Please Write for Details by John D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online

Cadillac, Miles leaned back into the softness of the upholstery and was pleased that he had not been able to get in touch with Gloria. Agnes seemed a very careful driver. Almost too cautious. The interior of the car was scented with her flower perfume. And she talked and talked and talked.
    And, at the same time, in the DC-7B droning south toward the high spine of the Sierra Madres, Paul Klauss was being inundated by a relentless flood of conversation, directed at him moistly and forcibly by a young man named Harvey Ardos. Klauss had been bored into a state of helpless and irritable stupor. When he had sent in his late registration for the Cuernavaca Summer Workshop, along with his payment in full of five hundred dollars, Paul Klauss had hoped that, this summer, he was not making a mistake as grave as the one he had made last summer. Harvey Ardos had very nearly convinced him that this might be an even worse summer.
    Had Paul Klauss not been almost half asleep when Harvey Ardos approached him, he might have avoided these endless words. But he had looked blearily up into the eager and pimpled face, into the young spaniel eyes behind the thick lenses in their black frames, and said, “Wha?”
    “I said are you going to the Cuernavaca Summer Workshop?”
    “Uh … yes.”
    And Harvey Ardos had dropped into the seat beside him, grinning with a sort of oily and ecstatic warmth, and clasped Paul’s hand in a long, cold-fingered, damp hand and said, “How about that! How about that! I’m going there too. How about that!”
    During the intervening hundreds of miles Paul Klauss had learned more about Harvey Ardos than he wished to know. Harvey was twenty-four. His formal education was limited. “No real good artists ever went for that college crap,” is the way he put it. He was an orphan. He was not married. He hadworked as a stock clerk in a Philadelphia department store that winter. “I figure a man has to keep on the move. See the world.” He said that he lived very simply, and whenever he got money ahead he would take courses, study under someone. And this was his big adventure. He carried black-and-white prints of what seemed to be to Klauss several hundred of his paintings. Most of them seemed to be of back alleys illuminated with a scrawl of neon.
    “I figure I’m maybe of the James Penney school. Anyway, somebody told me that once. I haven’t just got the right breaks yet, Mr. Klauss. As soon as I start getting the breaks, I’m going to have it made. The way I figure it, I’ve got something to say. That’s the main thing, you got to have something to say, and then you got to work like hell to say it the way you want to say it. And when you can do that and you’ve got the breaks, you’ve got it made. You know, I’ve never been out of the country before. The army didn’t want me on account of my eyes. But let me tell you, I know how to use my eyes. I don’t look at anything without thinking of painting it. That’s the way I look around me all the time. You know. The colors and shadows and stuff. Shadows aren’t ever black. They’re lousy with colors. Isn’t it the funniest damn thing in the world, you being from Philadephia and us never running into each other?”
    “It’s a big place,” Klauss said weakly.
    “I know, but when you’ve got the same kind of interests, you run into people with the same kind of interests, you know what I mean. What kind of painting do you do?”
    “I’m … a beginner.”
    “Oh! Well, you’ve wasted a hell of a lot of time, Mr. Klauss, but I don’t guess it’s too much time. I mean a lot of the good boys got a late start. I figure what makes a painter is being sensitive. I’m real sensitive. You wouldn’t think it, but my feelings get hurt easy. And I think a painter has to work, too. He has to be working every minute. Everything he looks at is part of his work. Just looking at it is part of what he has to do. The guys I work with, they think I’m nuts, but