Single White Female Read Online Free PDF Page A

more to you.”
    Allie listened to her own breathing. “I don’t think I will tell him. Anyway, he’s asleep again.”
    “I really think you should.”
    “Sorry, I don’t agree. You’ve got a lot of your facts wrong, Lisa.”
    “Not the essential one. Wake up Sam, if he really is asleep. Put him on the goddamn phone.”
    “ No.”
    Lisa laughed, not with humor. The bitter sound seem to flow from the phone like bile. “You poor, dumb bitch.” She hung up. Hard.
    Allie lay unmoving, the receiver droning in her ear. The darkness closed in on her tightly, making it difficult to breathe. Poor, dumb bitch . . . There had been more than bitterness in Lisa’s voice; there had been pity. Allie slowly extended her arm, hung up the receiver with a tentative clatter of plastic on plastic. The buzzing of the broken connection continued in her head, like an insect droning.
    After awhile she said, “Sam?”
    Seconds passed before he said, “Hmmm?” Drowsy. Pretending to be asleep. Maybe it was all a dream. Maybe hope could make it so, glue it where it was broken so nobody would know the difference and nothing was changed from the time they’d gone to sleep.
    But Allie knew it couldn’t be repaired.
    “Lisa told me to say she knew you were married. That she followed you home.”
    He gave a long, phony sigh, as if this didn’t concern him and he resented it interfering with his rest. “Whaddya say her name was?”
    “Lisa.”
    “Last name?”
    “You tell me.”
    Nothing but silence from the darkness on Sam’s side of the bed. A jetliner roared overhead like a lion in a distant jungle. The echo of traffic rushed like flowing black water in the night.
    She watched him in silhouette. “She’ll call back, Sam.”
    Lying on his stomach, he raised himself up so that his upper body was propped on his elbows, head hanging to stare at his pillow. It was a posture of despair. His hair had fallen down over his forehead and was in his eyes. “Yeah, I guess she will.”
    Allie said in the calm voice of a stranger, “Who is she, Sam?”
    He flopped over to lie on his back. The mattress swayed beneath his shifting bulk; springs squealed. The back of his hand brushed her bare thigh and quickly withdrew, as if he’d touched something forbidden.
    “Sam?”
    “Yeah.” Resigned.
    “Who is she?”
    “A girl, is all.”
    Allie was thrown by the simple evasiveness of his answer. He was speaking to her as if she were twelve years old. She didn’t like what was welling up in her but she couldn’t stop it. She couldn’t even put a name to it. “Christ, is that what she is, a girl is all? Is that what you’ve got to say, like some goddamned adolescent caught two-timing his steady?”
    “I’m sorry. God, I’m sorry. But really, that’s all she is to me.”
    “Sam, that’s so shabby. So fucking banal.”
    “So maybe I’m banal. I’m sorry about that too.”
    He was working up anger now, preferring it to guilt. The hell with him. He wasn’t fooling her.
    “How long you two been being banal together?” she asked.
    “This isn’t an ongoing relationship,” he said. “Something happened one time. Only one. Damn it, Allie, I wish it hadn’t happened. I sure didn’t plan it. Neither did she.”
    “God’s plan, huh?” she said bitterly.
    “More like the devil’s,” Sam said. “A moment of weakness on my part, and it led to something. I thought that kinda thing only happened to the clowns on soap operas, but I was wrong.”
    She said, “I don’t believe things like that just happen, Sam.”
    “But they do. Then the people involved regret it but can’t change the past. Please, Allie, try to understand this. Try not to be—”
    “Try not to be what?” she interrupted.
    “I dunno. Naive, I guess.”
    She sat up, and switched on the lamp by the bed. Sam twisted his head away from the light, shielding his eyes, as if he might decompose under the glare like Dracula caught in the sun. Allie knew it was the truth that