My Name Is Lucy Barton Read Online Free PDF Page A

and I was frantic, and he had me come in. The children were immediately quiet and very well behaved once we got inside his place, as though they knew no children were ever there, and in fact I had never seen children going into Jeremy’s apartment. Only a man or two, or sometimes a woman. The apartment was clean and spare: A stalk of purple iris was in a glass vase against a white wall, and there was art on the walls that made me understand then how far apart he and I were. I say this because I didn’t understand the art; they were dark and oblong pieces, almost-abstract-but-not-quite constructions, and I understood only that they were symptoms of a sophisticated world I could never understand. Jeremy was uncomfortable having my family in his place, I could sense that, but he was an exquisite gentleman, and this was why I loved him so.
    —
    Three things about Jeremy:
    I was standing one day on the front stoop, and as he came out of the building I said, “Jeremy, sometimes when I stand here, I can’t believe I’m really in New York City. I stand here and think, Whoever would have guessed? Me! I’m living in the City of New York!”
    And a look went across his face—so fast, so involuntary—that was a look of real distaste. I had not yet learned the depth of disgust city people feel for the truly provincial.
    —
    The second thing about Jeremy: I had my first story published right after I moved to New York, and then it was a while, and my second story was published. On the steps one day, Chrissie told this to Jeremy. “Mommy got a story in a magazine!” He turned to look at me; he looked at me deeply; I had to look away. “No, no,” I said. “Just a silly little really small literary magazine.” He said, “So—you’re a writer. You’re an artist. I work with artists, I know. I guess I’ve always known that about you.”
    I shook my head. I thought of the artist from college, his knowledge of himself, his ability to forgo children.
    Jeremy sat down beside me on the stoop. “Artists are different from other people.”
    “No. They’re not.” My face flushed. I had always been different; I did not want to be any more different!
    “But they are.” He tapped my knee. “You must be ruthless, Lucy.”
    Chrissie jumped up and down. “It’s a sad story,” she said. “I can’t read yet—I can read
some
words—but it’s a sad story.”
    “May I read it?” Jeremy asked me this.
    I said no.
    I told him I could not bear it if he didn’t like it. He nodded and said, “Okay, I won’t ask again. But, Lucy,” he said, “you talk to me a lot, and I can’t imagine reading anything by you that I wouldn’t like.”
    I remember clearly that he said “ruthless.” He did not seem ruthless, and I did not think I was or could be ruthless. I loved him; he was gentle.
    He told me to be ruthless.
    —
    One more thing about Jeremy: The AIDS epidemic was new. Men walked the streets, bony and gaunt, and you could tell they were sick with this sudden, almost biblical-seeming plague. And one day, sitting on the stoop with Jeremy, I said something that surprised me. I said, after two such men had just walked slowly by, “I know it’s terrible of me, but I’m almost jealous of them. Because they have each other, they’re tied together in a real community.” And he looked at me then, and with real kindness on his face, and I see now that he recognized what I did not: that in spite of my plenitude, I was lonely. Lonely was the first flavor I had tasted in my life, and it was always there, hidden inside the crevices of my mouth, reminding me. He saw this that day, I think. And he was kind. “Yes” is all he said. He could easily have said, “Are you crazy, they’re dying!” But he did not say that, because he understood that loneliness about me. This is what I want to think. This is what I think.

I n one of those clothing shops New York is famous for, one of those places privately owned and sort of like the art