Shade of Pale Read Online Free

across the hall, a print he bought after attending the Picasso and Portraiture show with Cathy at MOMA. It was Cathy’s idea. She loved the facial distortion and thought the colors were just what Jukes’s living room needed. And of course he went along with it, not really in love with the thing, but to make her happy. And it said something about Cathy. But tonight Dora Marr made him uneasy and he avoided looking at the picture.
    He phoned Cathy at the Doral Hotel, and she agreed to come right over.
    For the last two years Cathy had been living with Bobby Sudden, a photographer. Jukes disliked photographers, he thought they were all voyeurs, but Bobby seemed particularly bad. When Cathy showed him some of Bobby’s pictures he had to bite his tongue Jukes thought Bobby’s work violent and brutish, the worst kind of crap masquerading as art.
    He leafed through a book of Bobby’s photos that Cathy had given him as a gift last Christmas. He kept it out of a sense of morbid fascination, but then he kept everything Cathy gave him. And that book never failed to depress him; page after page of moody black-and-white images of girls with bored, dangerous faces, in various bondage scenarios. It was the overall attitude of Bobby’s work that Jukes found offensive: the depiction of women, of his sister , as objects, as slaves, as unhappy victims in Bobby’s perverted fantasies. Jukes found nothing erotic about it; in fact, he found it repugnant.
    Wedged between two of the pages was one old photo of Cathy before Bobby. It was a color print of her first modeling card, when Cathy was an ingenue with a future as bright as her smile. Her face beamed; she looked the very essence of unspoiled beauty. In contrast, Bobby’s dark images of her were of a completely different person.
    Another piece of paper detached itself from the book and fluttered to the floor. As he bent over to retrieve it, he realized with a scowl what it was—a doctor bill from Bobby’s last tirade. He scanned it for the hundredth time, still not wanting to believe.
    That son of a bitch has beaten her up for the last time . Jukes felt his rage dilate and focus on Bobby.
    Jukes looked at the doctor bill and remembered how he had insisted that she file charges with the police, which she did, and later dropped.
    And then, incredibly, against Jukes’s pleading and every logical argument, she went back to that monster again.
    Jukes blamed himself. For all his professional training, Jukes was impotent when it came to Cathy.
    He begged his sister to move out, to leave Bobby, but she stayed. For some unknown and terrible reason, she loved Bobby—and it was killing her.
    Down deep, Jukes had always believed that Cathy was the reason he became a psychiatrist. Yet he never understood her, even though they’d grown up together. Everyone else, it seemed, he could help, but not Cathy, and that rankled Jukes.
    She seemed to be slipping further away, and Jukes was determined to pull her back.
    He shuddered to think what his parents would have said: “Instead of watching over her, you’re watching her destroy herself.”
    But as easy as it had been for him to understand the monster Bobby, that’s how hard it was for him to fathom his own sister, the victim Cathy. Knowing her background, he agonized that he could not think of one event, one unhappy period of time, one tragedy, other than the death of their parents, that would have shaped so strongly a victim’s personality. Whatever events that caused Cathy’s problems were part of her secret life, the part of her she never showed Jukes. The part Bobby lived in.
    The doorbell rang, bringing Jukes back.
    He opened the door and looked into Cathy’s blackened eyes. His stomach turned.
    The insanity of the situation overpowered him, and he fell into the easy grip of helpless rage. She stood there in the doorway like a monument to his failure. He stepped forward and threw