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IN THE END, DESPITE THE PERPETUAL ADMONISHMENTS of her dead mother, Amantha, as she had innumerable times before, made her decision based not on logic but aesthetic appeal. This time, however, it was not just the guy’s good looks, but his name which prompted her to quit chewing her lower lip in indecision and finally hit the reply button after an hour of scrolling through his pictures and analyzing his profile. His name was August Windham.
August, she marveled. She had never encountered anyone with that name before. There was Augustus McCrae, the ill-fated hero of Lonesome Dove, her favorite novel, but that was a fictional character. August Windham. It sounded almost regal, and though wild dogs would never have dragged such an admission out of her, she couldn’t help imagining how both names would look on wedding invites: August and Amantha. Thus, despite her dear departed, if still overbearing mother’s chastisement that she was being typically foolish and impulsive, she wrote the mysterious Mr. August an email expressing interest, and once it was sent, spent the better part of the next two hours cleaning her apartment and feigning calm. Six times she reordered the throw pillows on her couch. She ran the dishwasher twice even though it had only been a quarter full to begin with. She made her bed and then wrecked it just to make it again. Her extensive library of books got a dusting. Finally, she closed her eyes and took a breath and told herself she was being childish (her mother’s disembodied voice concurred) as if the promise of a date had somehow forced her to regress to the cute idiocy of her teens.
To ground herself, she went to the mirror over the bathroom sink.
Her reflection showed bright blue eyes sparkling with hope and excitement, cheeks flushed, her not-quite-full lips spreading into a pleased smile that showed white and almost even teeth. A hand flew to her mouth to conceal the pleasure. She was embarrassing herself, but really, what was so wrong about having a little fun? Her fifty-third birthday was just around the corner—December 18th, to be precise—and if she wanted to send a harmless little “I like you” message off into the ether, perhaps in the fragile hope that the very handsome Mr. August might see it and decide she was worth chasing, then why the hell not? She was a grown woman, and yes, she could admit that there was some validity to her mother’s claims that she was given to folly when it came to matters of the heart, but wasn’t everyone? Dating was a lottery, nowadays more than ever before, but at least it came with a chance to win, whereas being alone was a loser’s game. Of course, there was a problem with that analogy too, for hadn’t both of her marriages taught her that being alone can sometimes be the better and happier option? Or, in the case of her first marriage, the safer option?
She rolled her eyes at her reflection. “I’m human,” she said, indignantly. “And humans make mistakes. It’s part of what we are, and I have more than earned the right to make mine, when and however I wish.”
She ran a hand through her wavy auburn hair, turned her head this way and that, admiring. Though some had claimed that her angular face and high cheekbones gave her a severe look, she knew she looked good for her age and, if her mother had been any indication, would continue to look good well into her dotage.
“Yes, dear, but I used my years much more wisely than you have.”
Amantha straightened her back, pushed her breasts forward, and raised her chin. “That,” she told her mother indignantly, “is a matter of opinion.”
All composure fled when her computer chimed to indicate a message received.
One last look at herself in the silvered glass, as if the sender of that email might somehow be able to see, and worse, judge her through the screen, and she hurried back into the living room, all nerves.
It’s probably just an email from the book club, she told herself, heart pounding in her chest. Or Judith from the library letting me know they have the new Caroline Kepnes book in.
But it was none of these things.
As she sat down at the computer, she saw against the background of an Italian villa in summer (her dream escape), the little blue envelope flashing in the bottom right hand corner of the screen. It was from PerfectMatch.com. The subject line read: “Re: Hello, Mr. August.”
Breath held, the cold winter light through the tall window behind her creating a dark likeness of herself on the computer screen, she opened the email.
His response read:
Hi Amantha (what a great name!):
Thank you for your message. I must admit it was much more eloquent than I have come to expect on this site. And thanks too for the kind words about my pictures. I’m the worst person to judge what I look like and, combined with my lack of talent with a camera, I worried that they come across as forced or just foolish. On the subject, I am quite taken with your pictures, the quality of which put mine to shame. Clearly you know what you’re doing, and you look terrific in them. I particularly liked the one of you on the park bench in the fall. Is that Highbanks? Something about autumn colors makes me warm inside.
