The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride Read Online Free PDF Page A

idea … I’ve a suspicion—”
    A skin that can’t tan can blush the deeper; the hot, expectant dye rose from shoulders, to cheek—to scalp. I awaited him, steadily.
    “Now, tell me,” he said, “isn’t this the real one? The original?”
    I lowered my face, until that flush should ebb. “It was, once,” I managed to say hoarsely.
    “And now?” His cheek was almost on mine.
    “And now?” I said. “And now—almost. Not quite.”
    Then the singer, Makeba, came in to sing. “Isn’t her head beautiful?” I said. “I wanted you to see it.” My wig, pat to my head as it was, felt clumsy. She stretched back her ebony head, that long, almost shaven head which needed no goldleaf behind it, on which there was merely the faintest blur, only a hairsbreadth of difference between it and skull, a head drawn all in one swelling line which completed itself again, into which setting the face receded like a jewel. He agreed to all these points, adding only that length of neck also was a point of beauty—that singular head, like a music box with a bird in it, on that neck poised. And once more, he doubted that ever a Western—And I stretched so that he could see that my neck also was long. And then we rose, to a rhythm of our own, and went home.
    “Very good,” he said when we were inside. Travel-case in hand, he scrutinized the room as if it were a collection submitted to him for the museum, but I had pruned as close to the personality I wanted here as the most careful grower of dull plants, even among the prints permitting myself only that commonplace Cranach nude, the high oval of whose forehead flows endlessly from her other nudity, back, back into the dark, “—very good, but where’s the rest of you?”
    I thrilled to the roots of my danger, like a cat in her suit of fur. “What do you mean?”
    He put the case down, teetering on his heels, as if he were here for forever. “Come, come,” he said, “anybody talks to you for ten minutes knows you draw your imagery from some other world than the one you look like—I got it the first ten minutes I saw you. And it’s certainly not this one.”
    Never before had I been wild enough to dream him into those alleyways I had assumed I must give up for him, seeing him there at best like some large balloon in the shape of a philanthropist, which I might perhaps tug after me, on tour. But now, I stretched my neck for him, delirious with his cleverness.
    “Yes, like that, ” he said “—and then you’ll say something with a joke at the back of it, or a pun even, that I can’t catch. But there’s no joking to this place.” He surveyed the room again, scanned the books with a nail. “Ah, I begin to see,” he murmured. “For the other ‘workers,’ eh, as you call them. Your fellow workers. That avocation of yours, that I can never quite believe in.”
    Yet he was marrying me. My legs trembled toward our pleasure, like some girl of the trottoir married by a young roué for her purity—which she has. His hand strayed toward the sugar-cheap marble bust of the English jurist, the ripple of his mouth turning down.
    “He looks like you,” I said. My voice tremored. “That’s why I bought it.”
    He shrugged, smiled, and said, “Sculpture with curls? Or beneath them? D’ya suppose they were his own, powdered? Must say he doesn’t look too honest.”
    Oh, he was keen. Somewhere, a little lady, sitting quiet back there in her altogether, had observed this, adding gaily to herself, “all as it should be, invisibles on both sides.” I smiled back at him. “I haven’t been to your place,” I said.
    “Ah, nothing there,” he answered. He was holding the bust to the mirror, its profile parallel with his own. “Guess I carry my crimes with me,” he murmured, mugging at himself like a man sure of only a few hearty blemishes. Then he put the bust down, smoothed his own crown where it was tan-bare, and sighed, in the bluff way men can, when they refer to