You look like you could use a boat ride.” Mac McLeod stands on my porch Sunday morning, smiling with just his eyes. “What I could use is about three more hours’ sleep,” I grumble.
“Sorry. You haven’t been to Bailey’s all week, so I thought I’d check on you.”
“I didn’t get back till Monday night. I’ve been trying to crawl back into my rut.”
He laughs at my surliness. “Come on, get dressed. We’ll just ride over to Bainbridge and back. Being on the water might improve your attitude. Works for me.”
We get coffee at the Market, walk down First Avenue past the adult movie houses and used bookstores, the Oriental rug showrooms with their absolutely rock-bottom, no-joke, going-out-of-business-sale signs, homeless people asleep in doorways under dirty overcoats. He tells me the nicknames of all the skyscrapers. Washington Mutual is the Phillips Head Screwdriver building, Fourth & Blanchard is the Darth Vader building. First Interstate is the vacuum-cleaner tube, Century Square is the Ban Roll-On building.
It’s cold by the waterfront. The coffee cup feels good in my hands. At the Colman Dock, we run for the Spokane with a few other passengers, stand by the aft rail as she pulls away. The wind’s still kicking up whitecaps, but the clouds have broken and long fingers of sun test the water.
We stay outside aft, sheltered from the biting wind in the lee of the passenger decks. The boat shakes with the effort of the engines and the wake trails out before us, a white road back to the pier. I hang over the rail. “Tell me a story.”
“About what?” he says.
“I don’t care. You must hear some great ones at work.”
He gives me his little wry grin. “It would be a flagrant breach of professional ethics.”
“Then tell me one about you. Tell me the Gillian story.” A gull flies up and hovers alongside, eyeing us impassively.
“I don’t think this is—”
“Please. Distract me.”
“Okay.” He pulls his hat down lower on his forehead. “I was hitchhiking from Auckland to Wellington. This guy in a beat-up old Land Rover picked me up. He took one look at me and asked if I was interested in making a few bucks. I was practically running on fumes, so I was extremely interested. He owned a sheep station and they were in the middle of the shearing season. Somehow a shearing shed had caught fire and it had spread to some other buildings. Anyway, the family and all their regular help were too busy shearing to rebuild, so they were looking for guys to work construction in return for room and board and a few bucks. I was thinking I’d work for a week or two and then move on.
“So that night we’re having dinner at this long table—about eight or ten guys—and this young woman comes in to help her mother serve. The daughter of the guy who picked me up.”
“What did she look like?”
“Not beautiful. Really not even what you’d call pretty. Brown hair, blue eyes. Tall. Rangy. She had that body ease that people have when they’ve grown up doing hard physical work …” He smiles. “If you looked at her, she looked right back, like she was checking you out. I didn’t pay much attention to her at first. She was just there every day, helping her mother. Then one day she didn’t come and I realized I was looking for her at every meal. She was gone for a week. She came back the morning I was leaving. In fact, I was walking down the drive when this car pulled up and she got out. We just looked at each other there in the driveway. She smiled. I turned around and went back into the bunkhouse and unpacked my bag. I ended up staying for six months.”
“My God, how romantic.” I grip the rail, lean back. “So what happened?”
He turns around, his back against the metal pole that braces one of the lifeboats. Over his shoulder, Mount Rainier pokes its snowy head up through a lei of clouds.
“Nothing. She wanted to get married, have kids, raise sheep. I didn’t, so I left.”
The wind whips a strand of hair across my face and he hooks it behind my ear, being careful not to touch my face.
We get off at the Winslow terminal, buy ice cream from a cart in the parking lot. We stand, shivering and laughing because we’re cold and eating ice cream anyway. He asks me what my favorite flavor is.
“Rocky Road.” I say it without hesitation, without thinking.
I have a sudden, crystal-clear memory of my mother and me standing in the shade of a eucalyptus grove beside the little Sebastian general store on Highway I in San Simeon. We’re eating Rocky Road ice cream cones while my father takes our picture. The golden hills and the towers of Hearst’s castle rise in the background. I can see the waves of August heat rippling off the road and smell the piercing scent of eucalyptus oil.
