Red Hook by Reggie Nadelson Read Free Book Online

mean, just the flowers.”
    â€œIt’s the way he is,” I said.
    In the loft, half an acre of it, the central air conditioning purred, ceiling fans moved the filmy white curtains along the windows. Little trees with real lemons on them stood in terracotta pots, and everywhere there were huge clusters of white lilies and roses, white, pink, yellow, red, lavender, the kind that threw out a rich smell that mixed with the smell from the fruit on the long bar.
    Four bartenders crushed fruit in blenders, fresh lime and pineapple for Caipirinhas, peaches for Bellinis. The pineapple smelled exactly the way it had the time I went to Hawaii years earlier, up around the northern shore where there were pineapple plantations and the air actually smelled of the fruit, sweet, intoxicating; it made you drunk without the alcohol.
    Waiters in black pants and white shirts and aprons circulated around the loft with platters of shrimp, oyster, lobster, and caviar set in glass bowls of cracked ice. There was more food on two tables opposite the bar. Around the edge of the room and out on the terrace were smalltables draped with linen and set with more flowers, and already people were sitting down at them, eating, yakking, drinking.
    In the middle of it all, circulating like the ringmaster of a circus, was Tolya Sverdloff He had offered to give us the party and now I saw his head bobbing above the others, moving through the crowd, kissing the women, hugging men, holding up a glass, toasting, laughing. The music played louder. More corks popped. Half expected to see a girl swing down from the ceiling on a trapeze or a dancing bear appear.
    Then out of nowhere an odd feeling, something dark, came over me like a cloud coming over the sun unexpectedly; things suddenly felt wrong, out of place, and I knew that the morning in Red Hook, and Sid’s fear, had left me on edge.
    A waiter passed with a tray and I reached for a glass of champagne and gulped it.
    â€œYou look like a dog when you shake yourself like that,” Max said and kissed me again.
    â€œI do?”
    â€œYeah, didn’t you know that?” she said. “I asked you before, what’s the matter? Tell. Come on.”
    I kissed her. She tasted of pineapple. She wore a pale pink sleeveless silk dress and high-heeled silver sandals and her long legs and arms were tan, her arms so long they gave her the look of an overgrown girl or a rag doll. We had been together more than eighteen months solid, ever since I had worked Billy Farone’s case on Sheepshead Bay. I had known her a lot longer; we had been casual friends for years.
    Max had grown her brown hair to her shoulders and she had pinned it at the side with a little green orchid, and she was wearing her grandmother’s pearls and the diamond ring I got for her on 47th Street from my old contact there; Hillel Abramsky had given me a good price, and now it was on her thin brown finger where she admired it constantly and held it up for me to see the rainbow it made in the light from a candle on a table near us. Max had elegant long fingers; I loved watching her fix dinner or do a jigsaw puzzle; I loved looking at her hands.
    Hillel was at the party. I saw him in the crowd in a blue suit and I waved and he laughed because he had been trying to get me married for so many years. He said it was better for your health. He once told me he wished I would marry a Jewish woman, not for religion but for the sake of the tribe. I wasn’t sure what he meant.
    I had a ring, too, plain gold; Maxine had wanted me to have one. I have never worn a ring in my life and my hand seemed to belong to someone else, but that was part of it, being like other people, getting a life with Maxine Crabbe and Millie and Maria. Everyone I knew was relieved that I had grown up and settled down. After the case with Billy, and the kidnapping and the rest of it, I was finally OK. I wasn’t at the edge of chaos anymore.
    This is it, I kept