Acts of Love by Judith Michael Read Free Book Online

date when Luke agreed to take her out for a drink, having his most normal conversations with a taxi driver from Pakistan and a limousine driver from Dublin. Suddenly he felt stifled, wanting to run. Run where? He didn’t know. Somewhere. To find something. But he had no idea what he wanted or where to look for it.
    Forty-five years old, he thought. Healthy, financially secure, internationally known, admired, maybe envied. Unmarried. Unattached.
    â€œShall I wait, Mr. Cameron?” Arlen asked as he turned onto Fifth Avenue.
    â€œYes. I’ll be about half an hour.” I’m attached to Arlen, he thought ruefully: the only person who always waits for me. Good God, that sounds maudlin. It’s the heat, as everyone says. Or the beginning of a new play; for me that’s always the hardest time, when nothing yet has a shape, when I have a manuscript but no actors, no characters coming to life, nothing to mold. I’m always tense at the beginning of a project; it doesn’t mean a thing.
    But the truth was, there was something else that he wanted, something he hadn’t achieved, and even though he could not define it, he often felt a longing that crept up on him, as just now, taking him by surprise. It always faded, but it always came back.
    Across the street from the Metropolitan Museum, Arlen pulled up at a limestone building festooned with stone gargoyles and rearing dragons and wrought-iron balconies that stretched the width of the building at each floor. A doorman reached for the limousine door as Luke opened it. “Well, sir, Mr. Cameron, it’s a hot one, and hotter tomorrow, the radio says.” Luke wondered how many times that day he had said those words to other residents of the building, how many times he had ducked inside for a breath of cool air and a swig of something iced, how many times he had mopped his face and changed his white gloves to keep them pristine. We all have stifling days, he thought, but his own restlessness, a kind of urgency, still gripped him, and he wished, as the second doorman took him to his penthouse in the self-service elevator that the residents insisted be run by a doorman, that he could stay home that night and try to figure out what was wrong with him.
    But there were almost no nights that he could stay home, and so he greeted his butler, who told him that it was exceedingly hot outside but that the apartment was blessedly cool, swiftly took a shower, shaved and changed into his tuxedo and returned to the street. Arlen pulled up just as he emerged and, without being told, drove to the glass-and-steel tower on Madison Avenue where Tricia Delacorte was coming toward him across the lobby. She kissed Luke lightly as her doorman closed the car door behind her. “My, you do look handsome; your hair is different.”
    â€œStill wet from the shower.” He looked at her with pleasure, admiring her cultivated beauty and the expensive perfection of her ball gown that exposed a good part of her creamy skin between puffed sleeves in a rainbow of colors. She had been born Teresa Pshevorski on the west side of Chicago, but at seventeen, newly arrived in Los Angeles, she got her first job as a maid, as Tricia Delacorte, a name from a novel long since forgotten. She had planned to marry a famous actor or director she met while serving hors d’oeuvres at parties, but the years went by and it never happened, and one day, bored and angry, she wrote an article for a neighborhood newspaper describing the scandals of fictitious characters as if they were major names in Hollywood: the high and mighty who ate and drank but ignored the maid. Her writing was lively and racy and attracted the attention of the editor of the Los Angeles Times, who called her in.
    By then she had had two face-lifts and could talk like an insider, using the storehouse of gossip and movie lore she had overheard in years of parties. She talked her way to a column in the Los Angeles Times,