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Zester
“Can I bring you something else?” the waitress asked.
Your phone number and that of a good divorce attorney, Richard thought, mostly kidding. At least it had always been kidding before. Lately, he’d been trying on the idea to see how it felt. It felt liberating.
His blue eyes, parched by a wasteland of black ink on white paper, gazed longingly into the Promised Land of the waitress’s cleavage as she bent to consolidate plates and glasses and condiments. But the flu must have hit him harder than he thought: this fresh cleavage intrigued him no more than Leslie’s had the last few days.
Anyway, this weekend he hoped to avoid the issue of women entirely if possible. If God was indeed a man, this Sam Matthews of Leslie’s would be the sort to want to watch the Indiana game tonight, maybe enjoy some golf in the morning.
“Uh, no, nothing, thanks,” he finally managed to reply to the waitress.
She flashed him a luscious smile while her hand slid the bill onto the table: “Come again.”
He watched her walk away, pulling out his money clip. He looked at the total to try to figure a tip but drew a blank. The flu, the flu medication, and the pint of ale stacked layers of befuddlement on a brain promised a weekend off. Twenty percent of $27, usually a gimme, eluded him today.
His eyes lingered on the waitress’s young figure as she bent over the bus tub. What the hell, give her ten bucks.
Leslie returned from the rest room and glanced first at the tip and then at the waitress, and the corner of her mouth curved ever so slightly. “Who’s winning?” she asked.
“The Hoyas are dead in the water,” he said dispiritedly, glancing at the Official Beer Ad of the 1998 Final Four on the TV above the bar. “Turner’s missed the last three from outside the key and the Tarheels are completely dominating the boards.”
“Shall we?”
A coughing fit overtook him as they got up to leave the Lighthouse. In deference to the other diners, he as discreetly as possible deposited yet another oyster-sized mouthful into yet another tissue and lumped it into the plastic bag in his coat pocket with the rest.
“Doesn’t Superman ever get sick?” he wondered aloud, the fresh, damp air outside raw on his throat.
“Does kryptonitosis count?” she asked.
“No, he gets over that in no time. I mean something serious, like the flu.”
“Comic book heroes have it easy compared to you, dear,” she coddled. “Besides, one sneeze and Gotham City would be blown off the map.”
“Gotham City is where Batman lives,” he pointed out. “Superman lives in Metropolis.”
“And we’re in La Conner,” she reminded him. “And look. There are those shoes I told you about.”
The way to La Bon Table led past the knick-knack-filled stores along the three-block waterfront of La Conner, Washington. Window shopping was as unavoidable as the never-ending gray overcast, the crunchy litter of gull droppings, or the funky ocean smell of Swinomish Channel, as long and narrow as a river but connected at both ends to the sea.
“$130? For shoes?” Richard asked, uncharacteristically price-concious.
“But if they have my size, they’d be worth it,” Leslie said. “Hell hath no fury like a woman’s corns.”
He was trying hard not to rain on Leslie’s parade. Selling Sam Matthews a $350,000 home on Camano Island had set a new record for first sales at the real-estate company she now worked for. She had every right to be proud. A $35,000 commission is nothing to sneeze at, he thought, sneezing.
But since Thursday’s opening bell the NASDAQ composite had risen a total of 180 points. He could picture his cell phone ringing off the front seat of the Volvo even now, his clients hoping to hitch their financial wagons to his star. By 5:45 Monday morning, he’d need to be strapped into his cubicle and staring at the screen instead of leisurely watching the sunrise from his 29th-floor window in downtown Seattle.
Though he hadn’t yet mentioned it to Leslie, he had reinvested much of their small, conservative portfolio into the telecommunications and high-tech small cap stocks that led the bull’s charge. Net result: they were worth $50,000 more than they had been Wednesday. He had made more money in two days than she had in three months. But that news that could wait at least till Monday, maybe even Tuesday or Wednesday. Let her have her moment in the sun.
He put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her from the grip of the shoe store and past a couple of window displays of unfascinating trinkets and mementoes. But then came the chocolate shop.
Born right after the Boomers, they had played tennis together in high school back in New York, sailed his catamaran through the sun-struck waves on the Hudson on breezy summer days. Now the hours sitting at the computer left his belly slopping over his belt, and her figure, voluptuous to begin with, rounded out more each year. But she had granted him a beer, he would have to yield a chocolate.
To his surprise, she looked past the chocolate shop. Three doors down lurked a kiddie boutique, teddy bears, cradles, and tiny quilts crowding the window.
