An Imperfect Spy by Amanda Cross Read Free Book Online

criminal law; you were pointed out to me afterward as his lit-crit wife; you had come to hear him. I remembered that when I had to think of a literary type to help me teach this course. I thought, you see, you might be more amenable to adventures in legal realms because of your husband. And then with him doing the clinic, I thought we might as well take up nepotism as well as revolution. Would you like another drink or shall we order?”
    “Let’s order, by all means,” Kate said, feeling rather breathless. First it had been Harriet, now Blair. Reed was going to do a clinic for them while she was teaching a course, and so far everyone they’d met had been surprising. Was that a good sign?
    When they had ordered, Kate sat there, feeling somehow the pawn of destiny, and admiring his hair, straight, with some gray beginning, and lying thick like an animal’s pelt; his vivid blue eyes, blue, no doubt, from staring at the sea, looked at her, smiling. You’ll be writing romantic fiction next, she told herself.
    Without waiting for their food to arrive, Blair Whitson apologized for launching into the topic of their proposed course immediately, and then launched. “The fact is,” he said, “if we’re going to do this course, we’ve got to start planning yesterday. Sorry to pressure you, but isn’t life, at least academic life, always that way? First it’s don’t do today what you can put off to tomorrow, and then it’s hurry up, this stuff was needed yesterday. I’m sure you understand what I mean. I know, I know,” he added before Kate could respond, although for once she was thinking and hadn’t got yet to a response, “I’m pushing you. Of course I am. The class starts late next week. We can muddle through the first meeting with reading lists and gab about papers, participation, the usual. But after that, of course, we’re going to have to say something both literary and legal.”
    “Simultaneously?” Kate asked. She leaned back in her chair and took in the scene. The Oak Room at the Plaza, when you got right down to it, was an odd place to plan a revolution, or even a course on literature and law. For some idiotic reason, Kate thought of a story she had heard about Marlene Dietrich arriving in some elegant dining place just like this wearing white tie and tails. “We do not allow women in trousers,” the maître d’ had proclaimed. With which Dietrich took off the trousers and tossed them aside. It helped, of course, to have gorgeous legs.
    “As near simultaneously as possible,” he answered.“I don’t mean we have to both talk at once, but that we both talk on whatever the reading is—literature or law. Is that all right with you?”
    “Sounds lovely,” Kate said.
    “Do I catch an ironic note?” he asked. “I was told you wear irony the way some women wear perfume.”
    He had begun to flirt, a younger man with a woman just the right number of years older.
    “It’s a good defense,” she said. “Against many things. Oddly enough, the only thing I find it difficult to be ironic about is the misuse of words for no decent reason.”
    “What words, though I hardly dare to ask? I probably misuse them all.”
    “Since you ask,
disinterested
to mean
uninterested; transpired
to mean
happened;
and a recent candidate,
serendipitously
to mean
by chance
. Now that I have established myself as a pedant, have you had any ideas about particular texts, or legal briefs, if that’s what they’re called?”
    “Yes, I have,” he said, obviously trying to remember if he had misused these words, and producing some papers just in time almost to collide with the waiter serving their first course. He handed her the sheets of paper. “These are the legal readings I thought we might use.
Michael M
. v.
Superior Court
, for instance, is a case of statutory rape which might go with some novel or other. About the rights of a woman to say no and mean it.”
    “Jude the Obscure,”
Kate said. “I think this isgoing