“What?” He’s looking at me.
My gaze veers to the terminal. “I think they’re boarding.”
Coming out through the turnstile at Colman Street, he finally says, “So how was the wedding?” One lurching sob and the waterworks open. This is getting old.
He puts one arm around me and lets me cry all over his fuzzy flannel shirt that smells like pine trees. He rubs my back a little, but gingerly, as if I have something sticky all over me and he doesn’t want to get it on him.
He hands me his handkerchief, not one of those white, ironed linen things that David carries, but a blue bandanna. As I’m trying to clean up my face and stop hiccuping, he takes my elbow and steers me over to the escalator. “Let’s walk back up to the Market.”
On the way, I spill my guts. I tell him every gory detail, every disgusting nuance of the weekend. I tell him about my mother and me sniping at each other, about me getting drunk and being a bitch to Gary and pushing Howard’s boxes down the stairs.
I say stuff that I wasn’t even conscious of until it pops out of me. Like how I thought it was a slap in the face to my father to have the wedding in the house he and my mother shared. I tell him about David giving me my pink slip, even how I tried to seduce him and he wasn’t buying it. I tell him about CM and the way we parted company that night. He just walks along beside me, hands in the pockets of his denim jacket, the heels of his cowboy boots making a hollow tap with every step. He doesn’t make any noises like sympathy or disgust or outrage. It occurs to me that’s exactly why I can tell all this to him and not to CM, say, who’d be all sympathy and righteous indignation, ready to fly to L.A. and kick David in the crotch. He’s just letting me dump it.
By the time I’m through, it’s almost five, and I ask him if he wants to get a pizza or some Thai food, my treat.
“I’d really like to,” he says, “but I have something I have to do tonight, so I’ll take a rain check.”
Men. Why the hell can’t he just say he has a date? And what do I care? I was only offering because he baby-sat me all afternoon.
As soon as I get home, I sit down and call CM. When a man’s voice says, “Hello,” I think I dialed the wrong number. Then remembrance and recognition collide in my brain. It’s Neal. This is the weekend of his seminar.
“Oh hi, Wyn,” he says cheerfully. “She’s right here. Hold on a minute. She’s drying her hands.” She probably cooked dinner and did the dishes while he sat on his skinny ass reading some esoteric treatise on the sociopsychological implications of hangnails.
“I forgot this was the big weekend,” I say when she picks up the phone.
“No problem.” Her voice is elaborately casual. “How are you?”
“I’m fine. I just called to apologize for being so weird the other night, but—”
“It’s not a problem,” she insists. “I’ll call you later and we’ll talk.”
This has to be the shortest conversation she and I have ever had.
It’s there when I pick up my mail Monday afternoon, the plain white envelope with the return address of a law firm in Beverly Hills. “There you are,” I say to it. “I’ve been expecting you.” One of the big advantages of living alone. You can talk to inanimate objects without getting a lot of weird looks.
I rip open the envelope and skim several pages of legal war chant. Looks like the way it works is, if one person says the marriage is broken, it is. Never mind what the other person says. It doesn’t seem quite fair. We both had to say “I do” to get married but only he has to say “I don’t.”
The faceless gray army of legislators and judges and lawyers and clerks who, in their infinite wisdom, created our legal system apparently have decided that you wouldn’t want to bind someone to you who didn’t wish to be bound. So it’s no longer necessary to prove insanity or substance abuse or infidelity or nonsupport or abandonment. All you have to do is say “I don’t” and start dividing up the stuff. Sort of takes all the fun out of it. No more corespondents, no more alienation of affection, no more medical records or expert testimony from prominent psychiatrists. Just “I don’t.”
I fold up the papers and slip them back in the envelope.
Every afternoon when I wake up, I think about calling Elizabeth. But I know that once I do, it’s the cannon shot that sets off the avalanche. My whole world becomes a rumbling mass of debris, irreversible in its slide to the bottom. I don’t know how long I would have procrastinated, but while I’m still floundering, she calls me.
“Wynter, it’s Elizabeth Gooden.”
