The Palace Thief Read Free

payment on the ring, I found myself offering it to Scheherazade and not to LeAnne, and seven months later in the ballroom at the Clift Hotel, Scheherazade and I were dancing at our wedding.
    I must add that our marriage has now lasted nearly three decades, and even as our passion has subsided it has been replaced by a spring of tenderness and gratitude at which I drink now as reverently as a pilgrim. I have never said this before, however, and I do not like to say it now, but I must also add that on the day of our wedding I felt gloomy. When the rabbi signaled past the congregation for my bride to approach, my heart leapt in panic, and when he gestured to the cantor atthe blessing, I felt doomed. This was a secret I carried forth into the twenty-nine years of our life together. During this time, by the way, I have divined through careful conversation that a similar feeling was present in the hearts of several of my fellow accountants during their own nuptials.
    It has not escaped my attention that perhaps Scheherazade sensed my gloom and it was for this reason that she began spending my money like a bandit. In one year, unable to settle on a pattern for our living room drapes, she installed three separate sets. Our living room, I should add, is large, and so are its windows. Of course, I could afford ten sets of drapes, but that is not the point.
    I did not mention the money to her because it was my duty to provide and that is what I was doing. In fact I spent little for myself. This as everyone knows is a value instilled in childhood, and I have my own mother to thank for it. When the soles of my shoes wore through I repaired them with vinyl glue, as my mother used to do with my father’s, and when my barber began charging sophisticated rates for his haircuts I went elsewhere. However, though I had intended to reduce our monthly expenditures by such practices, I soon understood that I would not be able to.
    It was as though the more I tried to economize, the more she tried to waste. I began servicing extra accounts during my lunch hour, while at auction one day Scheherazade purchased a small etching by Goya, in front of which I found her standing when I returned home from the office. It was only a few inches tall, depicting a farmhouse and several chickens, yet she had placed it in the center of our living room wall. Over the course of months I saw that she was capable of standing before it for a half hour at a stretch, and I must concede that at times like this I felt no closer to understanding my wife than I would havebeen to a pygmy. The following year she purchased a terra-cotta figurine from the Han Dynasty, smaller than my thumb, which she set on our mantle and which now and then I found her holding in her hands, late at night, when I ventured downstairs for seltzer water.
    Nonetheless, I soon grew accustomed to our charge-account balances, and in the decade before our children were born we reached an equilibrium in our marriage. Indeed, these were the first times in which I can say that I was blissfully content. Thursday evenings at the symphony we stood outdoors on the octagonal balcony at intermission, and while Scheherazade gazed dreamily over the square I pursued in my mind some of the tax shelters and bankruptcy manipulations that had become a standard part of my practice. Such evenings were the embodiment of happiness for me. I felt I was about to be made a partner and had again heard news to that effect from Mr. Emond. My salary was as high as I had ever hoped to earn, and with stock options I could look forward to being a reasonably wealthy man in a decade.
    Mr. Peters, however, had in the meantime expanded his auto-parts business into four factories in three states and had opened a chain of retail outlets. Furthermore, he had for some reason seized on the idea of baseball as a theme for his advertisements, which began to appear in the newspaper. I do not see what the connection is between automobile parts and