some skin disease. From time to time a car passed by and I stopped to follow it with my eyes. Except for a few branches that were in the way I could see for miles. I felt like a lookout in the crow’s nest of some half-sunk tub floundering in the Sargasso Sea. I wore my eyes out watching the road. For the first time I started to see the town as a sort of desert-a hellhole. I started to understand what she meant. Seen from that angle, it was not a happy sight. My paradise suddenly looked like a lost wilderness, baking out in the sun-a place nobody would want to live in. I saw it that way because she wasn’t there. Still, the fact that a girl can take your world and turn it inside out can shake you up.
When I finally saw the truck coming back, I hooked my roller to a rung of the ladder and lit up a cigarette. The countryside became calm again, the leaves rustled lightly in the trees. I relaxed. Little by little everything came back to normal. I struggled against my desire to go see her. When I felt that I was about to give in, I drove my fist into the side of the house. I lost a little skin off my knuckles, but it worked. I didn’t come down off my ladder.
The glasses salesman came out to see what was going on. He had a nudie magazine in his hand, I saw the tits.
“Hey, is that you making all the racket?”
“Yeah. I swatted a mosquito.”
“You teasing me? There aren’t any mosquitoes this time of day.”
“Come up and see for yourself. The little feet are still moving in a pool of blood.”
He waved it off, then rolled up his magazine and looked at me through it.
“How you doing up there?”
“I was beat a little while ago, but now I feel it coming back, full speed.”
“Shit,” he said. “I don’t know how you can stay out there in the sun like that. Talk about your idiot jobs…”
He went back in with his naked girls folded under his arm and I got back to work, charged with new energy. I started painting like a madman, a smile on my lips and my jaw set.
I stopped working a little earlier than usual. I’d already proved what I wanted to prove-no sense going overboard. The wait had gotten me excited, and it was all I could do to walk back to the house at a normal gait. I felt sparks going through my arms and legs. I was ready.
I had barely opened the door when Betty threw herself into my arms. This got me. I hugged her. Over her shoulder I saw that the table was set with a huge bouquet of flowers in the center. It smelled good.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “Is it my birthday?”
“No,” she said. “Just a little dinner, for lovers only.”
I kissed the nape of her neck and didn’t try to understand. I didn’t want to ask any questions-it was all too beautiful.
“Come on,” she said. “Sit down. I’ll pour you a glass of cold wine.”
I maneuvered around gently, still under the effects of the surprise. I looked around me, smiling. It was a fabulous little wine, just right for sipping under a setting sun. Women, I thought, they really know how to take you from Hell to Heaven. They know how it’s done.
I poured myself another glass while she looked in the oven. She told me about her stroll through town, her back turned toward me, crouched down in front of the stove, her little yellow dress rising to the tops of her thighs, stretched to the max. I wasn’t really listening. I was watching a little bird who had just landed on the windowsill.
“In ten minutes we eat!” she said.
She came and sat down on my lap and we drank a toast. I ran my hand up between her legs. It was the good life. I was hoping she’d remembered to buy cigars. I started diddling around in her panties, but she stopped me. She leaned back away from me. Her eyes lit up.
“Gosh,” she said. “Let me look at you.”
I was in heaven. I let her caress my face without moving a muscle. She seemed to like that. I downed a few glassfuls of wine. “Now I understand why you came here to bury yourself,” she whispered. “It’s because you had something to WRITE!”
I didn’t answer but just smiled. In truth, it wasn’t at all what she thought-I hadn’t settled in that town to write. The thought had never crossed my mind. No, I was just looking for a place that was peaceful, sunny, and away from people, because the world had been getting on my nerves and there was nothing I could do about it. Writing had come much later-maybe a year afterward, and for no real reason-as if that sort of thing happens to you automatically after a few months of solitude: a way to get through sleepless nights, the need to feel alive.
“You know… I don’t know how to say this,” she added. “You have no idea what it does to me. I’ve never read anything like it! I’m so happy that it’s you who wrote it! Kiss me…”
I thought she was going a little overboard, but I didn’t need to be coaxed. The evening’s temperature was just right. I slid into it as into a warm bath of cinnamon perfume. I was totally relaxed, all the way to the tips of my toes.
Betty was radiant, witty, desirable, I felt like I had gone into outer space and was floating in a vacuum. All that was left was to batten down the hatches and land in bed. But all she was interested in was my notebooks, my BOOK-the hows and whys, this and that. I realized I had really shaken her up, broadened her horizons with what had come out of my brain, and the idea simply overjoyed me. Had I been a genie, I might have knocked her off her feet with my stare.
I tried to calm her down but there was nothing doing. She covered me all over with her tender eyes. She caressed my writer’s hands. Her eyes shone like those of a little girl who had broken open a stone and found a diamond. I had been given the red carpet. The only slight dark spot in the picture was that I had the feeling she was mistaking me for someone else. But I told myself I might as well take advantage of my attributes-my big writer’s dick and the vast depths of my soul. Life resembled an automat-you’ve got to know how to grab the food before it passes you by right under your nose.
Around eleven o’clock the writer started flapping his wings. Two little bottles of wine and it was all he could do to keep from falling off his chair. He was happy-ogling his girl, smiling-he no longer understood what she was saying to him and did not have the strength to ask her to repeat herself. The wine had made him drunk, the tenderness had made him drunk, well-being itself had made him drunk, but it was mostly the girl with the long black hair who was rolling her chest around in front of him who made him drunk. It wouldn’t even have taken much for her to make him want to go reread all those notebooks himself-she had given them a new dimension. In bed, he amused himself, removing her panties with his teeth. She took him in her arms and hugged him. She’d never hugged him like that-it made him feel odd. She clung to him as though they’d come through a storm, her legs hooked across his back. He went into her gently, staring into her eyes. He clutched her behind and licked her breasts, and the night moved on. They smoked a cigarette. They were drenched with sweat. After a while the girl lifted herself up on her elbow.
“When I think that you’re out there painting houses…” she said.
The writer had a witty comeback all ready-it was his stock-in-trade.
“What the fuck difference does it make?” he said.
“It’s not where you should be…”
“Oh yeah? Where should I be?”
“At the top,” she said.
“You’re sweet,” he said. “But I don’t think the world is exactly tailored to my measurements.”
She straddled the writer and took his head in her hands.
“Now, that…” she said, “that’s what we’re going to find out.”
He paid no heed to what she had just said. He was a writer, not a fortune-teller.
5
The owner showed up the next day just as we were taking a nap. I went out to meet him on the doorstep. It was obvious that he was looking for trouble. The heat hadn’t spared him on his way over-he was livid. Betty was
