Free Found in the Street by Patricia Highsmith Page A

is he following you around?”
    Jack grinned. “I don’t think so. Hadn’t noticed.”
    â€œWatch out. He’s out to improve the world.—He lives on Bleecker, I think. He said you lived on Grove.”
    â€œ El-sie! —Get those burgers with! They’re on your side!”
    Once more she was gone.
    Jack wished he had a ballpoint pen with him or a pencil. The sharp angle at the corner of her eyes when she laughed was just what he wanted for Suzuki, the fantasy girlfriend of the adolescent boy in the Dreams book. Could he remember it? The angle was best seen in profile, and with the upturned corner of her lips too. Jack’s left hand shot out and seized a short pencil that seemed to have materialized just for him, inches away on the counter. He drew rapidly on the back of his check, eyes as much on Elsie as on the paper. He had it. Whew! Good! He felt like a man who’d just captured a fish. Rapidly he drew the line of her neck, the back of her head.
    â€œYou’re drawing me?”
    â€œFinished. Thanks.” Jack gave her a real smile, and stuck the folded check carefully into his back pocket.
    â€œAre you an artist?” Elsie asked with a suddenly childlike curiosity. “Ralph said you were a journalist.”
    â€œWho’s Ralph?”
    â€œThe guy with the dog.”
    â€œOh. No, I’m more of an artist—I like to think. I wanted to get the corner of your eyes. Eye in profile. And I couldn’t have asked you to come to my studio, could I? That’d have been like asking you to come up and see my etchings, no?” Jack repressed a happy laugh now, and there was something funny in the serious and thoughtful way the girl looked at him, as if she were pondering his last words. “Anyway, thanks—Elsie.” He got up from the stool.
    â€œHey!—I’ll come up if you need any sittings. No charge.”
    Jack’s amazed smile was back. “Wh-where do I find you? Here?”
    A laugh bubbled from her. “For the next week maybe. Sure. I’m around.” She lifted a hand carelessly by way of good-bye, and turned back to her work.
    The rain had diminished to droplets. Jack felt happy, rather as if he had just fallen in love. He was familiar with the sensation, though it had not come to him often. He’d had it a few times in art class on a good day, when a female model, not necessarily young or pretty, had inspired him to produce a good charcoal sketch or line drawing or whatever, and suddenly he had felt in love with the model, as if she had a special power, only she, to bring his talent out. It never lasted. But it was easy for Jack to understand why artists, Modigliani and others, had felt a desire to bed their models on completion of a good piece of work. Absurd, considering that his effort was a few lines with a blunt pencil on the back of a check that had faint blue lines on it. He had felt like embracing this girl Elsie, as if to make sure she was real, solid.
    Elsie had worn a cheap ring on her middle finger, left hand, a skull surrounded by snakes. Bright red nail polish, neatly applied. Her hands were graceful and rather lean. A couple of boys, white, had stared at her, paid her wild compliments on her blue eyes, asked her when she was going off duty tonight, and Elsie had ignored them totally.
    Jack let himself quietly into the apartment, heard the murmur of voices, slipped to the right, into the bathroom, where he combed his hair. His trousers were still slightly damp at the cuffs, but no matter. He went into the living-room where the air smelled of women’s scent, cigarette smoke, where Natalia lolled back on the sofa, Louis on her right, Sylvia in the big green armchair facing them. Sylvia saw him first.
    â€œHi there, Jack! You were out?”
    â€œWalking Joel and his girlfriend down.” Jack saw his unfinished Jack Daniel’s on a corner of the bamboo cabinet, and picked it up. Half an inch