The Believers by Zoë Heller Read Free Book Online Page B

in a sardonic smile. Daniel had a gift for eliciting undignified behavior from women. She had never seen his appeal herself. She accepted the fact of his attractiveness as she accepted the existence of gravity--it was the most plausible explanation for various phenomena that would otherwise have remained mysterious--but by her own judgment, Daniel was a most unimpressive specimen. There was something affected and unmanly about him, something smarmy and callow and fundamentally unserious . If such a word had been permissible within her lexicon, she would have said that his looks were common.
    Daniel glanced up in her direction as she approached, but he made no acknowledgment of having seen her, and only when she was standing directly in front of him did he look up again. "Audrey!" he exclaimed, with a feigned quiver of surprise. Audrey sighed at this gratuitous bit of theater. Daniel was a master of furtive insult. Had he ever dared to openly disrespect her, she would have had no trouble in squashing him, but he was too wily for that. His insolence only ventured out in lightning raids, under cover of scrupulous politeness. She was about to say something tart when he raised his hand in a restraining gesture. "Sorry, Audrey, could you hang on? We're right in the middle of something here." Smiling, he turned his back on her and resumed his conversation with the nurse.
    Audrey stood for a moment, absorbing the shock of his impudence, before turning abruptly on her heel and walking away. The temerity of that little pissant! She and Joel had had many fierce arguments about Daniel over the years. Joel tended to dismiss all of her complaints about Daniel's impertinence as "paranoia." He maintained that Daniel was a brilliant young lawyer--one of the sharpest legal minds he had ever encountered. Once or twice, he had even hinted that he would like Daniel to take over his practice when he retired. Audrey, who refused to believe that her shrewd husband had miscalculated Daniel's talents so extravagantly, accused him of keeping Daniel around only to make himself look better. He was such a vain old fucker, she claimed, that he would rather champion a mediocrity than risk being outshone by a genuinely talented young man.
    In Audrey's absence, two large, teary women had taken up residence in the Family and Friends Lounge. One of them, it seemed, had just been informed that her husband had a cancerous tumor in his brain. "They say it's the size of a golf ball," she was boasting to Kate when Audrey entered.
    "Danny's here," Kate told Audrey. "He's just gone to see if--"
    "Yeah, I saw him." Audrey interrupted. "He's down the hall, being very important and in charge with one of the nurses."
    Kate smiled nervously.
    "I take it no one's been in to tell us anything yet?" Audrey said.
    Kate shook her head.
    Audrey made a clicking sound with her tongue. "Bastards."
    Presently, Daniel appeared. "Audrey. How are you?" he drawled. "I'm sorry about just now. I was trying to get to the bottom of all this."
    "So I gathered." Audrey said. "And what did you learn on your big fact-finding mission?"
    Alerted by the sarcasm in her voice, the brain-tumor woman and her friend rustled to attention.
    "Well," Daniel began, "they're pretty certain that he's had a stroke--"
    "We know that," Audrey said.
    "--and they're running a bunch of tests at the moment--"
    "Right," Audrey said. "I heard."
    Daniel smiled at her with the twinkly forbearance of a kindly uncle handling a rambunctious niece. "They seem to think that his condition is stable now," he went on. "But they really can't tell us much more until they've finished the tests. A doctor will be in to talk to us as soon as they get the lay of the land."
    "I see," Audrey said slowly. "So in fact, you found out nothing."
    The room was quiet for a moment. Audrey stood up to get a magazine from the pile on the coffee table and caught Daniel rolling his eyes good-humoredly at the tumor ladies. They simpered