Under My Skin Read Online Free PDF Page B

called him at his studio and she was at Elaine’s. He could hear her parents in the background and they were drunk and gung-ho and wanted to meet him now.
    He did not want to hurt her, so he agreed, but picked a place where the barman knew him, and where he knew every drink on the cocktail menu and every picture on the wall. The barman was waiting for him and he asked, ‘What gives, Arthur?’ as he gave a sideways nod to the people at the bar.
    ‘You watch,’ Glassman said, ‘this is better than the
Jerry Springer Show
.’ When he walked towards Matilda’s parents hesaw – and they saw – that he was almost as old as them. It was embarrassing but soon everyone was smiling. Glassman pulled it off, for himself and for her, and that night when she put her hand in his, he told her that really he wanted to be alone. And what he meant, although he could not say it yet, was that she was beginning to trouble him and that he just wanted her to go off somewhere and leave him by himself. The night before she had woken him by taking a photograph of him asleep.

    The trouble with Matilda had begun with Marilyn.
    The
Marilyn.
Marilyn Monroe
.
    One night he said it to her and now she could not let it go. He mentioned it in the afterglow and watched as she lit up in front of him. He made a casual remark out through the dark of his bedroom and she turned into a star right before his eyes. She did remind him of her – the high brows, the red mouth kiss, the sleepy sensuous eyes – but now he was getting tired of her. No, she was making him feel tired – which was a different thing. She was, he felt, somewhat ‘displaced’. Maybe even a little ‘unhinged’? One night she came wearing a blonde wig and a raincoat and not very much else. Every man’s fantasy, wouldn’t you think? But Glassman felt uncomfortable and a little afraid. He began to wish, in the most basic terms, that Matilda would simply go away.
    ‘Go buy a farm in Virginia,’ he wanted to say. ‘Have a cobra, ostriches, a boa constrictor, just find new ways to extend your madness.’
    Now when she left her parents at their hotel she came back and banged on his door. And he let her in. ‘You’re my umbilical cord,’ she said and she slept on a chair again. She lookedbeautiful to him then but this was something that he did not need to know. In the morning after she went to work he drank two cups of coffee and went to the bathroom, and here he cursed the medication for burning up his inners and looking into his own face in the mirror he congratulated himself on managing three rabbit pellets and a fart.
    The next day, a businessman ordered chocolate ice cream at Darcy’s in the Village. He was celebrating the christening of his first granddaughter and he ate a fillet steak and fries before ordering a poached pear with chocolate ice cream. He did not know that there was a crushed almond in it and within minutes he was in anaphylactic shock and it was Glassman, who was on reduced hours now, who injected the adrenaline, even though he knew it was already too late. And as they elbowed each other around the gurney at St Vincent’s it was Glassman that was elbowed closer than anyone else. He was moved up from the end so that he saw the body jump and some kind of aura move upwards and then the man opened his eyes and he was able to tell him that his granddaughter was called Anna Louise. But then the pink and orange aura lifted again and he was gone, and before he died, he saw the face of Glassman.
    And ‘What a face’ – that was what Matilda once said – ‘like a younger Samuel Beckett.’ But it all seemed too familiar to him now – the metallic grey of his hair, the weathered Cape Cod skin – and the deep lines from temple to jaw and each one with a story of a different woman and a different kind of song.

    When Matilda wrote her column she called out to him for spellings and definitions. Whatever question she had he could always explain and then add new