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

salmon canapés and grilled shrimp at openings, the subway was dirty and dangerous, men masturbating and muttering to themselves behind pillars in stations garishly lit and tiled like big filthy Turkish baths. Now the subway was cleaner and less frightening and more people seemed to use it, at least if you judged by those who rhapsodized about how practical it was at parties that belied the rhapsodies because the street outside was choked with black cars, their hired drivers standing at the curb, drumming their fingers on the hoods.
    The city is unkind to those with overdrafts, although it has long been their ancestral home. It is most comfortable for people who never have to think of what to spend because there is always more where that came from. Rebecca was now no longer one of those people. She had become someone who sees a plate of free scones as a windfall, someone worrying about what the charge would be for shooting a critter in her crawl space.
    She had made a deal with herself: she would live here, in exile, until she could afford to return to that old New York. How this was to be effected, she had absolutely no idea. At the doctor’s she had read an article about the fact that women over fifty began to obsess about mortality, and she knew this to be true. There was a certain tone of voice she had heard often in the city, at lunch or at a party, a lowered tone for the friend of a friendwho had had a terrible diagnosis, who had so little time left to live, or who had just died. Rebecca actually thought very little about dying, but she thought about money constantly. She was afraid she was going to live forever, impoverished, her career a footnote in a dissertation that no one even read.

KNEW IT WHEN SHE SAW IT
    Rebecca liked knowing what would happen next, and even in this strange place she began to impose order. She’d done it when she’d done stints abroad, studying art in Florence, living with Peter for a visiting semester in Rome. It had been almost like a printed itinerary, her routine: the campo for coffee at ten, the museum between eleven and two, the late lunch, the hour of exploration.
    She began to do it here, too. The disarray in the rented cottage dismayed her. Old paperbacks that had lost their midsections, Ball jars without lids, random keys pushed to the backs of drawers. In New York, when Rebecca found an orphaned key, she used it in every lock in the apartment. If it fit none of them, she tossed it in the trash, although sometimes she photographed it first. In a rented house she did not feel free to do thesame, but she did put all the keys in one of the Ball jars, and put the most mangled books into a box beneath the bed. She regretted the possessions she had left behind her, the big down comforter, the firm pillows, the collected Shakespeare she had always promised herself she would read someday, the cast-iron frying pan that had seen her through graduate school, marriage, and countless breakfasts for Ben. That frying pan signified home, comfortable, dependable, substantial, well-seasoned. There were two frying pans here, one tiny, one enormous, both flimsy.
    At least she had begun to develop a routine for her day. The tearoom opened at six in the morning and had a wireless connection, so she started there. Sarah’s Scone of the Week and a double espresso. As soon as she opened the computer Sarah would mime zipping her lips and disappear into the back, the timpani of paddle mixers and oven doors breaking the silence. On her computer screen dispatches appeared as though from another world: she was invited to an opening for new work by Iris Cohen, who had early on been described as the new Rebecca Winter but who had now come out and moved on, currently to photographs of tattoos. Dorothea wanted to come and visit before she left for her teaching fellowship, insensible of the conditions in the cottage. Ben was working as a grip on a film shooting in Queens and on Long Island. “Hooray!” she