Anyway, rather than prattle on, let me say that yes, I am very interested in chatting with you and maybe getting to know each other better. I know too that sites such as these present very real dangers and risks for people, so I’m all for doing whatever I can to assure you of my legitimacy and sincerity. While it’s easy to say so, you have nothing to fear from me. Ultimately, I think it would be great to meet you in person, but for now, I am quite happy to know more about you.
I’m glad you got in touch. I noticed your picture before but was a little too shy to pull the trigger. I’m happy you had no such qualms ☺.
Hope to talk soon.
Yours,
August
Amantha read the letter at least two dozen times and studied the half dozen or so pictures of her new flame before she clapped her hands together, rose from her seat and danced her way through the apartment. Always, when she felt most alone, she wished she had a cat or a dog, or even a bird with whom to share such joyous occasions, but now that hardly seemed to matter. The girls in the book club would be thrilled for her, even if they forever operated at a remove from her notion of friendship. Their elation would be tempered by the same distance Amantha had felt from women her whole life without ever knowing its genesis.
“It’s because you’re odd,” her dead mother chimed in. “And they have never once thought you weren’t making it up.” As usual, she sounded bored, pious, possessed as she had been in life of an unwavering certainty that the nature of all things was no more and no less than she said they were. “I’m sorry, but it’s true. You dress strange, you act strange, you are strange, and normal people don’t know what to do with that. They will be happy for you, sure, because they are nice people. They will also wait for the inevitable heartbreak when it all falls to pieces as it always does and brace themselves for your unique way of dealing with sorrow, which is of course, oddly. I often blamed myself for that, wondered what I could have done differently, but in the end, I cleansed myself of blame once I came to believe that you are the way you are because you simply decided you wanted to be.”
Mid-pirouette, Amantha shook her head and closed her eyes. “Say whatever you want, Mother. You can’t take away from how I’m feeling. Not today. Maybe not ever again.”
“That’s fine, dear. Mind me when I say this new euphoria will hardly last very long.”
“Says you.”
“More than me have said it. You’re strange. Compulsively drawn to impossibilities.”
“Shut up, Mother. For once just shut up.”
Amantha blew air through her lips and headed for the computer desk, a cheap if elegant pine affair with a duo of drawers and sturdy, curved legs. Gingerly, so as not to disturb the contents, she slid open the left-side drawer. Inside, arranged end to end so they made a perfect triangle, were three cigarettes. Pall Malls. All that remained of a habit that had ended up escalating a hereditary blood pressure problem resulting in a week in hospital for what she had suspected was a heart attack. It wasn’t. The doctor, in his infuriatingly condescending tone, had told her it was a panic attack, but that quitting was always a good idea if she wanted to live longer. She had held onto these last three cigarettes strictly for celebrations that required more than her customary dancing and defiance of her mother. In the center of the triangle was a red Bic lighter. She freed it and then removed one of the cigarettes. Breaking the triangle pained her on a deeper level than she’d expected, even though she felt it justified. It was not guilt at indulging in something that was bad for her health (and had killed her father) or undoing over a year of abstinence. No, it was simply the act of changing the shape that had sat there in darkness, untouched and unviolated for so long. It felt like wanton destruction of a carefully organized construct. It felt like she should have left it alone, because the triangle, even though she had created it, wanted to be the shape it was.
She screwed the cigarette between her lips and lit up. “Sorry,” she said, but reminded herself that all it would take to make the shape whole again would be to replace the missing cigarette, something she resolved to do on her next trip to the store. But this presented another problem. The store didn’t sell single cigarettes. She would have to buy a pack, and if she bought a pack then she would have to figure out something to do with all those other cigarettes. She wouldn’t smoke them. Throwing them away would feel like a waste. Give them away? Wouldn’t that be assisting someone else in harmful behavior?
