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

became too much. Since then, I’d sought out the opposite: I wanted to be the child amputee or the mistress, to make my domain the dark corners where I could see the things people took such pains to hide from everyone else. I put my hands on Paul Shepherd’s chest and kissed his neck. He groaned and leaned back. We were strangers, with nothing to hide from each other.
    We adjourned to the bedroom. I was in something of a lather, having been deprived for so long of not just sex, but any sort of physical contact. I felt clumsy, irrationally afraid that my face would be damaged. Paul seemed pretty starved himself, and the whole thing was over quickly. We lay there awhile and I thought we might begin again, but he stood up to go, murmuring something about an early meeting.
    And it was only as he rose from the bed, his body illuminated by the colored lights of the city, that I caught the glint of calculation behind his eyes, a cold, blank set to his face. His shadow self, and not a nice one.
    When all else failed, I found it by looking at people when they thought they couldn’t be seen—when they hadn’t arranged themselves for anyone.
    He dressed, used the bathroom, then joined me in the living room, where I sat in my silk kimono, smoking. He leaned down from behind me and put his arms around my neck, and in the bright light he was kindly again. But I’d seen it.
    “I have to go,” he said, retrieving his coat and scarf and briefcase. It was ten forty-five. I was grateful not to be the one heading back out into dark New York. At the door, he handed me his card. “Give me a call if you’re ever in Hong Kong.”
    As he stepped from my apartment into the hall, I said, “Just a minute.”
    He stopped. I sensed impatience, the cool mathematician prowling behind his sandy face. “Yes?”
    “How do I look?” I asked.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Look at me,” I said, and he did. “If you were going to describe me, what would you say?”
    He took a long look. The light in the hall was warm and flattering. I found myself holding my breath.
    “You look tired,” he said, and the two halves of him fused in a moment of humanity. It wasn’t what I’d hoped for, yet I felt relieved.
    “Good night, Paul Shepherd,” I said.

Chapter Three
    Toward the end of her bicycle ride, Ellen’s daughter, Charlotte, paused in Shorewood Park to watch the water-skiers from beside the spindly bleachers arranged on the riverbank for the Wednesday and Friday night water shows. One wore a red bathing suit. He buzzed in Charlotte’s direction, hewing the river in two until she hid her face. But it wasn’t Scott Hess. All summer long he had haunted her, and she hadn’t seen him yet.
    Unsure of the time, she resumed pedaling toward home. They were having dinner tonight with Uncle Moose, a biannual ritual that always roused in Charlotte an anticipatory flutter, some peculiar alloy of expectation and dread. She found herself rushing, now, streaking past the restored portion of Rockford’s original marshland—brackish water, broken sticks—past modest houses and raw-throated dogs and lawns that smelled of the river. She skimmed under the Spring Creek Bridge and ploughed the paved jogging path beside the old railroad tracks, tame and manicured now, surrounded by grass.
    Near the YMCA she stopped to cool off. A man in a yellow shirt sat cross-legged on the Rock River’s grassy bank, one arm in a sling. Charlotte leaned her bike against a picnic table and moved closer to him. She took off her glasses, letting the lush greens mingle with the river’s muddy brown. Rockford was a nineteenth-century town, bisected north to south by the Rock River. On the west side, across the water from where Charlotte stood, were a smattering of brick factory buildings and a neglected downtown; north of these were the industrialists’ old riverside homes, still cushioned by dense trees and thick, fragrant lawns. A fatigue seemed to hang over these original parts