The Loop by Nicholas Evans Read Free Book Online Page B

what the restaurant manager had laughably called the terrazzo , by which he meant the dustily hedged display pen out on the street, Helen poured another glass of white wine, lit another cigarette and wondered why the hell her father always had to be late.
    She searched for his face among the lunchtime crowds along the sidewalk. Everyone looked impossibly cool and beautiful. Tanned young businessmen in linen suits, jackets tossed with studied nonchalance over one shoulder, chatted to women who all had perfect teeth, legs a mile long and probably several Ivy League degrees apiece. Helen hated them all.
    The restaurant was her father’s choice. It was in an area called SoHo which she had never been to and which, he said, was the chic place to live. It was full of art galleries and the kind of stores that sold just one or two exquisite items, exquisitely lit amid acres of space, patrolled by assistants who had stepped straight from the pages of Vogue . They were uniformly thin and disdainful and looked as if they might well refuse you admission simply on aesthetic grounds if you had the nerve to venture inside. Helen already didn’t like SoHo. It was even written stupidly.
    It wasn’t that she was, by nature, mean-spirited. Quite the contrary, she lived her life normally at the danger end of generosity, prepared to give the benefit of even the most doubtful doubts. Today, however, several factors had conspired, along with the city and the weather, to put her out of sorts. Not least among them was that she was about to turn twenty-nine, which seemed to her a colossal, quaking milestone of an age. It was the same as thirty, only worse, because at thirty at least the crash had happened. Once you were thirty, you might as well be forty or fifty. Or dead. Because unless, by then, you had a life, you almost certainly never would.
    Her birthday was tomorrow and, barring divine intervention, when it dawned she would still be unemployed, unmarried and unhappy.
    It had become a ritual that her father took her out for a birthday lunch, no matter where either of them was living at the time, which was usually several hundred miles apart. It was inevitably Helen who did the traveling because her father was always so busy and still under the impression that as she spent most of her life in the back of beyond, coming to the city was a treat. By the time the event came around every summer, Helen had quite forgotten that it wasn’t.
    A month in advance, an air ticket would arrive in the mail, with details of how to get to some fashionable restaurant, and Helen would phone around and fix up to see friends and get excited. She loved her father and their birthday lunch was about the only time she ever got to see him nowadays.
    Her parents had divorced when she was nineteen. Her sister Celia, two years younger, had just gone away to college and Helen was studying biology at the University of Minnesota. Both girls came home to Chicago for Thanksgiving, and after the meal, their parents pushed their plates aside and calmly announced that now their job of bringing up their children was done, they were going their separate ways.
    The marriage, they revealed, had been wretched for years and they both had someone else with whom they would rather live. The family home would be sold, but the girls would, of course, have their own rooms at the two new homes that would replace it. It was all being done rationally and quite without rancor. Which, to Helen, made it infinitely worse.
    It was devastating to discover that a household she had always assumed to be, if not exactly happy, then only averagely unhappy, should all along have secretly sheltered such misery. Her parents had always rowed and sulked and needled each other with countless petty vengeances; but this, Helen had assumed, was the kind of thing, surely, that everybody’s parents did. And now it turned out that all these long years they had loathed each other and suffered each other’s company