Read Online On Off by Colleen McCullough - Free Book Online Page A

earned more! And the children just kept coming, coming. The only way she could prevent a fifth child was to sin — Paola was taking the Pill.
    The quarrels, she understood, were totally destructive. They upset the children, they upset her, and they were driving Walt to seek his cabin more and more often. His cabin — she’d never even seen it! Nor would she. Walt refused to tell her where it was.
    “Oh, wow, fudge ripple!” cried Stanley.
    “Fudge ripple doesn’t go with grape Jell-O,” said Bella, who was the fussy one.
    According to her own lights Paola was a good mother. “Would you prefer your Jell-O and your ice cream in separate bowls, honey?”

    Dr. Hideki Satsuma, letting himself into his penthouse apartment atop Holloman’s tallest building, and feeling the day’s stresses slide from his shoulders.
    Eido had come home earlier than he, set everything out as his master liked, then gone ten floors down to the far less elegant apartment where he lived with his wife.
    The decor was deceptively simple: walls of beaten copper sheeting; checkered doors of black wood and frail paper; one very old three-leafed screen of expressionless slit-eyed women with pompadour hairstyles and ribby parasols; a plain polished black stone pedestal that held one perfect flower in a twisted Steuben vase; glossy black wooden floors.
    A cold sushi supper was laid out on the black lacquer table sunk into a well, and when he went through to his bedroom he found his kimono spread out, his Jacuzzi giving off lazy tendrils of steam, his futon down.
    Bathed, fed, relaxed, he went then to the glass wall that framed his courtyard and stood absorbing its perfection. To have it built had put him to a great deal of expense, but money wasn’t a commodity Hideki needed to worry about. So beautiful, living as it did inside the apartment where once had been an open area of roof garden. On the courtyard side its walls were mirrored, but from the room that surrounded it the walls were transparent. Its contents were sparse to the point of austerity. A few bonsaied conifers, a tall Hollywood cypress growing in a double helix, an incredibly old bonsaied Japanese maple, perhaps two dozen rocks of assorted sizes and shapes, and varicolored marble pebbles laid down in a complex pattern not meant to be walked upon. Here the forces of his private universe came together in the way most felicitous to his own well-being.
    But tonight, his fingertips still reeking faintly of xylene to his exquisitely sensitive nose, Hideki Satsuma stared at his courtyard in the sure knowledge that his private universe had shifted on its foundations; that he had to rearrange the pots, the rocks, the pebbles, to neutralize this profoundly disturbing development. A development beyond his control, he who was driven to control everything. There…There, where that pink rivulet meandered through the glowing jade pebbles…And there, where the sharp grey rock leaped like a sword blade in front of the tender vulvar roundness of the cloven red rock…And there, where the double helix of the Hollywood cypress tapered up to the sky…They were suddenly wrong, he would have to start again.
    His mind went wistfully to his beach house up on the elbow of Cape Cod, but what had happened there recently required a period of recovery. Besides, the drive was too long, even in his maroon Ferrari through the night marches. No, that house had a different purpose, and while it was connected to the shifting of his universe, the epicenter of the disturbance lay in his Holloman courtyard.
    Could it wait until the weekend? No, it could not. Hideki Satsuma pressed the buzzer that would summon Eido upstairs.
    Desdemona, erupting into her apartment on the third floor of a three-family house on Sycamore Street just beyond the Hollow. Her first stop was the bathroom, where she ran a warm bath and removed the lingering traces of her two-mile walk home. Then it was into the kitchen to open a can of Irish stew