Harmony In Flesh and Black Read Online Free

surroundings.
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    But he had to wait. Molly had invited her sister, Ophelia, for dinner. It was to be the year’s first backyard barbecue. Molly flagged him down as he turned into the driveway, and leaned into his car window to give him a kiss and warn him about what was impending in the backyard. Molly had been doing something with mint, whose crushed scent greeted Fred with her kiss.
    She was dressed in a blue skirt and cardigan over a white blouse, and her skin was flushed with a Dutch color, rose: the color Renoir had goosed up and made monumental in those late nudes. Her green eyes glowed.
    â€œI’m just home from the library,” Molly said. “Ophelia’s back there trying to start the picnic by herself. Don’t let her come into the kitchen and help, you ugly man.”
    Fred left Clayton’s package in the car, locked the car in the garage, and headed around the house to Molly’s backyard, where the pear tree bloomed against the house and sea gulls, if there was no competition, liked to walk on the twenty-foot square of lawn next to the brick patio where Ophelia was prepared to receive.
    â€œYou make the yard smaller,” Ophelia said when Fred appeared. “We have been waiting for you. Where have you been, great hunter?”
    â€œBagging a virgin for Clayton Reed,” Fred said. “Where’s the kids?”
    Ophelia shrugged, gesturing toward the house. She was in an aluminum chair, wrapped in a pink blanket, drinking gin and tonic from a tall glass. Although the sun was almost gone, she had on the shades with the bangled corners. She was the perfect blond; she looked as if someone had reached into a Hockney painting and jerked her across the country from Hollywood. She should have palm trees around her, and a blue pool—not Molly’s tiny yard, which, as Ophelia said, Fred made smaller.
    Fred was never sure if Ophelia was making a play for him, or was making fun of Molly, or liked him, or was pretending to like him on Molly’s account, or was pretending not to like him (also on Molly’s account), or had something else on her mind. Molly’s sister, Ophelia Finger, had kept her first husband’s last name, a rock of stability as she blew from the reef of one marriage to the storm of another. Married three times, Ophelia was presently between marriages. She operated in the world at a success level that amounted to a public nuisance. Ophelia’s achievement was based on the fashion of faith healing that disregarded any system requiring either more or fewer than twelve steps. She sold people what already belonged to them: the American Dream.
    Her best-selling book, a pamphlet fleshed out with photographs, Learning to Love the Body You Have, was the offshoot of seminars she had done around the country before large audiences. The lectures led to a TV series that featured Molly’s sister, pert and chic and fit in a skintight golden gown, addressing the limps, bulges, and goiters of a crowd of persons of both sexes whom she had persuaded into white leotards. They were learning to love, under Ophelia’s direction and amid the lights and cameras, those parts of themselves and each other that all the other seminars told them they should get rid of with exercise or starvation.
    â€œTell me about the virgin,” Ophelia said, licking her lips and making her eyes bright for the cameras.
    Fred looked around for Sam to see if he wanted to light the fire, but Sam was lying low, as was Terry. They had a program on TV that they depended on about this time, Fred knew, and it drew them as urgently as their aunt repelled them.
    â€œI can’t imagine Clayton Reed’s knowing what to do with a virgin even if she were completely bagged,” Ophelia said.
    Molly had insisted on introducing Ophelia to Clay, and it hadn’t worked.
    â€œâ€˜Virgin’ is a figure of speech,” Fred said, brushing dust and charred