Paint It Black Read Online Free PDF

a heart condition.”
    And a leaf came spinning out of the trees and landed in his dark cropped curls. Yellow. Why could she remember that, and he couldn’t remember their whole life together, couldn’t remember one damn thing?
    And she’d asked, “What about his father?” Not realizing what caves were burrowed in every lapse.
    “Dead,” Michael had said. “He was epileptic, subject to rages. One day his brain just burst. The boy found him on the study floor, blood pouring out of his ears.” He sketched, his hand moving boldly across the pad, making these eucalyptuses, these pittosporums.
    A sad house. She knew it even then.
    “Want to see it? Come on. They won’t mind.” He picked up his portfolio, and held out his own hand. She hesitated, but could not resist, she had never seen a house like this. He took her hand and pulled her from the water in one swift movement. He was so strong. She hadn’t imagined that from looking at his tall, lanky, lazy body. Behind him loomed the silent bulk of the house, the brooding eyes of its windows. She dried herself off with her dress before putting it back on, slipped her feet into her shoes. He found the key under the mat.
    With its old-fashioned hexagonal black and white tiles the big kitchen was a disappointment, a sink with the built-in washboard and a faucet that came right out of the wall. Not at all elegant. China piled up to the ceiling on sagging shelves inside glass-fronted cabinets. The house had an odd scent, like floor polish and cedar and mothballs. In the dining room hung a chandelier bagged in muslin like a cluster of bees suspended over a vast lake of table. A silver tea service gathered dust on the sideboard, and she remembered thinking,
Maybe cleanliness was just middle-class.
How would she know, she grew up on a tow yard in Bakersfield.
    The living room, down three steps. All that fragrant wood under enormous, worn-out Oriental rugs. At the end, a piano gleamed. Black and long as a pickup truck. “Which one plays?”
    “They both do,” Michael said. “They play music for four hands.”
    Deaf-mutes playing songs for four hands that neither of them could hear.
    Under the sweep of stairs, a room paneled in dark red leather lay hidden. She had never seen anything like that. Like a womb. Against the walls, stretching from floor to ceiling, bookcases bore elegant leather-bound volumes. She pulled one out. It was filled with music, but not the way it was usually written, just single lines down the page—
2
Flöten,
2
Oboen,
2
Klarinetten in B.
Notes in the margins.
    “The father’s room,” Michael said. “He died, right there on the rug.”
    Someone had died there, but not the father. The house was nothing but
ming,
with its great sweep of staircase, iron railed, floored in stone. She’d run her hand along the strange sponginess of the curved stucco wall, it was as if the house had grown there, like a fungus after rain. He’d opened the door at the head of the stairs, let her in first. “This is his room.” The boy’s.
    It was decorated like the library of a monastery. No rug on the wooden floor, a trestle desk, a narrow iron cot guarded by a primitive painted Madonna and made up with a coarse gray blanket woven with a single red stripe. And books. All the books, tattered and whole, tall leather-bound ones and paperbacks, vertical and horizontal. “Lucky he’s deaf and not blind,” she’d said, teasing him. After all, how would a crippled boy climb all those stairs? But she understood, even lies could be true, if you knew how to listen.
    They moved through the French doors into the crippled boy’s studio. Where he was supposed to have been.
I need the space, Josie, try to understand.
    But she didn’t understand. She didn’t. Maybe it was the voddy and the Percocets and maybe she was just stupid but she didn’t. Maybe she was blind and mute and deaf and falling in the darkness, but she didn’t. He was finally working again, they were good