The Café, Santa Barbara, 1998
Dr. Jerome Benton was a full professor of English literature and author of such weighty tomes such as Chaucer and the Romain de la Rose, Religious Themes in Shakespeare, and Justine to Clea: A Man Matures. He had agreed to meet his former wife, Kate, at the Café, somewhat amused that she was still hanging out at the same restaurant in Santa Barbara where the menu rarely changed and all of the same people had lunch every day. She was such a traditional creature despite her environmental crusading, and it gave him some pleasure to think that she probably even still loved him. She was seated near the fireplace, sipping Chardonnay and watching the door for his entrance.
Kate stood up when she saw him, and extended her hand defensively as she considered the changes in her ex-husband. He was still slender, with light brown hair only slightly receding at points on his forehead, and seemingly unnatural blue eyes. For a moment, her stomach clenched and some buried pains resurfaced.
“Jerry—thank you for meeting me here. After talking with Chris, I thought that we might have some issues.”
He pulled her closer and kissed her cheek. “I’m not a client, Katie,” he chuckled. “You’re prettier than ever.”
“Liar,” she replied calmly, sinking down into the cushions. “You’re looking very well. Spain agreed with you. Our son apparently loved it—his command of the language has improved. Especially the slang.”
Jerome laughed. “He’s a young man now, Katie. There are things that he needs to know.”
“And I’m sure that you’ve told him about all of them,” she snapped, hating herself for sounding bitter. “But he looks well and seems very happy. I understand that he wants to move out to the dorm when school starts.”
“Seems like a good idea. May I sit down?”
She flushed. “Of course. You never needed to be asked before.”
“Maybe I learned some manners in Europe,” he teased, taking the seat opposite from her. She refrained from comment and studied the menu on the table.
“C’mon, Katherine—you know that menu by heart by now,” he commented, signaling the waiter and ordering a mineral water.
“One never knows when something might change,” she said. “My little son is now a young man, and you’re back in Santa Barbara. Have you found a place to live?”
“The university has a condo for me. Unfortunately it’s out in Goleta, but I’ll look for something better in town.”
“The commute is getting tougher. Maybe you’ll want to stay in Goleta,” she observed. They sat in silence for a few awkward moments. He was sensing something cooler and more remote in this woman that he had known so well for the fifteen years of their marriage.
“I heard about Geoff. I’m sorry,” he said at last.
She shrugged. “We’re coping. I would like to take Christopher up to San Francisco to visit him soon. You won’t object, will you? Chris seemed to understand when I told him about Geoff this morning at breakfast. I see that you’ve given him a credit card. He paid for our meal.” She paused. “It was a strange experience.”
“You’re not kidding,” he added. “Our son has been sort of the last link between us, I suppose.”
She nodded and met his gaze fully for the first time. “Maybe the next time we meet will be at his wedding. Let’s order—I’m on the agenda for the Coastal Commission meeting this afternoon.”
“Still fighting the good fight, eh?” he asked. They talked for a few more minutes, catching up on relatives and other fragments from their past relationship. Lunch arrived and was duly eaten.
“So you’re writing now, I hear,” he said, pushing back his plate with only a few fragments of salad remaining.
“Just for fun. A family history. So what are you writing now? I would imagine that the university won’t make your teaching load too heavy.”
“Ah, the myth of the useless professor lives!” He laughed. “As a matter of fact, I’m deep into Basque influences on early European epic poetry.”
“Sounds vitally important,” she said with a grimace.
“Katie, don’t be bitter. After all this time—” he began.
She stopped him with a shake of her head. “Sorry, Jerry. I’m just preoccupied today. I honestly don’t mean to be hateful.” She regarded him with wide green eyes, and he noted that despite a few new wrinkles, they were still honest and kind. “It seems so strange to be sitting here with you now. You were such a part of my … past.”
“We can be friends.”
She laughed. “I don’t think so, Jerry. Do you know something strange? I’ve been writing you into the family history. You’re only a paragraph. Just a collection of sentences and dates. Something like ‘Katherine Cobham married Jerome Benton in 1979. He was a professor of English literature at UC Santa Barbara. They had one son, Christopher, born in 1980. The Bentons were divorced in 1995.’ I’ve only to add the dates for Christopher’s wedding, his children, and then somebody will add my death date.”
For a moment he was speechless. “You make me feel very transient, Katie. How depressing to think in such terms. How much wine have you had?” This was not, after all, the woman he had known. Some elusive, remote quality suddenly surrounded her; very much different from the solid, serious wife he left three years before.
She took a deep swig of her wine, suddenly practical again. “This is my first and last glass for today. I’ve gotta go defend the planet from the forces of evil,” she added somewhat sourly.
He snorted. “I think that you’d better consult with a therapist.”
