The Man Who Melted Read Online Free PDF

accomplishments and good fortune.
    â€œI must say that things have been going quite well for me,” Pfeiffer said as if on cue. “Have you seen any of my shows?” He picked up a thin brown suitcase behind him.
    â€œDid you camouflage your bag?” Mantle asked, but Pfeiffer only chuckled.
    As he followed Mantle up a flight of stairs, he told him of his recent books—he was a readable, if somewhat pedantic essayist, and sold everything he wrote to the popular fax magazines. It was depressing to think of Pfeiffer's gems of wisdom oozing out of every living-room computer terminal in America. His collected essays were bound in hardcover, an honor indeed; and the best thing of all was that he had also been doing fiction again (his fiction was terrible); and of course, he was selling it under a pseudonym; and, yes, he had sold a novel, finally, and it would be in covers first and then go to fax for a huge amount of money; and he was taking a leave of absence to complete the book.
    Are you still jealous? Mantle asked himself, or was that burned out too? But that was unimportant now. Only one thing was important: Pretre must call today.
    The hallway was dark, windowless except for the top landing, which had a yellow and red and orange stained-glass window, and, in marked contrast to the rest of the hall, was also clean. Mme. Acte and her flabby-fat daughter swept daily, but neither bothered to use a dustpan, and Mantle did not care enough to clean up the mess they left on his landing. They were his only tenants.
    As Mantle opened the door to his flat, he excused himself and rushed into the living room to make a quick check of the computer for coded messages. There were none.
    â€œIt's all right, come in,” he said to Pfeiffer, who was waiting at the door.
    â€œYou did get my messages, didn't you,” Pfeiffer said. It wasn't a question.
    Ignoring that, Mantle said, “I'm afraid everything's a bit of a mess.” Mme. Acte and her daughter used to clean house for him in lieu of rent, but he couldn't stand them fumbling about in his rooms, arguing, and fingering through his personal effects. They suffered the indignity of free housing by sweeping their dirt onto his landing.
    Pfeiffer set his bag down in the middle of the living room (and surely he intended to stay as long as he could), then sniffed around like a tawny, compact animal. The room had large high windows that caught the morning light. Situated before the windows, upon a brightly colored drop cloth, were two easels and a ruined satinwood desk littered with broken paint cylinders and brushes. Piled upon and around a paint-smeared video console and the ever-present computer terminal were piles of books in covers, fax and fische, and disordered stacks of gessoed canvas boards.
    The plaster-chipped walls were covered with Mantle's own paintings and graphics, with the exception of a few etchings and woodcuts by Fiske Boyd, a little-known twentieth-century artist. Most of the paintings were land- and seascapes; Mantle especially loved the perched villages, such as Eze and Mons. As he frequently traveled the old Esterel Road, many of the paintings depicted the red porphyry of the Esterel Massif and the Calanques, the deep, rugged inlets. Upon first look, some of his paintings appeared to be vague, almost smoky-looking, but shapes seemed to form as one stared into the milky canvases enclosed in heavy frames; they gained definition and color, as if the viewer were somehow superimposing his own imagination upon them. Then, for an instant, the paintings would appear to be as clear and defined as old photographs.
    Mantle watched Pfeiffer inspect the room. Short, squat, freckled Pfeiffer with his baby face and widely set eyes and high cheekbones. How long have we known each other? It must be twenty years. All that hate and love wasted like a bad marriage. Now there was the old silence between them and all the walls of the past. Although he wanted to