I can’t help it. My first thought is my father telling me how sharks pick up the minute vibrations of an injured fish flopping around erratically in the water. Then I’m ashamed of myself. She’s trying to help me.
Before I can tell her I’ve been served with papers, she says, “Our information specialist has come up with registrations from some rather pricey hotels in Cancun, in Scottsdale, and in San Francisco. I’ll give you the dates, and you tell me if you accompanied your husband on any of these trips.”
“I can tell you right now I haven’t been to Mexico in at least three years.”
“Interesting. Cancun’s the oldest one.”
I bite my lip. “When?”
“Let’s see, that one was … last December. December fifteenth to twentieth.”
It’s like being smacked in the face with a wet towel. My birthday. The important client meeting he had to attend. “And the registration was for … two people?”
“Mr. and Mrs. David Franklin.”
The ache inside me transmutes to a molten rage, expanding to fill every crevice in my body. I’m certain it’s going to flood out of me, like a pregnant woman’s water breaking.
“Wynter? Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
It’s not just that he lied, repeatedly and across a span of months, it’s that I believed him. Long past the point where I should have started questioning. I was willfully ignorant. I was stupid.
I remember reading a few years ago about a woman in Malibu who solved her sticky divorce situation by pumping her husband and his girlfriend full of .38 slugs as they slept. I’ve always wondered what led her to the moment of decision. What was the last straw, the final humiliation? Or was it just an impulse? Ya know what, Jack? I’m not going to put up with your bullshit one more minute. And out the door with her Saturday-night special.
I’m especially curious at this moment because, while my own intent becomes instantly clear, I don’t recall having given the matter any previous thought. No internal debate, no dividing a piece of paper into two columns labeled “Pros” and “Cons.” It doesn’t feel as if there’s any other recourse open to me. When you’re forced to fight, you use whatever weapons come to hand.
I tell Elizabeth that I’ve received papers from David’s attorney, and she asks if I’m coming back to L.A.
“I hadn’t planned to. Is that a problem?”
“It makes things slightly more complicated, but we can work around it. What is it you like so much up there?”
“My best friend lives here. And my mother doesn’t.”
This is the first time I’ve heard her laugh outright. “I thought maybe it was the weather.”
I must be starting to think like a native Northwesterner, because it irritates me the way people are always ragging on about our weather. When I don’t respond, she becomes all business again.
“All right, Wynter, here’s what I want you to do. Read over the papers, sign them where it’s indicated. It’s pretty straightforward, but if you have any questions, call me. If I’m not here, Charlene can help you. Make photocopies of everything and start a file for yourself. Then overnight the originals to me and I’ll send you a response form to fill out. And just remember, the sooner you get things back to me, the sooner I can—”
“How long could the whole process take? Worst-case scenario.”
“Everything depends on how cooperative your husband and his lawyer want to be. My hope is that we can put it to bed by this time next year, but it could take two or three years. Longer if we have to go to trial.”
“Elizabeth, I want to drag this thing out as long as we possibly can.”
She barely hesitates. “You know, I think we can have it over fairly quickly, and still mop up the floor with him—financially speaking. But the longer it takes, the less money there will be for you as well as for him.”
“Its not about the money. I want him to understand very clearly what it’s going to take to marry her. I want him to have a good, long time to decide if she was worth it.”
“There’s a saying, Wynter: ‘She who seeks revenge should dig two graves, one for her victim and one for herself.’ “
“I’m willing to accept that possibility.”
“This isn’t the way I usually work.”
“I know. That’s why I’m telling you up front. I’d like to work with you, and I’d rather give the money to you than to someone else. But if you don’t want to handle it, I’ll respect your decision.”
An audible sigh. “Very well. But there are limits to what I can do.”
I was so preoccupied in rehashing my conversation with Elizabeth when I left for work last night that I forgot to take my pillowcase full of dirty clothes to work with me, so now I have to visit Launderland in the afternoon. Kids running around like it’s a big, sudsy theme park, screaming, slopping Cokes on the floor. Mothers deep into paperback romance novels or balancing the checkbook or sketching their next tattoo.
