Read Online The Dwelling: A Novel by Susie Moloney - Free Book Online Page A

say anything and she felt trapped by him. She looked at his hand on her. An artist’s hand. The fingers tapered at the ends. His nails were always clear, they never got white spots or cracks. They were dirty, though. Always. She knew intellectually that it wasn’t dirt; it was ink. The tool of his trade. She wanted to snort at that. Trade. You married a tradesman. But it was.
    (In college she had liked the idea, welcomed the idea, of his dirty hands trailing over her clean white flesh as though the ink on his fingers would stay on her skin and make her in that way a piece of what he made with his hands—lovemaking as art.)
    “Bec—” he said. She looked back up at him. His eyes were soft; sad. Like a dog’s. The air, cold, swirled around her. Let’s get this together. Fix it.
    She turned her head away from him. “Cold,” she said mock-shivering again. “What time are they coming?” and the moment broke, as loudly as if it had been glass.
    His hand dropped from her arm and he turned away. “Seven,” he said flatly.
    “Okay, then,” she said, and left the room. In a minute, he heard her on the phone, ordering Chinese, reading off the order with clipped efficiency, enunciating each word carefully, so she did not have to repeat herself.
     
    They gave Max and Kate the grand tour, of course. Dan changed the moment they arrived: his mouth became a perpetual smiling organ, he laughed easily and was more physical, even, hugging Kate and slapping Max on the back a few times, as though he hadn’t seen them in years, instead of since just before they moved. He even seemed taller, walking straight down the hall when they knocked at the door, galloping the last couple of steps like a randy horse. Becca was hurt by it. He was so changed by the appearance of his friends that she couldn’t help but compare it to their (mostly) silent afternoon.
    Becca didn’t like Max and Kate ( You don’t know them, was Dan’s answer to that when she had brought it up once). It was too difficult for her to articulate to Dan, but it was almost an impersonal dislike, the way you don’t like someone because of their politics, although it wasn’t their politics that she didn’t like. It was the way Max seduced Dan out of the natural funk he was in after Clayton and Marks had let him go, into the current foolish, practically maniacal enthusiasm for their project, the comic book. They were calling it a series of graphic novels. But it was, as far as Becca could tell, a comic book. To call it anything else was what her mother would term (and had, when she told her) gilding the mule. Kate, she disliked by association.
    Under other circumstances, such as previous to Dan’s losing his job, Becca might have enjoyed having them around. They were interesting people, people of the sort that Dan had always had in his closet of strange friends. She had met them once or twice before the project, usually in passing at someone’s Bohemian house party, the kind where the food was exotic and laid out on a long table, buffet-style, and you ate sitting cross-legged on the floor, and took your drinks standing up. Fridges full of beer. Half-empty bottles of wine—some of it very good—strewn about on tabletops, manteltops, coffee tables. The music too loud, the conversations peppered with talk of grants, funding, projects, theater, and art. Max and Kate were alternative. And Kate recently had a showing at a large gallery downtown that had been well reviewed.
    (“It smells so clean up here,” Kate remarked, when they looked into the yellow room. “Yes,” Becca said.)
    The four of them went down the stairs, crowding into the little room underneath, with their bottles of beer.
    “My room,” Dan said.
    He’d pulled it all together for the evening. The shelves were filled with the books; he’d set up his drawing board, a large, tall, slanted surface with a glass plate in the center that lit up when you turned on a switch. His tall stool was in front of