Radiance Read Online Free Page B

erotic.
    “She
writes for the
Sunday Review,”
he said, gesturing with his chin at Irene, who had thrown back her head to laugh at something Dean Atchity had said. “And
she
—” He pointed to a woman dressed in a black turtleneck, leaning against a wall, talking to a man in grey. “But you–” He looked her up and down, at her pointed breasts in her gabardine suit jacket, at her tightly cinched waist (when she took off her girdle later that night, her stomach was imprinted with leaves and flowers). “You put on your best suit,” he said, “nothing too showy, but flattering, and you drove here. Commuted.”
    “Couldn’t I have taken the train?”
    “Unlikely,” he said. “Got yourself a car, a station wagon, I’d guess. And you like to use it.”
    “And where did I commute from?”
    “Long Island,” he said promptly. “Or possibly New Jersey.”
    “And how do you know all this?”
    He bent so close that she could feel his lips against her hair. She half expected him to bite her earlobe, or thrust his tongue suddenly and thickly into the whorl of her ear, but he merely said, in a hot voice: “It shows.” Then he stood back and laughed. “But there’s nothing wrong with that. You lovely ladies are what keep the world turning.”
    Daisy placed her glass on the table. “You happen to have misread me completely.”
    He dipped into the punch bowl. “As a matter of fact, Irene has told me quite a bit about you. Said you were just right to host our visitor. Please don’t take offence.”
    “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
    She nodded goodbye to Dr. Carney and made her way through the crowd to the bathroom, where she locked the door and splashed cold water on her face. In the mirror she looked blurry—and bloated too, from eating too much at night after Walter had shuffled away from the supper table, his slippers on the hall floor sibilant and gritty. She would stand in the cool of the Frigidaire, eating beef stroganoff, using up precious energy—energy that was badly needed in Germany or Japan, in restructuring France or still-conserving Britain. She took her spoon, or even Walter’s spoon if it was close, and shovelled the creamy wine-flavoured noodles into her mouth. She hardly chewed, just took the food in as snakes do. She had read somewhere that they could swallow an animal three times their size by relaxing a muscle deep in their throats.
    When Daisy returned to the living room, Irene was calling for everyone’s attention. “Dean would like to say a few words,” she said. “Nobody move!”
    Atchity had taken up a position by the front door, where he could address everyone. His ears were backlit by one of the sconce lights on the wall behind him, to unfortunate affect: they shone pink in a rather distracting way. “I do have a few words,” he said in his thin, practical voice. “Possibly more than a few words.” He cleared his throat and then began to speak.
    “For the past year,” he said, “I have had the honour to work with a team of dedicated doctors and philanthropists, both here and in Hiroshima. Our goal has been nothing less than to bring victims of the atomic bomb to New York City, to Mount SinaiHospital, so that their faces can be operated on by the best plastic surgeons in the world. Sometimes it looked as if this project might not even get off the ground. At other times we were full of hope and anticipation. Tonight, we see the first fruits of our labours. We welcome you, Keiko Kitigawa, to Manhattan and to the Hiroshima Project. It is our dear hope that you will be only the first of many visitors from Hiroshima to come to our city for restorative surgery. This is the beginning—only the beginning.”
    There was applause.
    Atchity rocked back on his heels. “Even as we stand here,” he said, “united by this humanitarian cause, we must be mindful of the dangers we face. Last month, Senator McMahon, the chairman of the Joint Senate-House Atomic Energy Committee, told us for