Love Always Read Free

instead of books to check out, there was a staff of psychologists to evaluate people’s mental condition and see whether they should be checked in.
    But Lucy’s column was the biggest success, and it had been from the first. She was, as Cindi Coeur, a Latter-Day Miss Lonelyhearts, and the picture that accompanied her column showed her with hair romantically disheveled, eyes wide (presumably with wisdom), and a smile that, coupled with hair and eyes, might have suggested après l’amour, tristesse. The beatific smile was actually après $125 a gram.
    These days, Lucy did the column straight—if you could call making up the questions and writing the answers on pieces of pink stationery she had her mother send her from John Wanamaker in Philadelphia and using a fountain pen with lavender ink doing it straight. Lately, Lucy had been thinking that maybe it was time to stop. Just because Jagger was still popping up like a jack-in-the-box, did she really want to be Cindi Coeur at forty? Still, Lucy herself admitted to a morbid fascination with being facile.
    Dear Cindi Coeur,
    When my husband makes love to me he always has a lot of money under the pillow. I mean, before we get into bed he empties out his wallet, and in the middle of lovemaking, he plunges his hands into the money. His money is always all wrinkled. I think that clerks in stores will see the money and maybe know what is going on. What can I say to my husband to make him stop? Do you think that he likes money more than he likes me?
    Sad in the Sack
    Dear Sad,
    Your husband is sexually excited by money. This is called a “fetish.” You have not given me enough information. First, I need to know the ages and educational backgrounds of some of the clerks in order to tell you whether they will know what your husband is up to. You do suggest that your husband has quite a bit of money if there is so much that he can plunge his hands into it. What denomination is this currency? If your husband has as much money as it seems, I want to suggest two things: (1) that you putup with whatever he does and (2) that you not consult your clergyman, as he will expect increased donations.
    The phone rang in the kitchen and Lucy got up to answer it. It was her sister, Jane, calling from California. Jane’s calls were always a sidestep from whatever she was doing. She would call someone, clamp the phone between shoulder and ear, then become so involved in painting her nails or doing leg stretches that when the phone was answered, it caught her off-guard.
    “Oh. Hello,” Jane said.
    “Hi,” Lucy said.
    “I set my alarm,” Jane said. “I wanted to be sure to catch you. It’s seven o’clock here.” She sounded offended, as if Lucy had arranged for it to be early morning on the West Coast.
    “What’s up?” Lucy said.
    What was usually up was something involving Jane’s daughter, Nicole.
    “Nicole’s blue,” Jane said. “Piggy was trying to set up a spot for her on
Saturday Night Live
, and it fell through. Then you know that gorilla that she liked so much—the one they put in a sailor suit, that she stood next to on the deck of the QE 2 for
Vogue
? He just died of pneumonia. I sent a contribution to the San Diego Zoo.”
    For the last two years, Nicole Nelson had appeared on
Passionate Intensity
as Stephanie Sykes, an abused child from a broken family, a teenage alcoholic who was being rehabilitated by a woman internist and her husband, Gerald, a wimpy would-be novelist who felt misunderstood not only by his wife but by the world. The woman internist, who secretly subjected herself to experimental surgery to correct sterility, then found out that she could conceive. She faced the dilemma of whether to divorce her husband, who was at last working on his novel, to have a child with her true love, another doctor at the hospital, thereby disrupting the family routine she had established that had put young Stephanie on the road to recovery, or to settle for what she now