His recent doubts about his marriage made this a touchy subject. She had informed him at breakfast that her temperature registered the requisite half degree warmer, meaning she had an egg ripe for fertilization. The flu had provided him the perfect excuse this week: his temperature had soared so his sperm count and libido both sagged.
But the flu wouldn’t last forever. Sooner or later he would have to express his doubts. It wouldn’t be easy: she usually determined when they needed to talk and what they needed to talk about. But it was time he took matters into his own hands. Not that he wouldn’t try to be diplomatic. Maybe suggest some marital counseling as a first step.
It wasn’t as though the attraction had completely fizzled. She still looked good, even if she could stand to take off a few pounds. He liked her palamino-blonde hair, her chocolate-brown eyes. Her ironic smile always made him feel like she knew something he didn’t, which too often turned out to be the case. It bothered him sometimes. Worse now was the feeling that she had gone stale.
That hadn’t really crossed his mind until Sharon Scoville had moved into the cubicle next to his. Fresh out of Wharton, she wore her black hair short and spiky and her skirts short and pleated.
Oddly, it seemed that the more doubts he had, the fewer Leslie had. They had driven up early today to see the bulbs. Each March, iris, crocus, daffodils, and countless varieties of tulips carpet the Skagit Valley in every imaginable color. But in each moist, fertile furrow he saw nothing but hard work and commitment. He groused and gloomed his best, but like a crimson tulip petal shedding the dew, she remained serenely unperturbed. That corner of her mouth where smiles began never lost its curve.
Now she cooed over some panda pajamas in the shop window. He decided to intervene. “What time are we supposed to meet Sam?”
She glanced at her watch, putting on her realtor’s face again. “Let’s go.”
La Bon Table, the kitsch-y kitchen shop Sam Matthews owned, beckoned invitingly from the north end of the tiny downtown, the window spangled with brass jello molds, anodized aluminum pots, gleaming dishwares, and napery too nice to sully with one’s lips.
“I promised I would make Sam and Eileen snow pudding for dessert,” Leslie said, her heels clicking assertively on the walk. “But I forgot to bring a zester.”
Snow pudding, from a recipe his mother had given Leslie at their wedding, was a rich home-made pudding topped with lemony meringue. Les, with Richard’s whole-hearted encouragement, had made it one of her specialties.
“A zester?” Rich asked. He didn’t know what it was but he liked the sound of it.
“Like a grater.”
“You need a greater zester?” To himself he added, “Too?”
She frowned on this sort of clowning. “Don’t forget.”
A bell on the door tinkled as they went in. The shop was warm and bright and, but for the narrowest of aisles, bulging from ceiling to floor with enough kitchen supplies to fete the crowned heads of Europe. Wine glasses, kettles, whisks, rolling pins, wicker baskets, woks, ladles, cookbooks, corkscrews, and egg cups fought with French jellies, Spanish olives, and Norwegian lutefisk for shelf space. A deli case wafted cheese and salami temptations through the air, mixing with the ubiquitous aroma of roasted coffee beans.
Behind the counter stood a slender woman a bit older than they, with silver-streaked red hair in long curls, pale freckles, and leprechaun-green eyes. She wore a colorful, ankle-length cotton dress and wire-rimmed glasses. She looked up from tallying the day’s totals and smiled at them.
“Eileen?” Leslie asked.
“Yes?”
“I’m Leslie Moore and this is my husband Richard.”
Eileen came from behind the counter. “Of course!” she exclaimed. “Sam said you’d be here right on time. I think you and I spoke briefly on the phone once or twice.” She and Les held one another’s arms and touched cheeks. “And Sam and I have really been looking forward to meeting you, Richard.”
He took her proffered hand, thin and fragile, and shook it gently. “Me too,” he replied, then added, “You may want to wash that. I’m just getting over the flu.”
To himself he said, She sure looks familiar. And for just an instant he thought he saw recognition in her eyes as well.
She jokingly held her hand away from her body and said, “I’ll tell Sam you’re here and then sterilize this.” She opened the office door with her left hand.
Sam Matthews turned out to have many of the qualities Richard had anticipated: the well-tailored suit, the short-cropped gray hair, the keen, no-nonsense eyes. Sam’s most significant lack, however, was the anticipated Y-chromosome.
Rich darted a quick and hopefully subtle glance at Les for a reaction, but she busied herself with greeting her client.
