That Part Was True Read Online Free

house, where she’d bent to peer beneath a slatted blind.
    Jack, alerted by the rustle of foliage, had instinctively dropped and rolled behind a three-seater sofa. Lying on his back, rock still, sharply aware of his physical being, the pinch of suppressed breath, and the charged prick of carpet fibers, he realized that this was no way for a grown man to live.
    â€œAdrienne!” Dex said, alert suddenly. “I forgot.”
    â€œThe love life lull endeth?”
    â€œNot mine, pal. Yours.”
    â€œHello?” the voice came again, louder now, clear but not insistent. Wind chimes at sea.
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    She was a tall, sand-colored blonde, wearing loose, white linen pants and a very pale blue shirt that might have been a man’s except that it fit her too perfectly. When she took off her sunglasses and smiled at him on being introduced, he noted that her eyes and the shirt were an exact match. She looked like something perfect from nature—driftwood. Very different from Lisa. This was not a comparison that Jack was making from imagination—Lisa had followed Adrienne into the house and out onto the deck.
    â€œI’m Lisa,” she said, introducing herself brightly, although she looked nervous, like someone who, having stepped confidently onto a bridge, has found it less sturdy than assumed. She had been watching Jack’s house, unwillingly compulsive, for signs of life, signs of Jack, for days—although the thought of actually seeing him made her stomach jump. Since her curtailed moment in his arms, a long-held, enjoyable crush had mutated into excruciating hope. She had called out to the blond woman, whom she’d seen skirting his side wall, on impulse, and now here she was. And there was he: inflated, illuminated, and too handsome.
    â€œHi,” she said.
    â€œHey,” he replied in a voice that gave her nothing.
    â€œAdrienne,” the blond woman said.
    And then Jack introduced Lisa to Dex, and asked everybody what they were drinking.
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    â€œI have a friend who’s a model,” Lisa said.
    Rick, Jack’s Filipino housekeeper, was clearing the pancake debris, and as he leaned past her, Lisa jiggled her chair slightly, automatically closer to Jack’s. It was a moment in which nothing was obvious, but a great deal was perceptible. Dex looked from Jack to Lisa and back again, but it was Rick’s eye that Jack avoided. Rick could assume a blank expression that spoke volumes, and Jack didn’t want to hear it.
    Lisa’s comment hung in the air for a moment before Adrienne, understanding suddenly, said, “Oh, no, I’m not a model. I’m a photographer.” Dex had said that they’d met on a shoot.
    â€œShe took the stills for that short film I did in March,” he added now.
    â€œThe one you went up to Canada for?” Jack asked.
    â€œYep. She’s spectacularly good.”
    Jack and Lisa both looked at Adrienne then, but she barely responded.
    â€œEvery shot had a sort of…quality to it,” Dex went on. “Beautiful. Never obvious.”
    Jack found himself watching Adrienne for some sign of a connection between her and Dex that went beyond professional admiration. He saw none. Nor did he see Lisa, gingerly chewing a celery stick, intently watching him.
    â€œI tried to capture the sense of the piece,” Adrienne responded mildly. “And the actors—I was very impressed by that particular cast—the intensity you brought to the work. It was incredible.”
    They wandered off then into film talk, and Jack was struck as he had been before by the change in Dex. He took his acting seriously. He was different when he spoke about it—focused.
    Lisa, taking advantage of the conversational pairing, leaned in and twisted to Jack. The view of her that this angle afforded him—wide eyes and cleavage—was part infantile and part maternal. Jack found it an uneasy combination.
    â€œHow are