Invasion of Privacy - Jeremiah Healy Read Online Free PDF

hisses.
    Across Charles Street, Parks Department employees
lovingly tended the flower beds in the Public Garden, their
supervisor the bearded man with the headband who seems to have
replaced the tanned man in the hiking shorts. I nodded at the bearded
supervisor the way everybody does, meaning thanks for making the
effort. He nodded back, a little sadly, I thought, maybe thinking how
little more time was left for the blossoms this year.
    Which after last night with Nancy was the wrong way
for me to be thinking. I shook it off and continued over the bridge
above the Swan Pond. The red and green pontoons for the boats were
moored in the center of the pond next to a skiff, the white swan
figureheads and bench seating already removed and sent somewhere else
till spring. I walked around the equestrian statue of George
Washington, saber drawn but broken off at the hilt, and then up the
Commonwealth Avenue mall under the century-old  Dutch elms that
were also reaching the autumn of their days.
    Jesus.
    I picked up my pace, breaking a little sweat under
the second-day shirt. At Fairfield, I turned right, shortly hitting
Beacon and going up the steps of the brownstone on the comer. I was
renting a one-bedroom unit from a doctor doing a two-year residency
in Chicago, and when I opened the apartment door, the morning sun
slanting through the violet stained-glass windows across the rear
wall of the living room reminded me briefly of a church service. I
felt tight enough inside that I postponed the shower and change to
pull on my running gear and go back downstairs. Crossing Beacon, I
went over the pedestrian ramp straddling Storrow Drive and started
upstream on the macadam path into a northwest wind that would have
spent yesterday blowing newspapers along the streets of Montreal.
    I forced myself to watch the river. Ducks playing tag
near the docks, cormorants diving for the fish making a comeback
against the receding pollution, a lone night heron looking a little
lost in the crotch of a maple tree. College freshmen learned to sail
in the tricky,  skyscraper-skewed winds, their sunny sails
dazzling against the blue-black water. A women's scull surged
downriver in eight-oared spurts, Harvard colors on the crew shirts. A
State Police launch drew alongside a Miami Vice motorboat, checking
some kind of paperwork.
    After two miles, I turned back at the Western Avenue
Bridge, using the pace to force my thoughts toward managing my
breathing, a deep breath drawn in for six strides, then blown out
with three short bursts to follow. Six-three, six-three, over and
over. It bought me fifteen minutes of focused, empty peace.
    Warming down against the trunk of a poplar at the
Fairfield ramp, I noticed a golden retriever swimming along the
opposite shore of the lagoon. On the grassy perimeter, two terriers,
a cairn and a Scottie, scampered point and drag to the retriever. An
older woman waved leashes at the dogs, whistling for them. The
terriers responded but the retriever didn't, just plugging along in
the water, jaws open, drinking in the day—and I hoped not too much
of the lagoon water.
    Finishing my stretching, I
walked back over the ramp, looking forward to a little professional
deception to get my mind off my own reality for a while.
    * * *
    "Let me get this straight," said the young
woman at the copy center, twisting a hank of frosted hair around her
index linger. "You want me to type this up like a
questionnaire?"
    "Word process it," I said.
    "All's we do anymore. We just say 'type' because
it's easier, you know?"
    Elbows on the counter, I nodded as a disheartened
yuppie asked a male near an enormous Xerox machine to print his
résumé on "the ivory stock again, same as last time."
    My helper read my writing, twisting a different hank
of hair. Either she'd been awfully active that way or she'd had a
perm recently. "Now, you want lines next to the questions?"
    "Lines?" I said.
    "Yeah, like for the people to write on. Their
answers, I