Read Online Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon - Free Book Online

of elegance, she assumed, was not
real
elegance—though to Lucy it was in fact fairly impressive. Beautiful oriental carpet, gold-leaf wallpaper, heavy wooden furniture, shelves full of books—not junky paperbacks, either, but real hardcover books with thread-bound spines and thick pages and a dense, woody smell.
    Was there a difference, she wondered, some fine distinction of good taste or breeding that would make it okay to call a room a “study” but not okay to have a light fixture that is called a “chandelier”?
    There were a lot of things she had yet to learn about social class, said George Orson, whose college days at Yale had sensitized him to such things.
    So what did it say about her that her own experience of chandeliers, studies, and so on was so limited? She herself had come from a long, long line of poor drudgers, Irish and Polish and Italian peasants—nobodies, stretching back for generations.
    You could draw her family in two dimensions, like characters in a comic strip. Here was her father, a plumber, a kindly, beer-bellied,muddy little man with hairy hands and a bald head. Her mother: windblown and stern, drinking coffee at the kitchen table before she went off to work at the hospital, a nurse but only a licensed practical nurse, just a vocational degree. Her sister, simple and round like her father, dutifully washing dishes or folding a basket of clothes and not complaining as Lucy sat moodily, lazily, on the couch reading novels by the latest young female authors and trying to emanate an air of sophisticated irritation—
    She couldn’t help but think of her lost, sadly cartoonish family as she looked around the empty study. Her old loser life, which she had left behind for this new one.
    In the study was an old oak desk, six drawers on either side, all of them locked. And a file cabinet, also locked. And George Orson’s laptop, password protected. And a wall safe, which was hidden behind a framed picture of George Orson’s grandparents.
    “Grandpa and Grandma Orson,” George Orson had said, referring to the grim pair, their pale faces and dark clothes, the woman with one light-colored eye and one dark—“called heterochromia,” said George Orson. “Very rare. One blue eye. One brown eye. Probably hereditary, though my grandmother always said it was because her brother hit her in the eye as a child.”
    “Hmmm,” Lucy had said, and now, alone in the room, she regarded the picture once again, the way the woman fixed her heterochromatic gaze on the photographer. A frankly unhappy and almost pleading look.
    And then she unhooked the latch the way that George Orson had shown her, and the old photo swung out like a cabinet door to reveal the nook in the wall with the safe.
    “So,” Lucy had said when she first saw it. The safe had appeared to be quite old, she thought, with a combination wheel like a dial on an antique radio. “Aren’t you going to open it?” she said, and George Orson had chuckled—though a bit uncertainly.
    “I can’t, actually,” he said.
    Their eyes met, and she wasn’t exactly sure what to make of his expression.
    “I haven’t been able to figure out the combination,” he said. Then he shrugged. “I’m sure it’s empty, in any case.”
    “You’re sure it’s empty,” she said. And she looked at him and he held her gaze, and it was one of those moments in which his eyes said,
Don’t you trust me? And
her eyes said,
I’m thinking about it
.
    “Well,” George Orson said. “I doubt very seriously whether it’s full of gold doubloons and gems.”
    He gave her that dimpled half smile of his.
    “I’m sure the combination will turn up somewhere in the files,” he said, and touched her leg playfully with the tip of his index finger, as if for good luck.
    “Somewhere,” he said, “if we can find the key to the filing cabinet.”
    But now, standing in the study, she couldn’t help but take another look at the safe. She couldn’t help but reach out and