American Appetites Read Free Page A

wore, that evening, a lemon-yellow Thai silk dress, a beautiful garment, though soiled at the cuffs; well-weathered Roman sandals on her long narrow white feet; necklaces, bracelets, distractingly large and ornamental earrings that pulled cruelly at her earlobes. Talking to Ian and one or two others she smiled a good deal and showed her teeth, licked her lips nervously. Ian quickly perceived her intelligence, which was as much physical as mental: the young woman was conscious not only of her beauty but of its inevitable effect upon others—the resistance it aroused in them.
    Look at me, she was saying. For here I am.
    She had come to the McCulloughs’ house alone but had not been there an hour before a man appeared beside her, to take her away; Ian, caught up with other guests, had hardly more than a glimpse of a dark-skinned, unsmiling, but strikingly handsome young man of perhaps thirty, with thick black glossy hair brushed back from his forehead, a manner both civil and restrained, and very sporty, surely very expensive clothes. He was slender and no taller than Sigrid, his upper arms and shoulders muscled in that hard, compact way Ian knew to recognize from the gym. Ian, as always rather awkwardly at sea in so large a gathering, would not have spoken to the man at all had he not happened to be saying goodbye to another couple, at the front door, when Sigrid and her companion slipped by—Sigrid clearly agitated, her boyfriend decidedly unfriendly—but there was a brief obligatory exchange of names and a hurried and perfunctory handshake, as Sigrid introduced “Dr. McCullough” to “Fermi Sabri.” And Ian closed the door after them and promptly forgot them.
    That night, undressing in their bedroom, Glynnis asked Ian casually what did he think of Sigrid Hunt; and Ian said, frowning, “Who? Which one was she?” “The one with the long red hair, in the yellow silk,” Glynnis said, adding, with a hurt twist of her mouth; “the one who didn’t so much as trouble to introduce her boyfriend to me, or even to say goodbye to me.” Ian said, yawning, “I don’t remember, actually,” and they went on to talk of other guests, of other more important guests: who had said what to whom, who had new and startling news, who had invited them to a dinner party the following Sunday if they were free. . . . There were so many people in the McCulloughs’ lives, after all, and so few that really mattered.
    But when Ian and Sigrid Hunt met some weeks later, at the mill pond, and again shook hands, Ian was oddly struck by a sense of—was it certitude? rightness? an excitement so keen as to feel, or even taste, like danger? He would not subsequently remember much of what he said, or how, slightly stammering, he’d managed to say anything of substance at all.
    He would remember that they talked together with the nervous elation of old friends who have not seen each other in some time; that the corners of his eyes pinched, as if looking into Sigrid Hunt’s face, at such close range, gave pain. It was not because Sigrid was a beautiful woman—in the sharp November sunshine she seemed in fact distinctly less beautiful than she had appeared the night of the party—but that, for all her guardedness, her self-consciousness, she was so vulnerable. And, being vulnerable, she aroused emotions in Ian he could not readily have named.
    Though surely knowing that she had been dropped, or casually misplaced, in Glynnis’s life, she asked after Glynnis nonetheless, with so gentle an air of regret one might have missed it altogether. Ian made a reply of some vague general smiling kind, alluded to the fact that Glynnis and he had been uncommonly busy these past few months and had not seen nearly as many people as they’d wished to see. And Sigrid, dropping her gaze, smiling enigmatically, said, “We never have time, do we, for all that we don’t