He recovered from his stupor and smiled graciously. But as they exchanged pleasantries all around he thought, What is this? Some kind of a prank Les is pulling on me? How could she casually forget to mention that Sam and Eileen were lesbians? Not that he had a problem with that; they made a nice couple. But couldn’t he reasonably expect that some time during the past three months Les would point out that Sam was Samantha? On the other hand, maybe she had and he hadn’t been paying attention.
By then Eileen had come back in and once again he had the nagging feeling he knew her from somewhere, but drew a complete blank. He felt like his already overburdened central processor teetered on the brink of a system overload message.
“Well, I guess we ought to get the business out of the way first,” Leslie proposed. She took Richard’s arm, looked up at him and said, “Sam and I need to go to the bank to sign and notarize the papers. Are you going to be okay, Richie?”
She looked innocent enough, but people who look innocent rarely are. Some faint hint of smugness lingered on her features, but he couldn’t tell for sure and couldn’t do anything about it anyway.
“I’ll be fine,” he said, coughing.
“We should be half an hour, maybe 45 minutes. Can you amuse yourself that long? Maybe go back to the bar at the Lighthouse or something.”
“Or something,” he said, pecking her cheek. “You do what you’ve got to do.”
She and Sam walked out arm in arm, talking excitedly about the new house.
As they watched them leave, Eileen said to Richard, “She didn’t tell you, did she?”
“Tell me?” Richard repeated.
“About Sam. And me. I could tell by the look on your face when your wife introduced you.”
“What? That you were … co-owners?” he said as nonchalantly as possible.
She laughed. “Le juste mot. Yes, co-owners.”
“No,” he said, clearing his throat. “Evidently she didn’t think it important enough to mention. How long have you been … co-owners?”
“We’ve been partners for eight years now, and we opened La Bon Table five years ago.”
They’ve been together about as long as Les and I have been married, he thought, looking around. “This place is really something.”
“Sam’s the practical one,” Eileen said. “If I had my way things would spill out onto the sidewalk when you opened the door. Sam says that if God had wanted to save kitchenwares instead of animals, I would have been the one building an ark.”
“You seem to have just about everything,” Richard agreed. “And one of those things is something Les needs to make the dessert tonight.”
She furrowed her brow to match his. “You don’t remember what it was, I take it?”
“It had an er in it. Slicer, juicer, plunger — no, not that.”
“A peeler? A corer?” Eileen guessed. “Let’s look at utensils, maybe it will jog your memory.”
As clogged as his nose was, he caught her fragrance as she preceded him down the aisle. His memory didn’t just jog, it sprinted. Eyes and ears can waver, but the nose knows. He had certainly smelled that fragrance before: rich, like vanilla or musk, but not those. Not flowery, like a perfume. Mellow, woody.
She held up a masher. “What’s she making?”
“Something called snow pudding,” he said, looking distracted.
“I don’t know what that is,” she said, setting the masher down. “Is something wrong?”
“It’s your cologne.”
She waved the invisible fumes away from him. “I’m sorry. Is it bothering you?”
“No, no, it just seems familiar, but I can’t remember where I’ve smelled it before.”
She looked relieved. “It’s something my grandmother gave me.” She lowered her voice. “It’s very politically incorrect. It’s ambergris.”
He looked blank.
“They get it from sperm whales,” she explained. “It hasn’t been sold for years but my grandmother had some and it didn’t seem like it would help the whales to refuse to wear it. Since I can’t get it any more I save it for special occasions.”
He shrugged. “I’ve never heard of it. But I’m sure I’ve smelled it before. In fact — and pardon my diseased-racked brains if they’re deceiving me — but I feel like we’ve met before.”
“You know, I had the same feeling when you came in, that I knew you somehow,” Eileen confessed, looking relieved to admit it.
“Do you ever deal with stockbrokers, in Seattle? That’s what I do.”
“Sam handles all that for us,” Eileen said. “Have you been here before?”
“La Conner? No,” he said. “Hey, you know some French. What’s with ‘La Conner’?”
“You know, I didn’t know this until a couple of years ago, even though I grew up over in Mount Vernon. The town was founded by a man named Conner, and he wanted to name it after his wife, whose initials were L. A.”
“And there was already an L. A.” he surmised. “One mystery down, one to go. How do we know each other?”
“Where did you go to school?”
“Back east.”
“Oh.”
The bell on the door jingled and she went to help an elderly couple buy some ramekins. He wandered around, hoping to remember either where he knew her from or the name of the gizmo Les wanted.
