The Wintering by Joan Williams

Author:Joan Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497694644
Publisher: Open Road Media

Turning over in midmorning sunlight, Amy avoided the sight of Tony sleeping with his mouth open. Two green flies buzzed in a bothered way against the screen. Getting up, she thrust further open a torn place and freed them to the city. Cautious eyes on Tony, she dressed, not wanting to be seen. She particularly could not imagine being revealed naked in this strong morning sunlight. One of his hands lay limply on his stomach, with a look as useless as a single glove. At the window, clad in her slip, Amy imagined herself as the cover of a cheap true-confessions magazine. Midday in her rumpled underclothes, her hair mussed, she felt slatternly.

Today, even Tony’s gigantic colorful canvases added nothing to the plainness of his other room. Dressed and coming into it, she felt disgust at ants, Indian-file along the table going toward dabs of peanut butter and jelly. No longer did it seem to add up to experience to live in squalor. It was not even worth relating to anyone that the plates off which they ate always had to be washed in the bathtub at the end of the hall. Tony’s sink was too small to hold them, though it held cups. When Amy moved a stack of dirty ones, circumspect brown bugs darted for the open drain. Tony last night had asked for an appraisal of his pictures. Thrusting out her chin, Amy had said that some looked merely like slashes of paint, or paint thrown, on canvas.

In a fit, Tony had said she was still a hick from wherever she had come from. She liked probably only paintings that looked like photographs and had not a single idea in her head. Had she read Freud or Marx or anything besides Jeffrey Almoner! What a fool, always defending this country. She ought to go back where she belonged. He then expounded lengthily on the meanings of his paintings and so windily that Amy reassured him, hastily, that she knew nothing about painting. But now that he told how he thought them out, she understood much better. But this morning, she came into the room and thought the pictures seemed merely slashes and dashes of paint on canvas.

Evidence of mice was everywhere in the room. In the night, she had sat bolt upright, thinking something had run across her feet. Nothing had confronted her but the darkness, that boldly. Wondering what had made her wake, she had decided it was simply apprehensiveness, constantly with her.

Moonlight had seemed not to penetrate the apartment. She had been glad for daylight when it came, at last. Tony’s lax hand, his total surrender to sleep, had given Amy an opposite feeling, that she must do something energetic. After washing cups and straightening the apartment, she gathered a laundry pile by picking up clothes off the floor.

To be outside with something to do made the streets themselves seemed more functional. She was passing quickly a building with a doorman, usually suspicious and rough.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.