And Mac, bent over his notebook, oblivious to the pandemonium in progress all around him.
I divide my clothes into three piles, carefully measure detergent, and feed in my quarters. Then I flop down in the orange molded plastic chair next to him.
He immediately closes his notebook.
“Nuclear secrets?”
“Just stuff.”
My face heats up. Maybe he has no interest whatsoever in conversation with me. What if I’m presuming too much? We had dinner once, spent an afternoon on the water. What does that mean?
I pull out my copy of Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth.
“Great book,” he says.
“You’ve read it?” I don’t mean to sound astonished.
He laughs. “Yeah. Right after I finished Vampire Lesbian Cheerleaders.”
“I didn’t mean …” My voice sounds stiffer than cardboard. I open the book, shuffle past the introduction to the first page, where God sits on his throne, thinking.
“I’ve never been to California,” he says. “What’s it like?”
I look at him, first from the corner of my eye, then straight on. “It’s not like anyplace else.”
“No place is like anyplace else,” he says. “Even the most boring, dusty hole in the middle of the prairie is different from all the other boring, dusty holes.”
I close the book. “It’s big. A lot of it I’ve never seen.”
“Tell me what you know.”
“Mostly L.A. The central coast. The High Sierra.”
He turns a little bit in his chair. “Actually, I’ve been in southern California once, the L.A. airport. It looked pretty brown. What’s the central coast like?”
I settle down, letting the chair cup my body. Memory kicks in. “It smells so good, the fog, the eucalyptus. The hills are golden all summer, green in the winter, when it rains. That’s where William Randolph Hearst built his castle …” I look at the book in my lap. “You’ll probably go there sometime. Everyone goes to California eventually.”
“Mostly San Francisco and L.A.”
“And that’s a good thing. Keeps them away from my spot.”
“Where’s your spot?”
“What’s there?”
“Dunes. Huge sand dunes. My father used to tell me how Cecil B. DeMille had thousands of workers build an Egyptian city there for the 1923 version of The Ten Commandments. Hundred-foot walls, even a boulevard lined with statues of sphinxes and pharoahs. Then, after they finished filming, they just left it there, and now the whole thing’s buried somewhere under the sand. I always used to think I’d be walking along the ridge someday and I’d drop down and disappear into another world.”
“Like standing on top of the ocean,” he says softly.
He gets to his feet and starts yanking laundry out of a washer, blue jeans, flannel shirts, and dark socks in with the towels and white clothes. Typical guy. Throwing it into the nearest dryer without turning around, he says, “No, I don’t care if my underwear’s gray or if the towels get lint on my socks.”
“I didn’t say a word.”
“You didn’t have to.”
I open my book again.
When the dryers stop, he hauls his stuff out, jams it into a green army duffel, and watches with obvious amusement while I fold everything and pack it carefully in the pillowcase. I turn to say good-bye, but he says, “You want a ride? I’ll try not to emit too many fluorocarbons between here and your place.”
“Hydrocarbons.”
He throws the duffel into the truck bed, my bag into the front seat. After two false starts, the truck grumbles to life, and we roll heavily down Queen in the afternoon gloom, Crosby, Stills and Nash on the radio.
He turns up the volume. My breath makes a little circle of fog on the window. It reminds me of some movie where they hold a mirror in front of a guy’s mouth to see if he’s still alive. I guess I pass the test. Mac’s talking to me.
“Coming to Bailey’s tonight?”
“I’m kind of tired.”
“Is that a no?”
When he turns on Fourth, a string of blinking lights draws my eye. “I can’t believe they still have their Christmas lights up.”
He follows my gaze. “Some people have a hard time letting go of things.”
I fold my arms. “Pure laziness.”
“Sometimes it’s one and the same.”
We pull up in front of the gray Victorian. He puts it in park, but doesn’t turn the engine off.
“Been inside that place yet?” he asks.
“It’s all locked up. I’m sure they don’t want anybody wandering around—”
He laughs. “Somebody did a great job of socializing you.”
My left hand tightens around the pillowcase while my right fumbles for the door handle. “Thanks for the ride.”
