Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [26]
Dickie walks to the window and holds out a lit cigarette.
“Of course I take you seriously,” Vivian says. “I take you dead serious, as a matter of fact.”
“Because I was wondering if when the house is finished you might want to move in with me,” he says. He pauses. “Till November, say? Then I thought you and I might go down to New York for a bit. Stay at the Plaza and so forth. Take a side trip to Havana.”
Vivian struggles not to show her considerable surprise. She takes a long pull on the cigarette and suppresses a cough. Dickie smokes Chesterfields, which are too strong for her. “Are you proposing?” she asks lightly.
“You need me to?” he asks.
She exhales and studies the skirt of her sundress. She can see her skin through the thin material. “Not really,” she says.
“Then it’s a deal?”
“What I like,” she says, looking up and gesturing to take in all of the house, “are all the windows open to the sky. It’s an aerie. It’s inspired. It makes me want to lie down and sleep.”
Dickie moves toward her, but she pushes him gently away with her fingers. “It’s too hot. Don’t come near me.”
Could she make a go of it with Dickie Peets? she wonders. She’s been dreading the return to Boston. She is simply too old to live with her father, and what future is in that? Far better to live with Dickie, even if it would cause a scandal. Perhaps she could go bohemian, she thinks. Espouse free love and all that. For a moment she contemplates that idea as she allows Dickie to kiss her neck. “What on earth would we do all day?” she asks.
“Look at the ocean,” Dickie says. “Don’t know. Got something I’ve been working on. Something I’ve been painting.”
“Not seriously,” Vivian says too quickly, and she can see that she has hurt him. She wraps his tie around her hand and pulls him closer to her. “I thought you were in stocks or something,” she says.
He is silent a moment. He takes her breast in his hand. “Stocks all the way,” he says.
McDermott
McDermott pauses at the entrance to the apartment building.
“Come on come on come on,” Ross says, wiping his face with his handkerchief. “Don’t hang about.”
“I’ll be right with you,” McDermott says.
“Suffering Jesus, it’s hot,” Ross says, putting his filthy handkerchief back in his pocket.
A movement catches McDermott’s attention, and his eyes travel across the facade of the brick tenement to a fourth-floor window. A boy sits on the windowsill, watching him. All week, the heat has been stifling, nearly intolerable inside the mill. For a moment, McDermott feels sorry for the boy and thinks of sailing him a coin so that he can go to the movies. Two coins, so that he can take a friend. Ross tugs at the sleeve of McDermott’s shirt. “You don’t want to be seen,” Ross says from the bottom of the well. “The last thing you want to do is end up on someone’s list.”
Alphonse
All afternoon Alphonse has watched the men come and go through the door with the peeling red paint. Arnaud Nadeau’s father, who keeps coming to the door to wave the men inside, is a mule spinner at the mill, and what all the men are doing in the Nadeau apartment Alphonse has no idea. The men move toward the door and pretend they aren’t actually going in, and then they slip across the threshold with a sneaky movement that reminds Alphonse of Sam Coyne, who was always arriving late for school and trying to slide into his seat without Sister Mary Patrick noticing. Trying to pull a fast one. As if Sister Mary Patrick, who sees and hears everything, wouldn’t catch him. It would be better, Alphonse thinks, for the men to walk up to the door as if they were going visiting, because anyone can tell there’s something up.
He doesn’t know the dark-haired man in the blue shirt who looked at him, the man who had his sleeves rolled and paused a moment on the steps. Alphonse is frightened because who knows what the men are up