wouldn’t think anything, and that had been the end of that. But now, as he looks at the painting, he wonderswhy he’d ever cared so much. The figure itself barely resembles her. It’s a crude rendering at best. He leans back in his chair and considers this.
    “How do you like your tea?” Elise says to Elson, turning around and taking the kettle off the stove. “With cream? Sugar?”
    “I think I’ll just stick with what I’m having,” Elson says, nodding toward the gin and tonic on the table that he’s just made for himself.
    Lorna looks at the drink, perhaps noticing it for the first time, then at Elson.
    They have a rule lately, or rather, she has a rule: no more than two drinks a night. A rule implemented after Elson drove his car into one of her neighbors’ trash cans and spilled half of its contents onto the street. But Lorna doesn’t know about the Brunswick Hotel or the two drinks Elson has had earlier, so for all intents and purposes, this is really his first. His first real drink anyway. The other two were starter drinks, what his wife would have called
relaxers
. And besides, he thinks, his daughter just got expelled from college, right? Didn’t that warrant a drink?
    He leans back in his chair and stares at the two women.
    “So, I meant to congratulate you,” Elise says as she and Lorna sit down at the table with their tea. “For that building you just built. That music building over at Rice. It’s lovely.” She smiles at him. “I understand you had a hand in that.”
    “Oh no,” Elson says. “Not really.” He picks up his drink and sips it. “They had me on it at first, but then they took me off.”
    “Oh,” Elise says, looking down.
    “It’s not that uncommon,” Elson continues, trying to recover. “Happens all the time in a big firm like ours. They think they want you on one thing, and then they decide they want you on something else. There’s a lot of moving around, you know, a lot of reshuffling.”
    Elise nods. “I’m sure,” she says. “I can imagine.”
    The truth was, it did happen all the time in a big firm like theirs. People were always being moved around, reshuffled. But it was also true that this had been happening to Elson more and more often lately. He had been reassigned twice in the past month alone, and when he had made a formal complaint about it to one of the partners, Ted Sullivan, Ted had told him not to worry about it, that they’d soon put him on something else, something better, which of course they never did. What Ted didn’t tell him, and what Elson knew to be the truth, was that they nolonger cared for his aesthetic. They felt he’d gone too far, that his buildings were too severe, too cold. There had been some complaints among some of the clients as well. One of them, a very famous movie actor, who had actually requested that Elson design his house, had threatened to sue the firm after seeing the final product. He claimed that the house itself had caused emotional distress in his marriage, that his wife had cried when she’d seen it, and that it wasn’t the type of place where a normal human being could raise children. Never mind that Elson had won a prestigious national award in the late seventies that had brought in more recognition, and more clients, to the firm than ever before. Never mind that one of the first buildings he’d ever built, a small Presbyterian church on the outskirts of Houston, was still being used in graduate classrooms as a model of formal simplicity. Never mind that half of the interns who worked there had listed him as their number one reason for choosing Sullivan & Gordon. None of that mattered anymore. What mattered now were profits. The bottom line. And none of his buildings were bringing in profits anymore,