Still Life With Bread Crumbs: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

Counter series sold and sold and sold and sold.
    “Please, leave the dishes. My wife will be immortalizing them once you’ve left,” her husband used to say to great hilarity during dinner parties, considerably less pleased with her success than Rebecca had hoped. It had taken her a few years to realize that Peter was an angry man, in the fashion of men who had dreamed a big future for themselves and then had not seen it materialize. That it had somehow materialized for his wife did their marriage no favors. “Well, what did you expect?” her mother said when she complained about that after the divorce.
    Ironically, great success made Rebecca less and less sure of herself, until everything she produced, even the successful things she produced, seemed like something she’d done before. Over the years it became commonplace for her to orient an image in the frame and have it feel like plagiarism. “Back to the future,” TG rasped, speaking in aphorisms as though her words were for sale and a client like Rebecca would get only so many. But she couldn’t go back and do what she’d done before. Her son outgrew his quiescent babyhood, her marriage came to asudden, almost inevitable end in a blizzard of adultery, abandonment, and unacknowledged anger and envy on the part of her husband. There was no longer any dinner party detritus, no baby boy.
    It has its own momentum, success. It far outstrips its particular moment. A writer who has written one great novel can go to parties twenty years later and still be treated like a literary celebrity of sorts. But Rebecca understood that novelist’s secret in a way the party guests did not: the coin of notoriety pays with less and less interest as time goes by. She knew this because several years before, she had realized that she was bringing in very little money although her expenses had not shrunk but grown. Until finally the best plan she could come up with was renting out one place dear, renting another place cheap, and trying to do some work that would let her ditch the second and go back to the first.
    She should have been used to the reversal of fortune; she’d been born into a family that had had plenty of money, until one day it turned out they didn’t.
    It is terrible, being poor in New York, or at least that was what she’d heard, although the sum total of her exposure was a requirement in high school that resulted in the collection of canned goods at holiday time, which is how Christmas is referred to in a city with so many Jews, Muslims, atheists, and liberals.
    Rebecca knew very well that she did not know about being poor in the city or anywhere else, but she had certainly learned about not having enough money, which is different from being poor. Passing on restaurant lunches because the check would be split and there were certain of her acquaintances who thought nothing of a hundred-dollar meal. Agreeing only to dinners at which she knew somebody’s husband would prove his manhood by slamming his palm and his platinum Amex on the discreet little silver tray. Arriving at dinner parties not with wine or flowers but with a small photograph in a plain frame—but signed! Signed! A genuine Rebecca Winter!
    And in return she might receive a warm email from her wealthy hostess: they are taking a place in Italy for September, the sunflowers will be astonishing, the vines drooping and dusty beneath the weight of the black pearl grapes, all crying out to be photographed, as though they hadn’t been photographed so often that they are postcards, plaques, staples of the narrow gaudy tourist shops of Siena and Montalcino. Oh, she always says, I would love to but I can’t get away, when what she means is, oh, I would love to, but the airfare. How will I pay the airfare?
    She had taken to riding the subway again, telling herself how much quicker it was than sitting in a taxi stalled in traffic. She was lucky, she guessed. When she had been young, going to art school, cadging