Bleeding Hearts(44)

Christopher got out of bed and went down the hall to Bennis’s bedroom. Bennis was out. Christopher thought she was doing that on purpose these days, so that he had a chance to sleep. He went to the suitcase he had left on the small bench at the foot of Bennis’s bed and looked through it. Christopher Hannaford had never been much for formal clothes. The closest he had ever come to wearing a suit was the blazer-and-tie combination required as a kind of quasi-uniform by his New England prep school. He’d worn a tuxedo or two to a wedding or two. He’d had to, because he was always being asked to serve as an usher or a best man. He always managed to get the jacket off and the tie untied and his sleeves rolled up in the receiving line. He didn’t have anything formal with him. He just didn’t want to look poor. He didn’t tell himself that Lida was too fine, too good, too pure to care about his financial status. He thought any woman in her fifties with a lot of money who was asked by a younger man to go out to dinner would be a damn fool not to worry about his financial status.

Fortunately, Christopher Hannaford was very well off. He was well off enough to play around with late-night radio shows and writing poetry, because his father had been considerably better than well off. Christopher found jeans and a workshirt and a sweater in what he thought of as the “insufferable snot with Hatteras connections” style and put them on.

Actually, the thing about the radio show was that it might cease to be playing around very soon. That was part of the reason he had come east to stay with Bennis. He wanted to ask her advice about this offer he’d gotten. It was amazing, really. Seven children in the family, and Bennis was the only one of them who had inherited the Hannaford genius with money. Christopher put on a pair of clean socks, shoved his feet into his cowboy boots, and headed out of the apartment.

Coming out into the cold air of Cavanaugh Street, standing at the top of the stoop and watching children run down the sidewalk and older people walk by, only pretending not to look at him, Christopher almost lost his nerve. People were so connected here. Everything was so public. A couple of dozen people were going to see him ring Lida Arkmanian’s doorbell. What would happen then?

If Bennis’s experience was anything to go by, what would happen would be a full-blown gossip circus, stopping just short of Peyton Place details. “The really incredible thing about what goes on around here,” Bennis had told him, “is that everybody is absolutely convinced that everybody else is falling in lust left, right, and center but it never seems to occur to anybody that when that happens, people mostly do something physical about it.”

Right. Bennis often sounded like that, off paper. Christopher knew what she meant. He went down the steps to the sidewalk, looked both ways in a perfunctory manner, and jaywalked across the street to Lida’s front door.

Lida’s front door had two gigantic crepe paper cupids on it. They seemed to be engaged in a duel with their arrows. Christopher was betting on the one with the silver dust in his eyebrows. He had the face of a cherub who could commit a murder and get away with it.

Christopher pressed the doorbell and stepped back to wait. He expected a maid. What he got was the grating scratch of an intercom coming on and Lida’s voice—it hardly sounded like Lida’s voice; it hardly sounded like anything human—saying,

“Yes? Who is it, please?”

The intercom button was hidden behind the left side of the silver-dust cupid. “Lida? This is Chris Hannaford. Did I get you at an awkward time?” dick. Dead air. Static. Cough. “Christopher. When I buzz, the door will open. You can come right in.”

“Where will I find you?”

“I’ll come to the living room. Just a moment.”

Click. Dead air. Buzz.

Christopher hated this sort of thing. Of course, nobody wanted to be a servant anymore. He didn’t blame them. It was an awful life and there weren’t many chances for advancement. He simply wished there were better alternatives than all this grate and buzz.

He got the front door open just in time and quickly pushed his way into the foyer. It was high-ceilinged and elegant and very, very clean, exactly as he remembered it. The living room was on the second floor. He went up the stairs.

Lida was wearing a pair of charcoal-gray wool slacks and a white silk shirt. She reminded him of the older women Saks sometimes used to model clothes for their suburban catalogues. He stopped at the edge of the stairs he had just come up and smiled.

“Hi,” he said. “I did get you at an awkward time.”

“No, no.” Lida shook her head. “I was upstairs trying to make a Valentine train, out of cardboard, to fill with candy. For Donna Moradanyan’s son, Tommy. Have you met Tommy?”