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Dragon 1 DragonSpell Paul, Donita K
Confidence pour confidence Paul Constant
Clive Cussler [NUMA Files 08] Paul Kemprecos (v5.0) (epub) id
Charles McCarry [Paul Christo The Miernik Dossier (v5.0) (epu
Coeur d'Acier Les Habits Noir Paul Feval (pere)
Beinssen, Jan Paul Flemming Die Paten vom Knoblauchsland id
Dragonlance Ergoth 01 A Warrior's Journey # Paul B Th
Chaplet, Anne Paul Bremer 06 Sauberer Abgang
Doctor Who The Eye of the Tyger Paul J. McAuley
[Hugh Corbett 14] Le livre du m Paul C. Doherty

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.The day after her departure, he invited Tom to join him for dinner at Mike & Tony’s Steak House on Fifth Avenue, and for the first time since his release from prison nine years earlier, he spilled the beans about his past – the whole brutal, asinine story of his misspent life, alternately laughing and weeping as he unburdened himself to his incredulous assistant.He had started out in Chicago as a salesclerk in the perfume department at Marshall Field’s.After two years, he had advanced to the somewhat more exalted position of assistant window dresser, and no doubt that was where he would have stayed if not for his unlikely union with Bette (pronounced bet) Dombrowski, the youngest daughter of multi-millionaire Karl Dombrowski, commonly referred to as the Diaper-Service King of the Midwest.The art gallery that Harry opened the following year was created entirely with Bette’s money, but just because that money brought him hitherto unimaginable comforts and social status, it would be wrong to assume that he married her only because she was rich or that he walked into his new life under false pretenses.He was never anything less than frank with her on the subject of his sexual proclivities, but not even that could stop Bette from finding Harry to be the most desirable man she had ever known.She was already in her mid-thirties then, a homely, inexperienced woman who was rapidly heading toward permanent spinsterhood, and she knew that if she didn’t assert herself with Harry, she was destined to live out the rest of her days in her father’s house as an object of scorn, the clumsy maiden aunt of her brothers’ and sisters’ children, an exile stranded in the heart of her own family.Fortunately, she was less interested in sex than in companionship, and she dreamed of sharing her life with a man who would bestow on her some of the sparkle and self-confidence she lacked.If Harry wanted to indulge in an occasional dalliance or clandestine romp, she would have no objections.Just so long as they were married, she said, and just so long as he understood how much she loved him.There had been women in Harry’s life before.From the earliest years of his adolescence, his sexual history had been an indiscriminate catalogue of lusts and longings that fell on both sides of the fence.Harry was glad he had been built that way, glad that he was immune to the prejudice that would have forced him to spend his life spurning the charms of one half of humanity, but until Bette proposed to him in 1967, it had never occurred to him that he might enter into a fixed domestic arrangement, let alone find himself transformed into a husband.Harry had loved many times in the past, but he had rarely been loved in return, and Bette’s ardor astonished him.Not only was she offering herself to him without reservation, but in the same breath she was granting him total liberty.There were, of course, certain drawbacks to contend with as well.Bette’s family, for one thing, and the bullying interference from her blowhard father, who would periodically threaten to cut his daughter out of his will unless she divorced “that obnoxious pansy.” And then, even more unsettling perhaps, there was the matter of Bette herself.Not the person or the soul of Bette, but her body, the outer manifestations of Bette, with her small squinting eyes and the off-putting black hairs that adorned her fleshy forearms.Harry had an instinctive, highly developed taste for the beautiful, and he had never fallen for anyone who was less than attractive.If anything made him hesitate about marrying her, it was this question of her looks.But Bette was so kind, and ever so intent on pleasing him, that Harry took the plunge, knowing that his first job as a married man would be to mold his wife into a facsimile of a woman who could – in the proper light and under the proper circumstances – arouse a flicker of desire in him.Some of the improvements were simple enough to achieve.Her glasses were replaced by contact lenses; her wardrobe was revamped; her arms and legs were subjected to painful depilatory treatments at regular intervals.But there were other factors that Harry couldn’t control, efforts that his new bride would have to make entirely on her own.And Bette did make them.With all the discipline and self-abnegation of a holy sister of God, she managed to diet away close to one-fifth of her body weight in the first year of their marriage, dropping from a dowdy 155 to a slender 126.Harry was moved by the struggles of his strong-willed Galatea, and as Bette blossomed under the care and scrutiny of her husband’s watchful gaze, their growing admiration for each other developed into a solid, lasting friendship.Flora’s birth in 1969 was not the result of some prearranged one-night stand.Harry and Bette slept together often enough in the early years of their marriage to make a pregnancy almost inevitable, an a priori fait accompli.Who among Harry’s friends would have predicted such a turnaround? He had married Bette because she had promised him his freedom, but once they settled in together, he discovered that he had little or no interest in exercising it.The gallery opened its doors in February 1968.It was the fulfillment of a long-standing dream for the thirty-four-year-old Harry, and he did everything he could to make the operation a success.Chicago wasn’t the center of the art world, but neither was it some Podunk backwater, and there was enough wealth floating around the city for a clever man to induce some of it to wind up in his pocket.After a period of deep reflection, he decided to call his gallery Dunkel Frères.Harry had no brothers, but he felt the name lent a certain Old World quality to the enterprise, hinting at a long family tradition in the business of buying and selling art.As he saw it, the marriage between the German proper noun and the French modifier would create an arresting, altogether agreeable confusion in the minds of his customers.Some would take the blending of languages to signify a background in Alsace.Others would think he was from a German-Jewish family that had emigrated to France.Still others wouldn’t have the first idea what to make of him.No one would ever be certain of Harry’s origins – and when a man can produce an air of mystery about himself, he always has the upper hand when dealing with the public.He specialized in the work of young artists – paintings mostly, but also sculptures and installation pieces, along with a couple of Happenings, which were still in fashion in the late sixties.The gallery sponsored poetry readings and soirées musicales, and because Harry was interested in all forms of the beautiful, Dunkel Frères did not confine itself to a narrow aesthetic position.Pop and Op, minimalism and abstraction, pattern painting and photographs, video art and the New Expressionism – as the years went by, Harry and his phantom brother exhibited works that embodied every trend and inclination of the period.Most of the shows flopped.That was to be expected, but more dangerous to the future of the gallery were the defections of the half dozen or so real artists Harry discovered along the way [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]