Read Online Charisma by Orania Papazoglou - Free Book Online Page A

barely taken anything in. The people around her, on the bus and at the curbs where the bus stopped, were so alien they made her dizzy. Most of them were black. A fair proportion of the rest were Hispanic. What few whites there were were all men and all what her mother would have called muscle-headed Irish, or some other ethnic culture’s version of the same: big, fat, ham-handed, rough, and obsessively reading the numbers on their lottery tickets. Among these people, she felt like Tinkerbell. Worse. She felt like a fraud. The clothes Andy had made her change into—all of them worn and all of them pulled from the junk closet in the service hall—made her feel as if she were wearing a sign on her forehead that said SLUMMING.
    “We can’t take my car,” he’d told her, back at the house. “It’s a Porsche and it’s practically brand new. It’d get ripped off with us in it before we got halfway to where we were going.”
    Now he sat with his legs stretched out across the aisle, just a little too broad for the plastic seat he was sitting in. If it hadn’t been for the intelligence in his face, he would have looked like all the other white men here. Susan thought the white men might not notice the difference. They weren’t staring.
    “We’re going to have to make a transfer,” Andy was saying, “and then when we get to Congress Avenue we’re going to have to get out and walk. That’s what I’m worried about.”
    “There isn’t a bus that goes to Amora Street?”
    “There isn’t anything that goes to Amora Street. Except for Damien House, there isn’t anything on Amora Street. The place was abandoned years ago. It looks like those pictures you see of the South Bronx.”
    “Oh.”
    Andy shook his head. He’d already told her he wouldn’t have come with her at all if she hadn’t “still looked so much like a nun.” Whatever that meant. Susan supposed he was thinking now that she still thought like a nun. She pressed her great mass of black hair more firmly into her combs and twisted until she could see out the window behind her. The view was dislocating. There was Yale: a medieval landscape of turrets and lawns. Then there were the bums. A little colony of them had set up a cardboard housing project under cover of a stand of leafless trees on a street off Prospect. Every one of them had his own brown bottle and his own paper bag.
    Susan turned back. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s not the New Haven I remember.”
    “It hasn’t been the New Haven you remember for ten years.”
    “I guess not. I’m surprised you and Dan haven’t sold the house.”
    “We can’t sell the house,” Andy said.
    Susan flushed. “The Hanrahans could have sold theirs, and they haven’t. Dec is living where he grew up. I saw the address on that invitation Dan is so crazy about. Why haven’t they moved to the suburbs like everyone else?”
    “Maybe Edge Hill Road is a special case.”
    “Why? We had a murder at the bottom of it the day after I got home.”
    “Is that what you want to talk about? Murders? If I’d wanted to talk about murders, I could have gone into the D.A.’s office and had a chat with Dan’s secretary. She’s got a running file in her head of every death in the city of New Haven back to 1962. She’s especially fond of murders.”
    Susan turned away again. This time, the window behind her looked out on the passing of small, neat streets of two-story houses. The houses were old and painted strange pastel colors, but they were reasonably well kept up. She turned back again and folded her arms across her chest.
    “I don’t understand you,” she said. “I don’t understand either of you. How can you live together in that house?”
    “It’s convenient and it’s cheap.”
    “A lot of things are convenient and cheap. What do you two do when I’m not around? Fight?”
    “I haven’t had a fight with Dan since Mother died.”
    “Mother or Daddy?”
    Andy didn’t look at her. The bus