“It’s been a while in any case, hasn’t it?” she ventured when she finished her sale.
“Yeah, it’s funny how you can remember how old a memory is even if you can’t remember what it’s about.”
“I suppose I’ve changed over the years. How about you?”
“Me? Naw,” he said flippantly. “Less hair, more flu germs, not quite as stupid maybe. Other than that, no.”
“I think I liked you,” she said.
“I think I liked you too,” he said, feeling like he was flirting and then realizing how pointless that would be. “So how have you changed?”
“Oh, my,” she said, leaning on the counter, her green eyes distant. “Would you believe I wanted to be an actress once?”
“You certainly have the looks,” he said, thinking, This is great: risk-free flirting.
She blushed. “Now I remember why I liked you.”
“Did you study acting?”
“Yes, briefly. At Julliard, in fact.”
“Impressive,” he said. “When was that?”
“1987.”
“There you go. In 1987 I was struggling to stay in Columbia. We must have run into each other a lot in the city.”
“New York being just a village.”
“But seriously, maybe we hung out at the same places. Remember the Manhole Cover in the East Village where you got a free shot of Cuervo if some part of your anatomy was pierced by a safety pin?”
“I was more the slinky-leather/Ecstacy/dance-till-you-pass-out type.”
He looked at her, picturing her slight frame in tight leather. “Crazy days.”
“Crazy indeed.”
They both were lost in thought a moment, then their eyes met.
“Oh, my God, Dr. Haussmann!” she exclaimed.
“That’s it! Dr. Haussmann!”
* * *
The afternoon of October 19, 1987, had been sunny and mild, Richard recalled. But the breeze off the Hudson added a hint of rain to the dry, crisp scent of dying leaves as he scuffled in jeans and a turtle neck through Central Park. A long, vague line of white cloud against the blue marked the edge of an approaching cold front. His head hurt and his feet dragged as he made his way to Dr. Haussmann’s office.
So far, this first year as an adult had been vastly different from his youth. His parents had celebrated his 21st birthday last March by ending their years of stony silence and clawing their way through an acrimonious divorce. His father Harvey, while remaining a full partner at the investment firm he’d established with his wife’s inheritance, now lived full time in Hong Kong with his young Japanese masseuse. Amanda, Richard’s mother, had moved in with her painter friend in Sonoma County. Richard compensated for the disintegration of the family by neglecting his pre-law studies at Columbia and devoting himself to what he felt was his true calling: party boy/slacker.
The judge who settled their divorce disliked Rich slightly less than she disliked Harvey or Amanda. She insisted he be given a monthly stipend of Moore, Myers, and Klein stock to pay his tuition and maintain the home both parents had abandoned along with their son, a luxury 8-room tower suite in the San Remo, five rooms of which overlooked the park. So far this year the value of the stock had topped $10,000 a month, leaving way too much money left over for a 21-year-old in New York City.
Leslie, Rich’s high school steady, disliked the direction he seemed to be heading, and cried about it to her mother. Her mother advised her to let him sow some wild oats, and she arranged for Leslie to travel through Europe for a year with her Aunt Josie. Leslie wrote to Richard weekly, asking discretely about his activities. He returned monthly his vague replies.
Rich felt, with some justification, that he had pushed forward the party-boy/slacker cause considerably the past summer. He knew the first names of 30 Manhattan bartenders, and they called him Mr. Moore. Edie Brickell played and sang at Amanda’s long-neglected Steinway at a Fourth of July party Rich threw.
But the highlight had been a fling with a woman who called herself Maja, a dark-haired, dark-eyed Basque and self-styled performance artist. The first time he saw her she had chained herself naked to the pillar below the statue of Columbus in Columbus Circle, shouting at passers-by, and then at the police, that she was protesting the last half-millenium of Spanish “rapes” of indigenous peoples, including the Separatists.
She had a bushel of peccadilloes. She plucked just one eyebrow. She always wept into red wine before drinking it. She felt that a man’s semen was the only night cream that could keep open the pores on her face.
Rich, cultivating the imperial boredom of a Caesar, found her endlessly entertaining. When he was drunk he loved her. When he was hung over he knew that if he didn’t get drunk again one of them would have to die. When his sexual appetite flagged from maintaining both her desires and her complexion, she said the Sex Gods could only be appeased by the sacrifice of a red-haired virgin.