She was getting annoyed, and that wasn’t good. Plus, it was hardly the time. Cigarette clamped between her teeth, the smoke curdling in her throat, she waggled her mouse to wake up her computer screen, and, smiling, began to type a response to Mr. August Windham.
✽✽✽
“You know nothing about this man,” her mother said.
“Neither do you,” Amantha snapped, irritated that the dress she had bought seemed snugger now than it had in the changing room back at the store. Her breasts were hardly big enough to cause obstruction, and yet she found the material hung oddly from them, as if she had purchased the dress solely because it created an overhang from her chest to hide her stomach. And while her stomach was hardly supermodel flat, nor was she ashamed of it. Certainly, it wasn’t something she felt warranted concealment and she didn’t care to give that impression. Flushed, she shimmied out of the dress and, hands on hips, red dress lying on the floor like a felled and bloody ghost, she inspected herself in the bedroom mirror.
“You’re getting pudgy, just like all the women on your father’s side of the family,” said her mother.
“Oh, shut up. Even death hasn’t cured you of your jealousy and bitterness. Doesn’t it ever get old?”
But she knew her mother was right, knew that the voice was simply her own impression of her mother’s disapproval, which meant that she was admitting her own flaws and insecurities to herself. Projecting such thoughts onto the face of another made them easier to bear, easier to deny, and over time it made the voice real. Sometimes, she thought it might be more real than her own.
“You’re going to spend all this time fretting about getting those small tits and big hips into a dress you knew back at the store wouldn’t work, all so you can impress some stranger who’ll probably turn out at worst to be a rapist, and at best, another in a long line of your failures.”
Angrily, Amantha bent down and yanked her dress up off the floor. Like blood through a vein, she worried herself through the outfit and emerged out the other side surer than ever that it would not only fit, but look devastatingly good on her. Briefly, she closed her eyes and smoothed her hands over the bigger wrinkles in the material, focusing on the areas around her breasts, belly and hips, as if she could, simply by wishing it so, mold them into the shape dictated by the label on the dress, the same shape the mirror in the store had claimed she already was.
“You’re fooling yourself,” her mother said.
Amantha opened her eyes.
“Shut up, Mother.”
The woman in the mirror smiled at her, and she looked good.
✽✽✽
She was late to the restaurant, a development caused in part by her war with the dress and in another by her inability to locate the place. Her car’s GPS had twice led her around in circles, forcing her to park off the street and navigate in treacherous high heels a series of labyrinthine alleys until she saw the warm wedge of light cast upon the cobblestones from an unseen window. Closer and the mullioned window came into view and with it, the subdued murmur of a pleasantly full room. The frontage of the place suggested history, class, and secrecy. It was to her wonder that she had never even heard of the place before, but then, she didn’t consider herself much of a foodie and was just as content (if not more) with a greasy pizza or a gyro from one of the neighborhood joints as she was with a high-priced steak at an upscale eatery. Still, as she made her awkward way over the cobblestones toward the restaurant, she felt a flutter of excitement in her chest. The place suggested intimacy, warmth, and pleasure. And, bonus, if it all went to hell, nobody would know her here.
Inside she found herself further seduced by the décor and ambience. Like most high-class places, the class itself was evident even while the menu remained a mystery. No plastic crabs on the walls or fishing nets suspended from the ceiling here. No large chalkboard menus or advertisements for happy hour touting the city’s best margaritas or offering cheap shots till 8. No multitude of television screens designed to hypnotize the patrons into watching them. No cheap sticky carpet. No harried looking wait staff dropping their plastic smiles once they’d turned their backs on their tables. Rather, it was, as she’d suspected, small, quiet, warmly lit, and cozy. She estimated there were perhaps a dozen tables, no more, unless there was another section of the place she couldn’t see from the door, but somehow, she doubted that. The sole concession to the season was a small and radiantly lit Christmas tree by the bar. The well-dressed staff seemed confident and efficient without need to hurry. The hostess seemed genuinely pleased to see her.
