Read The Lemur for Free Online

her brother was a banker and a bastard, she had been in New York a year, she lived in a freezing apartment above the Bleecker Street studio that her rich father had left her in his will—oh, and she had recently broken up with her boyfriend, a Romanian plasterer without a green card whose main interest in her, she had discovered, was the fact that she possessed an American passport thanks to her Brooklynborn dad.
    All this she had told him as they walked around the bare little park in the frost-smoke of the winter day. When he made to tell her something about himself she had said: “Oh, I know who you are. I’ve been reading you for years.” He suspected that he had blushed.
    Now, four months later, their affair had drifted into the doldrums, he could not quite say why. He loved her, in his way, and believed that she loved him, in her way, yet somehow they could not get a strong enough grip on each other, there was something that kept eluding them. Perhaps in their way was a way that was not direct enough, and that was why they seemed to keep swerving around each other. Then there was the fact that she resented the secrecy Glass had imposed on their liaison—that was the word he had once used to describe what they had going between them, and she had never forgotten or forgiven it—for he dreaded what would happen if his wife, or, worse, his father-in-law, should hear of the affair. Not that it was the first time he had been unfaithful to Louise, nor was Louise herself a model of fidelity. The Glasses had an unspoken arrangement, eminently civilized, and Glass wanted to keep it that way. There were certain rules to be observed, the first of which was the rule of absolute discretion. Louise did not wish to know of his affairs, and emphatically not one that involved what seemed to be, all doubts and reservations aside, love, the actually existing thing itself.
    “Go on,” Alison said now, getting ready to laugh again, “you may as well tell me what’s up.” His supposed haplessness in the face of the world’s difficulties was one of the things she claimed to love him for. This puzzled him and, although he would never say so, annoyed him, too, a little, for he had always thought of himself as quite a competent fellow, indeed, more than competent. Now, when he had finished telling her about Dylan Riley—telling her some of it, anyway—she did laugh, shaking her head. “Why do you call him the Lemur?” she asked. “And by the way, a lemur is not a rodent.”
    “How do you know?”
    “I was a keen zoologist when I was at school. The name comes from the Latin word lemures, meaning ghosts, specters.”
    “Anyway, he’s that type, tall, gangly, with a long neck and shiny black eyes like my dear stepson’s.”
    “You forget,” Alison said drily, “that I’ve not had the opportunity to know what your dear stepson’s eyes, or any other parts of him, look like.”
    Glass did not respond to this; in what circumstances could she possibly imagine him introducing her to David Sinclair? Standing next to them at the bar were a couple of caricature Wall Street brokers, loudly discussing hedge funds. One of them wore red suspenders—did brokers really wear red suspenders anymore?—and had a big, square head like a side of beef.
    “Anyway,” Glass said, “I think the Lemur has found out about us. You’re sure he didn’t call?”
    “Do you really think I would have forgotten if he had?”
    He looked into his drink. “You mightn’t want to tell me about it. I mean”—hastily—“you might have wanted to spare me.”
    “Spare you?” She laughed incredulously. “Well, he didn’t. And I wouldn’t. Want to spare you, that is.” She drank the last of her drink. The beef-faced broker was eyeing her speculatively. “And now,” she said, “I’m going back to work.”
    He took a taxi uptown, gazing out unseeingly at the damp blocks as they fleeted past. He was hungry, for in the bar he had taken nothing but two