“Oh no, Jerry love. I did that for a year after you left me. On the whole, I’m feeling better now than I have in some time. It is good to be with you here. I think that when I go home, I’ll store you on a floppy disk and erase you from the hard drive.” Suddenly she smiled with real warmth. “You’ve been a good father, and I don’t mean to be an old nasty ex-wife. Oh, I hated you for a long time, and I’ll probably always carry a piece of scar tissue in my heart where you used to be.”
He reached out to take her hand. “I’m sorry. I really mean that, Kate. I never meant to hurt you. It was just that our feelings changed—”
“Your feelings changed. Mine were executed,” she said quietly, pulling her hand gently but firmly from his grasp. She gathered her purse and jacket and rose from the table. “I did love you so, Jerry,” she added quietly. Then she grinned. “You can pay for lunch.”
She left the café without a backward glance
Santa Barbara, 1998
Kate had given so many presentations to the California Coastal Commission that the script was etched on her vocal chords. She had listed the issues regarding view corridors, traffic, air pollution, and zoning intent to oppose the City of Santa Barbara’s approval of a large hotel and condominium project, and presented them with clarity and as much forceful presence as she could muster. She watched the rather weary faces of the commissioners present—people from all over California with different levels of education, political philosophies, and power connections. She wondered how they managed to sit through these endless hearings, held all over California to decide land-use matters in the coastal regions.
She returned to her seat after giving her arguments, half-listening to the other presentations and being courteous to her fellow environmentalists who were also waiting to speak. She had always hated people who said their scripts and then walked out of meetings. Aunt Bette would call that “extremely tacky.”
The Coastal Commission meetings were a study in power plays, sloppy organization, carefully scripted theatrics, and a struggle to make decisions based upon insufficient and biased information. Kate had to admit that most of the commissioners tried hard to be fair, but then again, they were all political appointees and could be fired with one phone call from the right person.
The meetings were always held at a large hotel or convention center. The commissioners sat on a dais with microphones in front of them and mounds of paperwork on all sides. The audience sat in rows and rows of chairs, frequently rising to mill about in the back of the room or have a hurried consultation with some allied soul in a corner. The noise often made it impossible to hear what was actually being said at the meeting, and almost half of the audience had cell phones glued to their ears.
Kate sighed and looked out the window at the distant ocean. She wondered if Jerome were still sitting in the café, perhaps meeting old friends—or new lovers. There was a curious numbness in her now—she had felt so strangely during her lunch with him, almost as if there was some type of clear but unbreakable window between them. He had loved her once, enough to marry her, but that love had slowly evaporated. As Maddie once said of Jerome: “He only thinks with his brain when a beautiful woman isn’t around. Then he thinks with his other head.” Kate smiled to herself. Jerome turned into a bombastic, if amusing, scholar who was increasingly enchanted with his own voice and the admiring eyes of younger people.
The commission decided to take a fifteen-minute break, and Kate groaned. That meant that more phone calls would take place and also that she would have to hang about talking with people when she wasn’t in the mood to do so. She rose from her chair and slipped through the stretching crowds toward the coffee urn in a far corner of the room. She turned her back to the room and pretended to be on her cell phone in earnest conversation, a ploy which suggested that she was simply too busy to exchange comments at the moment.
After a few minutes of peace, a man approached the coffee urn, poured himself some coffee, and stood staring at her. She smiled, nodded, and tried to think if she had ever met him. He was watching her closely, so she was forced to end her pretended conversation and replace her phone in her purse. She hoped that he’d leave her alone. He was an attractive man in his midforties, somewhat balding but with an ample amount of graying black hair in his beard. His eyes were grayish green, and when he grinned he displayed fine white teeth and a couple of dimples barely hidden in the hair on his cheeks. He was rather formally dressed in gray slacks, a dark blue blazer, and necktie with small Tabasco bottles on it.
“You’re Kate,” he said finally.
“Uh—yes. I’m sorry, but I don’t remember where we met …,” she replied. There were always a lot of people at these meetings that she had seen on some occasion, and rarely recalled their names.
“You haven’t met me. But I know a lot about you. You’re an attorney for an environmental group, very dedicated, divorced three years, and a damned fine person,” he explained. “But you’re prettier than I thought you would be … and you do wear makeup.”
She was intrigued. “Obviously you know somebody who knows me!”
“I’m Raymond O’Donnell. I’ve been treating your brother, Geoff,” he confessed. “I’m here to testify on a toxic spill cleanup in Alameda …”
“Ah, comes the dawn!” She laughed. “I do remember that Geoff said a Dr. Raymond—or somebody—was helping him with a new treatment. He felt better. You’re that doctor?”
