Life Sentences by Laura Lippman Page A

me.” Her voice caught; she had stumbled into an old psychic tar pit, her father’s incuriosity about her life. Cassandra knew the various ways her father might describe a woman’s ass, but he wasn’t sure what either of her husbands had done for a living. Ah, but if she had pressed him on it, he would have said, “Well, neither one stuck around.”
    â€œSure, sure,” he said now. “I’ll lob you a few softballs.”
    â€œAnd you’ll talk about Annie?” Probing, careful.
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œAbout meeting her, the circumstances.”
    â€œIf need be. But, you know, it doesn’t matter—”
    â€œOf course it matters.”
    â€œI didn’t need a riot. I would have met her some way, somehow. Annie was my destiny.”
    That had always been the rationalization, but there was no doubt that her father had come to believe it. He hadn’t cheated on her mother; he had encountered his destiny and he knew enough not to defy the Oracle of Delphi. Yet her father didn’t acknowledge destiny in any other aspect of his life.
    It was hard, trying to come to terms with the fact that her father had such a huge and ruling passion, much larger than any Cassandra had ever known. Sure, she knew what it was like to be swept away inthe early part of a love affair, but she was amazed by those people who never seemed to abandon that wildness, that craziness. Would it have been easier if her father’s passion had been for her mother, or more difficult? In some ways, she was glad that her father’s big love was for someone other than her mother, because she at least had her mother to keep her company. Around her father and Annie, she had been lonely, the odd girl out. Especially as a teenager, she couldn’t help feeling that they spent their time with her wishing she would go away so they could have more sex. Of course, teenagers think the whole world is sex, all the time. But even now, as an adult with two marriages behind her, Cassandra still believed that her father’s sexual passion with Annie had an unusually long life span. If Annie left a room for even a moment, her father looked lost. When she returned, the relief that swept over his face was almost painful to see. He was crazy about her. That’s the kind of line her father would have red-lined in an essay as vague, imprecise, and overwrought. Yet it was true in his case. And Cassandra didn’t have a clue why.
    Annie was beautiful, yes, the mild flaws of her face—the space between the front teeth, the apple roundness, the heavy brows that she never tended—balancing out the cartoonish perfection of her body. Sweet, too. Not unintelligent. But not sharp. This, more than anything, had bothered Cassandra, then and now. If her father, for all his snobbery, could choose a woman of ordinary intelligence, then what were the implications for his daughter? After an exceedingly awkward adolescence, Cassandra had grown into a reasonably attractive woman. Not necessarily pretty but sexy and appealing. Yet whenever she visited her father, she was reminded that the qualities that her father had taught her to value—intelligence, quickness—had nothing to do with the woman he declared the love of his life. The test of a first-rate mind, her father often said, quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald, was to hold two opposing thoughts simultaneously without going insane. Cassandra looked at herself, she looked at Annie, and she concluded that her father had a first-rate mind.
    â€œTime for dinner,” her father said. Although his apartment had a kitchen, he took his meals in the community dining room, but he always insisted on a cocktail before dinner. He seemed a little shaky getting out of his chair, and Cassandra reached a hand out to him.
    â€œI’m fine,” he snapped. “Just a little light-headed from that expensive gin you insist on giving me. It has a much higher