Under My Skin Read Online Free PDF

already broken and read the telling ‘Please love me’ sign in her eyes. The next night she called at his apartment on Prince Street at 4 a.m. and he smiled at her in his sleep and let her in. And later he stayed up and watched her while she slept in an armchair, like a beautiful blackbird, her shoulder supporting her bill.
    The next morning she said she was sorry to have woken him up and when she smiled that lovely smile and asked if he would meet her again, he heard himself say, ‘OK.’
    And now it was somehow five months later and her Connecticut parents who were concerned and wealthy wanted to meet Glassman. They wanted to see, and he enjoyed the irony of this, if he was good and kind and safe enough. Everyone loved Glassman. Lately he had been loved by a group of visiting German doctors and they had wanted photographs and had stood at JFK smiling broadly with their arms around him. He felt bewildered by their love and found it difficult to react. He told Matilda about it now and he frowned and knew there was a joke hidden somewhere in this.
    ‘German love,’ he said slowly, ‘is very difficult to reciprocate.’
    And she sipped her tea and laughed.
    ‘Mom and Dad want to have dinner at Elaine’s,’ and here she smiled and looked right into his eyes, ‘and then… they
really
want to meet you.’
    ‘What Mom and Dad…
really
want,’ Arthur replied in a deadpan voice, ‘is to have dinner at Elaine’s… and then meet someone who is a lot
younger
than me.’
    And again Glassman asked why, why when he was swimming lengths in the swimming pool did he decide to stop and why did Matilda also stop and turn around? And why did he take her home and make love to her and then continue to let her in again and again? Glassman had never met a good woman in a bar. He did try of course but he could not connect with the women he met there. And besides, a certain type of woman seemed to find their way to him anyway and this was something he found difficult to explain. To him they were like wild birds who could fly higher than the Himalayas and no matter what sort of storm clouds they encountered, they would not, could not, turn around. They would not stop until they found him standing – ready to be pecked apart – doing what he liked to do best, walking in the wind and collecting old sea glass on the beach. They found him the same way Matilda found him in the swimming pool – and perhaps he preferred it that way. But sometimes when he was lonely, as he often was, he too, like so many men, would have to go to a bar and drink and hope.
    ‘And what happens if you don’t find anyone?’ The Chief asked.
    ‘What happens?’ Glassman replied mildly. ‘I do what any self-respecting fifty-one-year-old man does, get a pint of frozen yoghurt and go home.’

    But on that one morning in January when he found himself at the mirror in his bathroom and he was not even sure how he got there, for the first time his spirit waned, and Glassman was afraid he was going to die.
    He saw for the first time what he needed to see – a real person, losing strength and growing older, feeling older and not very well in himself.
    ‘I do not look good,’ he said and it was the saddest voice he had ever heard. He knew then that he was in trouble but he didn’t want to be too harsh with himself. He looked down at his hands and said, ‘I promise myself that I will use these hands in a different way – and use these eyes to see new things, other than people who sometimes die.’ He promised himself that if he ever got out of it – and ‘it’ must have meant the special body corset for his back, the injections, the drugs – he would leave the ER at St Vincent’s and have a different kind of life. He had an idea around glass. Whenever he found a new piece on Long Island or Cahoon’s Hollow Beach he would pocket it and he knew that if he became well, this one piece, attached to many others, could allow him to make something great.

    Matilda