Sweet Water Read Online Free PDF Page A

times. Swinging shut the iron gate out front, walking in the sun or wind or rain and descending into darkness, tokens, the smell of urine. On the subway folding screens—the
Daily News,
the
Times
—hid blank faces the shades of New York: boredom, mistrust, ennui.
    As the clock struck nine we’d be open for business, for pleasure. Hot Brazilian coffee and bagels delivered by Julio, tip included. Inventory. Phone calls. Mail: exhibition at the Sonnabend Gallery, opening at Elena’s; the Philadelphia Museum requesting a piece for its collection, but the artist and his work were nowhere to be found.
    Time would speed up for a deadline, quickly slow down again: the clock would strike one and it’d be time for lunch. Adam seducing a collector on the phone in the office, me eating turkey on rye, reading the
Voice.
As the day heated into afternoon, Adam might leave for a late lunch with a dealer, and suddenly the gallery would be full: twelve Japanese tourists who speak no English and want to take pictures of the pictures; a couple with three little children; two skinheads who tell me they’re from Milwaukee. A headache pounding against my brain. Three o’clock. Four. Adam would return smelling of bourbon and cigarettes.
    Evening overpowered afternoon. Long shadows would fall across the butcher block as we shuffled papers, locked the office, straightened the desk. At seven the street was eerily deserted, trash dancing across the gutter. At eight I’d be in the White Horse Tavern with Drew, nursing a seltzer with lime.
    The silence consumed me like a parasite, making me high-strung and nervous. Nothing was happening. Tomorrow would be the same. In the bar I’d eat a bowl of olives and watch the lights come on. Nine o’clock. Ten. Then we’d be out on the street: perhaps nowit was raining. I wouldn’t have my umbrella. My hair would be plastered down in strips around my face. The rain would be soft, radioactive, bringing the refuse of the city back to itself. We’d split a taxi to Brooklyn, and Drew would tip the driver. It would already be tomorrow. I was almost twenty-seven. The silence whispered in my head. Other faces in other taxis turned and looked at me, and I looked back; I saw myself. The silence grew.
        At the park I slipped off my shoes and sat on a bench with my knees up and my arms wrapped around them. All of SoHo and all of the Village probably didn’t amount to sixty acres.

I was never good at much besides being a teacher, but I was real good at that. When I married Amory I couldn’t cook to save my life or anyone else’s, and I didn’t like to clean. I was not adept at organizing bridge or fixing the house for Christmas. My children were always a kind of mystery to me.
    But when I was inside those four walls of a classroom, with a book or a piece of chalk in my hand, I knew exactly what to do. I knew that I could get up there in front of the class and for fifty minutes I could be whoever I wanted; I could tell them almost anything, and they’d believe me. And then they would disappear, melt away until the same time tomorrow, when they’d be sitting there the same as today, waiting for me to start telling stories. I taught English; all of it was stories. I heard that behind my back they took to calling me Miss F’rinstance because I told stories about everything.
    I’d only been inside a few classrooms on my own when I had to pack my bags and leave the college, but I had the thrill of it in my blood and truly thought I’d be coming back. Amory seemed to be enough for a while; we’d be eating supper or lying in bed and he’d listen to my stories and laugh at the punch lines. But soon he got busy, and whenever I started to tell one he’d act irritated, get a glaze over his eyes, and that took the fun out of it. Then I tried with the children, but at first they were too young, and when they were older they acted like I was just rambling. Like they were impatient to get away.
    Both of my