Capriccio Read Free Page A

to the hall already, stopping on the way for a snack. He wasn’t a creature of habit. Lord, I hoped it wasn’t a glass of wine he’d stopped for, which had a way of multiplying to three or four glasses if the company was convivial. But really he had been very good lately. When he still hadn’t got home by six-thirty, I went ahead with my own dinner.
    The only worry in my mind as I showered and dressed was whether I’d been wise to give that ticket to Sean Bradley. But a fellow American with those liquid eyes and overlapped teeth couldn’t be dangerous. He wasn’t really a cowboy, I thought. What was he, and where was he from? The accent wasn’t heavy enough for Texas, and the clothes weren’t good enough for him to be an oil baron. A school teacher, an engineer? He didn’t look like a magnificently successful professional; he’d be a toiler in one of the lesser but still worthy professions. Not one of the world’s great men, but he was all right for a casual date.
    I brushed my tawny hair out loose and caught one side back with a white nacre barrette. For this grand occasion I had bought a wisp of white raw silk that made my Visa card tremble in shock. It looked like a fancy dust rag on the hanger, but much better on the body. A piece of the material was cut on the bias and draped over one shoulder, giving the effect of a toga, it fit fairly close around the waist, and draped again over the hips. It looked best on a long, lean body, which mine was in the process of becoming on those days when Rhoda didn’t bake a cake. It was lean enough that Victor included me in his condemnation of modern womankind, determined to destroy God’s greatest creation, the female body. He preferred full-figured Balzacian women.
    I went back to my room to do my face. I have a bold, mannish face, with a square jaw and a long straight nose that is redeemed from masculinity by full lips. “The lips of a harlot,” Victor once said. He tries to be shocking but only sounds quaint. I colored my harlot’s lips, put some gel on my cheeks and a brush of frosted burgundy shadow over my dark eyes and was ready.
    I picked a mauve mohair shawl and went down to the lobby. The doorman hailed a cab, and I drove off to Roy Thomson Hall with a tingling air of excitement hovering around me. I wondered if Sean would wear a jacket. In the heat of summer, some of the audience would be in shirt sleeves, but there would be no shirt sleeves at Eleanor’s party. If he came too casual, I just couldn’t invite him, that’s all.
    Sean hadn’t arrived yet when I was ushered to my seat. Inside, the hall is shaped like a horseshoe. The mezzanine and balcony seats curve around the stage and are angled to give a good view. The ceiling is a dazzling collection of acoustical banners, acrylic discs, and stalactites with two big circles of lights in the middle. I passed the time by looking around at the hall and the audience while waiting for Sean. Victor says the acoustics could be plusher, especially for strings. He mentioned a lean, transparent sound, but added that it was “very intimate” for a hall of nearly three thousand seats. I didn’t think Sean would be enough of a connoisseur to worry about the acoustics, and I knew I wasn’t.
    I got there at ten to eight. At two minutes to, Sean still hadn’t come. I was disappointed at first, then angry at the waste. The house was sold out, and any of my friends would have loved to get the ticket—or could have been coerced into using it anyway. He’d probably picked up some woman at a bar. Damn! My watch showed one minute to eight. An expectant hush permeated the hall as the audience waited for the lights to dim and the curtain to rise. I waited with the others, feeling an urge to tell my neighbor I was Victor’s niece. But first I’d make sure he turned up, and turned up sober. It was eight o’clock now, and the hush was deafening.
     

CHAPTER 2
     
    The hush was broken by a muted pounding of feet on the