Cabot Wright Begins: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

embrace and dry quick kiss when she began with the hardest question itself:
    “You mean then that you sent Bernie on my say-so.”
    A bit startled by such suddenness, Carrie was nonetheless relieved it had come so soon and so sure.
    “I’m afraid so.”Carrie felt she might as well allow Zoe full responsibility.
    “Do you have a cushion anywhere for this chair?”Mrs. Bickle half stood up to show how uncomfortable a seat she had found.
    Carrie produced a fat nondescript sofa cushion.
    “You’ll have something to drink,”Carrie mumbled. Thinking over her own invitation she said, “All I have tonight is some beer and a bottle of wine that’s been opened some time, I’m afraid.”
    “Not a thing just now.”Mrs. Bickle had adjusted herself to the cushion and lay her head back. “Perhaps I’ll have the beer later. I’ll see.”
    “Got a headache?”Carrie peered at her friend.
    Zoe shook her head. “Today was Tuesday,”she was barely audible. “That’s my long day at the office. Tonight I cooked Curt’s dinner for him.”
    “I thought he was the cook.”Carrie’s voice was gray as slate.
    “It was his evening not to feel up to it,”Zoe said.
    “Curt’s still wrapped up in the Old Testament?”
    “ Isaiah ,” Zoe nodded.
    “What do you think he’ll ever do with it? When he gets done with it, I mean,”Carrie wondered.
    Zoe had to laugh at the solemn manner Carrie always assumed when she touched on the subject of Curt Bickle, or indeed writing.
    “I think maybe you worry more about Curt than I do,”Zoe commented, and it was not the first time she had made this observation.
    “Oh well now, Zoe.”
    “What do you hear from Bernie since his trek east?”
    “He called just a few hours ago,”Carrie brightened a bit. “We’re keeping in touch by phone. Twice a day, as a matter of fact.
    “Look,”Carrie went over to Zoe’s chair and stood like a pupil who has brought a paper to be corrected. “I mean, Zoe, have I been a maniac, do you think, in sending him to Brooklyn?”
    “You do manage to make me feel totally responsible, if not exactly guilty, darling.”
    “You wouldn’t of course remember a sentence you spoke. Oh, it was at your house, and I guess neither of us was bright and shining sober.”
    “I’m sure of course I must have given you a sentence or two then,”Zoe’s voice was hard, if not precisely unpleasant. “I hope you’re not going to collect sentences I say when I’m in my Saturday cups.”
    Carrie waited a moment before she said: “I wouldn’t have done it, if you hadn’t said what you did. Mind you, I’m not blaming you.”
    Whipping out her compact, Zoe looked in it at her mouth which she had opened wide. As she closed it and the compact, she demanded:
    “What was my goddam sentence?”
    Carrie walked over to the mantel where one of her own miniature oil paintings had been placed. She did not reply.
    “All right! I’m beginning to see what you want to lay at my door,”Zoe said. She studied Carrie in the silence that followed, and wanted to shake her for not keeping up her personal appearance better than she did. Carrie obviously never went to a hair-dresser, she was at least twenty pounds overweight, and her complexion seemed never to know soap, let alone creams or bases. Yet sex was the only thing that had ever held Carrie’s interest over the years, and one would have thought, well——.
    “You thought then,”Zoe fairly assailed her, “you thought of course that I thought Bernie could write the novel about Cabot Wright!”
    Zoe had then exploded in laughter, but the sight of Carrie’s pale intent face stifled her merriment. “Of course I said it, Carrie,”she watched her from the corner of her eye. “I won’t back away from any part in it.”
    Carrie nodded now. “But you didn’t mean what you said,”Carrie struggled to subdue her own threatening arms, held forward suddenly toward Zoe.
    “I must have meant all of it,”Mrs. Bickle weighed