Read Online Into the Great Wide Open by Kevin Canty - Free Book Online Page B

her glasses, serious. Kenny leaned on the back of her chair and watched over her shoulder, watching the photographs, the back of her head, her neck … This time it was her ears, too, which were delicate and pink. Something about the way the gold temple-pieces of her glasses wrapped around—she wore the kind that circled her ears, little restraint devices … It was hard to take the photographs seriously when he could look at the line of her back, bare naked ears, her shoulders. He forced his attention onto the pictures, hoping that each new one would be perfect.
    They couldn’t hold his attention, though. The pictures seemed to be
attention-resistant
. Bare branches, the sea in winter.
    Junie’s room was spare, monkish, the same totalitarian good taste as the rest of the house: burlap wallcoverings, teak furniture, picturesque windows, that faint Japanesy feel. No Barbie dolls, here, no Poky Little Ponies. He saw her for a moment as her mother’s, child: piano lessons, ballet, spinach. The room had a desk the size of a kitchen table, upon which the pictures were now spread out; a single celibate bed; a bookcase, which Kenny promptly judged by his own hard standards.
My Antonia
, good.
Life on the Mississippi
, very good.
Slaughterhouse-Five
, eek!
The Trial
, very good, but only if she actually read it. In fact the whole shelf had the smell of schoolbooks.Advanced-Placement English classes, either that or books her mother left on the shelf because she thought they matched the decor. Kenny would bet a hundred dollars that Junie never read
Red Cavalry
, by Isaac Babel. (He was wrong about this, as he was wrong about her photography, as he was wrong about everything else, almost. This is one of the places where it’s still sore, looking back. He
underestimated
her.)
    The interesting thing was, she kept shuffling unopened boxes of pictures back into the drawers. “Come on,” he said. “What’s in there?”
    “Nothing,” she said, a faint rosy flush creeping up her neck. She wouldn’t look at him.
    “It says Nudes right there on the box.”
    “Well, it’s not exactly …”
    “You can’t just sneak them past me, Junie. I’m tired of rocks and trees.”
    “You don’t like my rocks and trees?” Even this she said without looking up from the table; and he couldn’t tell if she was angry or not.
    “I didn’t say that. I just meant, I don’t know. I wouldn’t mind some naked ladies.”
    Junie laughed, and for a minute it seemed to be all right. “These aren’t exactly naked ladies,” she said. “I bet my father’s got a copy of
Playboy
somewhere, if that’s what you’re after.”
    “I bet he doesn’t,” Kenny said; remembering, with some murky, left-handed shame, that his own father had an almost complete collection dating back to 1965. His father in a velvet jacket, smoking a pipe. His father and bunnies. It was hard to imagine Hefner having a place in Junie’s house. Jane wouldn’t allow it.
    “Maybe not,” she said, and took a breath, gathered her nerves, spilled the packet of nudes out onto the table.
    The ones on top were in the same brown-light and natural-shapemode as before, scarcely recognizable as human, closer to green peppers, tomatoes, folded pieces of cloth. After a couple of minutes, three or four prints, Kenny saw that the subject was a fat woman, bending, turning, reaching. The folds of her body shone in a kind of dim twilight. You couldn’t tell, exactly, what was her ass and what was her knee, and which of these curves might be her breast. Kenny felt like a minor dog for trying, but on the other hand … They were safe, hygienic. All the sex had been boiled out of them; at least till Kenny thought to wonder who the model was. He never thought Kim Nichols was quite that fat but maybe, with all the bending and twisting, etc.…
    “Where did you take these?” he asked her.
    “These? Oh, this was in the class I took last spring, Lee Nye. He’s a crazy man. He had the