Love Doesn't Work Read Online Free PDF Page B

wide-open, more in amazement than terror.
    Then, as he moved in closer, he recognized Linda’s features, so familiar yet out of reach.
    Even as she fell, she grew aware of him and looked over with a hurt, disappointed expression. There was a finality there, a realization that nothing could be changed.
    Harold understood that he had created the bottomless hole, and now his Linda would be falling forever.

Love Doesn’t Work
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    MY WORLD IS LIMITATION, HAS BEEN LIMITATION FROM BEGINNING TO END. I’ve gotten used to it. The first time I saw a woman naked I looked at her and thought, “My God, it’s not what I thought!” And when I went to the obligatory places for the first time—Venice, Paris, Barcelona—they struck me as self-conscious arenas designed for the tourist to come and buy a postcard. Consumed, empty theatres.
    At any rate, when I woke in the morning in my friend’s house, I wasn’t prepared for the utter brilliance of it all. He had bought acres of derelict houses in a tumbledown medieval town in Sardinia, then somehow managed to persuade the authorities to let him knock them all together and build a big white pod that dwarfed everything else in the town.
    All his architectural ideas were invested in that building.
    There were stark concrete terraces with overhanging Tibetan eaves and carved dragon’s heads; arrangements of terracotta pots with flowering plants; teak decking; plunge pools of fragrant juniper wood imported from Finland; a library with built-in bookcases; a secret door to the music room; a snooker room where the green baize of the table was always brushed, the symmetrical polished balls pristine as a Derbyshire tea-set; overlooked by a donnish bar stocked with every conceivable malt whisky, behind it a vulgar touristic map in the background, framed in dark wood, displaying “The Great Whiskies of the Auld Country.”
    “How the heck did you get planning permission for this?” I asked him, and he laughed with that anything-can-be-done expression of the land of his birth, California.
    “Never ever ask an architect how he swung the fucking planning application,” he oozed, almost breaking into an oily sweat at the thought of his triumph. “If against your better judgment you do ask, don’t have any illusions about getting the truth, because you won’t get it.” Before I could respond, he added: “You know, sometimes decay works in your favor. I told them this street would fall down if nothing was done. My builders saved fifteen houses adjoining this building.”
    “So that’s the truth, then?”
    “Plus I offered an anonymous donation to the municipality.”
    “If you have money there are no problems, only solutions.”
    There was something petulant in my voice when I said that. I was a penniless Londoner, flown in to visit my big-shot friend. He had always approved of me, said I was a “genuine phoney,” a phrase he stole from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. He’s not concerned with originality, he’s a straight-talking Jimmy from Sacramento and nothing ever went wrong in his life.
    “That’s not quite true. Money is simplistic, kind of like a lens. If you have money you’re looking through one lens, and if you don’t you’re looking through another. But neither is true.”
    “That’s profound, Jimmy. Profound. But I still don’t understand what the hell possessed you to live here. What do you do here? Don’t you get bored?”
    “Bored? Sure I get bored. I get bored anywhere, Chuck. Boredom …” he muttered, frowning as his sluggish brain-cells dug into the problem, “…is the human condition. That’s why I’m into form, and structure, and startling buildings. We need all that, we need beauty, Chuck. Or we’re fucking finished.”
    We were sitting on a terrace outside his library, an incredible number of swifts and swallows darting over the tiled roofs below us, screaming as they tumbled with great daring through the air. To make things even more scenic, we were