Angels All Over Town Read Online Free PDF Page A

muscles. His taut mouth lifted in a semismile. I felt like my father; I thought I could read his mind. “I bet I know what he thinks can make me happy.”
    Margo slapped the bedcovers. “Una, you sound like a Vibbert.” The Vibberts were unmarried sisters who referred to themselves as “maiden ladies” and lived next door to my mother, complaining nightly of sleeplessness caused by noise on the beach, any noise, all of which they attributed to sexual frolicking.
    “I’m serious,” she went on. “You’d better watch it. Mom says both of them liked men until they were thirty or so and then went frigid. And you’re twenty-eight.”
    “I’m not frigid. I just don’t like the Wild One looking at me that way when he’s supposed to be Lily’s boyfriend. Besides, I completely
hate
the word ‘frigid.’ It was created by men to make women feel guilty just because they’re not in the mood one night.”
    “That’s not what I meant. I meant hating sex.”
    “I don’t hate sex.” It seemed extraordinary that we were having this discussion with the Wild One standing in the doorway, a paragon of seduction, not understanding a word.
    “No, but you’re feeling guilty. Isn’t that what this is all about? You imagining Dad reading your mind, watching you and Boom-Boom in bed? And what about John?”
    I tried not to think about John Luddington. He was part of the reason I had decided to go to Newport. He was the curator of Achilles House, a small museum on East Eighty-third Street devoted to ancient art. It had once been the private residence of an obscure robber baron. For one year I had thought I loved John. I had spent nearly every night at his brownstone in Brooklyn Heights while my own apartment in Chelsea gathered dust and attracted burglars. During my time with John, it was burgled twice.
    John, tall and pristine, wore a gold stickpin to keep his collar together beneath his narrow pale-silk ties. He kept his hands still, just so, on top of his desk, as if he were posing for a sculptor. His black suits never lost their creases or picked up hairs. He took me to every four-star restaurant in the city, then every three-star one. He drew the line there; except for mad forays into Chinatown or Little Italy, excursions that he called “slumming,” he had no desire to try the two- and one-star establishments. The exception to this rule was any place that was very in with the art crowd, like Café Brillat and the Empire Diner. Often I would be unaware of a restaurant’s rating until we were in the cab, heading across the Brooklyn Bridge, when he would say, “If only they gave
five
stars, they’d move that place into the stratosphere,” or, “What a charade!
Three
stars? That place was no more than
fair
.”
    But in spite of his outward refinement, John had loved me messily. He would bring me croissants in bed and let me eat them amid his pressed white sheets (his cleaning woman, finding nothing to clean in the Luddington apartment, would press his sheets and then stack them in the cedar chest, tied with yellow grosgrain ribbons). On our weekend trips to the country, he would tromp through mud in order to show me the largest-known patch of lady slippers in New England. He would follow me into the dustiest stacks of my favorite library. He would hold me tight, without apparent fear that my makeup would smear on his shirt, whenever I told him I was afraid my father would die of cancer. He adored hugging me.
    His widowed mother was rich and lived year-round on Monhegan Island in Maine. John would often charter a plane and we would land at Brunswick, drive to Port Clyde, and ferry to the island for a visit. It was there, on a new spring weekend in April, that I discovered the strange sexual stirrings that went on in the Luddington household and sent me running, alone, to the ferry across Muscongus Bay to the first Bonanza Bus headed for New York and sanity.
    “John Luddington was a very sick man,” I said to