Three Rivers Read Online Free PDF Page A

still flawless, still unwrinkled face.
    She looked deep into her face and thought,
I am so lucky I’m wonderful to look at, but intelligent and practical too
. She ran her hands over the body of her dress, tucked the pink silk shirt into her skirt until every fold fell into its proper place, ran her hands over her hips and turned sideways to look at her profile; she pressed one hand against her flat stomach, the other hand over the flat of her buttocks; then she took a handful of the fleshy part to feel how nice and firm they were. She turned full front into the mirror again and thought,
How well I deserve my beauty; how hard I’ve worked for it all my life
. Then, smoothing a hair that was out of place and examining her fingernails for any slight chip in the enamel, she left thebar and the mirror. As she walked away she thought briefly of Isabel:
foolish, vain Isabel, living in dreams of men who might come along and make a life with her
.
    She thought of Isabel as beautiful and intelligent. But intelligent only because she had managed to pay her own way all of her life. Lazy Isabel, who sometimes stayed in bed until midday. Lazy Isabel, who never jogged, who didn’t work out in the gym four times a week. Lazy Isabel, who would never apply herself long enough to learn a second language perfectly and who got away with living in foreign countries merely with her personality and bits and pieces of the local language. Lazy Isabel, who made her money from other people’s laziness and lack of intelligence in being able to create things that Isabel was hired to do, and all in the name of Art. No. Money was the thing that Ava admired about Isabel. She at least earned her own way, but to this day Ava never quite knew how Isabel got away with it. Imagine anyone hiring someone because they had good taste! To Ava that was the height of tastelessness. No, she could never figure out how anyone could hire a design consultant. Why, even the title revolted Ava.
    Vain, selfish Isabel, with her jobs for the rich and sometimes famous — famous in whose eyes? Isabel, with her over-sophisticated, so-called beautiful home that was never, by Ava’s standards, quite clean enough; her clothes were just a bit too individual. Her animals belonged in a zoo, or at least in a country house — not in London! How sad that Isabel lived under the delusion that she had a beautiful and glamorous life.
    Ava looked around her living room at all the clean, practical Danish furniture with its simple cotton covers in bright primary colors; the photographs of herself and Alfred taken on their various trips around the world; the paintings, all original oils on canvas by Alfred or Ava — a flower, a bird, a tree, two fish kissing — in the same primary colors as the furniture; the tiny sculptures in clay, painted in bright, white enamel by Alfred; and, of course, the books — two hundred copies of
A New England Childhood;
two hundred and sixty copies of
Essays by a New England Girl
, which Ava had written and had privately printed in Athens. She sold them to friends or even strangers who read Ava’s cleverly written ad in the
Athens News
. Both she and Alfred believed that the only reasonthe publishers would not buy them was that they were too well written to make money. The fifty copies on the shelves in the living room of the March 1970 edition of the
Reader’s Digest
with Ava’s story — “The Sicilian Baker” — was proof enough to them that Ava was a writer and a success.
    Ava and Alfred could write, paint, sculpt, design and decorate as well as or better than any of the professionals, except maybe a few who had been dead for at least two hundred years. So they backed themselves instead of Art.
    Oh, yes, this is more like it
. She and Alfred had a neat package of a marriage.
Nothing phony about me or our life
, she thought.
Up at six in the morning and work, work, work, keeping this package together
.
    Isabel had never been able to find a husband.