Glass Houses(16)

“Don’t bother. We can still have dinner.”

“Right,” Alison said. “You’ve got my cell phone number, haven’t you? I mean, you’ve called me on it, so you must have it.”

“Of course I have it.”

“Good.”

“I’ll see you tonight,” Gregor said.

Alison hung up—or signed off, or whatever it was you did on a cell phone—and he found himself staring down at the piece in his hand, wondering what in God’s name was going on. Things had not been easy with Alison. The “relationship” hadn’t moved anywhere nearly as quickly as it would have if Bennis hadn’t still been in his life in spirit if not in body. But Alison was one of the most straightforward and unambiguous people he had ever known. She was certainly more of both than Bennis had ever been, and if women were supposed to like an air of mystery around them, nobody had ever told her. What she had just done had sounded uncomfortably like Bennis right before Bennis went on one of her patented tears, and Gregor had no idea at all what had brought it on. Surely it couldn’t be the lack of a physical life, or of a commitment, in this thing they were doing with each other. They had talked about that only last week, and she had not said anything unusual.

The traffic had cleared out. In fact, it had cleared out some time while he had not been paying attention, and they were moving along at a good clip. Gregor recognized most of the neighborhoods they were passing through. By now, either on his own or with Tibor, he had managed to thoroughly reacquaint himself with the city. The cab turned left and then left again and stopped at a light. Then it turned right, and they were at the far end of Cavanaugh Street as he knew and understood it, at the far end of the “neighborhood.” He saw the newsstand with its wire racks of papers out front. The papers were the usual Philadelphia ones, plus The New York Times, plus the Ethniko Kirix, and papers in both Russian and Armenian. Ha. Let Phillipa Lydgate blither all she wanted about how isolated Americans were and how little they knew about other countries; on Cavanaugh Street they even knew other alphabets.

They passed through to the next block, and Gregor checked automatically for Holy Trinity Armenian Apostolic Christian Church. He was looking at it—down the block and across the street—when the cab came to a halt in front of his own brownstone building, stopping dead in the middle of the street instead of parking, since there were no more places at the curb. Gregor reached into his pocket for his wallet as he turned his head back toward his own side of the street and stopped. For a single half second, he thought he was never going to be able to breathe again.

Then the cabbie said, “Are you all right? Because if you’re having a heart attack, I’m going to call nine-one-one. I don’t do CPR.”

“I’m fine,” Gregor said, getting the money out.

But, of course, he wasn’t fine. He had just seen why it was the cab driver couldn’t pull up to the curb.

The place nearest the fire hydrant—the one almost nobody ever took for fear of being too close and getting a ticket—was occupied by a tangerine orange, two-seater Mercedes convertible sports car, and there wasn’t so much as a tote bag’s worth of luggage sitting in it.





THREE


1


Of all the many things that had changed since Margaret Beaufort had been a girl, one of the things she resented most was the nagging matter of clothes. It used to be that in certain stores, and at certain price ranges, anything you found was likely to be acceptable. It was poor women, not rich ones, who liked to be flashy and conspicuous. That was why such clothes were called “cheap,” not because they were inexpensive (although they were), but because the women who wore them were cheap. They were the sort of women who did not know how to maintain their dignity, or didn’t care.

Margaret Beaufort knew how to maintain her dignity, and cared very much, but she was foiled at every turn by a world in which cheap people had inherited the earth. Saks and Lord and Taylor were full of Spandex and Lycra and shiny man-made fabrics that reminded her of the dresses Chinese taxi dancers used to wear in ancient World War II movies. Women of good family walked around town in tight tube tops that didn’t reach the waistbands of their jeans, and then there was the fact that they wore jeans at all. It was worse than the sixties, when all people really cared about was looking as if they didn’t care about money. The girls she grew up with bought patchwork skirts that fell all the way to the floor and expensive little peasant blouses they’d brought back with them from a vacation to Guatemala. Now there was Paris Hilton, who seemed to have made some kind of pornographic film. At least there was a pornographic film out there “on the Internet” with her in it. There were clothes that made everyone look like a streetwalker. You could go into the best department store in the city and spend three thousand dollars on something with rhinestones outlining the nipples on your breasts. Nobody was safe anymore. Nobody could be sure she was doing the right thing.