American Appetites Read Online Free Page A

woman’s bare legs and chafed, reddened heels, the badly creased and soiled skirt of the robe hanging loose about her hips. She offered no explanation, no apology: simply led him upstairs to her flat. The stairway was poorly lit and unheated and smelled of dirt; it reminded him, and the memory came swift and unbidden, though not entirely unpleasantly, of the shabby boardinghouse in which he’d lived as a graduate student in Ann Arbor, a long time ago. “Here we are,” Sigrid Hunt said, out of breath from the climb. “Here it is .”
    The apartment, or flat, was quite large, stretching the full length of the building, a single room with a low blistered ceiling, windows whose shades—cracked, crooked—were drawn, bare floorboards upon which brightly colored woven carpets were scattered. Ian had an impression of mismatched furniture, including, most conspicuously, several sling chairs in a synthetic coyote hide and a six-foot swinging mirror with a heavy carved frame: a mirror that had the look, Ian thought, of a mirror that is much consulted.
    â€œCome in. Inside . I must lock the door,” Sigrid said impatiently.
    Small buzzing radio voices emerged from beside the sofa bed, over which, with evident haste, a soiled crimson silk comforter had been drawn. There were smells of cooking, and of unwashed clothes, talcum powder, perspiration. An eerie undersea atmosphere pervaded: the blinds drawn against the daylight, and only a single lamp burning, with a soiled flesh-colored shade.
    Ian asked what was wrong, what could he do for her, and Sigrid, who looked both ill and nervously elated, as if on the verge of mania, began to speak in a rapid near-incoherent mutter, smiling and grimacing as if to herself. “I need to talk to someone,” she said, “who doesn’t know me and doesn’t judge me.” She pointed at a chair and said, “Sit down, please; you make me nervous standing.” Ian wondered if he would have recognized her: her face was thinner than he recalled, her eyes bruised, her skin unnervingly pale. There was a pouty blood-heavy slackness to her lower lip, and the lovely ridged-rippled hair, in a coarse braid that hung down limply between her shoulder blades, had not been washed in some time. The terry-cloth robe, a man’s robe, fell open to reveal, as if defiantly, her small shadowy breasts and prominent collarbone. “At least take off your coat,” Sigrid said breathlessly, when Ian remained standing. “Your . . .” And her voice trailed off as if she’d forgotten the word for hat.
    Ian took off his coat, his hat, and his scarf, and laid them neatly over the back of a chair. His mind was working swiftly but to no evident purpose. He said quietly, “What’s wrong, Sigrid? Have you taken some sort of drug?”
    And Sigrid said at once, in a low angry begging voice, “Don’t judge me, don’t look at me, I can’t bear it.” She was pacing about the room, too nerved up to remain in one place.
    Ian said, following after her, “What is it, Sigrid? You can tell me, Sigrid; you know who I am, don’t you?”
    â€œI don’t know who anybody is,” Sigrid whispered. “You’re all lying fucking hypocrite sons of bitches.”
    SHE WAS LYING , limp, across the sofa bed and looked as if she were about to fall asleep. Her face glistened with sweat, and her breathing was hoarse and arrhythmic. Ian, standing over her, uncertain what to do—call an ambulance? try to revive her himself?—saw in the corner of his eye a ghostly spectator: his own reflection, fair-skinned, fair-haired, attentive, rapt, alarmed, in the slanted swinging mirror. Why are you here, why you, and why here? The buzzing radio voices continued, like a demented chorus.
    Sigrid lay unmoving, breathing shallowly; Ian could feel the heat lifting from her. “I want to die,” she said softly. “I don’t want