Paint It Black Read Online Free Page A

was only that one.
    Suddenly she thought, what if he’d been murdered? What if it wasn’t what it seemed?
    But she knew it wasn’t murder. Knew the second she saw him. He just threw her away. Everything they had been, could have been.
For she is my love, and other women are but big bodies of flame.
Who in the world would have thought of her like that? When was the last time someone thought,
I know what Josie will like. A book. Yeah! A poem, by a dead Frenchman.
Who else in the history of the world? When most people looked at Josie Tyrell, they only saw a certain collection of bones, a selection of forms filling space. But Michael saw past the mouth and the eyes, the architecture of the body, her fleshly masquerade. Other boys were happy enough to enjoy the show, they just wanted to be entertained in the body’s shadow theater. But Michael had to come backstage. He went down into the mines, into the dark, and brought up the gold, your new self, a better self. But what good was it if he was just going to leave her behind?
    She took another drink from the Stoli, let it burn all the way down. She wanted it to burn more, she wished it was hot wax, boiling oil, gasoline, she could drink it down, let it burn out her guts, then it would feel real. He’d always seen her. The only one. With those eyes the color of aquarium glass seen sideways. That day she’d lingered behind in the Otis drawing studio. The students filtering out, but she’d waited, lighting a cigarette, so he could catch up with her, the boy in the tweed jacket with the glass green eyes. He’d brought her a Danish from Victor Benes. Of all things. Not the usual boyish gifts, a hemp necklace, a seedy joint, a ticket to a free concert. A fancy cheese Danish stuffed with white raisins. Even then, sensing her hunger.
    They’d walked out onto the street together, where a silver-gray Jaguar waited across the street, a dark-haired woman at the wheel. A rich lover, she’d assumed. Though it was mostly gay boys who had them. She’d put on her dark glasses, so he wouldn’t see how intimidated she felt. And he’d hung back, embarrassed, waiting for her to leave first, so she wouldn’t see him get into that car.
    Josie gazed at the painting hanging opposite the couch, the one he called
Civilization and Its Discontents.
Blind women climbed the white stairs through a ruined city in moonlight, carrying fruit and lizards in their arms, books and babies and the head of Sigmund Freud. And their faces all were Meredith’s. Josie leaned over and dug through Pen’s purse to see if she had any more Percocets, but they’d done the last of them.
    On the footlocker next to Pen’s bag lay the bowl of mail.
Michael Faraday, Michael Faraday, Mr. Michael Faradaz.
Junk mail, an
Art News.
A package from France, special gum erasers, and a kind of pastels he liked that you could only get in a certain shop in Paris. When they’d sent them, he was alive.
Why’d you have to buy these fucking erasers if you were just going to kill yourself, Michael?
Another girl would open it, but not Josie. She never went through his things. It was part of the way she loved him. She let him have his secrets.
    You stupid fuck. You ignorant fucking twat.
    She let her eyes wander the bowed bookcases, stuffed with paperbacks white with wear, old books of pebbly leather, crumbly calfskin embossed in gold. Books from his mother’s house, books that had followed him home like stray dogs. Michael couldn’t pass a hippie with three books on a blanket without rescuing one.
Crime and Punishment
for twenty-five cents? Can you believe that?
And on the top shelf, the line of black journals, which she had never read.
    She could read them now. But what would she find there, except discovering what a bitch she’d been, an idiot, stupid fucking moron? Things she should have known, that could have saved him.
Should have, could have.
She should have read them, should have read them all along.
    But that was never the