The City Below Read Online Free PDF

Eddie Cantor than Charlie Chaplin. Didi's offbeat appearance, Terry thought, was what made her try to win you over by being a little silly. And her offbeat appearance, more than her silliness, was probably what had put him at ease with her in ways he rarely was with the pretty girls. The offbeat he knew about, if of a different kind. He was good looking enough for a guy, and played basketball. But he had interior features that clashed. He was always turning around, as it were, and seeing shadows of disappointment fall across the faces of those he'd hope to impress. He reacted not by being silly, but by being, as they said, quiet. And no one had ever been surprised—this had been assumed of him in Charlestown since grade school—that God had blessed him with a vocation to the priesthood. Lucky bastard: many are cold, few are frozen. Kids left Terry Doyle alone.
    Didi wore a tan blouse and a dark skirt and snappy high heels, but it was like her that she also wore, as if it were a jacket, an oversize man's shirt that was navy blue. The sleeves were rolled back at the cuffs, and the bottom button was fastened so the shirt flowed around her like an artist's smock, gave her the air of a beatnik. Terry noticed stitch marks on the sleeves and realized patches had been removed. Didi's father was a cop. This was a shirt of his. Beatnik, hell.
    When she had drawn close enough to hand him his cigarette pack, he gestured at the bench beside him. "Have a seat, Miss? Is that what a gentleman says?"
    Didi grinned at him, and when she took a deep drag on the butt, he was more conscious than ever of her big lips. She exhaled dramatically, letting him see the pleasure a hit of nicotine could be. Only then did she sit. "What are you doing?"
    "Just looking. I come here sometimes."
    "I know you do. I see you from my window. You sit here by the hour."
    "Not by the hour. By myself."
    "Doing what?"
    "Sometimes my homework."
    "What else?"
    "Looking." He shifted his gaze toward the downtown buildings.
    She let her eyes follow. "Oh, you just have a case of senioritis. I used to do that last year. I can see downtown from my bedroom."
    "You see a lot from your bedroom."
    "I used to sit there by the hour too, trying to picture it, hoping I could get a job downtown."
    "And you did."
    "But it's not so great as a high school senior thinks it is, take it from me. I bang a typewriter all day. See that building there?"
    "The Hancock."
    "That's me. Hancock Insurance. Seventeenth floor, typing pool. I sit in a room ..." She put the cigarette in her mouth and began to mime the act of typing. Each time she hit the carriage, she made a
ding
sound. It was true, she had a Chaplinesque flair. Finally she stopped, and when she looked at Terry, it was with a sudden solemnity. Then she looked away again. They spoke, each with eyes on the distant skyline.
    "You don't like it?"
    "I like it okay," she said. "I'm a lot faster than I was."
    "But you—"
    "—see the rest of my life flashing before me. I'm nineteen. There are girls in the typing pool who are forty, still living with their mothers. I'm afraid if I blink, I'll be old. Maybe I'll spend my whole life filling out the forms of other people's accidents. They're not even my own accidents, Charlie."
    "I really wish you wouldn't call me that."
    She looked at him with surprise. "You don't like your new nickname? How would you like 'Horseface'?"
    "No one calls you that."
    "Me?" She was shocked. "I was talking about my brother."
    Terry stared at her, trying to fend off the feeling of horror, that he'd so insulted her. He'd never heard Jackie referred to as Horseface, but—
    But then she laughed. Her strange face broke into an expression that said, Gotcha! At that moment Terry, feeling a release of his own, was sure he saw a flash of real beauty in her. What he saw was the charm of a girl laughing at herself, and the self-acceptance such a thing implied was as far removed from his experience as the downtown buildings