Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen : A Novel (9781101565766) Read Online Free PDF Page B

issuers, having captured the hearts and loyalties of their customers well before they were of age to spend money or borrow with discretion. Since he’d been on the bank’s board, Captiva had sent out millions of “preapproved” letters to college freshmen and the first-time employed. If such communications had come from a familiar performer rather than an impersonal financial institution, he suspected they might have yielded dramatically higher success rates.
    Still, now that he recalled it, he remembered that something about that poster had stopped him in his tracks, as if the young movie star, with his fetching smile, his hair the color of butter and eyes the blue of Windex, might be more than an innocent object of affection—indeed, might be likely to infect his granddaughter with unrealistic dreams.
    â€œLook, Stuart, do me a favor, will you?” Billy asked. “Tell Cynthia and Emily I’m home.”
    â€œSure,” Stuart said, and scrambled enthusiastically for the stairs.
    â€œWhere are we going?” Emily inquired a few minutes later, examining her fingernails as she hugged her grandfather. She had painted them chartreuse two days before, and the enamel was beginning to crack.
    â€œThe club,” Billy said.
    â€œCan’t we go to Paolo’s instead?”
    â€œI thought you liked the club.”
    â€œI do, but Paolo’s has the best music—and the cutest waiters.”
    â€œOnly in the summer,” Billy said. “Their patio’s closed this time of year. You know that. And right now the guys who work out there are either in school or in Florida perfecting their tans.”
And getting laid,
he thought, although he did not say so.
    â€œNever mind,” Cynthia said. “I’ve had a wicked week. For that matter, I’m sure your grandfather has as well. We’d like to have a drink and some decent food and conversation, in peace and quiet.”
    â€œI’ll take your word for it,” Emily said.
    â€œEnough,” Billy said, but quickly thought better of it and decided to relax. He did not want their holiday to dissolve into argument or sullenness. “Let me ask you a question, Emily,” he continued. “Suppose we go to Paolo’s another night.”
    â€œ
Not
on Christmas.”
    â€œOf course not on Christmas. On Christmas we’ll be here. When does your father get in, by the way?”
    â€œChristmas Eve, I think,” Emily replied, searching her mother’s face for affirmation.
    Cynthia nodded.
    â€œHow about the day after Christmas?” Billy suggested, smiling reluctantly. Only yesterday she had been a little girl, uncritical, adoring. How could he help resenting the displacement of her affection to someone else, someone younger, an object of fantasies that were not platonic? Time was passing more quickly than he’d expected, that was all. And Emily, as had her mother so many years before, was simply going through another stage. There was nothing anyone could do but grin and see her through it, as they’d seen her through her recent difficulties at school, in French and science classes. A girl’s sexual awakening was no easier to manage than a boy’s, he supposed, especially one as pretty as Emily promised to become.
    â€œYes, yes, yes,” she said.
    â€œThen that’s settled,” Billy proclaimed, wondering, as he invariably did—as he couldn’t help but do—how genes could contrive to make siblings so different: one male, a future fullback and black, the other female, with a dancer’s delicate bones and the pinkest cheeks he’d ever seen.
    At seven o’clock, after baths, they gathered in the living room before a fire.
    â€œWould you like a drink?” Billy asked.
    â€œIn fact, I think I would,” Cynthia said. “The usual.”
    He went to the bar built into a nook opposite the large bay windows, and made two Rob Roys, mixing