Read Online The Blue Hour by Douglas Kennedy - Free Book Online Page B

what had pulled me toward trouble.
    â€œWell, hello there.”
    Paul was standing in the doorway of the balcony, dressed in the white djellaba that the night man had brought up along with the mint tea.
    â€œYou really slept,” I said.
    â€œAnd you?”
    â€œTwelve hours versus your fourteen.”
    â€œFourteen hours?”
    â€œYou needed it.”
    â€œSo did you. And I see that I have no clothes.”
    â€œThey’re being washed as we speak. That djellaba suits you.”
    â€œThe French have a word for an aging hippie still dressing as if he’s just walked off an ashram: a baba-cool . Even during my year here I never wore a djellaba.”
    â€œBut it now suits your ‘aging hippie’ look.”
    He leaned down and kissed me on the lips.
    â€œI walked into that, didn’t I?” he said.
    â€œIndeed you did.”
    Now it was my turn to lean over and kiss my husband.
    â€œTea?”
    â€œPlease.”
    I poured out two glasses of the mint tea. We clinked them.
    â€œ À nous, ” he said.
    â€œTo us.”
    He threaded his hand in mine. We both stared up at the emerging daylight.
    â€œDo you know what this time of day is called?”
    â€œYou mean, besides ‘dawn’?”
    â€œYes, besides ‘dawn’ or ‘the break of day.’ ”
    â€œThe last one’s poetic.”
    â€œSo is ‘the blue hour.’ ”
    I let that phrase resonate for a moment or so. Then I tried it out myself.
    â€œThe blue hour.”
    â€œIt’s rather lovely, isn’t it?”
    â€œIndeed. Neither darkness nor light.”
    â€œThe hour at daybreak or dusk when nothing is as it seems; when we are caught between the perceived and the imagined.”
    â€œClarity and blur?”
    â€œThe pellucid and the obscure? Simplicity masking enigma?”
    â€œNice image,” I said.
    He leaned over and kissed me. “ J’ai envie de toi .”
    And I so wanted him. Especially right now. After all that restorative sleep. After that business in the alley. With the blue hour enveloping us.
    He lifted me right out of my chair, his hands under my T-shirt. I pulled him toward me, feeling his hardness against me. Then he was steering us to the bed. And some time later, every neutron in my body was electrified as I bit into his shoulder and I came and came again and again. And then he let out a cry and shot into me.
    We lay there, arms around each other, bewildered and, yes, happy.
    â€œOur adventure begins now,” I said.
    â€œIn the blue hour.”
    But, in the world beyond our bedroom window, emerging sunlight had already eradicated the dawn.
    â€œThe blue hour has passed,” I said.
    â€œUntil sunset this evening.”
    â€œThe beginning of a day is always more mysterious than the onset of night.”
    â€œBecause you don’t know what lies ahead?”
    â€œAt sunset you are more than halfway through the day’s narrative,” I said. “At dawn you have no idea what will transpire.”
    â€œWhich is perhaps why the blue is always bluer at dawn. And why a sunset is always more wistful. The entry into night, the sense of another day of life spinning toward its end.”
    Paul leaned over and kissed me on the lips.
    â€œAs the Irish would say, ‘There’s a pair of us in it.’ ”
    â€œHow do you know that expression?”
    â€œAn Irish friend told it to me.”
    â€œWhat Irish friend?”
    â€œSomeone long ago.”
    â€œA woman?”
    â€œPerhaps.”
    â€œPerhaps?”
    â€œOkay, since you asked, her name was Siobhan Parsons. She was a professor of art at University College Dublin and not a bad painter. At the SUNY Buffalo for a year. Unmarried. As mad as a lamp, to use another of her favorite expressions. It lasted between us maybe three months. It was all around twelve years ago, when neither you nor I was aware of each other’s