Spirit Lost Read Free

in newspapers, in magazines. And Willy did bother to cut out the articles, intending to put them in a scrapbook, but only this week, when they were packing, John came across them, covered with coffee stains, stuck between some old letters.
    Willy’s parents were dead before John met her, but he learned from what she told him and from what he could glean from friends of the family that her family had been one of those lucky, eccentric, wealthy, educated, fascinating families that finds everyone outside of the family just a little uninteresting. So there was bred in Willy, John thought, a kind of gentle, unassuming snobbery. Willy was so self-sufficient. So self-satisfied. So content. John never doubted that Willy loved him, and yet he often wished he could break through that serenity of hers somehow, that he could make her look at him not with her clear, peaceful gaze but with the fierce glare of need he felt he often directed at her.
    “Well, I think you should think seriously about it before leaving,” John said now to Erica. “It’s a hard thing to do; it’s like stepping off the planet into outer space. But then you’re young, Erica. It’s been years since I’ve really tried to paint. Since I’ve even thought seriously about what I would like to paint. I’ve been too busy with other things. Now I’m bound to be rusty. And of course, I’ll miss Boston, the action, the agency—”
    “Will you really, old boy? Miss all of us, that is? How touching!”
    Donald Hood came up behind John just then and wrapped his arm around John’s neck. Partly a gesture of affection, this also served to stabilize Donald, who was already pretty well sloshed and found John a convenient hold in a wavering world. Donald was the artistic director at the agency, a likable man even when breathing scotch in one’s face.
    “Of course I’ll miss you, you old lush,” John said. Then realizing just howunsteady Donald was, he turned, aiming himself and his friend toward the dining room. “I’m starving. Let’s get something to eat.” He looked back at Erica, grinning to excuse his rudeness. She smiled back, understanding. Everyone in the office took care of Donald.
    John’s entry into the dining room got everyone else headed for the table, and soon the room was crowded with people leaning against the walls, plates in hand. There were almost thirty people at this party, and everyone but Anne and Mark and Willy worked at the advertising agency known in Massachusetts as the Blackstone Group. When Anne said she wanted to give the Constables a going-away party, John had made up his guest list and realized that all his friends—except for Mark, who was a lawyer, and Anne—worked at the agency. And Willy realized that the only friend she really cared about leaving was Anne, and so she didn’t bother to invite anyone else, not the managers of the various stores that sold her embroidery work or the various friends scattered around the city whom she had known for years but rarely saw. Besides, she liked the idea of this party being especially for John, a real and symbolic good-bye.
    Harrison Adder, the president of the Blackstone Group, came up to Willy as she sat on a wing chair by the living room window, her plate next to her on a side table. She had just taken a bite of buttery corn bread, which crumbled deliciously in her hand and down her front, and Harrison leaned down to give her his usual patronizing, pretentious kiss. Harrison was good at this, at catching people with crumbs on their mouths and bosoms; he loved being elegant and superior. White haired, impeccably dressed, slender, he always made Willy feel like a cow next to a gazelle, and Willy sensed that he enjoyed this—so he was not the true gentleman he seemed.
    Willy gulped down her corn bread and wiped her mouth, brushed her bodice with her napkin. “Harrison, hello,” she said. “Won’t you join me?” She gestured at the companion chair on the other side of the table.