The Pirate's Daughter Read Online Free Page A

could never see her naked, especially at this time of day, and not want to make love. If the effect was calculated—hundreds of hours at the health club with a personal trainer, on the Stair Master, on the little track around which two hundred laps make up a mile—the end results were still primal and redeeming.
    â€œYou look great, honey,” Wilson said. “You …” He couldn’t finish.
    â€œIt’s about time you noticed that,” Andrea said. “I’ve been losing weight lately. Four and a half pounds since July.”
    Wilson couldn’t see her eyes in the dim light.
    â€œI wanted you to come over the other night,” she said in a small-girlish voice. “I almost called you, I almost picked up the phone. Twice.”
    â€œWhy didn’t you?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œHow long has it been?”
    â€œEight, no, ten days.”
    â€œI’m sorry,” Wilson said, moving toward her, “that’s too long.” Soft yellow lights came up over the leather couch on the automatic timer, and Andrea lay back on the damp towel on the jungle thick pile of the rug, her legs open, her clean shampoo-smelling hair curling damp in Wilson’s hands.
    Later, in the darkness of the bedroom on the big bed, they kissed and said “I love you” to the hollow echo of the apartment and fell asleep at last, digital clock glowing amber and watchful on the nightstand beside them.

6
    On Friday, Wilson went back to work at the Tea Exchange and was immediately up to his ears in the minutiae that runs one year into the next: mailing lists, franking privileges, Xerox machines, lost documents, software and hardware, all the crap—he told himself bitterly—invented by the prosaic to keep the rest of us from asking the reasons for things. You look up, it’s years later, the mind is dull, and none of the Great Questions have been attempted.
    He finished the day exhausted by the effort of catching up, by nothing, by the routine, by sitting in chairs that he had sat in before, and he boarded the Rubicon bus and loosened his tie and fell asleep against the smudge of grease on the scarred plastic bus window.
    Asleep, Wilson’s temperature rose; he sweated into the collar of his Brooks Brothers shirt and began to dream.
    A bright afternoon in early spring, he is ten years old. His mother, young and pretty, wearing her shiny black hair in a flip and a leopard print pillbox hat and a thin leopard-print coat, holds his hand tightly as they cross the street from Lazar and Martin’s department store, where she has bought him a tin ray gun that makes whirring noises when he pulls the trigger. The Maas Tower is under construction, a skeleton of black girders rising up to the sun. As they pass beneath the scaffolding, he is the first to see the long shadow on the sidewalk. He stares up, not understanding for a few seconds; then there is no time to cry out before the deadly rush and the pavement bending like a springboard. He is heaved up and thrown through the air—the secret joy of flying in his heart—over the ranks of slow-moving cars, over the gawkers, over the policeman on the horse. But he does not land with a thump on a bag of concrete mix, as he did in life. Instead he spreads his arms and soars up and over the tops of the buildings, past the snapped crane cable, past the horror-stricken construction workers in their yellow hard hats gaping down at

    the woman smashed like a bug beneath the girder, past the deco silver needle of the Rubicon Building, and out over the Harvey Channel and Blackpool Island and the gray-blue sea churning with whitecaps and ships heading for the harbor. And at last, all sight of land left behind, he is robbed by the wind of his child’s clothes, and in the next second he is a grown man hurtling naked a mile above the earth to meet an approaching darkness that is not a storm or the night coming on, that is