69 Barrow Street by Lawrence Block Read Free Book Online

something fairly interesting during his hitch in the service. As it was he sweated out the time as a clerk in Fort Polk, Louisiana, typing report after report and spending his nights drinking or playing cards or sacked out with one of the local prostitutes.
    And then what? Then New York—with no job and nothing to his credit but ambitions. He thought he was a painter, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe he was just a bum who was throwing paint at canvas while he ran his way through his mustering-out pay and the few bucks his folks sent from home.
    Maybe Stella had hit the nail on the head. Maybe he was a bum from the word go and living with Stella was just another step down the primrose path to hell, just another step closer to the ultimate in depravity and total and complete degradation.
    No, by God, he had been a painter! He had never sold a painting, but his work was good, damned good! For confirmation he stood up and walked to the closet. On the top shelf was the nude he had done of Stella, the only painting he had in New York. The rest he had shipped home to Xenia or destroyed.
    He took down the painting and set it up on the couch, stepping back a few paces to look at it. It was done in a mockery of the classic style much as was Manet’s Olympia, a burlesque of the standard picture of Venus. Stella was posed on the couch, the same couch that the painting was propped up on now. She was completely nude. Like Venus, one hand supported her head while the other covered her groin from sight.
    At that point the similarity between the two paintings ended. The one of Venus was seductive but pure at the same time; Ralph’s painting attempted to capture the full character of Stella on canvas and succeeded admirably. Evil oozed forth unmistakably from every dab of paint on the canvas.
    The smile on Stella’s face was Satanic. There was cruelty shining forth from her eyes, cruelty in the lines at the corners of her mouth. The way she covered herself with her hand served not to conceal the area, as it did in the original painting, but to draw attention to it. Ralph had been very careful to make the area covered by the hand the dominant spot in the picture and he had managed to highlight it perfectly. Stella seemed to be offering herself in the very act of concealment.
    Even the pose of her body was obscene. The soft flesh tones he had used to paint her were not only beautiful but tremendously sensual. By a clever use of long brushstrokes on her thighs and calves he had given the illusion of an immense amount of power, evil power, lustful power. Similarly, short and strong brushstrokes around her breasts made the breasts even more prominent than they deserved to be and accentuated the feeling of corruption and dissipation that emanated from the canvas.
    He could not look at it without having to catch his breath. It was Stella, to be sure. More than that, it was one hell of a good picture. He had no doubt that he could sell it, but it was the one picture he had ever painted that he wanted to keep for himself, He wouldn’t even hang it on the wall; he wanted to keep it hidden in the closet and take it out from time to time to look at by himself.
    No, he hadn’t been a wreck when she met him. He certainly hadn’t arrived at the top or anywhere near the top, but he had the talent to make the grade.
    Maybe he could still make it.
    He thought about the painting he was going to do of Susan Rivers. She would make a fine model. She was certainly a lovely thing, but beauty itself had little to do with a subject’s suitability. There had to be something else. The features of the model had to reflect something inside, some inner quality which the artist could transpose into color and shadow and line. Otherwise he might just as well take her picture with a camera—a camera certainly did a better job of getting a likeness. A picture had to do more. It had to say something.
    Susan Rivers. He wondered if Stella was right and the girl was a lesbian.