Read Online Look at me: by Jennifer Egan - Free Book Online

So many were. I felt glad to be the treat, rather than the one they slunk home to.
    Inside my apartment, I poured us each a glass of scotch. Paul Shepherd wandered to the living room, stood at the sliding-glass door to the balcony and looked outside at my (I must say) spectacular view. The balconies in my building were staggered, which made for a jumbled exterior but gave the impression, from inside, that you were the only one with a balcony, that there was nothing above you.
    “You’re midwestern,” Paul Shepherd surprised me by saying.
    “What makes you think that?”
    “This apartment, the feel. I don’t know. Am I right?”
    “I’m from Chicago.”
    Like all men in my experience, Paul Shepherd vastly enjoyed being right. “Oh, yeah? What part?”
    “Actually, not Chicago,” I said, to my own surprise. “Rockford, Illinois.”
    “Never been.”
    “It’s hell on earth.”
    His brows rose. “Bad luck, talking that way about your hometown.”
    I laughed. “That may explain the last five months of my life.”
    Paul Shepherd said nothing. We looked at the view, Queensborough Bridge to the north, Long Island City’s broken industrial silhouette to the south. I thought of the few things I’d brought with me when I first drove to New York in my battered green Fiat: my grandfather’s gold watch, packed in a suitcase that was stolen while I stopped at a Denny’s on my way; my grandparents’ letters to each other from the summer my grandmother spent in New York before they married, letters full of wit and play, her confidence in the safety of writing by lamplight at 135th and Riverside. But I’d lost them during one move or another, and now all I remembered was the sepia tone of their ink and my grandmother’s neat, ruled penmanship. I felt a thud of regret. Oh, for God’s sake, I chided myself, how often do you think about your grandparents—once a year? Would you look at those letters if you had them? Weren’t keepsakes just a wee bit quaint in a world where you could travel anywhere in a matter of hours; where you could call Bangladesh from a pay phone on the beach? I’d had a diamond necklace ripped from my throat years before, a present from Hansen, my fiancé. After that, I gave everything I had of value to Grace. Let her keep it, I’d thought—in Rockford, land of small objects, where my valuables would be safe, at least, if not really mine.
    “Penny for your thoughts,” Paul Shepherd said, and I jumped. I was lapsing into reveries without knowing it—a form of mental incontinence I associated with spending too much time alone. He was sitting on my couch, and I sat beside him, now, tucking my legs under me. I hadn’t seen his shadow self. Often I found it by asking myself what the person’s opposite would be; what he was working against, compensating for. But so far Paul Shepherd was a nice man with a sandy beard and a wife and several children he hadn’t mentioned. I could always tell. Divorced men spoke up instantly, proclaiming their status. The rotten ones (and I could usually spot these, too) implied or even said they were divorced, but were actually married. I’d occasionally had the urge to track down one of their wives and give her a call, for her own protection. “Your husband doesn’t love you,” I imagined saying. “I suggest you get rid of him.”
    I leaned close to Paul Shepherd. This was always interesting: the moment when the surface first peeled away and what was underneath—desire, perversion, whatever it might be—moved into the light. The truth. I wanted to see it. Everyone was a liar, blah-blahing their way through life, pretending to be good and constant, to have and to hold and all that. Everyone was a politician, wearing a pious face until the last possible moment when the press unearthed a taste for child amputees or a beheaded mistress chained to a radiator. And I’d been pious, too, at first—I’d believed my own act until the pressure of sustaining it