He nodded, took a sip of coffee, frowned, and added cream to the sour black liquid. “Yes. Mostly doing research these days. Your brother is reacting very well to our new chemical cocktail. It’s tough about the lungs …” He paused. “I shouldn’t be discussing the details of this without his expressed permission … then again, Geoff did insist that I look you up if you were here today. He thought that you might be.”
“My big brother is setting me up again,” she said with a brief smile, suddenly feeling the urge to get away from this man. “I’ve really got to talk with someone before the meeting resumes. It was nice meeting you.” She offered her hand, and they shook briefly.
“I’ll be in Santa Barbara until tomorrow. Maybe you would be kind enough to have a drink with me later?” he asked quickly, averting his eyes as if expecting a negative answer. He wasn’t as confident as he seemed at first.
She paused. They could go right from this meeting back to the Café. Feeling suddenly wicked, she smiled at Dr. O’Donnell. “I’d be delighted. There is a great place right down the street with good parking, and you’ll find out how important that is in this city!” He looked a bit surprised by her sudden enthusiasm. “The meeting is reassembling. They should be getting ready to continue my matter and take some testimony on the Alameda dump soon.”
“You seem to be able to predict these things,” he commented as they found seats near the front of the huge room.
“Go to as many of these as I have and you’ll be able to do it too, Dr. O’Donnell,” she replied.
“Hmmm. Don’t you get tired of it?” he asked, looking around at the intense crowds who were never quite happy with any decisions made.
She paused. “Sometimes I am so incredibly tired of it that I want to quit. But I just can’t quite give up.”
He smiled. “Like your brother …”
The Café, Santa Barbara, 1998
Jerome was still at the Café, now surrounded with old friends and regaling them with stories of his European sabbatical. He had gone from mineral water to bourbon, and Kate realized that he must have been enjoying himself enormously in order to abandon his vigilant diet for bloating liquor. He saw her enter almost at once. It was typical of him to check out new arrivals to ascertain if they might be of interest to him. She and Dr. O’Donnell were definitely of interest. They had barely been seated by the ever-gracious Jack Ward when Jerome eased himself through the crowd and made his way to their table.
“Katie, back again so soon?” asked Jerome.
“Not soon. Looks as if you’re having a good time,” she replied calmly. “Jack, please give me a Ketel One up on the rocks with a twist.” Jack Ward nodded, amusement crossing his wise face. He had known Kate and Jerome for many years, and he knew exactly what was happening.
“And for the gentleman?” Jack asked of Raymond O’Donnell.
“Beefeater gin on the rocks with an olive,” said the doctor promptly. Jack turned back toward the bar, and Dr. O’Donnell looked up at Jerome, raising one brow expectantly. Jerome smiled at him and extended a hand.
“I’m Jerome Benton—Katie’s ex,” he said.
“I’m Raymond O’Donnell,” replied the doctor. “Katie’s future. Nice to meet you.”
“The doctor is treating Geoff in San Francisco,” Kate explained quickly. “He was at the meeting with me.”
Jerome nodded, his interest still piqued. “Well, nice to see you folks. Have a good evening.” He returned to his own table and settled himself once more among old friends, but his eyes often wandered in their direction.
The drinks arrived at their table, accompanied by corn chips, salsa, and a large mound of guacamole. They drank and nibbled in silence.
“Now I know why you accepted my invitation,” observed O’Donnell calmly. “Making the old ex jealous …”
Kate flushed. “Sorry about that. I just couldn’t resist. Thanks for taking the potshot at Jerome. Anyway, I did want to talk with you about your treatments—not that you have to violate any ethical standards, of course. After all, I am a lawyer. . .”
“And a pretty woman,” said O’Donnell with a laugh. “No matter. Geoff told me all about Jerome—he didn’t deserve you.”
“My brother has been very chatty with you,” observed Kate, with more than a bit of displeasure.
“He thinks that I’m perfect for you.”
She laughed. “He couldn’t have told you very much about me then. I can be a real terror, Dr. O’Donnell.”
“Call me Nick. My name is Raymond Nicholas O’Donnell—compliments to both grandfathers. My friends call me Nick. By the way, you don’t seem like a Kate to me. Maybe I’ll call you Katherine.”
“You’re very sure of yourself, Doctor. You remind me of my Aunt Bette.”
“About whom I have also heard a great deal. Now, let’s order another drink and have dinner. In fact, let’s order champagne. That will really give your ex something to think about. If you wish, we can hold hands and gaze at each other with smoldering passion.”
She laughed so loudly that both Jack Ward and Jerome paused in mid-sentence to watch her. She had tears in her eyes. “No theatrics necessary, Doctor,” she replied, wiping her eyes and noting with some dismay that her mascara was smeared. “You are way, way ahead of us.”
He looked a bit smug. “I like to do research, remember?”