The Necessary Havoc of Love by Lesley Krueger

Author:Lesley Krueger [Krueger, Lesley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lesley Krueger
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

THE BUZZER SOUNDED. Vera blinked back to the present, stretching her legs. She assumed there were more religious types at the street-level door. She had been inundated with Pentecostals lately—joke—and ignored the buzzer.

Then Vera glanced at the clock. Tripping on her yoga mat, pounding downstairs, flinging open the door, she found Lawrence waiting outside.

“As scheduled,” she said, trying to sound cool.

“As scheduled,” Lawrence said, and gave her a peck on the cheek.

Leading him upstairs, Vera couldn’t think where the afternoon had gone. She was conscious of her yoga clothes, which were flattering, and of the fact Lawrence hadn’t been inside any of her homes since university. They had lived together for three years while they went to McGill. Now Vera was camping in a temporary apartment over a store while Lawrence was CEO of an international machine parts conglomerate based in Philadelphia. She worried that he would think her apartment was shabby.

Of course, most women would have been more concerned about what he thought of their ass.

“I’ve got a great ass,” she told him.

“You do,” Lawrence agreed.

She opened the door and led him in, arms crossed.

“Vera, this is wonderful. Creative. Wow.”

She melted at his inept sincerity, and they had their usual long relieved kiss. Vera was always surprised at first by the difference in their height, or maybe about the difference between Lawrence’s height and Richard’s. Lawrence was a giraffe, a tall man with sloping shoulders and a long neck. He was still slender, his thinning hair buzzed short. Looking pretty good, Vera thought, and went to get drinks.

The apartment was fine, too. She and Richard had bought good furniture, and on each of their long trips abroad, they had acquired one substantial piece of art. That had been Richard’s idea, and when they’d divided the collection, Vera had grown irritated at Richard’s pretentious minginess and her acquiescence, wishing she had been able to chose among many cheap, bright keepsakes that could have cluttered up an empty space.

Now she clicked drinks with Lawrence, reminding herself that restraint worked.

“I want to know straight up if this is my fault,” he said. “I mean, if he found out.”

“He hasn’t got a clue. What about your wife?”

Lawrence shifted uncomfortably. “The question is whether she cares,” he said, with a surprising pucker of bitterness.

Lawrence’s wife suffered from lymphoma and he usually talked eggshells around her, the saint. “She can’t begrudge me getting laid. Not that you’re just…”

“I’m not?”

Making him smile shyly and duck down for another kiss.

Vera and Lawrence had broken up not long before they got their degrees, when Lawrence had decided to move back to Philadelphia and Vera had declined to go with him. It wasn’t a sense of Canadian identity. Maybe it was fear. In any case, she met Richard soon afterwards and they’d married in a happy flurry. A couple of years later, Lawrence had looked Vera up during a business trip and they had fallen back into bed.

Afterward, Vera found her lack of remorse reassuring. Lawrence was no threat to her marriage.

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