Just Friends by Robyn Sisman Read Free Book Online

section, like thistles in a meadow. He’d never known anyone who moved as often as she did. The very first entry, now crossed through, gave the address of that leaky old boarding house in Brooklyn where he’d come looking for a cheap room his very first week in New York. An image flashed up of long blond hair fanning out around her upside-down face as she leaned over a top floor banister to call out to him.
    In those days Freya had struck him as an impossibly superior being, a sophisticated twenty-five to his raw twenty-two. She knew where you could fill up on soup and bagels for five dollars, which flea markets sold the cheapest furniture, how to sneak into openings and gorge on canapés and champagne for free, what movie theater let you see the picture twice around to keep warm. She’d introduced him to “the gang”—a loose group of would-be artists, actors, and writers who shivered through the winters, dragged their mattresses onto roofs and fire escapes in summer, gossiped at Ambrosio’s over coffee and doughnuts, borrowed money and clothes, and assured one another they were geniuses. Freya was famed for her Celebration Spaghetti that marked their inching achievements, invariably followed by a disgusting English dessert called Bread and Butter Pudding, which Jack had learned to make almost palatable with a thick mulch of American ice cream. From the first, Jack had enjoyed her sharp wit and independence of mind—even her cool mockery, which was quite different from the flirtatious brand of teasing he was used to from the girls back home. There had even been a time, one particular night years ago, when he’d. . . .
    Jack frowned. He did not wish to revisit that humiliating occasion. He was different then, and so was Freya. Returning to the address book, he leapfrogged swiftly from one Freya entry to the next—uptown, downtown, this boyfriend, that boyfriend, this job, that job. Yes, ten years was a long time. They were still friends, would surely always be friends—but he had his own life to lead, and she had hers. He found Michael’s number and dialed.

 
     
    CHAPTER 4
     
     
    . . . A wisp of silver strayed diaphonous beneath the moon, suspended in the inky well of night. Watching it, something dark and primitive stirred in Garth’s loins, and he emitted a groan of longing, like the honk of a lonely goose. He felt himself spinning down, down, down, in a vortex of despair. Was there to be no love for him in this cruel world, just because his skin was black?
     
    Jack grabbed the pencil from behind his ear. His hand hesitated over the page. Where to begin? In the end, he contented himself with correcting the spelling of diaphanous, ringed the dangling participle, and gave his pencil a couple of vicious bites before returning it to its resting place.
    It was midafternoon. Over the last couple of hours he had done the dishes, cleaned up the living room, left a cup of tea by the bedside of a comatose Freya, and taken out the trash. Now he was lying on the couch under the large window, sneakered feet comfortably propped on the far armrest, a sheaf of papers on his chest.
    He checked to see how many pages remained, and sighed. From what he could make out, “Forbidden,” world copyright Candace Twink, was a story of doomed love set in the Civil War, featuring a feminist version of Scarlett O’Hara and a black slave apparently familiar with existentialism. Experience told him that it was not a parody.
    What was he going to tell her? Not the truth, obviously. Parts of her manuscript were very nearly not bad; but as a whole it was crap. Privately, Jack was doubtful whether creative writing could be taught. He loathed the word creative , which brought to mind women in floaty garments dancing barefoot and pointless artifacts made from sea shells. Good writing was a craft; great writing was an art; creative writing was all too often neither. But he needed the money. He wrote reviews and magazine pieces for the same