Her artistic pursuits killed the relationship. She tossed three pounds of ripe, brightly colored fresh fruit onto the landing below, then took pictures with a telephoto lens of a puzzled Neil Simon wearing just his robe, looking up, surrounded by splattered mangoes and peaches.
Threats of eviction followed. Harvey and Amanda, forced at last to agree on something, insisted they would cut off Rich’s funds if he didn’t drop Maja like an over-ripe passion fruit and visit Amanda’s psychiatrist on a weekly basis. It mattered little: Maja had begun a project with her friend Reynaldo, painting, using only their naked bodies for brushes, the floor of a photographer’s loft in SoHo while he photographed them. She had already discarded Rich.
Dr. Haussmann put him in a small Dangerous Behaviors group. Rich’s problems paled in comparison with the other members’ disturbances: an artist who’d nearly been killed several times while trying to outline with royal blue the white graffiti in the pitch-black subway tunnels; an exhibitionist arrested for leaping on stage during a performance of Cats and spraying the lead male; a sickly waif who for three years had eaten nothing but New York City wildlife, developing perotinitis after a rat’s toenail punctured her small intestine.
Last week the newest addition had been a slight woman in her early thirties, with pixie-short red hair, pale freckles, and leprechaun-green eyes. She had taken Sarah Bernhart’s first name as her stage name but had dropped out of acting school to “explore her sexuality.” Lately she had flopped like Raggedy Ann for anyone of either gender who showed the slightest sexual interest, giving in gladly to their whims as long as she could remain blissfully out of control. Her adventures, at the dawn of the Age of AIDS, threatened her health and her relationship with her family back in Washington, who chipped in to send her to “the best shrink in New York.”
Rich waited to cross 5th Avenue to get to the ground floor office of Dr. Haussmann, a couple of blocks from the Frick Museum. He’d either drunk too much last night or not enough today. His only interest in going to therapy was to see Sarah again. Compared to the rest of the group, he and Sarah seemed like Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher. The problems of the rest of the group made no sense to him, and even he was getting bored with his own whining about Maja and Haussmann’s questions about his parents. Sarah’s exploits proved far more entertaining.
He caught up with her outside the office. “How are you today, munchkin?” he asked, looking at her tiny leather skirt and the tight, cinched-up blouse that made her small breasts impossible to ignore.
“Better than you, Goldfinger,” she said, looking at the dark circles under his eyes.
He held the inner door to the office for her. Inside, Miss Trumble, Haussmann’s snooty receptionist, busily cleaned out her desk in a snit.
“No session today?” Sarah asked her.
“No sessions any more,” Miss Trumble informed them coldly. “The good doctor has filed for bankrupcy and moved to Geneva to be closer to all the money he never paid me.”
The news was no more shocking than hearing her speak more than three words in a row. Perhaps she was human after all.
“What are we supposed to do?” Rich asked.
“Here,” Miss Trumble said, handing them each a sheet from a prescription pad. “Haussmann wanted me to give you these.”
On each was written: “You’re cured. Haussmann.”
They looked at one another after they read it.
“Great!” Sarah said.
“Hallelujah, sister!” Rich concurred. “Let’s go celebrate. Coming, Miss Trumble?”
Miss Trumble reverted back to her scowl and went about clearing out.
“Just the two of us then,” Rich said, and they walked back out to the street.
“Do you suppose Haussmann’s right?” Sarah said. “Or is it crazy to think yourself sane?”
“Either way let’s have a drink to celebrate,” Rich suggested. “How about the Plaza?”
A Guinness, three Glenfiddiches, and two Rusty Nails (for him) and a chablis, three strawberry margaritas, and two Bailey’s coffees (for her) later, he was scraping the bottom of the barrel for jokes.
“Oh, I know,” he said, his speech only slightly impaired. “What’s the difference between a pick-pocket and a voyeur?”
She scrinched her features together a moment. “I give up.”
“A pick-pocket snatches watches.”
She thought about it and then giggled. The bow in the shoelace that held her tight blouse together had loosened. When she giggled her small breasts teetered on the brink of escape. She watched his bleary eyes watch her jiggles.
Rich tore his eyes away. “Terence, my good man!” he called to the bartender, but Terence busied himself with slicing lemons. “He doesn’t understand my pain,” he said melodramatically.
“Aww,” she said, stroking his hair, “is your little heart broken?”
“Maja was an angel,” he said. He’d already claimed she was a genius, an enigma, and a bitch.
“And now she’s up in heaven,” Sarah said, as to a child.
“It didn’t have to be this way,” he said, bitterness creeping into his voice.
