SWF Seeks Same Read Free Page B

he came home that evening. Sam. Scheming and ambitious as he was in business, he never resented her successes. Liberated man meets liberated woman.
    When the waiter brought her salad, she realized he looked familiar. But she didn’t ask where she might have met him. Possibly she’d passed him on the street often when he was on his way to or from work at Goya’s. New York was like that; people making casual connections over and over, not really recognizing each other because their memories’ circuits were overloaded. So many people, an ebbing and flowing tide of faces, movements, smiles, frowns. Pain and happiness and preoccupation. Good luck and bad. Bankers and bag ladies. All in a jumble. Millionaires stepping over penniless winos. Tourists throwing away money on crooked three-card-monte games. The hustlers and the hustled. A maelstrom of madness. A world below the rabbit hole. If you lived here, you took it all for granted. My God, you adapted. And, inevitably, it affected mind and emotion. It distorted.
    This man, the waiter, was in his mid-thirties, with one of those homely-handsome faces with mismatched features and ears that stuck out like satellite dishes. He wore his scraggly black hair long on the sides in an effort to minimize the protruding ears, but the thatch of hair jutting out above them only served to draw attention. The impression was that without the ears to support it, the hair would flop down into a ragged Prince Valiant hairdo. He was average height but thin, and moved with a kind of coiled energy that suggested he could probably jog ten miles or wear down opponents at tennis.
    When he came back and placed her beer before her on the table, he did a mild double-take, as if
he
thought he knew
her
from someplace.
    Then he nodded and went back to the serving counter to pick up another order, probably trying to remember if she’d been in Goya’s before, and what kind of tipper she was.
     
Chapter 5
     
    GRAHAM Knox had recognized her when he’d served her in Goya’s that afternoon. Allie Jones. It was the first time he’d seen her in the restaurant. He’d considered introducing himself to her but didn’t quite know how. “Hi, I live upstairs from you and can hear everything that goes on in your apartment through the duct work,” didn’t seem a wise thing for a waiter to say—it was the sort of remark that might prompt the flinging of food.
    Several months ago, curiosity had goaded Graham to find out what his downstairs neighbor looked like. He’d lurked about the third-floor hall like a burglar until he’d seen her emerge from her apartment. Already he’d gotten her last name from her mailbox in the lobby.
    Seeing her up close this afternoon had changed things somehow, made her vividly real and his eavesdropping both more intimate and shameful, no longer an innocent diversion before sleep. But the vent was beside his bed; there was no way
not
to hear what went on in the apartment below. Even in his living room, when he was working and didn’t have the stereo or TV on, sound from her living room carried through the ducts. It wasn’t exactly as if he were in the room with her and whoever she was talking with, but he might as well have been in the next room with his ear pressed to the door.
    And now he’d seen her up close, and she was interesting. In fact, fascinating. Much more attractive than from a distance. Direct gray eyes. Soft blond hair that smelled of perfumed shampoo. Firm, squared chin with a cleft in it. She had a sureness about her that was appealing and suggested a certain freedom. Not like the rest of us; a woman with a grip on life.
    Graham’s apartment was cheaply furnished, mostly with a hodgepodge of items he’d bought at second-hand shops. The living room walls were lined with shelves he’d constructed of pine and stained to a dark finish. The shelves were stuffed with theatrical books, mostly paperbacks, that he’d found in used bookstores on lower Broadway. One