Skinned Alive Read Online Free PDF Page B

must be a stylist in his own tongue.
    Sylvain was, in any event, more intrigued by Sister Julia’s vows than by Luke’s linguistic competence. He asked her right off how a pretty girl like her could give up sex.
    “But I’m not a girl,” she said. “I’m forty-six. This wimple is very handy,” she said with a trace of coquetry, “for covering up gray hair.”
    She was not at all like the stern, bushy-eyebrowed, downy-chinned nuns who’d taught Luke all the way through high school. When Sylvain asked her if she didn’t regret having never known a man—and here he even raised his muscular arms, smiled and stretched—she said quite simply, “But I was married. I know all about men.”
    She told them her father had been a composer, she’d grown up an Episcopalian in Providence, Rhode Island, she’d taught music theory at Brown and built harpsichords. Her religious vocation had descended on her swiftly, but she didn’t provide them with the conversion scene; she had little sense of the dramatic possibilities her life provided, or perhaps flattening out her own narrative was a penance for her. Nor was her theology orthodox. She believed in reincarnation. “Do you?” she asked them.
    “I’m an atheist,” Luke said. He’d never said that to a nunbefore, and he enjoyed saying it, even though Sister Julia wasn’t the sort to be shocked or even saddened by someone else’s lack of faith—she was blessed by the convert’s egotism. There was nothing dogmatic about her clear, fresh face, her pretty gray eyes, her way of leaning into the conversation and drinking it up nor her quick nods, sometimes at variance with the crease of doubt across her forehead. When she nodded and frowned at the same time, he felt she was disagreeing with his opinions but affirming him as a person.
    Sylvain appeared to be enjoying his two Americans. Luke and Sister Julia kept giving him the names and addresses of friends in the States to look up. “If you’re ever in Martha’s Vineyard, you must stay with Lucy. She’s just lost a lot of weight and hasn’t realized yet she’s become very beautiful,” the nun said. Luke gave him the names of two gay friends without mentioning they were gay—one in Boston, another in San Francisco. Of course Sylvain was heterosexual, that was obvious, but Luke knew his friends would get a kick out of putting up a handsome foreigner, the sort of blond who’s always slightly tan, the sort of man who looks at his own crotch when he’s listening and frames it with his hands when he’s replying. Certainly both Luke and the nun couldn’t resist overresponding even to Sylvain’s most casual remarks.
    When the flight attendant served them lunch, Sylvain asked her in his funny English where she was from. Then he asked, “Are all zee womens in Floride as charming like you?”
    She pursed her lips in smiling mock reproach as though he were being a naughty darling and said, “It’s a real nice state. France is nice, too. I’m going to learn French next. I studied Latin in high school.”
    Sister Julia said to Sylvain, “If you can speak English like that you won’t need more than a hundred dollars.”
    When they all said good-bye at the airport Luke was disappointed. He’d expected something more. Well, he had Sylvainsaddress, and if someday Luke returned to France he’d look him up. Ill as he was, Luke couldn’t bear the thought of never seeing France again, which suddenly seemed synonymous with some future rendezvous with Sylvain.
    Luke changed money and planes—this time for Dallas. He was getting pretty ill. He could feel it in the heaviness of his bones, in his extreme tiredness, and he almost asked a porter to carry his bags. He had just two hundred dollars with him—he was half as optimistic as Sylvain. He’d never had enough money, and now he worried he’d end up a charity case or, even worse, dependent on his family. He was terrified of having to call on the mercy of his