is it working out well? You have no friends, no music. No work. What do you do all day?”
“The solitude is good for me. It’s helping.”
“Helping with what? You’re not ill.”
“Christ, Annie, I’m ill as a dog!”
Her dead eyes turned back to the dishcloth she was running across the table. “Then you should be here, where I can look after you.”
“No.”
She looked up.
“I mean—no, thanks. I’m better alone. Really.”
“Your jinn lady keeping you busy, is she?”
He was not so dutiful, however, toward Max, whom he betrayed on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis. Irrational though it was to be in love with a woman he knew nothing about—who claimed, indeed, to know very little about herself—Gabriel was nonetheless gliding through the days in happiness. Prudence soaked through his pores and flowed through his limbs. Every time they made love, he betrayed his brother with exultation and oblivion. He delighted in her presence, quiet though it was, and relished her ignorance. She knew him not at all. There was scarcely a person in Ireland who didn’t know what he’d done. Even the nation’s favorite broadcaster had churned it over with his listeners, many of whom rang in to the show to express their heartfelt outrage that he escaped with only a warning. It must truly have been a living nightmare for his parents. He had crippled them. The depravity had been momentary, perhaps, but its gruesome consequences would be lifelong. His every relationship had been compromised, damaged or destroyed, and any future relationship would feel it also. But Prudence knew nothing. He asked her. He said, “If I told you I’d done something despicable, would you still come?”
It was nothing to her, she said.
“I could be dangerous.”
She pointed out that she could leave any time.
“You leave too often.”
When she lay with her back to him, letting his hand curve over the hill of her hip toward the dip of her belly, he felt good, rich, lucky. Luckier than he had any right to be. When he pressed into her, he reached his own hearth, that safe place where no one could touch his conscience. And then the fucking took over. He loved the way she twisted, stretched, coiled herself around him; he liked the power of giving her pleasure, and denying it, enjoyed her soft gutturals when he succeeded and when he desisted. Although she was generous, bringing him off in the kitchen, in the stairwell, in the diwan, he gave more than he took, because he had to hold her attention; he had to keep her coming.
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