“Wyn …” His eyes change color constantly, like the ocean on a cloudy day. Right now the pale irises are amber-flecked. “Listen, I know things are kind of weird for you …” Fingers drum the gearshift knob. “If you need a friend, I’m around.”
Tim Graebel syndrome. “That’s very nice of you.”
“No, really,” he says. “Just a friend. No expectations.”
I watch his face. For what, I have no idea. “Okay,” I tell him. “Thanks.”
Two weeks and one day after the wedding, my phone rings at nine in the morning and I know before I pick it up that it’s my mother.
“Hi, honey, I hope you weren’t asleep. I can never remember when you sleep in the mornings and when you sleep at night. We got home late last night.”
“No, I wasn’t in bed. How was Hawaii?” I assume this is proper etiquette for asking your mother about her honeymoon.
“It was so beautiful. We had the most wonderful time.” She sounds totally blissed out.
“Um, Mom … about the boxes …”
“I found them. Are you sure you want to throw all those pictures away, and all your wedding cards?”
“I’m sure. But I was talking about the other boxes. The ones with Richard’s things—”
“Not to worry. He’s getting everything out of your room. By the time you come home for your next visit, it’ll be just like you left it.”
“I mean the ones … in the foyer.”
“In the foyer?” She pauses. “There aren’t any boxes in the foyer.”
I can almost hear Rod Serling’s mellifluous baritone. “Wynter Morrison thinks she’s been on a trip to her mother’s house. But she’s been in … the Twilight Zone.”
“Oh. I guess … I meant to put the boxes from David down there, but I must have forgotten.”
“You’re absolutely certain you want to get rid of all that?”
“He came over the day after the wedding. He told me he’s going to marry Kelley. I got the papers.”
She sucks in a breath. “Oh, baby, I’m so sorry. That dirtbag! That—”
I laugh. “Mom, don’t waste your breath. I’ve got a good lawyer. I’ll do okay.”
“It’s not just the money, it’s the way he’s … He’d better hope he never runs into me again. Wait till Barbie finds out she’s just the flavor of the month. He’ll do the same thing to her, you mark my words.”
“You don’t look so good,” Linda says. “You sick again?”
I glare at her. “I can’t be sick again, since I was never sick before. I’m just depressed, that’s all.”
She snorts. “You got nothin’ to be depressed about.” I reach up on the top shelf over the sink, pull down a stack of aluminum bowls. “Do ya?” I slide my hands into the heavy oven mitts, take the sheet pans out of the oven where the day crew left them to dry, put them on the cooling racks. “You ain’t gonna be bakin’ bread for long,” she persists. “Your husband’ll come sniffin’ around again pretty soon. Take it from me, they always do.”
I have a vision of David on all fours, sniffing my leg. “It so happens that he’s just filed for divorce,” I shoot at her.
She grins with all her stubby little teeth. “You can still make his life hell, even if you ain’t married. I did.” The note of pride in her voice is unmistakable.
“Exactly how did you do that?”
“Oh, there’s ways, missy. There’s ways. You get a lawyer and they can tell you all the ways. There’s child support and there’s visitation.” “I don’t have children.”
“There’s maintenance. Every time he got a raise, I hauled his ass into court.” Her features are smooth with satisfaction.
“But he got drunk. He hit you. I thought you didn’t want anything to do with him.”
“ ‘Course I didn’t.” She rolls her eyes like I’m an idiot. “But I wanted to make his life hell. And I did. From the time I kicked him out, he never had a moment’s peace.”
“But neither did you,” I point out.
She smiles with grim satisfaction. “It was worth every minute.”
Phone calls at the bakery between midnight and 6 A.M. are almost always wrong numbers. For the occasional heavy breather or bored soul who wants to know what kind of underwear we have on, Linda keeps a police whistle next to the phone, the better to shatter their eardrums with, my dear. I always worry that some pervert will sue the bakery for injuries that prevent him from practicing his profession, but that’s probably a California sensibility.
