Free The Collected Stories of Amanda Cross by Amanda Cross

lunch.
    Kate contemplated his face across the luncheon tablewith pleasure. Richard combined the best features of an imp and a youthfully aging and gay (in all senses of the word) uncle. He was, in fact, quite heterosexual and a confirmed bachelor, having convinced everyone of this except himself. He still hoped to meet the right woman in the next day or so, and launch himself on a satisfactory career of marriage and fatherhood. Like a number of people Kate had observed over the years, Richard, marvelously suited to his life and vigorously happy, was unaware that his deep satisfaction arose in part from the delusion that he was abjectly in need of passionate love, babies, and a deep and lasting relationship. Kate liked him enormously.
    She did not immediately ask about Witherspoon. To have evinced that much interest would have started Richard’s investigative motors, and Kate did not wish to reveal her relationship with Arrie. But it was easy to work the conversation around to Witherspoon, whom Richard, together with the greater part of the department, despised with a vigor mitigated only by the pleasure they got in talking about how bloody awful he was. Witherspoon, Kate was forced to realize, had provided a good deal of pleasure in his curmudgeonly life, none of it intended.
    Richard knew all about the wife, tucked away in a nearer version of Betty Ford’s detoxification facility. “Before my time of course, but the usual story. He pursued her with tales of his unsympathetic wife; now she’s the unsympathetic wife: they never learn, poor dears. One hopes the graduate students these days are too smart to marry him, if not quite smart enough to dodge him entirely. I met the wife once; he had me to dinner in the early days, before I turned out to be too modern altogether. Obviously a lady, and punishing him and herself for her stupid mistake. They have two daughters, an absolutely mouthwateringcreature called Roxanna, and an afterthought called Arabella. The names are enough to give you an idea of the marriage. It’s widely assumed that Arabella isn’t his child.”
    Kate stared at him. “On what grounds?” she finally asked.
    “I think it was the poor thing’s final attempt to bolt, before she drowned herself in alcohol reinforced by prescription drugs. Considering his record of fornication and adultery, you’d think he’d have turned a blind eye, but not our Witherspoon.”
    “Why not?”
    “Kate, my sweet, you don’t seem your usual quick-witted self, if you’ll forgive my observing it. Must you go on grunting monosyllabic questions?”
    “I’m sorry, Richard. I’m always astonished at how much life is like prime-time soap operas.”
    “Which I’m certain you never watch. They are unreal only in the way outrageous situations follow hard upon each other, if not occurring simultaneously, and in the luxury of the surroundings. Actually, they are, otherwise, just like life, if you’re a shit like Witherspoon, which of course most of the characters are. Have you some special interest in him? A renewed fascination with manuscripts?”
    Kate laughed. “If I could take the smallest interest in manuscripts, it wouldn’t be renewed. It would be a new and sudden aberration. Actually, I had dinner there the other evening, and was overwhelmed with curiosity. Roxanna used to be a student of mine, and she asked me.” Richard would wonder why she hadn’t mentioned this in the first place; the reason was clear to Kate: it had entailed lying.
    “Ah. I wondered why your interest was so suddenlyawakened. The rumor is that he now wants a divorce and most of what there is of her worldly goods. In exchange, he’ll pretend to relinquish with infinite sorrow custody of Arabella.”
    “Do you mean he’ll get her to pay him alimony?”
    “Don’t ask me the details, but that’s often how it works out these days. The woman gets the children and the man gets the property.”
    “Surely the woman gets to keep what she