“What could you have done?”
“She didn’t ask for much.”
“What did she ask for?”
“Just the sacrifice of a red-haired virgin.” He drained the Rusty Nail, the Drambuie too sweet on his jaded tongue.
“I have red hair,” Sarah offered.
He looked over at her without moving his head.
She put her hand under the table and into her short skirt. “And just as I thought, it’s grown back again!”
He raised his eyebrows. “A miracle.”
“Our Lady of Perpetual Virginity strikes again.”
“Then I must sacrifice you on the altar of the goddess Maja.” He threw a wad of cash on the table. “Service in here stinks anyway.”
They dodged taxis across Central Park South and walked around the pond and past the drained ice rink into Central Park. The now overcast sky had warmed the air and the breeze had calmed. He pulled her slender body close with one arm. She shivered. He hoped she wasn’t too cold but he liked the way she shivered.
“What about muggers?” she asked him, looking around at the dark trees and lonely streetlights.
“We’ll mug them right back,” he declared, and they marched forward, singing, “Mug the muggers, mug the muggers!”
But the broad expanse of the Mall was deserted save for a solitary jogger and his big black Lab on a leash, and the double row of statues. The bust of Beethoven scowled as Sarah felt up the cold, rigid breasts of his statuary muse.
“Want to feel some big ones?” she asked him. “Last chance tonight.”
The bow on her blouse had come completely undone and the breeze toyed with the flaps of loose fabric.
“The time has come,” he declared. “The goddess awaits. You must be prepared for the sacrifice.”
She submitted to his strong hand on her shoulder as he led her down the stairs and under the brick arches of Bethesda Terrace. Their footsteps echoed hollowly on the concrete.
“Stop!” he demanded, clapping his hand over her eyes. “You must not behold the majesty of the goddess until you have completed the cleansing ritual.” He pushed her back against the cold brick wall.
Her eyes remained closed when he took his hand away, and he kissed her forehead, her cheeks, her lips, her neck, her small, hard nipples, until he fell to his knees. His face disappeared under her leather skirt. Her fragrance possessed him. The stubble on his cool cheeks against her warm thighs sent a shudder through her body, and when his nose touched her panty-less crotch, all her muscles tensed. He had barely begun when she cried out and forced his face away. He slumped to his knees and she ran out of the arch to the fountain.
The Angel of the Waters strode atop the sculture, wings outstretched and gaze bent down to the edge of the fountain. As Rich looked on amazed, Sarah stood on the curved stone rim and gazed up past the naked cherubs to the severe face above.
“Hear me, Maja, mighty goddess of the ever-changing waters!” she cried out, her voice thin against the splashing streams. “I come to do your bidding!”
What happened next seemed like a miracle at first. A shaft of white light came down from above and illuminated the solitary figure balanced between the stone and the rippling water. Rich felt his jaw drop and his shaky knees give way. Sarah’s arms shot straight up and she tried to twirl to face the light, but lost her balance and fell backward into the pool.
A moment’s silence was followed in quick succession by Sarah’s startled yelps as the cold water drenched her and then by the tinny crackle of the policeman’s bullhorn, saying, “Swimming is not allowed in the fountain. Please leave the area at once.”
“Holy shit!” Rich cried out, and dashed to the fountain and pulled Sarah sputtering from the water. Together they dashed down the trail around the lake, panting and squealing all the way to Bow Bridge, where they pulled up laughing.
“I guess that answers your questions about your sanity,” Rich said when he caught his breath. “Are you okay?”
Sarah shivered hard. “Never better,” she said through chattering teeth. “I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting the Wrath of Maja.”
“Me neither. I about wet my pants.”
“If I were wearing any, they’d certainly be wet,” she said. “But, exhilarating as that was, now I feel almost too cleansed.”
“Come on, let’s get you out of those clothes,” he said, wishing he had a coat to lend.
They jogged and skipped back to the San Remo, where Eddie the doorman greeted them with raised eyebrows. “Good evening, Mr. Moore. I should tell you —”
“No time, Eddie,” Rich cut him off. “I’ve got a lady in distress here.”
“Actually it’s a skirt but it’s soaking wet,” Sarah put in.
“But —” Eddie tried again as the elevator doors closed.
Rich pressed her wet back against the wall of the elevator and tried to kiss her. Her lips didn’t flinch but they didn’t respond either, and her green eyes watched him curiously. He abandoned the effort and stood back, suddenly aware of the difference in their ages, in their experiences, in their desires.
