The Lemur Read Free

look ghastly.”
    “It’s this place.”
    She looked about the office, frowning. It was she who had suggested he borrow the room—her father owned the building. “What’s wrong with it?”
    He did not want to admit his fright at being almost forty floors above street level. “It’s too impersonal. I don’t know if I can write here.”
    “You could work at the apartment.”
    “You know I can’t write at home.”
    She settled on him her gray-green gaze. “ Is it home?” The silence that followed this was a chasm into which they both cast a glance and then stepped quickly back.
    “You could go out to Silver Barn.” Silver Barn was their—her—house on Long Island. “The study is all set up. It’s quiet, no one to disturb you.” He pulled a face. “Well then,” she said, with a tightening of the lips, “if you can’t work, you can take me to lunch.”
    They walked east along Forty-fourth Street and Glass at last got to smoke a cigarette. The fine rain drifted down absentmindedly, like ectoplasm. The trouble with smoking was that the desire to smoke was so much greater than the satisfaction afforded by actually smoking. Sometimes when he had a cigarette going he would forget and reach for the pack and start to light another. Maybe that was the thing to do, smoke six at a time, three in the gaps between the fingers of each hand, achieve a Gatling-gun effect.
    Mario’s was crowded, as usual these days. The red-check tablecloths and rickety bentwood chairs proclaimed a peasant plainness that was contradicted by the breathtaking prices on the menu. The Glasses had been coming here since the early days of the establishment, long before they had moved permanently to New York, when Mario himself was still in charge and the place really was plain. They had nicknamed it the Bleeding Horse, for reasons no longer remembered. Now Louise gave up her dripping umbrella to a waiter and they were shown to their usual table in a corner by the window, set, Glass noted, for three. Flutes of Prosecco were brought at once. “I wish,” Louise murmured, “I had the courage to tell them what a common drink I think this is.”
    Glass said nothing. He liked Prosecco. He liked the gesture, too, the drinks coming uncalled-for and set down before them with an actorly flourish. It made him feel an old New York hand; he could almost see the caption, “Glass in the Bleeding Horse, one of his favorite Manhattan eateries.” He often thought of his life in journalese, it was an old habit. He wondered if Louise considered him common, too, like the wine.
    “How is the work?” his wife asked, her eyes on the menu. “Have you made a start yet?” The rain-light from the window gave her the look of an early Florentine madonna as she sat there with her long, angular, pale face inclined, and the menu she was holding might have been a psalter.
    “No,” he said, “I haven’t made a start. I mean, I haven’t started writing. There are things I have to do first.”
    “Research, you mean?”
    He looked at her sharply. But there was no way she could know about Dylan Riley; he had told no one about the Lemur. She was still reading the menu, bringing to it the rapt, radiant attention that she brought to everything she did, even, he ruefully recalled, lovemaking. “Yes, research,” he mumbled, “that kind of thing.”
    The waiter came and Glass ordered linguine with clams and Louise asked for a plain green salad. It was all she ever ate at lunchtime. Why, then, Glass wondered, did she spend so long poring over the menu? Having taken their order, the waiter pointed his pencil inquiringly at the empty third place, but Louise shook her head. “David might look in,” she told Glass. “I said we’d eat and he could join us for coffee.”
    Glass made no comment. David Sinclair was Louise’s son by her first marriage, to a Wall Street lawyer who seemed to have passed through her life leaving hardly a trace, except, of course, the young man who