American Appetites Read Free

stopping dead in his tracks. There.
    A family of tourists were rather too exuberantly tossing bread and seed out onto the pond for the ornamental waterfowl, but this young woman stood alone, unmoving, staring at the flat mirrored surface of the water: like Milton’s Eve, contemplating her own mysterious reflection. She had not seen Ian but he had the uncanny feeling that she was waiting for him: knew he was there, knew he would see her, would come to her.
    Which of course he did. An unavoidable social gesture, he’d thought it.
    Ian’s wife, Glynnis, was notable for taking up and cultivating, and eventually dropping, miscellaneous people of one kind or another: often people rather vaguely “in the arts” or “promising”; frequently young women of varying degrees of attractiveness, unattached or mysterious in their attachments, appealingly vulnerable or merely vulnerable. Her “specimens,” certain of their friends called them, not without a degree of jealousy; and, indeed, it sometimes seemed to Ian that his wife collected individuals with the avidity of an old-time biologist, hauling in and examining and classifying species. Ian, whose energy was drained by his work, whose imagination floundered when confronted by the mere prospect of cultivating a new friend, envied Glynnis both her will and her ability; was not, on the face of it, jealous; yet one day he would ask, “Where is Iris?” or “Whatever became of—was her name Frances?—I haven’t seen her for months,” and Glynnis would look at him blankly for a moment, before remembering. At such times Ian felt a slight chill, wondering if, at the start, he had not been one of Glynnis’s specimens himself, which she had decided to keep.
    Where Glynnis had met Sigrid Hunt, Ian did not know, though perhaps he’d been told. The young woman lived twenty miles downriver, in a déclassé area, as she smilingly called it, of Poughkeepsie; she taught, or sometimes taught, or had once taught, modern dance at Vassar. (She’d murmured vaguely, with a child’s reticent hurt, of university politics, academic jealousies and feuds, “budgetary restrictions,” so Ian guessed her contract had simply been terminated.) She had begun dance lessons at the age of four, had studied for years with the Martha Graham Company, had worked with various companies in New York City, Los Angeles, London, until an injury to a tendon in her right foot forced her into more or less permanent retirement, aged twenty-one. (“A dancer’s life is nasty, brutish, and short,” she had said, with an enigmatic smile.)
    Sigrid Hunt had told Ian these things at a large cocktail party at the McCulloughs’ house, to which Glynnis had invited her. She’d shaken Ian’s hand in a surprisingly hard grip and smiled happily, showing small, white, perfect teeth. “I’ve heard so much about you, Dr. McCullough,” she’d said, and Ian winced and said, Please, call me Ian; Ian is quite enough. But she never did quite bring herself to call him by that name, at least not in Ian’s hearing.
    Sigrid Hunt spoke in a careful, quaint voice, a voice seemingly without an accent; she fixed her listeners with round, wide, childlike eyes, smooth as coins and the shade, seemingly soft and powdery, of tarnish: her gaze given a subtle but arresting magnification by the perfectly round pink-tinted lenses of her glasses in their wire-rimmed frames. Her face was narrow, the features finely cut and teasingly asymmetrical, the eyes and mouth down-drooping at the corners, the eyelids naturally shadowed as if stained, or bruised, a faint blue. She was tall, perhaps five feet eleven, with a slender, rather epicene body: her neck long, shoulders narrow, breasts small as a young girl’s. Her hair, her spectacular hair, fell nearly to her waist, red-gold, ridged and rippled like a washboard, and wonderfully glossy. She