Genuine Lies

avidly curious. I don’t believe in jealousy, particularly over things past. As to the future, I’ve already warned Rory that if he becomes tempted to repeat his past mistakes, I won’t be one to weep and wail and nag or run screaming to my solicitor.” She sipped again, delicately. “I’ll simply kill him quickly, cleanly, in cold blood, and without a moment’s regret.”
    Rory laughed, then toasted his wife. “She terrifies me.”
    As the conversation flowed around him, Paul began to listen, to feel, with more interest. He wouldn’t have believed it, but he began to think that something had clicked, something solid, between his father and the woman he had married. A woman younger than the man’s only child—and one who, at first glance, had easily been dismissed as another of the big-breasted, pouty-lipped bimbos his father often dallied with.
    But Lily Teasbury wasn’t like any of the others. After he’d worked beyond an old and established resentment of one of his father’s women, he watched with a writer’s eye, listened with a writer’s ear. He saw the subtle gestures, glances, heard the timbre of voices, a quick laugh. This, he realized with no little astonishment, was a marriage.
    There was an ease and companionship that he had never sensed between his father and his own mother. There was a friendship he had seen in only one of his father’s marriages. When Eve Benedict had been his wife.
    When they went in for dinner, it was with a sense of relief and wonder. The relief came when he realized Lily would not fall into either of the two categories so many of Rory’s women had. She would not pretend there was an instant familial relationship between them. Nor would she allude, privately, that she was open to a more intimate relationship.
    His wonder came from the fact that his own instincts were insisting that his father might at long last have found someone he could live with.
    Julia sampled the pressed duck and eased her left foot free of her shoe. There was a fire in the hearth behind Rory’s back and a waterfall of crystal lights over their heads. The room with its tapestries and glinting display cabinets might have been dauntingly formal, but comfort seeped through by the way the two-pedestaled Regency table was left unextended, by the vase of fairy roses as a centerpiece, by the scent of applewood, and the quiet hiss of sleet. She slipped her other foot free.
    “I haven’t told you how wonderful you were last night,” Julia said to Rory. “Or how much I appreciated your going to the trouble to send tickets.”
    “No trouble at all,” Rory assured her. “I was delighted you and Paul would brave the elements and attend.”
    “I wouldn’t have missed it.”
    “Do you enjoy
Lear?
” Lily asked her.
    “It’s very powerful, stirring. Tragic.”
    “All those bodies heaped up at the end—really all due to an old man’s vanity and folly.” She winked at her husband. “Rory’s marvelous in the part, but I suppose I prefer comedy. It’s as difficult to pull off, but at least when one crawls off the stage, it’s with laughter ringing in one’s ears rather than wails of lamentation.”
    Chuckling, Rory directed his comment to Julia. “Lily likes happy endings. Early in our relationship I took her to see
A Long Day’s Journey into Night.”
Rory forked up some wild rice. “Afterward, she told me that if I wanted to sit around for several hours absorbing misery, I’d have to do it with someone else. Next time around I took her to a Marx Brothers festival.”
    “So I married him.” She reached over to touch her fingertips to his. “After I discovered he knew whole blocks of dialogue from
A Night at the Opera.”
    “And I thought it was because I’m so sexy.”
    When she smiled at him, a tiny dimple winked at the left corner of her mouth. “Darling, sex is limited to bed. A man who understands and appreciates comic genius is a man you can live with in the morning.” She leaned back again and fluttered her lashes at Julia. “Wouldn’t you agree, dear?”
    “Paul’s never offered to take me anywhere but a basketball game,” she said without thinking. Before she could regret it, Lily burst into delighted laughter.
    “Rory, what a pathetic father you must have been if your son can’t do better than a bunch of sweaty men tossing a ball at a hoop.”
    “I certainly was, but the boy always had his own ideas about everything, including the ladies.”
    “And what,” Paul