Acts of Love by Judith Michael Read Free Book Online Page B

dull?”
    â€œBecause they prattle about money, and measure people by money, and because they’re exhibitionists, which I find infantile.”
    â€œBut they’re famous.”
    â€œAnd you write about famous people, so you certainly should write about them. But as if they’re royalty? You don’t really believe that.”
    â€œI believe they’re as important as royalty, and that’s what counts.”
    He shrugged. He knew that Tricia’s enormous success was due in large part to just that sort of serious naiveté, her pure belief that the people she documented—most of whom were shallow and unimportant—were as newsworthy as royalty, their doings every bit as interesting to her readers as the machinations of presidents, generals and crooks.
    And he knew that that was exactly what he asked of his audiences: that they suspend their disbelief and let themselves be swept into the worlds he created. All his work as a director was toward that end: to bring to life the work of the playwright so that audiences responded to it with a pure belief in its reality and importance. For that reason he understood Tricia and even sympathized with her. She had the kind of belief that children have in fairy tales and adults have in fantasies that make their lives tolerable by keeping everything on the surface, avoiding depth and complexity. Together with her blond beauty and endless store of anecdotes, that had kept him amused and interested for almost four months.
    He liked her fame, too. He always chose to be with beautiful, well-known women and he was used to attracting photographers, and the night at the St. Regis was no different. For Luke, the whole evening—the auction to raise money for a cause he had not bothered to notice, the dinner and dancing, the fragments of conversation snatched from the air as groups gathered, broke apart and re-formed—seemed to float on the attention that surrounded him and Tricia. It was a way of getting through the evening without feeling boredom or impatience.
    Without feeling anything. The words flashed and were gone, but they left him feeling as he had in his limousine earlier that long day: stifled, waiting for something and trying to figure out what it was.
    He danced with Tricia, made conversation, bid on and won three items in the silent auction, and engaged in a fierce battle in the live auction for a sculpture he had determined to own. He won there, too, and the crowd broke into applause. In the limousine, he gave Tricia the necklace he had bought in the silent auction, and she cuddled against him. “Are you getting serious about me, Luke?”
    â€œAs serious as you are about me,” he said easily.
    She frowned. After a moment, she said, “I think someday I might like to marry you. I’m just not sure. I think you’d be hard to live with.”
    â€œYou’re probably right.” The limousine stopped in front of her building; Luke sent Arlen home and he and Tricia went upstairs.
    â€œWhat does that mean?” she asked. “That I’m probably right. What does that mean?”
    â€œThat I would most likely be very hard to live with.” He walked with easy familiarity through her living room, a large, coldly modern square space filled with clusters of wood-framed glass tables, white couches and armchairs, marble floors with Stark geometric rugs and a scattering of minimalist paintings on the white walls. Luke disliked it all, finding it neither beautiful nor comfortable, but a major designer had done it for a sum of money that even Tricia found excessive and so she defended it vigorously and wore bright colors that made her stand out like a brilliant flower in a black-and-white photograph. Luke went to the bar and made Tricia a drink and she sipped it while he made one for himself. Then he sat beside her on the couch and took her in his arms. “It’s not something we need to talk about