“You belong to Maja now, don’t you?” he asked her.
She retied the laces of her blouse. The rest of the elevator ride was silent.
When he opened the door to the suite, there, amid the shambles of his bachelor life, sat his mother.
* * *
“I’ll never forget the look on your mother’s face,” Eileen said.
“Nor will I,” Richard agreed. “And I’ve always felt bad about the way she treated you that night, giving you twenty dollars for cab fare like you were just a cheap trollop.”
“I was a cheap trollop back then,” Eileen said with surprising candor. “And your mother did give me her beautiful shawl, which I never returned.”
“I’m sure she never missed it. And if you were a trollop, I was something far worse. Maybe we both have changed a lot since then.”
“Sam has really helped me be content with who I am,” Eileen admitted.
“You two seem happy.”
“For the most part,” she said wistfully.
“Something wrong?”
“She wants to have children.”
“I can see how that could be a problem.”
“Actually, she can’t have children. She wants me to have children.”
“Have you tried?”
“We’ve gone the IVF route but no luck so far. Maybe we just haven’t found the right donor. But enough about me. What happened to you after that?”
“That turned out to be an interesting night,” he said, thinking back. “After Mother’s obligatory lecture about wasting my life on floozies, she asked me if I knew what had happened downtown that day. Overcoming her disgust at my expression of drunken ignorance, she informed me that the Dow Jones had dropped 500 points, my father had been indicted in absentia by the Securities and Exchange Commission for insider trading, and Moore, Myers, and Klein stock was now being used to line bird cages.”
“Oh, no!”
“Oh, yes. That was the end of that. The tuition I had prepaid at Columbia allowed me to patch together an M. B. A. and I’ve bounced from one brokerage to another around the country ever since, trying to duplicate my father’s success while avoiding his mistakes, every son’s dream. Mixed results so far.”
“What about that woman you were involved with?”
Just then the bell on the door jingled again and Sam and Leslie came in, the cool fresh air in their clothes fragrant in the shop.
“Here she is now,” Richard said without thinking too much about it. “Get everything squared away?”
“Sam and Eileen are now the proud owners of Twin Madronas, in my humble opinion the best home on Camano Island,” Leslie announced.
Sam, who had paused to lock the door and to turn the “Open” sign to “Closed,” joined them, saying, “Leslie made this whole process much easier than I thought it could be. You’re a very lucky man, Rich.”
He glanced at Eileen again, and saw her hastily reappraising Leslie, checking her out from her coifed hair to her expensive shoes. Most people hide most of their emotions most of the time. Eileen’s face betrayed hers for a moment, and Rich assumed the look he saw was jealousy.
When he finally said, “Yes, I am lucky,” he had paused too long.
Sam fixed her steely gaze on him and said, “That sure didn’t sound very sincere.” She turned to Les. “You know, if he doesn’t want you, we’ll take you in.”
Leslie took mock offense to Rich’s pause as well. “That sounds fine to me,” she said, turning to him with her nose aloft. “You and your cough can just watch your stupid basketball game by yourselves, Richie Moore. I’m having a sleep-over with the girls.”
Eileen had turned to readjust something on the shelf behind her. Phlegm caught in Rich’s throat and he had to turn away as well to clear it out and deposit it in the bag in his pocket.
“Did you bring your PJs?” Sam asked Leslie. “We’ll pop some corn and watch Doris Day movies.”
By the time Rich turned back around, Eileen had turned around as well, her face now a polite, smiling mask.
“I’d lend you one of my flannel nightgowns if I thought it would fit,” Eileen said to Leslie.
“That sounds great,” Leslie admitted. She glanced at Eileen’s slender figure, the proportions obvious through the thin cotton dress. “It must be nice not to have to wear a bra. I’ve got this new underwire that’s just killing me.”
“It must be nice to need an underwire,” Eileen returned, looking at Leslie’s bust. “What’s wrong with it?”
Leslie casually unbuttoned and pulled open her blouse, boosting the stiff white fabric of the right cup of her bra with her left hand to show Eileen. “See this seam? Well, look, it’s left a mark on my skin.” She lifted the underwire of the bra up to reveal the red mark on the pale flesh of her breast.
“Leslie, what are you doing?!” Rich exclaimed, shocked. In all the years he had known her he had never seen her do anything like this, especially in front of people she barely knew.
“The door’s locked,” Sam assured him.
Rich looked exasperated nonetheless.
