“The short one with the Rhodes scholar vocabulary,” Christopher said.
“I do not believe he is short for a boy of three. I’m afraid I wasn’t having very good luck. I’m not very artistic. That’s Donna’s department.”
“I’m not very artistic either. Maybe I could help you out anyway. I could hold the tape or keep the sides of the train standing upright while you try to figure out how to fasten them together.”
“Don’t be silly. You don’t want to waste your time like that. You have so much to do.”
“I don’t have a single thing to do except sleep on Bennis’s couch and eat her out of house and home. Which is hard, by the way, because food gets delivered to her door more regularly than the mail. Really. I’d like to help. It would keep me out of Bennis’s hair for a while and let her get some work done.”
Lida turned away from him. Christopher could see the lines of tension in her back, under the thin layer of silk. She had her hair knotted at the nape of her neck, the way ballerinas liked to do. The loose hairs there seemed to be standing on end. Christopher felt his own skin getting very, very hot.
“All right,” she said, turning back to him. “It’s quite a climb. I have a little workroom in the attic.”
“Let’s go, then.”
“Yes,” Lida said slowly, “let’s go.”
Christopher let her get a little way up the stairs before he started after her. This was where he had to be careful. This was the hardest time. He was as sure as he could be that they both wanted the same thing. It wouldn’t be a good idea to presume on that and rush things.
Rush things?
Sometimes Christopher Hannaford found himself astounded that any man and woman anywhere ever managed to end up in bed with each other. Getting there the first time was such a mess of conflict and confusion.
Lida stopped two-thirds of the way up the stairs and looked back at him. She looked tense and hurt and confused.
“Aren’t you coming?” she asked him.
“Oh, yes,” Christopher said. “I’m definitely coming.”
He thought it would be the better part of valor not to point out to her that, under the circumstances, she might just have made a very dirty pun.
2
Alyssa Hazzard was one of those women who kept her life busy with Projects, the kind of Projects that required committees to stage benefit balls and get their pictures in the paper. Unlike some of the women who worked with her on these committees, she did not deceive herself about what she was doing. Some people maintained that society charity was a fraud. Alyssa Hazzard agreed with them. Obviously, if any one of them had been seriously interested in raising money for AIDS research or providing operating funds for the Philadelphia Cancer Hospice, they could have done more for either cause by just donating the cost of the dresses they would wear to the parties they gave to raise money. That was what critics didn’t understand. They always bought new dresses to wear to charity parties, and the dresses always cost a minimum of eight thousand dollars apiece, and if you added that all up…
Actually, Alyssa never bought new dresses for charity parties. She made do by recycling clothes through the better thrift shops and by being good at alterations on her own. She had a Balenciaga she had worn three times, getting away with it by claiming that it was a vintage dress and an artwork and a homage to her mother. In another life Alyssa wouldn’t have bothered with benefit balls at all. She had taken them up only after Jacqueline had been murdered and Paul had gone on trial. It was very interesting the way all that worked. All her friends had stuck valiantly by her side the whole time Paul was in the dock. They had called her daily and urged her to be brave and made a big point of inviting her to be on their committees. Then, after the trial was over, it was as if she had ceased to exist. The phone calls stopped—and when she made phone calls of her own, they weren’t taken and they weren’t returned. The invitations to be on committees stopped too, and the invitations to parties, and the quick little morning flurries asking her to lunch or to a visit to a gallery. A court had proclaimed Paul Hazzard innocent of the murder of Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard. Alyssa’s friends seemed to think they knew better.
Alyssa didn’t have the same trouble with the women who ran the benefit balls because the women who ran the benefit balls did not know that she was Alyssa Hazzard. They knew her only as Mrs. Nicholas Roderick, informally called Ali, which she had allowed to be assumed to be a diminutive of Alice. Her picture had appeared in the newspapers quite often during the trial. Her picture had appeared on the television news too. She had stuck by her father throughout it all. She wasn’t unhappy that she had done it. In this crowd it did her no harm. None of these women ever read anything in the papers that didn’t mention their own names. None of their husbands looked at anything but the front pages and the financial sections.