Under My Skin Read Online Free PDF Page A

window of her house with the baby in her arms, and both of them – ‘Why?’ Glassman wondered – ‘Why?’ – survived.
    Now there were three kinds of antibiotics, a nasal spray that hit the back sinus wall and went straight to his brain. And binders. Painkillers. Vitamins. Every kind. All like bolts and screws to make a together man. His sexuality was unpredictable and it seemed as though the drugs and the disease had run away with his old life and his happy thoughts. Lately he believed it had taken his passions and feelings and he only seemed to
like
women now. He saw them and he was somehow pleased by them, but there were no real feelings of enthusiasm or desire attached.
    Matilda stood on the other side of the bathroom door. She inched it open and looked at his reflection in the glass.
    ‘Arthur,’ she asked in a whisper, ‘are you home?’
    Together they looked into the mirror and only his eyes, slate-grey and considered beautiful, could save him from becoming a shadow now.
    In the kitchen he took his meds and she made green tea. She poured some over the spider plant on the window ledge and he watched as she scalded the only green thing he had left.
    Plants died around him anyway. Bees buzzed and then spun on their backs until they were gone. But he could not infect people. His physician talked a lot about the pituitary gland and how the disease had gotten itself into the cockpit and taken the controls. ‘You may not be fully in charge of your emotions,’ he said, and when Arthur thought about this he saw devils in red cars driving his feelings around. Now, as he watched her for a moment over his small silver glasses, hecould have blamed these devils but really he believed it was more about him and her.
    So she was pretty, Matilda, in a voluptuous 1950s way, but he had no real feelings left for her. He would tell her soon, and without her, some of the headaches in his life would go. Lately women seemed to take from him and just leave a weaker fight inside himself.
    She talked about her work and he listened and asked questions like ‘Really?’ and ‘Why?’ and ‘Why there?’
    He was always interested in other people’s lives and he liked conversation. He knew how to use words to connect people and how to make them all feel as if they were the centre of his world. With women, that gift – and his eyes – seemed to be enough to bring them down.
    The pale winter sunlight came in across the river and New Jersey and they sat across from each other and talked about her parents who were in town.
    ‘Mom bought a scarf in Bloomingdales,’ she said, and although Glassman tried he could not think of any possible response to this. His eyes over his glasses were growing warm with amusement and inside he thought,
‘She’s going to ask me to meet them now
.’
    She sounded even younger when she spoke about her mom and dad. Matilda was thirty-four and he was fifty-one. When The Chief teased him about dating younger women he said calmly, ‘I would like to date a woman who is my age… or
a little
younger… but do you know any fifty-one-year-old women who are single and not completely insane?’
    He had met Matilda at the local swimming pool. She swam towards him in the shallow end and was beautiful, with pale wet skin. And she could swim, long athletic strokes learned and practised from a very young age. She had large breastswhich he admired and he liked the modesty of her old-fashioned bathing suit, and she in turn saw the marks and the scars from the injections and spinal taps, and because she seemed OK with that they slept together at his SoHo apartment that afternoon.
    He knew then that it would not last of course, as he always knew, but he was distracted by her raven-black hair, her thick slanted eyebrows, her wit and her smile, and so he let what he called another of the ‘undead’ slip in. He had read somewhere that orphans could always recognize another orphan in a crowded room. He sensed that she was