get a peek at you ever since you moved in. Have a seat." She scooped up a pile of clothing from one of the chairs and dumped it onto the crowded sofa. "So you finally decided to visit your neighbors. Get you a drink?"
"You're a painter," I burbled, for want of something to say. I was unnerved by the thought that any moment she would realize she was undressed and would scream and dash for the bedroom. I tried to keep my eyes moving, looking everywhere but at her.
"Beer or ale? Nothing else in the place right now except cooking sherry. You don't want cooking sherry, do you?"
"I can't stay," I said, getting hold of myself and fixing my gaze at the beauty mark on the left side of her chin. "I've locked myself out of my apartment. I wanted to go across the fire escape. It connects our windows."
"Any time," she assured me. "Those lousy patent locks are a pain in the ass. I locked myself out of this place three times the first week I lived here—and once I was out in the hall stark naked for half an hour. Stepped out to get the milk, and the goddamned door swung shut behind me. I ripped the goddamned lock off and I haven't had one on my door since."
I must have frowned, because she laughed. "Well, you see what the damned locks do. They lock you out, and they don't protect much, do they? Fifteen burglaries in this goddamned building in the past year and every one of them in apartments that were locked. No one ever broke in here, even though the door was always open. They'd have a rotten time finding anything valuable here anyway."
When she insisted again on my having a beer with her, I accepted. While she was getting it from the kitchen, I looked around the room again. What I hadn't noticed before was that the part of the wall behind me had been cleared away—all the furniture pushed to one side of the room or the center, so that the far wall (the plaster of which had been torn off to expose the brick) served as an art gallery. Paintings were crowded to the ceiling and others were stacked against each other on the floor. Several of them were self-portraits, including two nudes. The painting she had been working on when I came in, the one on the easel, was a half-length nude of herself, showing her hair long (not the way she wore it now, up in blonde braids coiled around her head like a crown) down to her shoulders with part of her long tresses twisted around the front and resting between her breasts. She had painted her breasts uptilted and firm with the nipples an unrealistic lollipop-red. When I heard her coming back with the beer, I spun away from the easel quickly, stumbled over some books, and pretended to be interested in a small autumn landscape on the wall.
I was relieved to see that she had slipped into a thin ragged housecoat—even though it had holes in all the wrong places—and I could look directly at her for the first time. Not exactly beautiful, but her blue eyes and pert snub nose gave her a catlike quality that contrasted with her robust, athletic movements. She was about thirty-five, slender and well proportioned. She set the beers on the hardwood floor, curled up beside them in front of the sofa, and motioned for me to do the same.
"I find the floor more comfortable than chairs," she said, sipping the beer from the can. "Don't you?"
I told her I hadn't thought about it, and she laughed and said I had an honest face. She was in the mood to talk about herself. She avoided Greenwich Village, she said, because there, instead of painting, she would be spending all her time in bars and coffee shops. "It's better up here away from the phonies and the dilettantes. Here I can do what I want and no one comes to sneer. You're not a sneerer, are you?"
I shrugged, trying not to notice the gritty dust all over my trousers and my hands. "I guess we all sneer at something. You're sneering at the phonies and dilettantes, aren't you?"
After a while, I said I'd better be getting over to my own apartment. She pushed a pile of books away from the window—and I climbed over newspapers and paper bags filled with empty quart