Read Online Eleven by Patricia Highsmith - Free Book Online Page B

but the memory didn’t work like that once you were grown, she knew. She remembered the Star Hotel only too well after fourteen months, every six-sided tile in the brown-and-white floor of the lobbythat always smelled of disinfectant like a clinic; and the view from her room window of the lighted glass star that hung over the entrance.
    Not far from the bus stop, she found a house with a roomers sign on the front lawn, and though the woman seemed a little suspicious at first because she didn’t have a car and then because she didn’t have a man with her—but what could be suspicious about not having a man?—she was soon in a clean, very tastefully furnished front room all to herself. Geraldine bathed in the bathroom down the hall, lifting the washrag so the water ran caressingly down her arms and legs, thinking—“How long it’s been since you’ve been my very own!”
    She put on her nightgown and went right to bed, because she wanted to lie in the dark and think. No one would likely find Clark for three days, she thought. His cheeses were due at Etienne Station tomorrow, but they were used to his being a day late when he was on a bender. And since this was Thursday, the Trelawneys weren’t likely to stop by until Saturday when they went to town, if then.
    “ I married you to help you, but the truth’s not in you. You are the first entirely evil human soul I ever saw and it’s my everlasting curse that I’m married to you! ”
    She spread her legs restlessly under the sheet, and brought them together again like scissors. The crisp new sheet rattled about her with a sound like thunder. She pressed her fingertips harder into her thighs. Her mother in Montgomery would say, “Well, you did finally fill out, didn’t you, child?” Geraldine turned on her side and let a few tears roll out, over the bridge of her nose and into the pillowcase, because her mother had been dead almost a year now. The wind gave a sigh that blew the bottoms of the curtains out, held them reaching toward her for a moment, then twirled them like two capes. And she let a few more tears roll, thinking of her and Marianne’s apartmentin Mobile and of how young and happy they’d been together when the fleet was first in. Oh, she’d tell them all about Mobile, too, if they wanted to ask her, she hadn’t a thing to be ashamed of. It was the country’s lawmakers themselves and the police who made money out of it who ought to be ashamed.
    She wouldn’t tell them about Doug, though, because it hadn’t been his fault. She’d say she came to the Star Hotel accidentally when she hadn’t any other place to stay, which was true. She could see herself telling it to some solemn judge with grey hair, asking him to judge for himself what on earth else she could have done—right up to the moment she lay here now in a strange tourist home—and she could hear him assuring her she couldn’t have done otherwise. She’d come to Mobile with her friend Marianne Hughes, from Montgomery, to take factory jobs after they’d finished high school, but they’d had to take jobs as waitresses until the factory jobs were open. She and Marianne had had a little apartment together, and she’d been able to send fifteen dollars a week home to her mother, and they hadn’t been there any time before the fleet came in. Not even the fleet, just a couple of cruisers and a destroyer stopping for repairs, but the city was suddenly full of sailors and officers, everything going full tilt day and night, and Marianne used to wake her up every morning at a quarter to six yelling, “ Out of bed, honey child, the fleet’s in at Mobile! ” which might sound silly now she was grown, but at eighteen and free as the wind, it had made her jump out of bed feeling like a million dollars, laughing and tingling with energy, no matter how tired she might be really.
    She and Marianne would throw on their waitress uniforms and hurry down to the restaurant without even coffee, through