Eagle Eye Read Online Free Page B

who were laden with last-minute cocktail items, she had surprisingly come back with them. It was a dark day, perhaps no planes were flying, her unsuccessful campaign was over, and as Bunty was helping fix the hors d’oeuvre, he heard his parents say there were rumors her husband had asked for a divorce. Certainly she had appeared alternately gay and distracted in a halting way, and wanting to be near any transient warmth, even theirs—as if she might be having one of those moments when she knew she was herself. In the intervening weeks he himself had grown used to these; his parents went out many weekend nights now, and he never called Wit.
    As their lone guest at first, Mrs. Reeves had been calmed by their devoted cocktail attentions, later greeting civilly each of the “the week’s pickups,” as Buddy called them—the man from the Arthur Murray dance studio—in whose group Maeve had once been, the Bronsteins’ dentist’s assistant and her new fiancé, also one of Bunt’s teachers and the reedy vocal coach who lived with his spaniel-faced friend on the ground-floor.
    “Oh yes,” Bunt heard Buddy say later that night, on the other side of the bathroom wall. “She treated us all with the consideration of a candidate.”
    “Buddy—” Maeve said. “She lost.”
    “It was the house that got all her impertinence, Maeve—didn’t you see?”
    Reeves’d been angry for sure to find herself here, and went for the house instead of them. “Boy—” she’d said to him as he passed her the first plate of his own hors d’oeuvre—(out of boredom, and some interest in the company, any company on the long Sunday, he’d become adept at getting tins open and their contents into praisedly weird combos)—“boy, what is that awful thing over there—a girandole?”
    He knew she shouldn’t speak that way to him, and stared at her until she dropped her eyes and asked him, in her Nantucket voice, where he was at school. “Ah yes, that’s the one people move in for.” But she seemed to calm herself again, now that he had made her realize he was a child, and asked him if he played that nice old upright piano.
    “No, my father used to. It’s the only thing here that’s really ours.” Which since all this lot had been acquired at Bloomingdale’s, was what he felt. He’d made her one more polite offer of his tray, pretending meanwhile that he was at diplomatic reception—at school his class was doing careers and he had chosen as his project Ambassador—and had moved on. He’d just been considering whether the tray wasn’t a flaw in his role, when the coach and his friend came up. “How’d you get the name Bunty?” they said in chorus. Rehearsed it maybe, the way Buddy could sometimes be heard in low-voiced shaving monologue, speaking to the trade. Did his mother’s guests all look so uneasy because they were here, or because they were themselves?
    “It’s a Little League connosh … connotation,” Bunt said, in character, then ambled into the kitchen, where he dumped tray and responsibility, walked on down the hall as a third secretary of the legation, and landed on his bed, kicking up his heels in a high mystic glee which had to be shared. His wealth of gathering experience dazzled him, but at the same time he had to confirm the world with his own kind, even if all he said when Witty came to the phone was “How’s tricks?” Lately, though they were still close, Witkower had taken to girls, advising “Get onto it, Bronstein,” and Bunty, since his thirteenth birthday, had taken one to the Modern several times. Tonight, Wit had said “Jesus, what a weekend!” the minute he picked up, giving Bunt scarcely time to recall the barrier which had been crossed. “Jesus, am I glad you called.”
    They were deep in Wit’s story when his parents, showing Mrs. Reeves the house, had knocked at his open door. “Hold it Wit—” he’d said. “Here’s folks.”
    With what had happened to Witkower, this