The Judas Glass Read Free

Richard Stirling for an hour.”
    â€œI bet some of them left impressed.” She felt for something in the dark, her silver bracelet.
    I ran my hand along her side, her hip, her thigh. “I don’t think it works—arguing with people. Even when you prove them wrong, with charts showing how they’ve failed, they see you as a form of live entertainment.”
    â€œâ€˜Ethical barbarians,’” she said.
    When I didn’t respond, she said, “I’m quoting you. I have your book on tape. That’s what you said banks and developers amount to.”
    I was a little embarrassed that this lovely woman would waste her time listening to one of my fairy tales on how to make banks socially aware, how to encourage financial institutions to open more branches in the inner city, how to avoid excessive lawsuits by having contractors do the job right in the first place.
    Our nakedness seemed vulnerable at that moment. The quilt over us was not a magnificent antique meant to last forever, the collection of one-sided records in the hall was not a storehouse of music that would survive for generations. It was all so easy to love, and easy to lose. I took her in my arms, and experienced the most pleasurable combination of protectiveness and lust.
    Connie would have said, “Again? Already?” And laughed, not sure she wanted to continue, already having collected herself back into her normal state of mind. Rebecca did not know that this was unusual for me. To her I was a sexual creature, easily aroused, not a distracted man with a mind riddled with while-you-were-out memos.
    Her body was made for mine. Her knees parted around me, her heels finding a place on the small of my back. But without a prophylactic this time, and neither of us noticed, neither of us gave it a thought. As though we already knew what was going to happen and celebrated in its shadow.
    There was no hurry. It was late, approaching midnight, but I didn’t want to leave.
    I was dressed again, feeling both reassured and artificial, as I sometimes did when I followed my consultant’s advice regarding what to wear for the cameras. Auburn jacket to go with your hair, blue ties to match your eyes.
    Rebecca wore her kimino, her feet bare. She was on the dark front lawn, reaching for the faucet and finding it. The sprinkler’s glittering spider of water shrank, hesitated, and vanished. The lawn was saturated, a sudden puddle of water appearing with each step.
    â€œThere aren’t any snails, are there?” she asked.
    I stooped to pluck one from the stone before her and toss it into the darkness. When she sat beside me on the front porch I soothed a grass clipping from her foot.
    â€œI want you to do something for me,” she said.
    Anything, I wanted to say. Anything in the world. But I said nothing. We both knew that I had accepted limits on what I could do for Rebecca, the time I could spend with her, the love I could give her.
    â€œI’m recording a few pieces,” she said, in that off-hand way people sometimes use to share worrisome secrets.
    â€œThat’s wonderful!” I put my hand around her wrist, around the silver bracelet I had given her, silver otters interlinked, chasing each other.
    â€œIt’s terrifying. They want that Chopin thing everybody does, Fantasie-Impromptu. And the others I do.”
    Her talent awed me. I had taken a few piano lessons as an eight-year-old, when my father said a well-rounded person should be able to improve upon his parents. He meant this jokingly, believing himself to be superior to most of his fellow Homo sapiens, including, although he would not have put it bluntly, myself. He was so self-confident he could admit to being incomplete in trivial ways. However, several weeks of “In An Indian Wigwam” had everyone agreeing that perhaps riding lessons were a better idea.
    â€œThis was the kind of break you dreamed about,” I said. “Why are