Read Westlake, Donald E - Novel 50 for Free Online

giggled, their fingers
from time to time brushing as though inadvertently each others thighs. The
bikinis bulged, the eyes sparkled like the sea, the
pink tongues lolled in their mouths.
                 Beyond
the pool and deck was the house, all white and glass, broadside to the sea,
extending to the right beyond the deck. Through open sliding glass doors was the wide main room, at once parlor, dining area, and
kitchen. In here, among the white walls, blond furniture, and large semierotic
paintings, more people, all of them male (like those outside), chatted and
drank and ate the delicate canapes. The kitchen was at the right end, and
beyond it stretched a skylit hall flanked by doors—master bedroom and bath on
the ocean side, guest rooms and bath on the poison ivy side—with an open door
at the far end leading to a room enclosed by crowded bookshelves, with small
windows grudging an ocean view and a desk against the windowless farthest wall. In this room, hunched over a small portable typewriter on the
desk, sat the owner of the house, George Castleberry, trying to get some work
done.
                 It
was always the same thing every summer. Get into a social mood, invite friends,
accept friends of friends because the whole world and his gay brother wants to
come to Fire Island Pines, and when the house fills up discover there's just
too much work to be done, deadlines are pressing, the whole thing was just a
dreadful mistake. The typewriter calls, duty calls, let the damn locusts amuse
themselves, they'll all be gone on the last ferry anyway, no sleepovers. Except, of course, for those very
few, that tiny number, that infinitesimal troop of those George Castleberry
actually liked. Then he could
settle down with that hardy band for the true amusement of the day: dishing the
day trippers.
                 In
the meantime, work. It was so hard to concentrate ;
while his guests cavorted, George frowned furiously at the leaden words he had
most recently typed. A slender petulant balding man of fifty-three, dressed in
a green and white caftan and brown sandals, George Castleberry was among the
three or four most powerful playwrights of the current American stage, and yet
it seemed to him when working that every word he put on paper was meretricious
and false, that he had been incredibly lucky in the matter of actors and
directors and producers, that he was a fraud and a mountebank who would
inevitably some day be exposed for the utter waste of everybody's time he really
was, that it was only the deplorable state of the American theater—all the
really talented writers were either
doing novels for the art or movies for the money—that had made it possible for
him to get away with this fourth-rate toothless mumbling for as long as he had.
Having to fight his way past that clawing gorgon in his mind to the typewriter every day left him not much time
or patience for the sensibilities of others. Now, hearing light laughter more
distinctly than the general background wash of social chitchat, he snarled, he
actually ground his teeth, he turned
to glare over his shoulder and down the long hall to where some pretty pansy
all in white stood twinkling in amusement, just beyond the threshold into the
kitchen. “Damnit!" George cried. “Close that door ! 1 '
                 Startled
faces were turned toward him. Two or three people reached at once for the knob,
bumping into one another, creating a brief Keystone Komedy before at last the
door was shut and he was alone.
                 Still
angry, George turned to the typewriter and glared at the words written there.
“Now I don't get the ventilation," he muttered, anger shading into
self-pity.
                 Two
or three minutes of despairing concentration quite slowly elapsed. George's
fingers moved tentatively to the typewriter keys, tapped out a word, another,
another, a phrase, a sentence, another.