Garden of Lies Read Online Free PDF Page B

feelings came
    creeping over her. Sylvie would watch him surreptitiously as he repaired a broken drainpipe or
    dug holes in the garden for her roses—his chest bare, shirt knotted about his waist, the muscles
    leaping in his glistening brown back—and would experience that same secret flash of shameful
    excitement. She’d [19] wonder what it would be like to be kissed by him, to feel those big rough
    hands sliding over her. Guiltily, she tried to banish those thoughts. Women would kill for a
    husband like hers. How could she even look at another man?
    Yet she couldn’t control her private fantasies. Bathing, she would become aroused suddenly by
    a warm trickle of water between her legs, and feel impaled by a hot arrow of desire. Or napping
    in the afternoon, she would dream that Nikos was beside her in the big four-poster bed, his sweat
    soiling the stiff, hand-embroidered linen sheets Gerald imported from Ireland. Then she’d awaken
    to sunlight sifting through the drapes, and stare up at the tall carved bedposts, filled with a kind of
    dazed yearning. Sometimes, still half-dreaming, she’d give in and satisfy her desire. But
    afterwards she’d hate herself even more.
    What was this, she would ask herself, was it love? Yet how could that be? She didn’t admire
    him the way she admired and respected Gerald. And when she came home from the infertility
    specialist’s office, aching all over from yet another painful test, it was always Gerald’s arms she
    wanted about her, no one else’s.
    And yet ...
    It was Nikos’s muscled chest she thought of when Gerald heaved atop her. Nikos’s powerful
    hands and full mouth. Sometimes she closed her eyes, found herself imagining that Gerald was
    Nikos, and only then would Gerald’s touch bring her pleasure.
    But the worst thing was that she thought Nikos knew. It was nothing he said or did; it was the
    way he looked at her. A sideways glance sliding out from under heavy lids as he appeared to be
    absorbed in the dismantled parts of a faucet. Or a long speculative gaze from atop a ladder as he
    paused while patching a ceiling.
    Late one sticky summer night with the air so thick she felt as if she were suffocating, Sylvie
    had gotten out of bed, leaving Gerald asleep, snoring softly. Downstairs, out on the terrace that
    led off the back parlor, it was cooler, and she could breathe.
    She had seen the red tip of a cigarette glowing in the darkness, and had frozen, startled first,
    then terrified that the shadowy form half-astride the stone balustrade might be an intruder. Then it
    struck her that the steps curving down to the garden led around to the basement room where
    Nikos slept.
    [20] He rose and came forward.
    Silhouetted against the moonlit garden, he appeared somehow darker, more dangerous than an
    intruder.
    A shiver ran up the back of her neck.
    He offered her a cigarette, which she accepted even though she didn’t usually smoke.
    “I couldn’t sleep,” she explained. “It was so hot I thought I’d come out for some air.” She was
    self-conscious about the transparency of her silk robe, and fiddled with the sash, talking too fast.
    “You know what I used to do when I was a little girl? I’d pull my mattress out onto the fire
    escape and sleep there. Mama would scold me, she was always afraid I’d fall.”
    He laughed, tossing his head back. “And now you have no fire escape.” His English had gotten
    better over the past year, but was still limited to short sentences. “Too bad.”
    “Yes, it is too bad, isn’t it?”
    A spacious brownstone overlooking Riverside and the Hudson, servants, more money than she
    could ever have dreamed of, but no fire escape. She laughed too, a high-strung giggle.
    “And your mama, where is she now?”
    Her laughter shriveled. “Dead.”
    Sylvie looked out at the garden, at the dark cascade of ivy obscuring the brick walls, and at her
    roses, gleaming in the moonlight like old and precious silver. She even loved their