The End of a Primitive Read Free

sympathetically by the table lamp. It was fantastically well-preserved for her age and the abuses to which she had subjected it. Her full breasts had fallen but slightly and were still firm, and she had handsome shoulders, peppered with tiny red pimples, but voluptuous as a Botticelli painting. Her legs were long and gorgeously shaped with beautiful knees, but her stomach was bloated and those old demon rubber tires had begun forming above her hips. Her skin was very fair, the faint hairs on her arms and at the base of her spine golden in the slanting light, the longer hair on her mound and that on her head, cut short in the modern businesswoman’s fashion, was of a light translucent brown, verging on gold. Her face had the high cheekbones and flat planes of Mongolian ancestry, contradicted by a short, straight, tiny nose, and huge, light blue, slightly glassy, almost bulging eyes, slanting upward at the outer edges. A famous writer and critic of New York City, an old man famous for flowery phrases, once described her as handsome as four peacocks. But he had seen her only when she was dressed. Now as she bent over the set in the somewhat awkward and unflattering position of a can-can dancer sans costume stooping to peer through the monocle of an inebriated Englishman, the thirty-seven year accumulation of derrière belonging to the one hundred and thirty-six pound body commanding fullest attention, she looked extremely naked and shockingly obscene.
    Just at that moment the light appeared on the twenty-inch screen and the close-up of a man’s face, blooming with the bright wide smile of a bleached skull, and wreathed in that dreadful early morning cheerfulness of this telatomic age which inspires old-fashioned diehards suffering from old-fashioned hangovers to rush into their kitchens and cut their throats. The happy, smiling eyes, crinkled about the comers with inner joy and healthy living, stared knowingly at her anatomy, causing her to feel suddenly indecent and very unhealthy.
    “Oh!” she exclaimed, involuntarily shielding herself with her hands.
    She had turned the volume too high and a booming jovial voice issued from the smiling lips of the happy face: “ Are you overweight? Are you overwrought? Do you suffer from morning depression? Do you have a stale brown taste of biliousness on arising? ”
    This boisterous catechism bursting upon her mood of morbid introspection rattled her. She did what she always did when rattled; she giggled.
    “THEN THIS IS WHAT YOU NEED!” the loud voice informed her.
    “What?” she asked the happy face, her quick, spontaneous wit coming to her rescue.
    The face instantly disappeared and in its place appeared a giant’s hand holding a giant bottle with the label forward. “THIS!”
    “Oh, shit!” she said disgustedly.
    The face disappeared. “ Yes! This enervating laxative, charged with vitamins, also contains chlorophyll. Not only does it urge nature about its business, but it also provides a pickup after a sleepless night. It sends you cheerfully to work with a clean body, an alert mind, and a sweet breath! ”
    Kriss turned the volume down, her giggle turning to a chuckle. There was a corny humour in the situation—she’d have to tell Dorothy about it—but she was still a little disconcerted. It was the first time she’d ever tuned in during the commercial and caught Gloucester’s close-up almost nesting in her thighs. She knew it was foolish but she felt embarrassed, which inspired the impulse to do something naughty, some kind of striptease dance or shake her behind. However, she mustered her respectability and began to walk away from the set with becoming dignity. But she felt Gloucester’s appraising eyes on her bare rear, and looked over her shoulder, wondering the while how many broad beams and rare nudes paraded each morning before his amused, straightforward television gaze. The laughing face of a pet chimpanzee now appeared on the screen, the little beastie