Interesting Women by Andrea Lee (reading books for 7 year olds .TXT) 📕

which broke; an actress who cultivated three long, golden hairs on a mole in an intimate place.

The telephone rang before dinner that night, and it was Nestor. He was in France, in some place where there were a lot of people and the line kept dropping; he wanted to know whether Elizabeth had arrived. His uncle swore at him and said that no one—male, female, fish, or fowl—had arrived and that he was spending Easter alone. Then Edo slammed the phone down and looked at Elizabeth. “Now you’re out of the world,” he told her. “You’re invisible and free.”

They stood looking out of the sitting-room windows toward the northwest, where a veil of daylight still hung over the Atlantic, and he told her that when seals came ashore on the town beaches people went after them with rifles. He came closer to her, felt desire strike his body like a blow, called himself an old fool, and began to kiss her face. Her hair had a bland fragrance like grain, which called up a buried recollection of a story told him by his first, adored nurse (a Croat with a cast in one eye), about a magic sheaf of wheat that used to turn into a girl, he couldn’t remember why or how. Elizabeth remained motionless and experienced for the first time the extraordinary sensation she was to have ever after with Edo: of snatching pleasure and concealing it. “We won’t make love tonight,” he said to her. “I’ve already had you in a hundred ways in my mind; I want to know if I can desire you even more. Prolonging anticipation—it’s a very selfish taste I have. But without these little devices, I’ll be honest with you, things get monotonous too quickly.”

Later he told her not to worry, and she said happily, “But I’m not at all worried. In a few months we’ll be sick to death of each other.”

This arrival at Easter has become currency in Elizabeth’s sentimental imagination, but unlike other episodes with other men it doesn’t pop up to distract her during work or even very often when she’s not working. She had never been anxious about Edo, but she wants to see him often. Though he is never calm, he calms her. When he sends for her and she takes the now familiar flight up to Aberdeen, she feels her life simplified with every moment in the air. It’s a feeling like clothes slipping off her body.

She thinks of it this morning as she sits in the sunlight with her knees up under the covers, and she takes possession, a habit of hers, of a phrase from the book she is reading. “So the days pass,” she reads, half aloud, “and I ask myself whether one is not hypnotized, as a child by a silver globe, by life, and whether this is living.”

3. S

PORTSMEN

For the last ten minutes Elizabeth, the old prince, and three young men have been sitting around the table talking about farts. The young men are Nestor and two cousins of his, whom Elizabeth knows slightly from parties in Rome. All three are tall and thin, with German faces and resonant Italian double last names; they wear threadbare American jeans and faded long-sleeved knit shirts. They are here for a few days’ shooting, and in the front hall stand their boots—magnificent boots the color of chestnuts, handmade, lace-up, polished and repolished into the wavering luster of old furniture. The front hall itself is worth a description: wide, bare, pine boards, a worn, brocade armchair, antique decoys, a pair of antlers twenty thousand years old dug from a Hungarian bog, ten green jackets on wall pegs, exhaling scents of waxed canvas and dog.

The three young men worship Edo—since their nursery days he has been a storybook rakehell uncle, wreathed in a cloud of anecdote unusually thick even for their family. They are also very interested in Elizabeth—two of them because she’s so good-looking, and Nestor from a piqued curiosity mixed with sincere affection. She has stopped confiding in him since he mischievously threw her together with his uncle at Easter. He owns the condominium next to the one she rents in Via dei Coronari and knows that she has been using a lot of vacation time going up to Scotland; he assumes that the old skinflint is laying out money for the tickets and that they’re sleeping together, but he can’t understand what they do for each other, what they do with each other. She is not an adventuress (in his world they still talk about adventuresses), and she is clearly not even infatuated. Elizabeth’s non-whim, as he is starting to call it, only serves to confirm in Nestor’s frivolous mind the impenetrable mystery that is America.

Elizabeth sits among them like a sphinx—something she learned from watching fashionable Italian women. But she feels conflicted, torn between generations. Edo feels a growing annoyance at seeing how her fresh face fits in among the fresh faces of the young men. Her presence makes the gathering effervescent and unstable, and all the men have perversely formed an alliance and are trying with almost touching transparency to shock her.

“It’s a sixteenth-century gadget in copper called la péteuse,” continues Edo in a gleeful, didactic tone. “It consists of a long, flexible metal tube that was used to convey nocturnal flatus out from between the buttocks, under the covers of the seigneurial bed, into a pot of perfumed water where rose petals floated. I own three of them—one in Paris and the other two in Turin. I keep them with the chastity belts.”

Everyone is crunching and sucking the tiny bones of larks grilled on skewers, larks that the guests brought in a neat, foil-wrapped parcel straight from Italy, it being illegal to shoot songbirds in Great Britain. They eat them with toasted strips of polenta, also imported. Elizabeth hates small birds but is determined this evening to hold up the female side; she draws the line at the