Westlake, Donald E - Novel 42 Read Online Free Page B

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mean, and the other one said gimme your money. ”
                “Two of them? Older boys?”
                “Grown-up, kind of,” she said. “Like you see playing basketball.”
                “Twenty year olds,” Mary translated.
                I could feel Jennifers skinny arm trembling, like when you hold a frightened cat. She said, “I just
thought, oh, wow, what if I don’t have enough for them? Enough
money. I mean, I only had, I. . . .” Her face
scrinched up. “Ohh,” she said, on a rising note.
                Then at last she dissolved, and I
held her very close, and Mary came over to pat us both on the shoulder. I sat
on the floor, pulling Jennifer down onto my lap, curling her in against me
there, rocking back and forth and holding her while she cried herself out. I
said stupid things like, “There, there,” and “It’s all right now,” and, “Okay,
okay.” Mary made coffee for herself and me and Earl Grey tea for Jennifer, who
doesn’t like coffee, and after a while we got off the floor and sat around the
kitchen table instead and drank our stimulants and Jennifer went about
reconstructing her public persona as the hip existential city kid. “It was all
such a complete drag,” she said. “I had to tell the cops they were black guys, it was like I was making it up, you know? An agent
provocatater. And one of the cops was black, so it was really
embarrassing.”
                I love both my kids, with a mad
helpless mute mortifying love that gets more bumblefooted the stronger I feel
it or the harder I try to express it. Realizing Jennifer already had too much
to bend her mind around at the moment, I mostly kept quiet, so she wouldn’t also have to deal with her father’s inadequacies. “The black cops
know,” was all I said at that juncture.
                She managed a little grin, a
condensed version of her usual mode. “He looked real tough,” she said. “I bet
if he caught those guys, he’d beat them up a lot worse than a white cop,
wouldn’t he?”
                “Maybe so,” I said, smiling back.
                Mary said, “Jennifer’s staying home
from school today, I phoned the school and they know about it. Tom, why don’t you stay and have lunch with us?”
                “Let me take you both out to
lunch.”
                Mary had to drape herself in cameras
before we left, which used to annoy me toward the end of our marriage but which
I now am becoming indulgent about again, as I had been when first we’d met.
Mary, out of East St.
Louis , had come to New York originally to be a photographer, having won
some awards and sold some pictures at the local or regional level. When I first
met her, at a magazine’s Christmas party, she was making a precarious living
doing freelance research for everybody and anybody: museums, book illustrators,
ad agencies. She would root around in libraries and morgues and find you just
the right daguerreotype to go with your pantyhose ad, or the eleven specific
paintings ripping off (or “homaging”) such-and-such a Rembrandt, or clear
photos of every kind of European tram at the turn of the century, or whatever
you want. Meantime, she was taking millions of pictures of her own, submitting
them everywhere, looking for an agent, and hoping for the best.
                Which never came. We married, we had the kids, she continued the research work to supplement my
income, and she went on taking pictures, but very few have been published.
                The problem is , she doesn’t have a unique eye. Although she’s always surrounded herself with
hung copies of Diane Arbus photos, for instance, she herself has a much softer,
more sympathetic view of the world, and could never look through her lens as dispassionately
as Arbus. On the other hand, she has too much sophistication and selfawareness
to go for