The Lemur Read Online Free PDF Page B

something of the same sense of alarmed anticipation—though for different reasons—that he had felt when he had followed her into the dive on Houston Street that snowy afternoon in Christmas week, determined she would not disappear out of his life. She was standing at the bar, leaning on an elbow, holding a tall glass of something crimson. “What’s up?” she said. “You’re green around the gills.” She was a painter, and she wore a painter’s smock, but although she had been working and had come straight round from her studio on Bleecker Street there was not a spot of spilled paint to be seen anywhere on her person; she was not that kind of painter. She also wore leggings with black and gray horizontal stripes that made him think, incongruously, of Siena Cathedral.
    He ordered a dry martini, and Alison arched an eyebrow. “A bit early, isn’t it?” she said. “What’s the matter, has your father-in-law cut you out of his will?”
    Glass’s connection with the Mulhollands was for Alison an unfailing invitation for raillery and comic elaboration. She was a humorous girl, with a wayward appreciation of life’s more ridiculous arrangements. What she thought of his marriage to Louise he did not know, for she never said, which was fine by him. She painted big, bold abstracts in bright acrylics, which he did not consider very good. Alison knew what he thought of her work, and did not mind; she was that kind of painter.
    He asked her what she was drinking, looking dubiously at the gory stuff in her glass, and she said it was a Virgin Mary. He sipped at his martini. She was waiting for him to tell her what it was that had made him speak to her so urgently, and so cryptically, on the telephone. Patience was one of her more notable qualities, patience, and a peculiar, and sometimes, so he found, unsettling way of becoming suddenly, eerily still, as if she were waiting calmly for something to take place that she had already foreseen.
    “I think,” he said, “I’ve got myself into a spot of bother.”
    She laughed. “Again?”
    He took another go of his drink. He was trying to recall the exact moment when it had occurred to him that it would be a good idea to hire a researcher to help him in writing the Life of William Pius Mulholland. It had seemed such a simple, such an innocent, thing to do. “Did anyone phone you?” he asked.
    “Did anyone phone me?” She pretended to ponder. “My mother rang the other day, to ask me how I am and if I’ve dumped you yet, which she is forever urging me to do. That dealer on Seventy-fourth Street called, but he’s less interested in putting my pictures into his gallery than in getting into bed with me. And I spoke to the plumber about that leak in the—”
    “I mean,” Glass said, “anyone you didn’t know. Anyone asking questions.”
    “What kind of questions?”
    “Well, about us.”
    “Us?” She gave another, louder, laugh. “Who in this town knows about us ?”
    Her beauty assailed him afresh each time they met, yet it dismayed him, too. How would he bear it if he were to lose her? And lose her he would, of course, sooner or later. He found it hard to believe that he had got her in the first place. He had followed her into the bar that snowy December day and after a search had found her drinking Christmas tequilas with a couple of her girlfriends—tough broads, and how they had glared at him!—and spun her a transparently fake line about wanting to interview her for a piece he was supposed to be writing on the new Irish in Manhattan. She had gazed up at him in the solemn-faced way of someone trying not to laugh, and taken his card and braced it between a finger and thumb as if she were considering flipping it across the bar. Instead she had kept it and, to his surprise, telephoned him next morning and arranged a meeting in Washington Square at noon. She was, as he had guessed, a Dubliner, like him. Her father was dead, her mother worried about her endlessly,