Summer Lies Read Online Free

of my prince when I was a girl.”
    He saw her smiling face in the dull glow of the dashboard. Susan was lost in her memories. For the first time since they’d met, she was somewhere else. Richard wanted to ask which actor or singer she’d dreamed of back then, wanted to know everything about the men in her life, wanted to hear that they’d all been mere prophets while he was the Messiah. But then he thought that his worries about the other men were as petty as the excessive charge on his credit account. He was tired and laid his head on Susan’s shoulder. She reached over and stroked his head with her left hand, pressed his head to her shoulder, and he fell asleep.
8
    Over the next few days he learned everything about the men in Susan’s life. He also learned about her longing for children, at least two, preferably four. At first with her husband there was no success, then she no longer loved him and she got divorced.He learned she’d studied art history at college, then had gone to business school, and had reorganized a toy train manufacturer which she’d inherited from her father and then sold along with the other firms she’d inherited. He learned that she had an apartment in Manhattan that she was in the process of having renovated because she wanted to move from Los Angeles to New York. He also learned that she was forty-one, two years older than he was.
    Again and again, whatever Susan told him about her life until now ended in plans for their future together. She described her apartment in New York: the wide staircase in the duplex that led up from the sixth floor to the seventh, the wide corridors, the large high rooms, the kitchen with the dumbwaiter, the view of the park. She had grown up in the apartment until her aunt fetched her to Santa Barbara after her parents’ death. “I used to slide down the banisters and roller-skate in the corridors, I could get into the dumbwaiter till I was six, and when I was in bed I could watch the tops of the trees waving from out of my window. You have to go see the apartment!” She couldn’t show it to him herself because she was flying back from the Cape to Los Angeles to organize both the foundation’s move and her own. “Will you meet with the architect? We can still change everything.”
    Her grandfather had acquired not only the duplex but the entire building on Fifth Avenue at a very favorable price during the Depression. Along with the estate on the Cape and another in the Adirondacks. “I have to renovate that again too. Do you enjoy architecture? Building and renovating and decorating? I got the plans and brought them with me—shall we look at them together?”
    She talked about a couple, old friends of hers, who had been trying in vain to have children for years, and had just spenttheir vacation at a fertility farm. She described the diet and the program, which laid out when the two of them were to sleep, exercise, eat, even have sex. She found it funny, but was also a little anxious. “You Europeans don’t know about this kind of thing, or so I read. You see life as fate that cannot be changed.”
    “Yes,” he said, “and if we’re destined to kill our fathers and sleep with our mothers, there’s nothing we can do about it.”
    She laughed. “Then you really can’t hold anything against the fertility farm. If it doesn’t help your destiny, it can’t do any harm, either.” She shrugged apologetically. “It’s just because things didn’t work with Robert back then. Perhaps it wasn’t my fault, perhaps he was the one with the problem, we didn’t have any tests done. But all the same, I’ve been afraid ever since.”
    He nodded. He was feeling afraid too. About the minimum two, maximum four children. And beforehand, about having to follow a set diet and have sex at set times with Susan at the fertility farm. About the loud ticking of the biological clock until the fourth child arrived or no more children were possible. About the