Peachtree Road by Anne Rivers Siddons

Author:Anne Rivers Siddons
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Romance, Contemporary, Adult
ISBN: 9780061847158
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1987-12-31T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

When I would not go to them, they came to me. I had not been back in New York a week before the phone rang in my apartment, on a Friday evening, and I lifted it to hear Charlie Gentry’s voice. Even without the absence of the small hollowness that meant long distance I would have known that he was in the city with me. His voice had such an immediacy that I instinctively held the receiver away from my ear.

“Sarah and I are at the Plaza, and we want to see you,” he said without preamble. “None of us can live decently until we’ve talked. We’re not going to go home until we have. When have you got some time?”

He had not said “Hello,” or “How are you,” or identified himself. Despite his phlegm, Charlie had delicacy and empathy, and he knew that there was no need and no way to frame this conversation in convention. And he knew very well how I was. He had been that way for years: stricken and without Sarah.

Pain and a child’s simple, consuming fury at the unfairness of it all surged into the cold, whistling hollow that had filled my chest ever since I had heard Dorothy Cameron’s words the Saturday before, and washed back out, tidelike. I saw rather than felt that my knuckles around the black plastic telephone receiver were blue-white, and my whole body was clenched, as one does just after a sudden injury to brace for the pain that will inevitably come boiling in. I hated them both in that moment, weakly and hopelessly, and I felt tears prickle in my eyes. But I willed the pain to stay back.

“I haven’t got any time for you, now or ever,” I said. My words sounded childish and impotent even to me, though my voice was level. “I don’t have anything to say to either of you. I don’t know what you can possibly think you have to say to me. Go on home and go to some parties, or get married, or do good works, or all three.”

He sighed.

“Sarah said you wouldn’t want to. I didn’t believe her. I thought we were more to each other than all this. We’re not going home, Shep. We can outwait you, if we have to, but we’re going to talk to you. Can we come down?”

“No,” I said instantly, in something close to abhorrence. “I’ll come up there.” I thought I would die, would kill them both, before I let them come here, to these rooms that were my own, that were where Sarah and I had made love and the beginnings of a life. If they came here, every place and everything I had would be contaminated with the pain of them, and I would literally have no refuge. I already sensed the poison of their pairing in the warm air of the city outside, as if it had drifted out from the hotel uptown and curled down into the Lower West Side to find me.

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