Read Without Reservations for Free Online Page B

evening. Immediately, Justin and Liliane returned to some sort of squabble that obviously had been interrupted by my arrival. Embarrassed, I sat there until Liliane turned to me.
    “A lover’s quarrel,” she explained, laughing. “Sorry. But you know how these things are.” She laughed again and turned to pick up Justin’s hand. He did not look amused. And he made no attempt to smooth over the situation.
    Liliane, meanwhile, tried harder and harder to cajole Justin into a better mood. She grew flirtatious and then flattering, telling me about Justin’s accomplishments as a banker. And about his exquisite taste. “I met Justin when he hired me to decorate his flat in London. But his eye is so good he really didn’t need a designer.”
    I asked Justin a few questions about himself. He answered in a bored tone, making it quite clear he felt no need to impress me.
    His dismissal did not bother me. I was completely oblivious to the idea of personal slights; my attention was focused on the intriguing dynamics between Liliane and Justin. Particularly fascinating to me was how different she was in his presence. Gone was the easy openness I’d seen at lunch; replacing it was an extreme awareness of how Justin reacted to her. She became manipulative, changing her tactics if they seemed not to please him. It struck me that despite the ease with which she attracted men, she wasn’t really comfortable around them. Some impulse seemed to take over in the presence of a man, one that changed Liliane from a freestanding entity into a needy, dependent person.
    It was a familiar pattern to me. I’d seen it in my mother, a beautiful woman who even in her seventies elicited the attention of men. By that time, however, she no longer wanted it; in fact, she once confessed to me she had never really been comfortable in the company of a man. “Your father came close,” she told me when we were both old enough to talk of such things, “but sometimes even with him I found myself pretending to be someone I wasn’t.”
    Still, she married again less than a year after my father’s death. It was a sad marriage, one that depended a good deal on both participants giving up their real personalities. Only when my mother reached her sixties was she able to assert her independence, able to free herself of the fear of being on her own. “I always thought of it as being alone, not on my own,” was the way she described the fear that dictated so many of her actions.
    I thought I saw that fear of being alone in Liliane, too. I watched as she leaned close to Justin, leaned until the tiny green bird on her hat almost touched his forehead. She began talking. Her face looked anxious, crumpled. I couldn’t hear what she was saying and I didn’t want to.
    After all, I was a stranger who knew none of their mutual history. It was like walking into the middle of a movie: I arrived too late for the beginning and wouldn’t be around for the end. Still, I was quite caught up in the drama of whatever was being played out between them. It didn’t matter that I no longer existed to Liliane and Justin except, perhaps, as a deterrent to things getting really out of hand. By this time, Liliane was no longer a real person to me. The woman I’d met at lunch had vanished. And while I hated to admit it, I found myself deriving some small satisfaction from the belief that I no longer was susceptible to being compromised in such a way by a man.
    “Let’s go,” I heard Justin say to her. “I didn’t want to come to begin with.” His face was cold and impassive.
    Liliane turned to me. “I’m sorry. But we have to leave. I’m not feeling well.” I saw she was close to tears.
    I didn’t know what to say. It was such an intimate situation, one I shouldn’t be witnessing. “Never mind,” I said. “I’m not uncomfortable staying here alone. I just hope you’re all right.”
    Liliane and Justin rose to go. He nodded coldly. I nodded back just as coldly. I