Manhattan Nocturne by Colin Harrison Read Free Book Online

under the protection of their own charming loveliness and the presence of a fiancé. Without some good reason, right?”
    Now she gazed into her lap.
    â€œLook,” I went on, my voice softening, “I’m just saying that if you want to play, if you want to get into something here, some kind of real conversation, not the usual cocktail-party crap, fine. I’ll do that. I deal with bullshitters all day long, with great interest, I might add, but I’m on my own time here, so do me a favor—get to it, okay? Get to whatever it is you want with me.”
    She looked up then, straight into my face. I hadn’t scared her at all. Perhaps a hint of amusement passed through her eyes. “I was hoping I might talk to you about something important, actually,” she said in quite a different voice—a calm, clear voice.
    â€œWhat is it?”
    â€œIt’s complicated … I mean, it takes a while.”
    â€œI see.” But of course I didn’t.
    â€œCould we talk about it?” she asked.
    â€œSure.”
    â€œTonight?”
    â€œAre you serious?”
    She nodded. “We could leave right now.”
    â€œAnd where would we be going?”

    â€œMy apartment, about fifteen blocks from here.” She stared at me. “Charlie wouldn’t be coming along.”
    Her eyes, I realized, were the blue of a mailbox. “I don’t know, Caroline Crowley, maybe I shouldn’t be left alone with you.”
    She touched a finger to her pearls, smiled to herself. The girlie act was gone, and she looked up at me, eyes unblinking. “Am I to understand,” she said huskily, “that we’re protecting your virtue, not mine?”
    â€œYes. Absolutely.”
    But this, I told myself, was not about sex. She had something else in mind. And maybe it could be a story. I’ve learned that you have to put yourself in the way of opportunity if you want to get the good stories. I told her I needed a few minutes, and then found a phone and called Lisa, knowing it was just late enough that she might have turned off the ringer so that the kids would not wake in our small house. The answering machine came on. I muttered something into the receiver about running into some people, that we were going out for a drink. Was this a lie? Yes, sort of. I had not done anything to feel guilty about, nor did I expect to, but my lie seemed easier than explaining that I was leaving the party with some woman in a peach gown whom I’d just met. So I said I was out for a drink. My wife is used to this—it’s definitely part of the job—and only expects, ultimately, that I keep my underwear on and be home by the time the kids climb into our bed in the morning—about five-thirty or six. Sally and Tommy stumble sleepily into our room and crawl into the blankets and get between us and then sometimes fall asleep again, with the sweet stink of their breathing, and more often they flop around and everybody is forced to wake up. Or I fall asleep again—a troubled, shallow sleep, always—and Sally lies there awake, thinking of something, and then rolls over and asks me directly, right in my ear, something like this: “Daddy, does LaTisha have hair on her bottom?” LaTisha is Josephine’s daughter, a sullen black girl of fifteen, almost six feet tall. I quite imagine that she has hair “on her
bottom,” as Sally refers to it, and I have little doubt that the whole area has been thoroughly pawed over by some boyfriend or another. And then I push my eyes open and there, at 6:02 A.M., or whatever the time, is my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, with her eyes clear and awake, watching her unshaven dad rise from the grave of sleep (maybe she sees the heaviness of my eyes, the flecks of gray in my stubble, maybe she can already intuit that I am closer to death than she), and to see her face like that, so close to mine, is the sweetest thing in the world.