Nothing That Meets the Eye by Patricia Highsmith Read Free Book Online Page A

bedspread. And there was also, at one end of the bag, in a drab canvas sack, perhaps two dollars’ worth of pennies.
    He pulled up the spool-legged table, removed the alarm clock and the pencil stub and made a field of the chocolates on the top, arranging them in rows of dark blue, mauve, and green, squinting from all possible angles at this panoply of color, at these hundreds of pieces of candy which he would have bought only one at a time, and very rarely. Then, luxuriously, indulgently, he chose a certain piece and, unwrapping it, put the black cool candy onto his tongue. He pushed himself back against the wall, turned his flat-topped head to let the light fall on the little paper in his hand and, humming tunelessly, began reading the ingredients of the thing releasing flavor in his mouth.

MAGIC CASEMENTS

    I
    H ildebrandt knew it was the magic casements that drew him each evening to the deserted bar, but he would have confessed this to no one but himself. The magic casements were only doors, made to look like the windows of the galleon’s stern, which, looming absurdly from a wall of red brocade, formed the entrance to the gigantesque Pandora Room. Mid-Victorian was certainly not his style, yet the casements redeemed it all. Their brass-hinged, golden-hazed arms were influng casually, differently each evening, and had a tremulous, suspenseful look of being about to usher forth a miracle.
    He turned from his brandy to gaze at them once more, and idly recited to himself, “‘That oftimes hath (something) magic casements, Opening on the foam of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. Forlorn! The very word is like a bell!’—”
    Oh, when would someone, be it man or woman, walk through those magic casements and into his life? Or was he becoming one of those fixtures that had always roused his pity, sometimes his contempt, the brandy-fuddled, rather asinine gentleman-at-the-bar, eternally waiting?
    He surveyed the Pandora Room dismally. His somber brown eyes were partially shielded by shriveling lids that drew over their outer corners. Though there was no one but the bartender to see him, he was conscious of the aristocratic lids as he straightened on his stool and inspected the room with an air of thoughtful superiority. Far away amid a cemetery of white-clothed tables, a waiter attended a lone dinner guest. Sources high in the walls, concealed by festoons of gray or red velvet, poured recorded music without cease into the ever-empty chalice lined with tapestry, Persian rug, and gilt moldings. Background music that backgrounded nothing, Hildebrandt thought. The gargantuan loneliness of the place seemed at times to dwarf his own. He wondered if that might be another reason why he came here.
    â€œPandora Room,” he whispered, “what a mockery of your name!”
    He slumped lower on the tall, delicately legged stool and turned the stem of the brandy glass that resembled a mounted thimble. His slight black-suited figure looked insignificant as a candle wick. The amber bar that occupied only a corner of the huge room glowed around him like a fuzzy flame.
    He began to stare critically at himself in the mirror behind the bar. The ingenuous hope of deliverance from boredom, which ordinarily only peeked now and then through the jadedness, confronted him plainly like an imprisoned but still spirited child that cried, “What have you done about me? . . . What are you going to do about me?” It was a face hard to notice and easy to forget, a wisp of a face unasserted by the broad, close-clipped mustache. Whatever distinction it possessed was inherited, his own contributions tending to its detriment. The eyelids, for example, might have been old when he got them, for they reminded him now of outworn lace curtains hanging at oeil-de-boeufs in a decaying mansion. He admitted that it was, already, the perfect face for a gentleman-at-the-bar of one of New York’s largest and most conservative