Lovers Read Online Free PDF

the last year Gigi had remade its interior with romantic and whimsical finds from flea markets and swap meets, holding her extravagantly disparate choices together by stapling hundreds of yards of various evocative and slightly faded floral fabrics to all the walls, hanging every window in full, floating swags of white dotted swiss, and painting each floorboard in washable green deck paint so that each room had the frothy gaiety and relaxed ambiance of a summer house. She set a round table for herself inside a pair of French doors that led out to a large balcony, where the elaborate wrought iron was wreathed in white jasmine that was just beginning to bloom, scenting the air with richly potent nostalgia. On the other side of Sunset Boulevard, far below her, the lights of Los Angeles performed their traditional magic show with all the promise of city lights seen from a height anywhere in the world, and what’s more, the real-estate agent had been right. On a clear day you actually could see Catalina. And so what?
    She felt bleakly gloomy, Gigi realized. Heavy-hearted. In fact, utterly depressed. Zach’s absence was getting to her, and it was worse every day. The last time he’d returned from a distant location shoot—and that hadn’t been so long ago—he’d promised her to try to accept only those jobs that would keep him in L.A., for he was in such demand as a director that he could decide among a multitude of offers. But he had quickly become so deeply fascinated by an offer to direct a movie based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about life a hundred years ago in Kalispell, Montana, that she hadn’t had the heart to ask him to turn it down. How could she refuse to marry Zach and yet expect him to reject projects that fulfilled his ambition and vision? If she were ready to leave her job, become a wife, and follow him from one shoot to another, they could be together full-time, Gigi reminded herself, but exactly what kind of a life would that be, besides peripatetic?
    She already knew the answer, she admitted. Even when both of them were home, they were rarely alone together. “Full-time” togetherness didn’t exist for more than an hour or two. Not for Zach Nevsky, unless he was asleep.
    She remembered the days when she and her best friend, Sasha Nevsky, had shared an apartment while they worked in New York. It was then that she’d met Sasha’s Off-Broadway director brother and actually been enough of a hero-worshiping patsy to be charmed by the way his life had the shape and sound of an ongoing party. Zach had hundreds of friends in the theater, and sooner or later they all seemed to drop by his place, uninvited, coming almost every night to take a warming, revivifying bask in the glow of his conviction of the importance of actors in the world. They flocked to heal their insecurities by listening to his great, unguarded, confident laugh, to give themselves courage in their professional struggle by sheer contact with him in all his rough power, his longshoreman’s height and width, which belied the cleverness, intelligence, and generosity with which he wrestled to the ground the problems they brought him.
    Zach was a bloody theatrical institution, Gigi told herself in a gust of sudden rage. A fucking institution, a giant sauna who should be transformed into a large building made of concrete, not flesh and blood. Then all the needy people who demanded a share of him could walk in and shelter themselves in his walls, and she would be spared the illusion that he could be loved like an ordinary man. A girl who was so pig-stupid that she’d fallen in love with The Institution that Walked Like a Man had only herself to blame.
    Gigi got up to go into the kitchen and make herself dinner, but stopped with the realization that not only was she not hungry, but she was too furious to be able to swallow. In her state of mind she was afraid to put anything into her mouth without someone around to apply the Heimlich