When she answers the phone about twelve-thirty that night, I brace myself for the blast, but she adopts her habitual look of disgust and holds the receiver out to me. My stomach sinks. I have three options. My mother is deathly ill. CM’s been in a car accident. My house is on fire.
Instead, a man’s voice says, “Wyn! I can’t believe it. I’ve called every bakery in Seattle. I was beginning think you’d gone into the witness protection program.”
“Who is this?”
“Gary Travers. I’m at the Edgewater for a few days on business. I was wondering if I could take you to dinner tomorrow night.”
I hesitate, recalling our last and only encounter. Maybe he wants to take me to dinner so he can slip arsenic into my soup.
“Unless you’re still mad at me,” he adds.
The room has gone stone-silent. From the corner of my eye, I can see Linda walking on tiptoe. She fairly quivers with attention, like a dog with its ears up, whiskers twitching.
“Of course not. Dinner would be nice.”
“Tomorrow night, then? About seven?”
“Sure.” I give him directions to my house, hang up, and resume oiling pans for cinnamon-raisin bread. Linda’s about to have a fit.
“‘Zat your ex?”
“Nope.”
Silence except for the swish of the brush and the rhythmic lunging of the Hobarts. “You’re not s’posed to take personal calls at work, you know.”
I smile. “Sorry. Normally I wouldn’t, but it was my brother.”
“Your brother?”
“He lives in San Francisco and he’s up here on business. We haven’t seen each other since our parents got married …”
“Since your parents got married?”
“So we thought we’d have dinner tomorrow. Catch up on family news.” I push the tray of oiled pans across the table, pull out the black binder, and pretend to study the recipe for cheese bread.
Canlis is the kind of restaurant my father would have liked. Cantilevered over Lake Union at the south end of the Aurora Bridge, it simulates being inside a Christmas tree ornament, suspended in the dark, while lights that could as easily be candles or stars as headlights shimmer below. The place seems suspended in time as well, an old-style, expense-account watering hole, featuring hunter-gatherer slabs of red meat and premium cabernets. The servers all wear kimonos, which strikes me as odd, but they move easily in them, seeming to glide rather than walk.
We’re early for our reservation, so we sit at the piano bar drinking vodka martinis and observing the salespeople and their clients, who seem to be the occupying majority. I don’t really like vodka, but I love the tunneling warmth of it going down. And the olives.
After a few sips, I gather the courage to say, “I have to know. What happened to the boxes of your dad’s stuff that I jettisoned down the stairs?”
Gary’s had a haircut since the wedding, and he looks older, in a pleasing way, less like a refugee from a Partridge Family rerun. “I closed them up and put them in the den.”
“You came all the way back to the house for that?”
He shrugs, almost embarrassed. “I thought it would be easier on everyone if they didn’t come home and find a mess.”
“That was a really nice thing to do. I guess it’s lucky I was too drunk to push them all down. I feel like such an idiot.”
“Don’t. I understand why it happened.” That makes him one up on me. He pushes a lock of thick brown hair off his forehead. He smiles. “Now it’s my turn. Why did you introduce me to that guy as ‘Howard’s son’?”
I suck the pimiento out of my olive, nearly choking on it. “I know your father’s a great guy, he just reminded me of—Did you ever read The Fountainhead?”
His laugh explodes, startling the couple on his left. “Man of granite, buildings of steel. Or vice versa. Except Howard Roark had flaming-red hair.”
“I always thought that was a mistake.”
“Yeah. Men of granite shouldn’t be carrottops.” He finishes his drink and declines a refill. “So tell me, Wynter Morrison, what are you doing up here?”
“Making bread.” I stir the ice around and around in my glass.
“That’s not what I meant.” At this juncture, the hostess comes to seat us. After we’re settled and he’s ordered wine and people have ceased fluttering around us, he says, “Back to my question.”
I look over the menu at him. “Gary, knowing my mother as I do, I’m quite sure you’ve heard more about my life than you ever wanted to know.”
He gives me the sleepy-eyed smile. “I’ve heard a few things, but nowhere close to everything I want to know about you.”
“The short version is, I’m separated and my husband’s just filed for divorce. What about you? You live in San Francisco, right?”
