To Live in Peace Read Online Free Page A

the Yankees or the Mets, ask Joe.”
    Kitty had a vague impression of a smart foyer – “All visitors must be announced” – with a red carpet, gilt bamboo mirror, porter’s desk and ornate lamps on either side of a silk-covered sofa.
    “I got the bagels,” Joe said, going up in the smooth elevator, “and some blueberry pie.”
    It was Joe, who as Kitty was later to learn came from Puerto Rico, who had helped Maurice prepare his studio for her and had carried the melancholy accumulation of paintings to Maurice’s apartment across the hall. The studio consisted of one large white-painted room with polished boards covered with vivid oriental rugs, at one end of which was a low bed with an American Indian throw-over spread, and at the other the pale and gleaming surfaces of a high-tech kitchenette. Louvred doors led off the room to a walk-in closet and a stripped pine bathroom. On a chrome and glass table, which served as a room divider, was an arrangement of flowers in a pottery crock such as Maurice used for his brushes.
    Maurice and Joe watched as Kitty picked up the card: “Welcome to New York. And to my heart. Maurice.” She could not say thank you. Could not breathe. She rushed to let some air into the room although it was cool, hammering at the glass.
    “Double windows,” Maurice said, “we don’t open them.”
    It was one of the things she had to get used to: the fact that she was fifteen floors up with a view only of the apartment building across the street and had to rely for ventilation upon the noisy mechanism of the air-conditioning which kept her awake at night; the confines of the studio when she had been used to space; and above all, the heat. You shivered in the buildings and died in the streets. The blistering city was an inferno.
    Maurice’s apartment was high-ceilinged, harking back, Kitty thought, with its large dark furniture, its book-lined walls, to central Europe. He had rolled up the rug at the window end where he had placed his easel, and worked surrounded on three sides by his canvases stacked face to the wall.
    In the kitchen, with its Bauhaus table, Joe took the bagels from a brown paper bag and, opening Maurice’s cupboard, put them on a plate. He seemed very much at home.
    “Coffee?” Maurice, his hand on the steaming glass jug in the coffee machine, addressed Joe.
    “I already had.”
    Joe set the pie, topped with the dusky blueberries Kitty had never seen before, in its fluted baking-foil case on the table.
    “Enjoy,” he said to Kitty, and to Maurice: “You want anything, Doc, you call.”
    “He looks after me,” Maurice said when he’d gone. “Anything you need, ask Joe.”
    It had all been too quick. That was the trouble with flying. Your body was transported while your grey matter was still packing its bags. Kitty could hear herself speaking to Maurice, answering his questions, filling in the weeks since Rachel’s wedding, but she felt that she was imagining her presence in his apartment and that she would shortly wake up in her own bed to find that it had been a dream. Outside, the orange ball thatwas the sun shone fiercely but Kitty’s internal clock told her that it was time for bed.
    Maurice took cream cheese and pale Nova Scotia salmon from the refrigerator. Kitty drank the coffee he poured out for her and toyed with the food.
    “I can’t believe you’re really here,” Maurice said.
    “Neither can I.”
    He cut a slice of pie and put it on her plate. “From the patisserie on Madison. People come from all over town.”
    He wanted to please her. Had arranged the studio with Joe, bought the flowers and the pie, wanting everything to be nice. He could see that she was dropping.
    “You go to bed too early, you’ll wake up too early.”
    He turned on the radio, tuning into the news from the Middle East. She guessed that he listened to every bulletin. “…Prime Minister Begin has informed Secretary Shultz that Israel has accepted the proposal for a