The Real Liddy James Read Online Free Page A

she and Peter worked side by side, sharing milk cartons and ideas on semiotic literary criticism, as Rose discreetly avoided promotion and other suitable men. She reread
Great Expectations
and cherished her unrequited passion, until one day Peter appeared in the common room, gray-faced from sleeplessness, and told her that he and Liddy had separated. Rose reached out her right hand to touch his, the first time she had dared to be so intimate, and he looked at her as if for the very first time.
    She was forty years old that day; it took a year for him to want her, and so, when she moved into the town house in Carroll Gardens with the fig tree in the garden, and after three miscarriages in rapid succession, she abandoned her dream of a child and accepted it would be just the two of them. And soon it did notmatter, at last she had him, it was the
enough
miracle—and of course there was his child too, Matty, whom she had first met as a tall and winning seven-year-old boy, and whom she had decided to love as if he were her own. And while their relationship had never become the one she had fantasized about, she dutifully cooked and cleaned and cared for him, which, from her outsider’s perspective, seemed at least ninety percent of what parenting was really about.
    â€œWhat are you reading?” said Peter. It was a bright February morning and he had walked into the kitchen to kiss the top of her head, but stopped at the sight of her, her hand leaning against her cheek, her soft beauty framed in the winter light of the French windows as if she were posing for Vermeer. “You look completely absorbed.”
    Rose gulped. She had woken early and, unable to lie still, had half dressed and crept down the stairs, kidding herself she would get a head start on a paper about Shakespeare’s
Coriolanus.
But in fact, after an hour or so, she had stopped, too eager to read the Style section of the
Times
, which she had bought yesterday evening and had not yet had a moment alone to peruse. Cup of coffee in hand, Rose had crept across the room to the innocuous brown bag, slung across a wooden chair, whose contents seemed to be summoning her with an insistent
read me,
read me
until she gave in and pulled the newspaper out, although as she did this she knew she should have waited until the apartment was empty. Liddy James, one of
New York
magazine’s top ten divorce attorneys, stared out at her from the front page, sitting, legs crossed, on a desk, hands by her sides, her face tilted up in a smile just the right edge of rictus but still ever-so-slightly fake. Rose began toread in case there was anything she needed to know about, and it had indeed been so absorbing, she had not heard Peter’s arrival, his socked footsteps on the stairs, the thump of his elbow against the warped wood of the kitchen door they had resolved to fix three years ago.
    She stood up, attempting to stuff the newspaper nonchalantly into the table drawer. It was no good. She was being furtive and he knew it.
    â€œWhat is it?” he said, walking toward her, curious now. Rose was the least furtive person in his acquaintance and she could never not tell the truth, even when she probably should.
    â€œIt’s Liddy’s article in the
Times
yesterday. D’you remember? She warned us about it before Christmas.”
    Peter reminded himself that his determination to ignore Liddy’s self-promoting interviews (which inevitably portrayed a version of their marriage designed to fit whatever she was selling) had served him well in the past, and as she had recently reminded him with typical candor, the royalties from her book were paying Matty’s school fees and might even cover college. But there was something in Rose’s face this morning, a different brushstroke across her forehead.
    â€œWhat did she say?” he asked as he sat down, resolutely pouring his cereal and forgetting to kiss the top of her head.
    â€œOh, more or less the