The End of a Primitive Read Online Free

by the caffeine contained in two cups of strong black coffee, to an almost unbearable lucidity, like Hemingway writing a novel. By the time she had combed her short, curled hair, powdered her face smoothly white, painted her lips becomingly red, applied a light sheen of vaseline to her upper eyelids, and adorned herself with appropriate jewelry: two hollow gold matching serpentine bracelets on her right wrist; a gold wrist watch with leather band on her left wrist; a leaf-shaped gold pin containing a dark blue stone at her left breast; a gold rope-shaped necklace; two gold-plated, snap-on earrings; along with her wedding and engagement rings which she still wore for the same reason she still kept her married name, she felt capable and serene and alert and very secure. She loved her little pills for the security they gave her. Thus bedecked and ornamented to the wildest fancy of any savage, emotionally fortified by the latest in patent drugs, faintly amused by the early morning television antics of M.C.s and chimpanzees, her wits made keen by the essence of twenty-five milligrams of good, pure, American coffee, she felt herself an efficient executive, ready to face the day.
    Now she could afford to think about Dave Levine. He hadn’t called her again, the son of a bitch! She had tried hard to marry Dave, and had almost gotten him, but his mother who was very orthodox, and incidentally held the purse-strings even though Dave maintained an apartment in Manhattan, had put her foot down. Since then she had hated him, but she couldn’t bear the humiliation of his breaking off before she did. “The Jewish son of a bitch!” she thought, trying vainly to arouse some inner racial prejudice to support her ego. But she didn’t have any racial prejudice, really, and most of the people whom she had ever deeply admired had been Jews and a few blacks, so it didn’t work. The tragedy was that she loved Dave’s warm, friendly, compassionate mother more than she had ever loved Dave, whose chief influence over her had been to make her feel inferior. “The chiseler! He’s practically lived off me this past year,” she told herself, trying another tactic to prod her anger. But her clean cool thoughts would not accept the lie. She wished, wryly, that it was true, so that when he called next time she could say, “Get out of my house, you bastard! Get out of my life! You’ve done nothing but sponge off me ever since you knew me. Go back and marry that girl in the Bronx, Susan or Vivien or whatever her name is!” She knew very well the girl’s name; it was Denise Rose; and she was a damn pretty girl whose parents had money; and she had graduated from Smith and travelled extensively in Europe, read good books and dabbled in art as a pastime, now wanted to get married like herself and bear her husband some fine sons, one to take over the business, another to study law at Harvard, a girl to marry one of their good friends. Secretly Kriss felt that Dave was a damn fool not to have married her a long time ago.
    “The Brooks Brothers ass!” she thought, going quickly to turn off the television set. On the way out she made a quick cursory examination of the contents of her pocket book. She had three twenties, two tens, a five, and three ones, in a green billfold. She’d stop by Best & Co. at noon and pay her bill. In the change pocket were coins for carfare. The remaining contents consisted of the lacquered snuff box of pills; an enamelled lipstick case of saccharine tablets; a dollar lipstick of Chinese Red; a large, flat, round, gold inlaid, plastic compact; a long, flat, magnificent, solid-gold cigarette case given to her for a birthday present the year before by Fuller, and incidentally a letter from Fuller that had come to the office the day before, stating that he was making a quick hop to Los Angeles on business; a gold-plated Dunhill cigarette lighter given to her for a Christmas present by Dave; a ninety-eight cents ball-point pen