This Body Read Online Free Page A

balcony glass door. She was sure it was already terribly smoggy outside,
but the heat felt good. She thought fleetingly that she might go outside on the balcony but was afraid of the smell from the
bedspread. She couldn't tell what the balcony looked down on, but across the way was another apartment complex, five stories
high, with balconies jutting out like the ends of Lincoln Logs.
    She pulled out an Eggo waffle from the freezer, but after heating it, she eyed it warily. She couldn't trust this body. What
seemed like hunger might not be real hunger, and this body was liable to take retribution. She carefully ate the waffle over
the kitchen sink and waited, feeling the sun rays penetrate and ease her stiffness. Her stomach seemed to accept the food
with only a mild aftershock of queasiness, so she tempted fate and took some aspirin.
    Back in the bedroom, she checked out the telephone's answering machine. There were four messages. She pressed the GREETING button first and listened to a surly version of the voice that Katharine was able to produce from this body.
    “Talk to me,” the message said. There was a long pause and then a click.
    Katharine felt her blood heat.
God, she sounds just like Ben
.
    She pressed the PLAY MESSAGES button and a male voice slurred sluggishly, “Hey, this is Marko. You know, David's friend? You know, we met … where the fuck
were we? Oh yeah, at the rave down in Pasadena. I think. It was a couple of months ago. Around there, I guess. I hang with
Laddie and Greg. Anyway, I was thinking about you. Call me, you know, if you want to. My number is …”
    Katharine couldn't imagine ever calling this lost boy, but she wrote down his name, phone number, and his friends' names on
her brown paper.
    The last three calls were from the same person, a man whose voice was intimate yet demanding. “I need to talk to you. Call
me.”
    “I told you to call me. You said you were going to call in for messages. What, no phones down there? Call me.”
    “I'll be out of town for a day or two. Leave me a message where I can reach you.”
    He sounded as if he had a claim on Thisby, and Katharine hugged herself protectively.
But he said he was going out of town for a while
. She had some time. She erased the messages.
    No more excuses. It's time to tackle the mess in this room
.

    Katharine sat at the kitchen table surrounded by the loot she had brought in from the bedroom. The watch she now twirled on
Thisby's wrist was deceptively simple, gold with a thin expansion bracelet. The word “Cartier” was elegantly scripted across
the face. She had found it on the floor under a pile of clothes she'd sorted through, hanging up the decent-looking ones and
throwing the obviously dirty clothes in a corner for washing later. The style of most of the clothing was too weird and trendy.
Many were in colors Katharine never more. They had names in mail-order catalogs like coffee bean, mint julep, and hydrangea,
though Thisby's favorite seemed to be varying shades of the color purple. There was a great deal of black clothing, though,
that Katharine wouldn't mind wearing. She had often worn black herself. She had read that it made a body look ten pounds thinner.
    Katharine found a pair of hiphugger, bell-bottom Levis and a halter top made from a pair of cut-up denim jeans wadded together
under the dresser. These were original relics from Katharine's own teenage years. As she shook out the clothes, the smell
of musk oil escaped from the creases. The scent dazed and then slightly confused her until the image of herself in 1970 materialized
in her brain. She was dressed in similar garb, perfumed in musk oil, and planted in front of one of the last picture shows
that featured a concave screen that stretched from one side of the theater to the other, surrounded by the sights and sounds
of
Woodstock
— Stephen Stills of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, confessing to a half a million people, “This is our second gig. This
is the