“Larkspur. Marin. And don’t think I didn’t notice that extremely smooth transition. I’m divorced. One year tomorrow. But we’re good friends.”
“How very Marin.”
“I guess so. But we have two kids, so it makes things easier.”
“How old are they?”
“My son is eight. His name’s Andrew. My little girl Katie’s ten.”
“You’re not an architect, are you?”
“I park cars.”
“Where?”
He grins. “I have a small company. Contract valet parking for events and businesses.”
“So what are you doing up here?”
“Growing the business. I’ve been chasing some clients up here for about six months now. Seattle’s a funny town. They don’t much like out of towners.”
“Particularly Californians.” I smile.
“So I noticed. But it looks like a couple of them are finally coming around. I could be up here making a pest of myself every two or three weeks for a while.”
The kimonoed waitress is back to take our order. When she leaves, I arrange the silverware, lining all the handles up abutting the edge of the table.
“Wyn.” No choice now but to look at him. “I’m sorry if I’m making you uncomfortable. That’s not my intention at all.” His golden-brown eyes are looking very puppylike.
“You’re not.” The chain strap of my purse slips between my fingers and then back the other way. “I’m just … not used to this. I mean, I’m not even divorced yet. It all feels very strange.”
He touches my hand lightly with two fingers, then withdraws. “Believe me, I know exactly what you mean. I just went through it myself. At the same time, though—”
“Sir?” The sommelier presents the wine with great ceremony and we have to go through the sniffing-and-tasting ritual. Gary gives each step of the process his full attention, focused, unhurried, but never dropping the thread of his thoughts.
“At the same time, though, I have to tell you that I’m extremely attracted to you.” A pause. “I think it was the dominant way you ordered me back to the kitchen that day.”
A lot of the tension dissipates when I laugh. “That was my Hancock Park mistress-of-the-castle persona.”
“And you wear it well.”
“Not too well, I hope.”
Dinner is good, conversation pleasant, not overly intense, although there’s a purposefulness about him that makes me wary. This isn’t a man who does anything casually. By the time we’re finished, I’m relaxed enough to agree to a brandy at the piano bar.
He tells me about his kids; he and his ex share custody.
“They’re with me one week, then with Erica one week.”
“That seems like it would be difficult on them, shuttling back and forth. What about school?”
“They’re in private school, so that’s not a problem.” My brain is calculating the cost of private school in Marin for two children. “We’ve made their rooms as similar as possible in both houses so it’s not too jarring. Complete set of clothes at both places. We try to keep it as stress-free as possible for them.”
“What about for you and her?”
The laugh lines etched around his eyes and mouth are plainly not all from laughing. “We can deal with it easier than they can. Still, it’s hard. There’s no denying that. Sometimes when I’m driving all over the Bay Area I think it might be smarter if we shared a big house. Or got condos in the same building or something. But I guess that would have its own set of problems.”
We walk slowly up the gravel driveway. “I’m glad you called. I enjoyed seeing you.”
“Did you enjoy it enough to do it again Friday?” “Gary …”
“Too pushy? That’s a bad habit of mine.”
“No, it’s not that. I’m just … everything’s so tentative with me right now.”
“I understand.”
I fish the key out of my purse and insert it in the dead-bolt lock. I’m hyperaware of him standing right behind me, closer than necessary, closer than I want, but the heat radiating off his body tugs at me. I want to lean back against him. I know if I turn around now, he’ll kiss me. I do and he does.
“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” He’s still holding my face in his hands. His eyes are deep, but gentle. If I drown, it will at least be pleasant.
“I’m not sure. Maybe we should try it again.” The realization of how long it’s been since anyone kissed me like this sharpens my need, breaching my defenses like a traitor from the inside. You forget how that little electric spark dances over your skin, the sweet awkwardness of noses and chins, the softness of eyelashes, the burnished smoothness of a freshly shaved cheek.
It’s a wrench when I finally pull away. “I have to get ready for work,” I manage. Take a cold shower. “What time?”
He looks at his watch. “Ten-thirty.”
“I mean Friday. What time should I meet you?”