Read Transparent Things for Free Online Page A

or standing up, dimple-bottomed, to be lathered. Another revelation of impuberal softness (its middle line just distinguishable from the less vertical grass-blade next to it) was afforded by a photo of her in which she sat in the buff on the grass, combing her sun-shot hair and spreading wide, in false perspective, the lovely legs of a giantess.
    He heard a toilet flush upstairs and with a guilty wince slapped the thick book shut. His retractile heart moodily withdrew, its throbs quietened; but nobody came down from those infernal heights, and he went back, rumbling, to his silly pictures.
    Toward the end of the second album the photography burst into color to celebrate the vivid vestiture of her adolescent molts. She appeared in floral frocks, fancy slacks, tennis shorts, swimsuits, amidst the harsh greens and blues of the commercial spectrum. He discovered the elegant angularity of her sun-tanned shoulders, the long line of her haunch. He learned that at eighteen the torrent of her pale hair reached the small of her back. No matrimonial agency could have offered its clients such variations on the theme of one virgin. In the third album he found, with an enjoyable sense of homecoming, glimpses of his immediate surroundings: the lemon and black cushions of the divan at the other end of the room and the Denton mount of a bird-wing butterfly on the mantelpiece. The fourth, incomplete album began with a sparkle of her chastest images: Armande in a pink parka, Armande jewel-bright, Armande careening on skis through the sugar dust.
    At last, from the upper part of the transparent house, Madame Chamar warily trudged downstairs, the jelly of a bare forearm wobbling as she clutched at the balustrade rail. She was now clad in an elaborate summer dress withflounces, as if she too, like her daughter, had been passing through several stages of change. “Don’t get up, don’t get up,” she cried, patting the air with one hand, but Hugh insisted he’d better go. “Tell her,” he added, “tell your daughter when she returns from her glacier, that I was extremely disappointed. Tell her I shall be staying a week, two weeks, three weeks here, at the grim Ascot Hotel in the pitiful village of Witt. Tell her I shall telephone if she does not. Tell her,” he continued, now walking down a slippery path among cranes and power shovels immobilized in the gold of the late afternoon, “tell her that my system is poisoned by her, by her twenty sisters, her twenty dwindlings in backcast, and that I shall perish if I cannot have her.”
    He was still rather simple as lovers go. One might have said to fat, vulgar Madame Chamar: how dare you exhibit your child to sensitive strangers? But our Person vaguely imagined that this was a case of modern immodesty current in Madame Chamar’s set. What “set,” good Lord? The lady’s mother had been a country veterinary’s daughter, same as Hugh’s mother (by the only coincidence worth noting in the whole rather sad affair). Take those pictures away, you stupid nudist!
    She rang him up around midnight, waking him in the pit of an evanescent, but definitely bad, dream (after all that melted cheese and young potatoes with a bottle of green wine at the hotel’s
carnotzet
). As he scrabbled up the receiver, he groped with the other hand for his reading glasses, without which, by some vagary of concomitant senses, he could not attend to the telephone properly.
    “You Person?” asked her voice.
    He already knew, ever since she had recited the contents of the card he had given her on the train, that she pronounced his first name as “You.”
    “Yes, it’s me, I mean ‘you,’ I mean you mispronounce it most enchantingly.”
    “I do not mispronounce anything. Look, I never received——”
    “Oh, you do! You drop your haitches like—like pearls into a blindman’s cup.”
    “Well, the correct pronunciation is ‘cap.’ I win. Now listen, tomorrow I’m occupied, but what about Friday—if you can