The Pregnant Widow Read Free

“blondes are the opposite of their pious ideal. This gets them thinking. Brunettes are hopeless—they’re Italians. They won’t fuck you unless you swear you’re going to marry them. But the blondes. Blondes’ll do
anything.”
    Lily and Scheherazade were blondes, one a blue-eyed, one a brown—they had the transparent complexions, the candour of blondes … Scheherazade’s face, Keith thought, now had about it a look of quiet surfeit, as if she had hurriedly but successfully eaten something rich and greedy. Lily seemed pinker, puffier, younger, the eyes inward, reminding him (as he kept wishing she wouldn’t) of his little sister; and her mouth looked taut and underfed. They were both making the same movement, beneath the brow of the table. Smoothing their dresses kneeward. But the dresses wouldn’t go.
    “God, it’s almost worse in here,” said Scheherazade.
    “No, it’s worse out there,” said Lily.
    “Mm. At least in here they’re too old to leap up and down.”
    “And too hoarse to yodel in your face.”
    “They hate us in here. They want to lock us up.”
    “They probably hate us out there too. But at least they want to fuck us.”
    “I don’t know how to break this to you,” said Whittaker, “but they don’t want to fuck you out there either. They’re fruits. They’re all terrified. Listen. I’m friends with the top model in Milan. Valentina Casamassima. Also a blonde. When she comes to Rome or Naples and they all go crazy, she turns on the biggest guy there and says,
Come on, let’s fuck. I’ll suck your cock here in the street. I’m going down on you
right now.”
    “And?”
    “They quail. They back off. They crumple.”
    Keith uneasily turned his head away. And felt a shadow cross the harlequinade—the harlequinade of his time. Near the centre of this shadow was Ulrike Meinhof, strolling nude in front of the Palestinian recruits
(Fucking and shooting
, she said—
they’re the same)
, and even further in there was Cielo Drive, and Pinkie and Charles. He said,
    “That’s too high a price.”
    “Meaning?”
    “Well they’re not
really
trying to pull you, are they, Lily. I mean, that’s not how you set about it, is it. Their only hope,” he said, “is to stumble on a girl who dates football teams.” This was perhaps obscure (and they were staring at him), so he went on, “That’s what Nicholas calls them. My brother. I mean, there aren’t many of them, but they do exist. Girls who like dating football teams.”
    “Ah,” said Lily, “but by pretending to like dating football teams, Valentina proves that they don’t even want girls who like dating football teams.”
    “Exactly,” said Keith (who was in fact quite confused). “Still. Valentina. Girls outtoughing the boys like that. It’s …” It was what? Overexperienced. Uninnocent. Because the young men of Montale were at least innocent—even their cruelty was innocent. He said helplessly, “Italians are play-actors. It’s all a game anyway.”
    “Well, Lily,” said Whittaker, “now you know what to do. When they whoop and leap, you know what to do.”
    “Vow to go down on them.”
    “Yeah. Vow to do that.”
    “I was in Milan in the spring, with Timmy,” said Scheherazade, leaning back. “And you didn’t have to vow to go down on them. You got stares and whistles and that gurgly sound they make. It wasn’t a … a circus, like here.”
    Yes, thought Keith, a circus—the highwire, the trapeze, the clowns, the tumblers.
    “You didn’t get crowds. You didn’t get
queues.”
    “Walking backward,” said Lily. Who now turned to Scheherazade, and said with a solicitous, almost a motherly urge, “Yes. But you didn’t look like you look now. In the spring.”
    Whittaker said, “It isn’t that. It’s Franca Viola.”
    S o the three of them attended to Whittaker, with the reverence due to his horn-rimmed gaze, his fluent Italian, his years in Turin and Florence, and his unimaginable seniority (he was