The Beautiful Room Is Empty Read Online Free PDF

appreciate her. Not as a woman perhaps, for I dimly sensed there was a passionate woman hidden in this slim body, housing an appetite capable of rapture and even violence. I felt awed by this force, but I didn’t know how to make use of it. The rest of her I understood perfectly, with the best kind of devotion, the wide-awake kind. Nothing in Maria was wasted on me—that was the sole extent of my brilliance.
    That spring Maria and I went on long walks together through the grounds of the school, past a pool stocked with fat ornamental carp, up to the Edwardian mansion of the Founders (maintained in sealed-wax splendor), down a hill toward the artificial lake on which the girls’ school was floated. Then up along a wild tumbling brook to the Greek theater where plays were given in the summer. Now it was deserted. Behind the small amphitheater lay an atrium built around a rectangular pool, and there she told me shocking things—that she thought Jackson Pollock was a fraud, that she imagined we’d all be killed by the proletariat, that she considered the life of one African mine worker worth more than the Sistine Chapel.
    •  •  •
    I didn’t know whether I liked Maria or I loved her. One day in her studio we sat around talking about our futures. The window was open a crack, and just outside a branch of bright yellow forsythia was preening. Maria was wearing an old, tan canvas hunting jacket that had belonged to her grandfather; she wore it over a beige turtleneck sweater. An empty Hills Brothers coffee can nestled sideways in another one which was upright on the ledge under the window. From where I sat I could look into the upper can. Its grooved interior seemed a distillery for changing watery light into sparkling eau de vie . Her black pants were bright with daubs of white paint and had fainter comet tails where her hand had smudged them. She’d penciled her plucked eyebrows in very black today, as black as the dots of her small nostrils.
    “I can’t believe you actually want to be famous,” she said. “Famous as what? A writer?”
    “I suppose,” I said, “or an actor, or a general, or—”
    “General!” She unnested the coffee cans and used the top one as an ashtray. “So you’d do anything, anything at all to be famous.” She looked me in the eye suddenly, as though to surprise the answer there. “But why?”
    “Freud says the writer writes for fame, money, and the love of beautiful women.”
    “Or men,” Maria added. My heart stopped. Was she enlarging the definition to include the goals of women writers or was she suggesting I wanted beautiful men?
    “Or men,” I conceded, “though Freud, I’m afraid, didn’t encourage women to be very ambitious.”
    “Who does? Certainly no one at this school. My theology professor at the University of Chicago was more interested in his women students than the painting instructors here are. I guess they believe the female spirit is earthbound and only the male is creative.”
    “Maybe they think the girls will all get married.”
    “Not me,” she said.
    I asked her why. She threw out one reason after another but none seemed to justify her indignation. When I teased her, as I’d heard other men do a hundred times, and told her she would surrender to the right man, tears of anger sprang to her eyes. Anger, I guess, or maybe she was hurt that I understood her so little. I took her hand and stroked it. I was sick I’d vexed her. “Good,” I said, “because I’m never going to marry either.”
    “Really?” she asked, smiling as she slowly pushed the tears away with the back of her other hand. “Will you be famous all alone?”
    “No, with you. You’ll have to be famous to encourage the next generation of women painters and socialists and to keep me company.”
    She said she preferred reading all night and drinking bad wine. “Honestly, can you think of anything more inviting than fresh sheets and an open book turned face down on the night