“How are you this evening, Ma’am?”
“Great,” Amantha replied, and meant it. Already this felt like something from a dream, or one of the romantic fantasies she often read and intended someday to write.
“Are you meeting someone?”
“Yes, a Mr. August Windham.” As suspected, she liked how the name sounded when spoken aloud.
The hostess moved behind her pulpit and consulted a list. For a moment, watching the girl’s brow furrow in concentration, she felt a twinge of unease and uncertainty. What if he wasn’t here? What if he had stood her up, deciding at the last moment that maybe the woman in those pictures wasn’t really that attractive after all? What if some other woman had stolen his attention from her in the two weeks since they’d first made contact, perhaps someone better looking, someone more confident, with more money, someone who didn’t need to fool herself into pretending her expensive dress fit the way it was supposed to? The unease started to drift toward panic, fumbling up inside her from belly to chest to throat. It started to get harder to breathe, as if the air had abruptly filled with smoke. She coughed into her fist, felt a single bead of sweat trickle coldly out from beneath her armpit and trickle its way down her side, leaving gooseflesh in its wake.
“Didn’t I tell you your silly girlish fantasies would make a fool of you again?” her mother muttered coldly in her ear.
But then the hostess looked up and beamed at her, and that smile was like a blast of heat, killing the chill in one wave. “Right this way, Ma’am.” She turned and led the way, pausing to guide Amantha down a small series of steps into the dining room. And as the hostess moved ahead, Amantha scanned the dimly lit room for the man she had come here to see.
She felt a surge of excitement at the sight of him rising from the table to meet her. He was not, as her mother had whispered from the moment she had agreed to meet him, a fraud, an imposter, someone pretending to be someone else. Even in the limited view afforded him by the mood lighting, he was, as his pictures had shown, handsome. “Debonair” was the word she had conjured up when she saw the one of him in the tux at some function or another. His hair was dark and slicked back, his teeth an orthodontist’s dream. He was anachronistically handsome, like an old movie star. His eyes glimmered with delight as the hostess deposited her at the table.
“Your server will be with you in a moment,” the hostess said, and was gone.
“You made it,” August said, and the look of genuine pleasure at the sight of her threatened to melt her on the spot. She felt as if her whole body was full of butterflies.
“Just about,” she said, feeling suddenly self-conscious standing there before him. She was not quite sure what to do with herself, her limbs apparently receiving instructions from a quartet of masters.
“Please, sit,” he said, and she did.
And from that moment on, with the piped in piano music playing at a low volume from speakers nestled unobtrusively in the shadows, it was as if they had known each other all their lives. The unease fled as quickly as it had come. She relaxed into the evening as if the air itself had become wine. Even her mother had little to say throughout the course of their meal of goat cheese ravioli, King Crab-stuffed sea bass, and afterward, a dual course of crème brûlée, all washed down with a fine Merlot.
Later, over coffee, with the hour growing late and the restaurant all but empty, but with neither one of them inclined to make a move, Amantha knew two things at once. First, she did not believe in love at first sight, and second, she was somehow, inexplicably and wonderfully in love at first sight. And while her mother might have always felt like she had raised a fool for a daughter, Amantha did not believe that the man across the table from her was putting her on or engaging in a charade for the sole objective of taking her home. He was too present in the moment, too engaged for it to be anything but real, and that only inflamed her burgeoning passions further. She did not believe she had anything to fear from him, an increasingly rare quality in men these days.
“I just realized I never asked what you do for a living,” he said, stirring cream and sugar into his coffee.
“I work from home as a medical transcriptionist,” she told him, though it was not quite the truth. She had worked in that field when she needed the money, but with alimony and her inheritance, she hadn’t needed to work for a long time. It would not, however, do to admit such a thing upfront.
