Voice of Our Shadow by Jonathan Carroll Read Free Book Online Page B

in mind to do for years — she was going to illustrate her childhood. When they were living in London she had taught art at one of the international schools there. During her free periods she’d made over a hundred preliminary sketches, but getting her to show them to me was impossible at first. When she finally did, I was so impressed I didn’t know what to say.
    The Shadow was one of those humpbacked Art Deco radios with cozy round black dials and the names of a million exotic places on them that were supposedly at your beck and call. This radio was on a table set far back in the room toward the top of the drawing. Jutting out stiff and doll-like from the bottom were three pairs of legs set right next to one another — a man’s, a child’s (black patent-leather shoes and short white socks), and a woman’s (bare with pointed, high-heel shoes). Nothing more of these people could be seen, but the most wonderful, eerie part of the work was that all three sets of legs were pointing toward the radio, giving you the impression the bottoms of their feet were watching the radio like a television set. I told that to India and she laughed. She said she had never thought of it that way before, but it made sense. In all her work, that one-quarter naive, one-quarter eerie quality came through again and again.
    In another one, an empty gray room was totally bare except for a pillow in flight across the middle of the picture. The hand that had thrown it was there in the corner, but in its frozen openness it had lost all human qualities and was suddenly, disturbingly something else. She said she planned on calling the final version Pillow Fight .
    Only one of her pictures was on actual display in their apartment. It was entitled Little Boy . It was a still life, painted in fragile, washed-out watercolors. On an oak table were a shiny black top hat (the type the Germans call a Zylinder ) and a pair of spotless white gloves. That was all: tan wooden table, black hat, white gloves. Little Boy .
    The first time I went to their home I stared at it for a while and then politely asked what the title meant. They looked at each other and then, as if on cue, laughed at the same time.
    “That one’s not from my childhood, Joe. Paul has this crazy thing he does sometimes —”
    “Shh, India, don’t say a word! Maybe we’ll introduce the two of them sometime, huh?”
    Her face lit up like a candle. She loved the idea. She laughed and laughed, but neither of them made any attempt to clue me in. Later she said she had painted the picture for Paul as an anniversary present. I had noticed there was an inscription in the lower-left-hand corner: To Mister from Missus — Promises to Keep .
    They had lucked into a great big apartment in the Ninth District not far from the Danube Canal. But they spent little time there. Both of them said they felt compelled to be out and on the move as much as possible. Consequently, they were almost never home when I called.
    “I don’t understand why the two of you are always out. Your apartment is so nice and warm.”
    India shot Paul an intimate, secret smile that fled as soon as she looked back at me. “I guess we’re afraid there will be something out there we’ll miss if we stay home.”
    We met the first week in July, when they had been in town for over a month. They had seen the usual sights, but now I eagerly appointed myself their special guide and gave them every bit of Vienna I had accumulated (and hoarded) in the years I had lived there.
    Those dreamy, warm days passed in a delightful blur. I would finish my writing as early as I could and then two or three times a week would meet them somewhere for lunch. Paul was on vacation until the end of July, so we moved slowly and sensually through those days as if they were a great meal we never wanted to finish. At least that’s how I felt, and I could sometimes sense their happiness was growing too.
    I began to feel as if I had been fueled with some