Paint It Black Read Online Free PDF Page B

again, it was good. He’d been so cheerful. He loved her, they were going to give it a chance. It was just going to be a few days.
    She could see it so clearly, him in that studio, the windows opening onto trees through their rusty screens. His orderly worktable, cans full of brushes. That smell of turpentine and linseed oil, a canvas on the big easel, as it had been that day, when she’d tried to peek under but he stopped her, smoothing the tarp. “He’s an artist too, the deaf boy?”
    “He’d like to be,” Michael said, turning his back to her. “But he hasn’t the confidence. He’s afraid he’ll never be great.”
    Try to understand.
    “Does it matter so much?”
    He straightened the charcoal twigs that were already straight. “It’s the only thing he’s really suited for.” Flicked the tip of a brush in the coffee can, running his thumb over the clean bristles. “If he can’t do that, then why exist.”
    “As long as he likes to do it, what difference does it make? He’s just got to do it, and fuck what people think,” she said. “Otherwise it’ll get all twisted up inside.” Brushing her cheeks with a fan-shaped brush, like she was putting on makeup. “We had this neighbor, once. He’d been crippled in Vietnam. He used to get drunk and sit on the porch in his wheelchair and pretend to shoot you.”
    Michael smiled, looking down at the art supplies, so fastidiously arranged. “I heard you have to have a permit.”
    And here she’d thought he was someone who could see. She could feel the disappointment in her mouth, it tasted like dirty nickels. “It wasn’t funny. He was imagining blowing your head off.” That asshole’s house, bottles on the porch, the broken panes repaired with newspaper and duct tape. The sound of his laughter when he “got” you. Her brothers threw dogshit on his porch, so it would get in the wheels of his chair and then onto his carpet. “He wanted to kill you, don’t you see? He wanted to. If he’d had a gun he would have.”
    Michael shook off the smile then, dark eyebrows knitting over pale green eyes. Now he was listening, now she knew she could trust him. She picked up a sketchbook, started to open it, but he pulled it away. “Please don’t, Josie.”
    Jo-cee. No one else ever said it like that, they always said Jozee. She let him have the sketchpad when he asked. She might have teased him over it, allowing it to bring them over the line to touching, to kissing, but she’d never been with a boy like Michael before, it made everything different. She’d only gone with boys like her brothers, they’d share some Olde English 800 and cheap reefer with you and tear your clothes, too mean to undo the buttons. Nick Nitro’d been a god by comparison. But this, this was altogether new, and made her unsure. Putting her hand to his cheek, his scratchy beard, she drew his face down to hers. He was trembling. She felt like she was the boy and he was the girl and that gave her courage. She might not have gone to college but she knew about this, how to press against a boy, wake him up.
    That kiss. Sewn on her body, stitched into her skin.
    “Show me what to do,” he whispered. “Show me what you want.”
    She led him to the narrow iron priest’s bed. The way he looked at her as she unbuttoned her dress made her tremble too. She ran her hands under his jacket, over his jeans, he was more than ready.
    “Wait,” he said. “Come with me.” He took her hand and led her down the hall to the last door. The blinds were drawn, stale air suffused with a smoky perfume. He opened the drapes, cranked open the old-fashioned windows. An astonishing room. Luxurious, feminine, all blue and white, its antique white furniture with burnished gold trim. He turned down the bed to reveal blue sheets with white piping, shed his clothes, all but the white shapeless underwear, the kind her mother bought her brothers in packages of twelve, and slid in. Lying on the pillows, his bony