He took a sip of his coffee and appraised her anew. “Really?”
“Yes, why?” Had the lie been so apparent?
He shrugged. “I would have thought curator at a museum or gallery owner, or something along those lines. You look like you work in the arts.”
She leaned forward, eagerly. “Oh, I’ve always wanted to. I love the arts, in all its forms. Books and painting especially. It just never really panned out for me. I never had the discipline, or the concentration needed for it.”
“I would think the best kind of art comes from chaos.”
“I suppose it does.” It was impossible to keep the smile from her face. The fondness she felt for this man, his voice, his words, his looks, even the scent of him, was unlike anything she had ever felt before and she couldn’t keep from broadcasting it across the table to him with every look and gesture. Her mother was in her skull somewhere, pacing, chiding her to abide by the rules of etiquette, meant, not just for respectable women, but for those who wished not to be murdered by charming psychopaths. But though she confessed to a certain degree of naivete over the years—the same which had led to two disastrous marriages and equally as many bad dates—she knew in the core of her being that this man was not going to hurt her. She could sense it. You have nothing to fear from me, he had said, and she believed him.
“Honey,” her mother said, for once, not unkindly, “I love you, but sense has never been your strong suit. In fact, the absence of that very thing has led to some of your greatest miseries. Please, just be careful.”
Amantha shut her eyes and cut off her mother’s voice as easily as if it had been carried to her via an old radio.
“Are you all right?” August asked.
August and Amantha. “Oh yes. Just enjoying the atmosphere, although I think the wine has me a little buzzed.”
“Should I take you home?”
She opened her eyes and looked at his face for intent. Had he meant he would see her home in the most gentlemanly sense, or go home with her to extend the evening? The longer she looked at him and bathed in their combined aura and all it promised, she realized it didn’t matter one way or another. Sooner or later, they would become one.
Thus, when the night ended with their candle the sole light in a sea of growing dark as the restaurant began to close, she let him take her by the arm. On the way out, she exchanged a glance with the pretty hostess who had been so sweet to her before, and fancied she saw some envy there. Perhaps a soupçon of curiosity too. No bitterness, just a wistful longing to share in the same kind of magic that Amantha had found. Amantha was no stranger to that longing.
“Good night,” she said to the girl, with a wink and a smile. The hostess was young and beautiful. She had her whole life ahead of her, and though she might have to navigate a minefield to get there, and her dreams would lose some of their color, one day she would find good love too. Amantha was sure of it.
“Good night,” said the hostess.
Amantha let August lead her from that place and out into the night. She could feel the warmth of him, could smell the scent of him. It was as intoxicating as the wine. He could take her wherever he wished. She had decided this for him. Tonight, and forever. And when she looked into his handsome, smiling face to convey this to him, she could see he already knew. But he walked her to her car and bid her farewell anyway, because as promised, he was a gentleman and unlike all the others, she had nothing to fear from him. When he made to turn away, she put a hand on his wrist to halt him. He looked back and she closed the distance between them.
The kiss was Heaven and a promise of all the good things to come.
✽✽✽
“Christ, I thought she was never going to leave.” Barry slid home the bolts on the big main door of the restaurant.
“I think it’s kinda sweet,” the hostess said.
“Sweet? She’s fucking nuts.”
“You have no heart, Bryan.”
“I have eyes, Holly. Sometimes that’s enough. And I know a fruit bat when I see one.”
“Well, I thought it was adorable.”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “I just do.” She knew better than to try to make him understand. And maybe she wasn’t even sure herself why she found the woman so inspiring. Yes, she was odd, acting as though she hadn’t been seated at a table she herself had booked while ordering and eating dinner for two. But still, the look of serenity on her face had brought a smile to Holly’s. The woman had seemed so comfortable, so secure and so happy dining alone. And then later, as she’d walked out, arm crooked as if linked through that of a phantom lover, the look she had given Holly was one she figured it was going to take a long time to forget.
I am safe, it said. I hope someday you will be too.
