Blue Angel by Francine Prose Read Free Book Online

to shower, shave, dress, drive to school, which itself takes fifteen minutes—an obvious impossibility. Forget the personal grooming. So this chick wants to write? Let her see how a writer looks at nine-thirty in the morning.
    Swenson continues down the hall, slowing reflexively at the steps up and down between rooms. Each room was built as needed, in good harvest years. The earth settled before each addition as the segmented structure grew, perpendicular to the road. The front parlor faces on the nonexistent traffic, offering the world a buffer zone of the least inhabited room so as to protect the inner life of its bedrooms and kitchen. Farthest back is the attached dairy barn, reborn as Swenson’s study.
    Their other home improvement: Swenson’s shrinelike office, skylit, soaring, unheatable, the sacrificial altar on which they pulped the whole advance for his unwritten novel. Half the time he worries that his publishers will ask for the money back. Half the time he worries because no one seems to have noticed. His working title is The Black and the Black , though he doubts he’ll use it. His impulse—impossible to recall—was to recast Stendhal’s Julien Sorel as a young sculptor, the son of a martyred Black Panther dad and a Social Register mom, a charming, amoral striver who uses everyone he meets in his ferocious scramble up the art world ladder. Race. Art. Ambition. Bullshit ideas. He doubts he’ll ever finish. What a huge mistake to think he could write about single-minded ambition when all he can imagine, these days, is indolence and self-doubt.
    He should be glad for his teaching job, not simply for providing income but for removing him from the dismal spectacle of the ministack of typescript dwarfed by his giant desk, an oak monstrosity he bought twenty years ago from a failing law firm. It cost Euston a fortune to ship it from New York, but they were happy to pay his moving costs and let Sherrie write her own ticket at the clinic. The desk is his sole reminder of how much he was wanted.
    Where’s his briefcase? He’s always sure he’s lost it, left it somewhere. There’s never anything important in it, but usually several items, student manuscripts and so forth, that would be a time-consuming nightmare to replace. That’s enough to make him panic, and he begins to shovel paper and books around, increasingly agitated until he finds the briefcase under a stack of yesterday’s mail. A short stack: two magazine subscription offers, a begging letter from Greenpeace, an invitation to purchase travel insurance so like a real invitation he’d thought—before he opened it last night—that it might be to a party. He’s still invited sometimes. He and Sherrie could go down to New York, stay with Sherrie’s sister…. He throws the junk mail in the trash. Why would he need flight insurance? He never travels, never gets mail. He’s dropped off the edge of the planet.
    He’d just as soon not dwell on this as he runs off to meet some student. It’s hard enough to leave the house, what with his obsessive-compulsive need to make sure all the lights are off, even in Ruby’s room, which no one’s used for ages. After her freshman year at State, Ruby got a summer job waitressing so she wouldn’t have to come home.
    He stands in Ruby’s doorway and tries without success to remember its previous incarnations, how it changed from a nursery into a little girl’s room and then froze forever, a teenage Miss Havisham’s attic, plastered with the faces of actors, rock musicians, and athletes, whose stars have probably faded since Ruby put up their photos. The room had a living, evolving smell—first milk and talcum, then sneakers, nail polish, incense. But the dust and stale air have chased those poltergeist odors out.
    Grabbing his corduroy jacket from a hook on the mudroom wall, he’s snagged by the oversized mirror