Free News from the World by Paula Fox

next morning when I went to take a shower, I discovered a tiny snake coiled around the drain, asleep. I dressed hastily in the shirt and jeans I had just dropped on the floor and went to get Richard.
    He picked up a withered tree limb from the ground, went into the shower room and killed the little snake with three blows. I noted tiny amber-colored rattles at the end of its tail. Richard said, “Its bite is as bad as the big ones.”
    In the afternoon I sat on a folding chair in a horse stall watching Robin set up his easel and prepare his palette. For an hour or so he used me as a practice model. As I sat there breathing in the lingering smells of horse and dung mixed with linseed oil, I dreamed of ghost horses. I sat for him again, and later on, again, and the oil sketch became a portrait.
    Later that week, Robin invited us to join him and Peg for tea at Frieda’s house. We drove out of Taos in their rented car. There was no traffic, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains loomed over us, the land seemed to move along with the car on low billows, and the sun bore down fiercely, a brilliant yellow dazzle that did away with the past and the future, leaving only the present. We came to two adobe ranch houses facing each other across the road. They looked as if they’d been drawn by a child.
    As we drew closer, I saw an elderly woman moving clumsily about the veranda of one of the houses. An ear trumpet stuck out from beneath her Harpo Marx–like yellow hair. A graceful young man joined her, took her arm, and led her to a chair. Robin told us she was Dorothy Brett, a longtime friend of the writer’s. Actually, he added, she had been Lawrence’s acolyte.
    I was the first up the path to Frieda’s house, passing a wooden out-building halfway there. Breathlessly, I pushed open the front door and felt a soft resistance, as though pillows were piled up behind it.
    But it was Frieda Lawrence’s ample behind as she was bending at that same moment to open the stove door. I glimpsed burned crackers covered with melted cheese in a pan.
    â€œAt least,” she said to me as she straightened up holding the pan with a kitchen towel, “Lawrence isn’t here to scold me for my clumsiness with these—” and she nodded toward the cheese and crackers. She laughed then, a husky, amiable sound.
    The others had caught up with me, and we followed her into the living room, where she set the pan down on a roughly carpentered table. I was startled by the large paintings that crowded the white plaster walls. “Lawrence’s,” she said.
    I found them repellent. The subjects were naked women crawling on a stone floor, their breasts and buttocks enormous, their faces angry or as blank as balloons. The work was done in raw, brutal colors, full of energy and hysteria.
    I sat down beside her on a serape-covered sofa while Richard spoke across the room with Robin and Peg. Frieda told me that a week earlier a young man from Boston had visited her to talk about Lawrence. She was hardly able to get a word in. The young man had overflowed with his worshipful paean to the novelist.
    â€œAnd he had rented a horse in Albuquerque and ridden here, over seventy-five miles,” she said smiling. “For the effect, you see, to get my attention to his heroic effort in the cause of Lawrence.”
    The burned crackers had a good taste despite their charred edges. Frieda rose at some point to fetch glasses of water. The conversation, widening like a stream, grew more general. Peg twittered away, nourishing herself, no doubt, with her own Englishness. We stayed for an hour.
    As we walked silently down the slope—I was too bemused by Frieda’s reality, the power of her mystery for me, to speak—I saw a short, heavy man standing in the path with his back toward us. He turned when we reached him. Robin had whispered to me that he was Angelo Ravagli, brought from Italy by Lawrence. His expression was sad,