Read Online The Girl Who Passed for Normal by Hugh Fleetwood - Free Book Online

my Ph.D. I wrote a thesis on, I’m sorry to say, communications . And then one morning I get this letter, and I go and talk to a whole crowd of rather ordinary little men and at the end I’m offered this job and it sounds like the easiest thing in the world, so I say yes. Then I discover that there are these little groups of people all over the Westernworld doing the same thing, so I ask if I can do my thinking in Italy and they say yes, and give me the name of someone to contact here. So here I am, working. Do you want another drink?”
    “Please.” Barbara turned to the nameless American. “Why should he be ashamed?”
    From behind her David answered. “Marcello doesn’t approve. He thinks I’m aiding the forces of reaction and tyranny.”
    “You are,” Marcello said from his book.
    David smiled. “Sure I am. But Marcello’s rich and comes from an old and noble family, and I’m just a poor Jewish boy from New York.”
    Barbara looked around at him and he grinned. “I don’t look Jewish, do I? But —” he came over to her and put his face near hers — “I do have Jewish eyes. See.”
    Barbara felt embarrassed. “You have beautiful eyes‚” she said, without meaning to.
    Marcello laughed. “That’s not what you were meant to say. You were only meant to think it. Why do you think he showed you his beautiful eyes? You should have said, ‘Yes, you have got Jewish eyes.’ That would really have upset him. David likes to think he’s different.”
    *
    David was different, Barbara thought — and he did have beautiful eyes. She saw him again a week later at a party he invited her to; and she found, as she talked to him, that she liked him, that he made her laugh, that he was intelligent, that he was physically very attractive — and that she disapproved  of him. She didn’t know why, but something in her was outraged by him, and she wondered, as she spoke to him, whether he was queer or conceited or simply very truthful .
    After she had seen him a few more times, she decided that her outrage was caused by the fact that he gave the impression of liking her, of enjoying her company, of being happy talking with her, but of not, basically, giving a damn for her. He made her feel that he had no interest in her as Barbara, as a person with a past, a thin widow alone in the world — or, indeed, as a person at all. Strangely, he gave the impression of being the same way toward himself, and somehow he never referred in any way to his upbringing, education, family, or job. After she’d been out with him, she didn’t really know what he had spoken about at all. She felt, when she was with him, that she was living in a vacuum chamber; and while she was outraged by David’s implicit destruction of herself, she was also exhilarated by it.
    One day she thought of trying to explain this to Catherine, or even trying to interpret it to her in terms of dance. But she knew Catherine would never be able to follow her, and in fact, she doubted whether she would be able to follow herself.
    In short, she told herself after she had known David a month, she was in love with him.
    They went away together for a weekend; they slept together and made love, and it was the first time for her since Howard had died. She didn’t mention Howard to David. And as he never asked her about herself, other than to ask, occasionally , “How are you?” she expected never to have to tell him.
    One day, two months after she had arrived in Italy, she had met Marcello in the street, and he told her that his mother had died and he was going to move into her apartment. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. The next day, having dinner with David, she said, “I’m tired of living in that pensione, it’s sad. I think I’m going to get a small apartment of my own. You don’t know of any, do you?”
    David shook his head. “You’re welcome to stay with me while you’re looking.”
    “What about Marcello?” Barbara said. “Will there be