An Inconvenient Woman Read Online Free PDF

Boulevard that was backed by Jules’s money. It was understood that Willi would not speak unless spoken to, as Jules liked to think about the business affairs of the day ahead during that time, except on the mornings when a haircut took place as well as the shave, and then the two men exchanged baseball and football scores, for both were passionately interested in spectator sports.
    Jules was in the habit of leaving Clouds for his office by six o’clock, in order to receive telephone calls from his associates in New York when the stock market opened and to talk with his partners in London. Invariably, with a private sign to Pauline, he slipped away from their parties at eleven, without saying good night to anyone, so as not to break up the evening, and Pauline carried on until the last guest left. The last guest was always Hector Paradiso. Hector liked to wander through the rooms with Pauline, helping her blow out candles and making sure the butler and maids had emptied all the ashtrays. Then it was their habit to settle down in the library with a last glass of champagne, beneath the van Gogh picture of the
White Roses
, and discuss every detail of the evening. It was a ritual they both enjoyed and looked forward to as the perfect denouement of the party. So it was a surprise to Hector, who had something urgent to say to Pauline, when Pauline, after she had blown out the candles, told him that she had a killing headache, “simply killing, darling,” and was going directly to bed without their usual postparty chat andglass of champagne. She did not tell him that Kippie had returned to town.
    Hector Paradiso loved Pauline Mendelson without ever having to play the role of lover, a relationship understood by them both, without its ever having been verbalized by either. Never was Hector happier than on those evenings, which had become increasingly frequent, when Jules was busy working, or away from the city, and he was pressed into service as Pauline’s escort at a charity benefit, or a museum or ballet or opera opening. The photographers always went mad over Pauline Mendelson, who had achieved celebrity status in the social and fashion press, and Hector stood by her side smiling widely, sometimes even waving, as if the media acknowledgment were equally for him and his family’s place in the history of the city.
    Driving down the mountain from Clouds after the Mendelsons’ party, Hector marveled at Pauline, at the utter perfection of her. Hector was a gossip. It was a thing about him everyone knew, and no one knew better than Pauline, but one of the people he never gossiped about was Pauline Mendelson. For Hector never to have mentioned to a single soul in the whole world what he knew about Jules Mendelson and Flo March was a measure of his utter devotion to Pauline.
    Hector led a compartmentalized existence; people who were intimate with him in certain areas of his life knew nothing of the other areas, and it had always been so with him. Tall, dashing, bald, and fit, he looked younger than his forty-eight years. He was that rare sort of man whose looks had improved with the loss of his hair. Dancing, he always said, kept his waistline as slim, or almost as slim, as it had been at twenty-five, although tennis, which he played on Rose Cliveden’s court every weekend, also helped. He was often described as being a descendant of one of the Spanish Land Grant families, like the Sepulvedas and the Figueroas, who had major boulevards named after them, in recognition of their involvement in the founding of the city; and he never did not enjoy the moment when a new person heard his surname, Paradiso, and asked, “As in Paradiso Boulevard, on the way to the airport?”
    The fortune his family once possessed had long since evaporated, but he lived more than comfortably, for a person who didn’t work, on a trust fund left by his sister, Thelma Worthington, the mother of Camilla Ebury, who had killedherself a dozen years ago after an