Sharp Practice by John Farris

Author:John Farris [Farris, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

One night shortly after the new term began, Oxey walked over to Terry’s house, which was five minutes away on the other side of the arboretum. Terry’s first seminar in creative writing was under way, a get-acquainted session for old and new students. They’d dragged chairs out to the porch to augment the wicker furniture and the chain-hung wooden gliders. There was beer aplenty, good talk and laughter. Terry’s second novel had just been published in the United States, and it was on The New York Times’s New and Recommended list. Oxey figured Terry must be feeling pretty good about that.

He skirted the porch and took the back stairs to the third-floor atelier.

A painter owned the house, but he now spent most of his elderly days in the warmer climate of San Miguel de Allende. Terry had economically transformed the floor-through atelier into a writer’s roost. He’d installed a functional gray metal desk in the north-facing oriel, flanked it with two powerful bullet lamps. One wall contained bookshelves knocked together from weathered old cedar boards rescued from a barn demolition. Colorful Naugahyde pillows were scattered around the paint-stippled floor. Around the walls he’d hung his favorite lithographs and woodcuts. There was a water bed in a partly screened alcove. The toilet, washstand and ball-and-claw tub were in a far corner under a skylight, surrounded by pots of tall green fern but otherwise not shielded from view.

Jeanie Lyles, still wearing her Dark Ridge Caverns guide uniform, was snoozing on the water bed.

Oxey didn’t know how long the seminar would last, but judging from the sounds of good fellowship drifting up from the porch, they were primed to keep it up until long past midnight. He looked through Terry’s collection of tape cartridges, selected a show album, plugged in the cartridge, plugged earphones into the jack so Jeanie wouldn’t be disturbed.

While he listened he idly looked over the contents of Terry’s desk. Copies of the first reviews had arrived. They were, for the most part, written by fellow novelists. “Victor Batchford Simms is the author of a novel, Stopgap, and Professor of English at Weedpatch U.” Whoopee. It was a flourishing form of literary vampirism. Mr. Camming’s second novel is a curious disappointment … Oh, fuck, Oxey thought, and he picked up the box that contained Terry Camming’s third novel.

About an hour later, when the music ran out, Oxey raised his head, feeling vague as feathers, a little dazed. He always read very fast but with total absorption, and it took him a few seconds to recover a sense of his surroundings.

Jeanie had awakened and was hanging up her uniform in the closet. She crossed to the bed, quite breathtakingly naked before the moonlit window. She seemed restricted to her own reveries as she prepared to put on a pair of beltless Levi’s. She bent at the waist to step into them. Oxey took in the commodious sway of her breasts, the foxy mask of corn-silk pubic hair, and lowered his head quickly to indulge in a wet dream of honeyed soul kisses and penetralia.

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