The Road Narrows As You Go Read Online Free Page B

be the first to admit it had been a long time, in fact not since college, that she had touched a canvas or a mound of clay. Long cream-brown hair grown out so she could pin all those curlingiron curls above her ears, then mid-conversation, let them fall loose, twist in her hands, coiling and uncoiling as she talked, then throw the whole length over one shoulder so the curls covered her full chest made fuller by an expensive bra, finally bundling all that hair back up again into a ball on top of her head. Third marriage failed on a vacation a year ago, the divorce was not finalized. It was her captivating, melancholy, and wise, freckled and shiny quality that got her hired wherever she applied. Chauvinism aside, aerobic weight-loss regimens aside, Gabby amused men, she was sure, and it made her livid. She wanted this editorship at Shepherd Media Syndicate to last, she didn’t want to leave the way she’d left the San Francisco Chronicle , or get phased out like the time at Third Word advertising on Madison Avenue, to name a couple. This job was a fresh start for Gabby, an autonomy she dreamed of, office with a door, an imported car, modern wardrobe.
    I’m overdressed, Gabby said out of the blue. She cringed when anyone rich walked in, for she’d forgotten to switch up—her purse conspicuously matched her black-on-white Chanel knockoff department store pantsuit. Fashion in San Francisco’s on another planet from Manhattan, she missed it out here, how free the North Beach still was with colours, even here in the centre of intellectual upper class, clashing still mattered. That’s special, that is not New York, she said. She missed facing the Pacific, she really did. Waking up three hours after Manhattan was a luxury. Manhattan’s hard. The rich tried better to blend in here and the poor all purported to be artists, homosexuals ran the city, and the hobos were considered saints. Original hippies. Original beatniks. That was not actually Ginsberg who just walked by, was it? Every face that passed the window contained in a flash a whole novel Gabby could envision writing. It was a story about the struggle to climb out of the sand and be a great American. What wasit that made San Francisco such an inspiration? Gabby loved it for the pastel houses stacked up on the steepest hills, the brisk ocean air bringing fog moods, the gonzo music and art legacy, this unusually high spread of nonconformists among the common hamburger-eaters. So many cartoonists!
    Twelve hundred and fifty cartoonists according to the phone numbers on my kitchen wall, Wendy said.
    Gabby loved this cool and casual peninsular city without any underground network of tunnels. And sitting with her artist in the Trieste, shopping at City Lights and just circulating through the heart of San Francisco, staying at her favourite downtown hotel, it made her want to make art more often .
    At last she asked Wendy how she was doing, After all, that’s why I’m in town. Life? Boyfriend or not? How’s Hick? You look gorge, by the way, your hair is insane, it’s iconic . And what is that you’re wearing, a blouse top and a man’s blazer over it, tight black denim pants, riding boots? All those accessories for your hair, wrist, ankles? You’re a self-made trend, you are San Francisco incarnate.
    No reason to make a big display of disagreeing with Gabby then having to tell the editor of her comic strip how far away in her mind she was from this meeting and that on a deep, totally nauseating level, she felt like absolute shit. The first sips of the espresso hit her sideways, the right half of her abdomen folded in on itself as involuntary clenching of her colon released a thankfully odourless gas bubble. She was still shaken from seeing Hick; his face was often grossly superimposed over Gabby’s. Making an effort to appear present was a task—she asked what brought Gabby to San Francisco this time, a family occasion