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

room?”
    “Marcello has decided he wants a place of his own,” David said. “He’s taken an apartment just down the street.”
    Barbara looked at him sharply.
    “Do you mind?” David asked. She shook her head. “No, of course not.” Then she added, hoping it wasn’t true, “It’s nothing to do with me.”
    David said nothing.
    A week later she moved in. Hanging her clothes in a wardrobe , she said to David, “You’re sure you don’t mind?”
    He smiled. “Why on earth should I mind?”
    Barbara lowered her head. “It’s just that — oh, I don’t know.” She looked up. “I mean — I’m barging in on you here. You’d probably like to be on your own.”
    David raised his eyebrows. “Don’t you want to stay here?”
    “Yes, of course. It’s just that I don’t see — what’s in it for you.”
    David laughed.
    She never did see what was in it for him, and that was all part of her reason for loving him.
    After she had been there four days she had said, “Youknow, you’re a fraud. You pretend you never work but you’re always sitting scribbling in corners. Why don’t you make the little room into a sort of study?”
    David had looked at her with a strange smile. “Sure‚” he said. “If you like.”
    It had been as easy as that; Barbara had moved her bed from the small room into David’s room, and put it next to his.
    “I guess if we’re sleeping in the same room you want to have sex?” David said.
    Barbara shrugged her shoulders. “That’s rather up to you.”
    David nodded. “Yes, I guess it is.”
    After that they made love almost every night in David’s bed; David always called it having sex.
    “Do you like it?” Barbara asked him one night.
    In the darkness David said, “What? Fucking?”
    “Yes. Making love.”
    “Sure, I like it.”
    Barbara said softly, “You don’t do it because — oh, I don’t know — you don’t feel you have a duty, do you?”
    David laughed in the darkness.
    “Do you?” she repeated.
    “If you’re not satisfied you don’t have to stay.”
    “Would you be happy if I went?”
    “Oh, Jesus. Will you please shut up.”
    *
    “Why do you live abroad?” she asked.
    “I like to be a foreigner. And I love Italy.”
    “Do you have any parents?”
    “Yes.”
    “Alive or dead?”
    “I haven’t any idea.”
    “Where did you meet Marcello?”
    “In New York.”
    “Did he suggest you come and live in Italy?”
    “Why don’t you like Marcello? You jealous of him or something ?”
    “No.”
    “Well then?”
    “I think he’s a bit dull, and I think he’s a hypocrite.”
    “Why, because he’s rich?”
    “No.”
    “What do you expect him to do about it if he is? What can he do about it?”
    *
    Two weeks after they had this conversation David had his twenty-ninth birthday, and went to Switzerland for a week with Marcello.
    Soon after he returned, Barbara took him to meet Mary and Catherine Emerson.
    “I want to meet these two mad women you work for,” he had said.
    “There’s only one mad one, and that’s not the one I’m teaching.”
    “Where’re they from?”
    “Mary Emerson’s from Charleston, I think. Somewhere in the South. She’s all big and soft — you know, big hands, broad shoulders, big tits, big red hair. She has beautiful hair. She washes it almost every day in raw eggs. She’s a fine-looking woman, after fifty, I’d say.”
    “And you hate her?”
    “She’s so mean to Catherine always. And people like that shouldn’t be mean. If you’re big and lazy and opulent you should have big lazy and opulent opinions and manners. But she’s like some shriveled-up harpie with Catherine.”
    “Perhaps Catherine deserves it.”
    “How can she? I think she’s been like this all her life.”
    “Then her mother resents her.”
    “But there’s no reason to. She’s rich enough to find someone to look after Catherine the whole time, someone who’d take her away forever. She could live where she likes, do what she likes,