Read Online House of Secrets - v4 by Richard Hawke - Free Book Online
Authors: Richard Hawke
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both considered his wife to be a buttoned-up little snob. Andy’s own feelings on the matter were much less charged. He simply found the couple tepid.
As he was pouring Hailey Jordan a glass of lemonade, Andy asked after her husband and was told that Paul was currently lying flat out on the floor in the family living room in New Canaan with a moist towel over his head. Andy passed up any number of wiseass remarks.
“Paul suffers horrible migraines,” Hailey Jordan went on, her accent not flattened in the least by the years of being surrounded by vowel-chewing Yanks. “Although given Paul’s agnostic bent, it’s not implausible he only wanted to slither out of what he considers a patently absurd ritual.”
Andy gave her a look of mock dismay. “Cute little children and colored eggs? Hailey! Your husband is one cold, cold customer.”
The woman’s explosive little laugh was like shrapnel to the eardrums. On Andy’s private list of Hailey Jordan’s “challenging” features, the hiccupy laugh ranked high. Andy made a mental note — again — to dial down the levity when he was in the woman’s company.
T he man who had been seated next to Christine at the table was an executive with Ogilvy & Mather, and he had worked hard throughout the meal to impress her with tales from the advertising jungle. Graciously, Christine had granted him the expressions he sought, though her private thoughts would have devastated him.
After the meal came the croquet, an amusing blend of the competitive and the could-care-less. The man from O & M proved to be one of the former, and he was managing to do his part in squelching the fun for the latter.
Andy sat out the croquet, logically asserting that the banging of wooden balls with wooden mallets was the precise sort of activity that the doctor who had stitched him up the other day had suggested he forgo for the immediate future. He parked himself in one of the children’s chairs with a tumbler of scotch and watched the game from there. In truth, his head
was
throbbing. Alcohol was probably not the wisest medicine for someone in Andy’s condition, but he had found himself edgy ever since arriving at the house and he could see no real harm in a little anesthesia.
Andy’s mind wanted to drift back to Joy Resnick, but his heart resisted. Or possibly it was the other way around. Maybe it was his heart that felt the tug, but his mind was resisting. It was the kind of silly semantic distinction he and Christine enjoyed batting around with each other. They both were sticklers for precision in that way. Of course, Andy could not very well walk over to his wife and put the query to her. The details necessary to define the terms of the question would themselves… Well, it wasn’t going to happen.
Andy sipped at his drink and traced the sweet liquor as it infiltrated his system. On the train coming up from D.C., Andy had briefly imagined coming clean with Christine about his involvement with Joy Resnick. Briefly. He had tried imagining Christine displaying astonishing grace and understanding of the affair as having come completely out of the blue. But that was nonsense. “Out of the blue” would have suggested that Andy’s affair with Joy Resnick had represented a completely aberrant episode in his life with Christine, and this was simply not the case. Andy took grim solace in the thought that he could count on one hand the number of women he had slept with since being with Christine. The grim part being that with Joy Resnick, Andy had used up his last digit.
Two of the occasions had been completely anonymous, legs and mouths and shoulders with no names. The first had come prior to his and Christine’s marriage, during a junket to Venezuela: a brisk bounce in a Caracas Hilton followed by a dark funk and raging hangover the next morning. The second nameless encounter — bizarre by any standard — had transpired many years later, in the back office of a Georgetown jewelry
As he was pouring Hailey Jordan a glass of lemonade, Andy asked after her husband and was told that Paul was currently lying flat out on the floor in the family living room in New Canaan with a moist towel over his head. Andy passed up any number of wiseass remarks.
“Paul suffers horrible migraines,” Hailey Jordan went on, her accent not flattened in the least by the years of being surrounded by vowel-chewing Yanks. “Although given Paul’s agnostic bent, it’s not implausible he only wanted to slither out of what he considers a patently absurd ritual.”
Andy gave her a look of mock dismay. “Cute little children and colored eggs? Hailey! Your husband is one cold, cold customer.”
The woman’s explosive little laugh was like shrapnel to the eardrums. On Andy’s private list of Hailey Jordan’s “challenging” features, the hiccupy laugh ranked high. Andy made a mental note — again — to dial down the levity when he was in the woman’s company.
T he man who had been seated next to Christine at the table was an executive with Ogilvy & Mather, and he had worked hard throughout the meal to impress her with tales from the advertising jungle. Graciously, Christine had granted him the expressions he sought, though her private thoughts would have devastated him.
After the meal came the croquet, an amusing blend of the competitive and the could-care-less. The man from O & M proved to be one of the former, and he was managing to do his part in squelching the fun for the latter.
Andy sat out the croquet, logically asserting that the banging of wooden balls with wooden mallets was the precise sort of activity that the doctor who had stitched him up the other day had suggested he forgo for the immediate future. He parked himself in one of the children’s chairs with a tumbler of scotch and watched the game from there. In truth, his head
was
throbbing. Alcohol was probably not the wisest medicine for someone in Andy’s condition, but he had found himself edgy ever since arriving at the house and he could see no real harm in a little anesthesia.
Andy’s mind wanted to drift back to Joy Resnick, but his heart resisted. Or possibly it was the other way around. Maybe it was his heart that felt the tug, but his mind was resisting. It was the kind of silly semantic distinction he and Christine enjoyed batting around with each other. They both were sticklers for precision in that way. Of course, Andy could not very well walk over to his wife and put the query to her. The details necessary to define the terms of the question would themselves… Well, it wasn’t going to happen.
Andy sipped at his drink and traced the sweet liquor as it infiltrated his system. On the train coming up from D.C., Andy had briefly imagined coming clean with Christine about his involvement with Joy Resnick. Briefly. He had tried imagining Christine displaying astonishing grace and understanding of the affair as having come completely out of the blue. But that was nonsense. “Out of the blue” would have suggested that Andy’s affair with Joy Resnick had represented a completely aberrant episode in his life with Christine, and this was simply not the case. Andy took grim solace in the thought that he could count on one hand the number of women he had slept with since being with Christine. The grim part being that with Joy Resnick, Andy had used up his last digit.
Two of the occasions had been completely anonymous, legs and mouths and shoulders with no names. The first had come prior to his and Christine’s marriage, during a junket to Venezuela: a brisk bounce in a Caracas Hilton followed by a dark funk and raging hangover the next morning. The second nameless encounter — bizarre by any standard — had transpired many years later, in the back office of a Georgetown jewelry
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