The Figures of Beauty Read Online Free PDF

eighteen. But then, I think everyone under forty is eighteen. Nonetheless, it was Robert’s experience—so he said, with no hint of irony—that had taught him the benefits of including a personal statement in the heftypackage of legalese that has now been delivered by someone’s hand to yours.
    “It is often necessary to explain …” I remember Robert pausing as he searched for a word. He rested back with some distaste into an enormous leather desk chair. Judging by its inelegant size, he’d had nothing to do with choosing it. “Nuance” was the word he was looking for.
    There is one disbursement from the estate that will precede my death. Your mother will receive one statue from the swimming pool. I am bringing it when I come to visit you and your family in Italy in a few weeks’ time. I am planning to present it to her myself. As gestures go, this is a little over the top. I admit that. But Anna did say it would take a miracle. And anyway, I find I like the idea. Perhaps your enthusiasm for drama doesn’t come exclusively from your mother.
    I’m not quite sure why my giving the statue to your mother feels like the right thing to do. But it does—despite what the cost of shipment will be. I’ve made some initial inquiry. And believe me: you don’t know how densely crystalline a substance marble is until you learn the extortionate charges of air-freighting a three-quarter life-size female figure across the Atlantic.
    Otherwise, you are my sole heir, and when Robert first made his suggestion that I write you a letter “of a more personal nature,” I couldn’t see that there was any need to say anything more than what is already in probate. There isn’t any nuance involved. I suppose I could tell you why I’ve decided to sell my house and the old pool in Cathcart, but that would mean I’d have to understand my reasoning—which, to be perfectly frank, I don’t. Not entirely. All I can say is that selling my property, like giving your mother that statue, feels like the right thing to do.
    A friend came by a few days ago to discuss my plans. He was very concerned, he said. He is one of those people whotake a certain irritating pleasure in being concerned. And partway through our conversation, I realized that what concerned him most was my sanity. Or my lack of it—as his overly gentle kindness made clear was his best guess. I think I managed to convince him that I am not having a nervous breakdown. But he was not greatly comforted.
    “It just seems such a bizarre thing to do,” he said.
    I suppose it does. But I’ve decided that it’s time for me to be unencumbered. It’s time for me to be what your mother always thought I should have been when I was young: unreasonable.
    I can’t see why, after I visit you in Italy, I can’t travel wherever curiosity or happenstance takes me. For as long as I care to. I missed most of the world the only other time in my life I set out on such a journey. There’s no shortage of places I haven’t seen.
    And anyway: Why should wandering around the continent of Europe remain the prerogative of youth? I can afford to travel now, for one thing. For years, if I want. I have time. It’s not as if I have to get back to anything important.
    Getting old is not the strangest thing about age. It can be unsettling. But what is really strange is getting used to the idea of getting old. That’s a shift, let me tell you. That’s a new perspective.
    Twice during the summer I was with your mother I woke from the same dream. It was of my father vacuuming the swimming pool. It was night, which is an odd time to be vacuuming a pool. And for some reason, I was in the water, watching him. He was poling hand over hand, drawing the head of the vacuum slowly across the bottom. The sadness the dream left in its wake seemed out of all proportion to what little I could remember happening in it.
    Anna understood this to mean that I would not be happy back in Cathcart. For a long time I