“Sam and Eileen are both women,” Leslie reminded him, “and you watched me put on this bra this morning.”
He watched Eileen’s green eyes follow Leslie’s long, polished fingernails struggling to rebutton her blouse.
“What time is dinner?” he said, steering toward calmer waters.
“How long have you two been married?” Sam asked with a laugh. “He’s spending the evening with three women and what he’s thinking about is food.”
“That’s my Richie,” Leslie said, patting his paunch. “First things first. But it’s good to see his appetite coming back.”
“I’m getting a bit hungry too,” Eileen said, looking at Sam.
“Why don’t you two go freshen up?” Sam said. “Eileen and I will stick the bird in the oven while you change. Casual, please. In fact, shall we say no bras tonight?”
“Usually Richie likes to wear his on the weekends,” Leslie said, “but I think I can persuade him to leave it off just this once. So we’ll see you … sevenish?”
“Perfect.”
Richard felt relieved to be out of the shop, but something nagged at him still. He needed time to think this through.
Before he could get very far, Leslie asked him, “Since when are you such a fuddy-duddy?”
“Me?” he exclaimed. “Since when are you such a…”
He pictured Eileen watching her button her blouse. He never claimed to understand women. For that matter, he never quite understood why women liked men to begin with. He liked women more than he liked men. He couldn’t figure out why women didn’t like women more than they liked men. But that had always been theoretical. The reality of what happened in the shop hadn’t quite sunk in yet.
“Such a what?” Leslie asked as they walked past the baby shop.
“I don’t know,” he muttered sullenly. Then, on the theory that the best defense is a good offense, he lobbed one back. “So how come you didn’t tell me about Sam?”
“I’m sure I told you about Sam three months ago,” she informed him, not sounding all that sure. “If you forgot, it’s not my fault.”
“Three months ago? I was in the middle of year-end stuff.” A drop shot, but it was the best he could do.
“Besides,” she went on, “do you tell me about all the women that you work with?”
He pictured that tight, tartan-plaid pleated skirt that Sharon Scoville wore. He sure hadn’t mentioned her to Leslie. For that matter, he had never talked about Sarah or Maja either. That’s what was nagging at him. Eileen was Sarah. They planned to spend the evening with Eileen/Sarah.
By now, he’d forgotten her question, so he said, “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” she asked.
Luckily her gaze drifted away as they passed the chocolate shop. In the momentary calm he tacked to a different heading. “Sam is sure nice enough though,” he said. “She seemed quite taken with you.”
“She invited us for a weekend at Twin Madronas when they get settled.”
“Uh-huh.”
Sam really had seemed pretty taken with Leslie. Is it possible she really was attracted to her? He didn’t know exactly how this lesbian thing worked, but attraction is attraction. And that look Eileen had had on her face as she gave Leslie the once over, that could have been jealousy. This was getting complicated.
“What do you mean, uh-huh?” Leslie asked. “What’s the matter with you?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Things got a little strange back there at La Bon Table.”
She stopped walking and looked up at him. “Why, Richie Moore, I think you’re jealous!”
“Me? Jealous?” He hadn’t considered it from that angle. Jealous about Sam being interested in Leslie? Or about Eileen being interested in Leslie? Eileen had been the one watching her button her blouse, after all.
And Eileen was Sarah. The Sarah who had gone with him into the park to sacrifice herself to Maja.
The question Eileen had asked just before Sam and Leslie got back was, What about that woman you were involved with? He not only hadn’t told Leslie about Eileen/Sarah, he had never told Sarah about Leslie. Only about Maja.
And his response to Eileen’s question: Here she is now. From that Eileen could easily come to the conclusion that Leslie was Maja. If so, maybe that look on Eileen’s face hadn’t been jealousy at all. Maybe it had been desire. Then Eileen offered Leslie her nightgown and Leslie started taking off her clothes. Curiouser and curiouser.
“Well?” Leslie asked.
“Well what?”
“What’s wrong with you?” she asked. “Are you okay?”
“I think I may have forgotten something back at the shop,” he said vaguely.
She stopped dead in her tracks. “Where’s the zester?”
“The what?”
“The zester. For the snow pudding.”
“Oh, yeah, the zester! That’s what I forgot! How dumb am I? Listen, I’ll run back and get it before they leave. While you’re waiting, why don’t you buy those shoes we looked at?”
“Really?” she said, brightening as always at the thought of buying new shoes. “You don’t think they’re too much?”
“You deserve a treat,” he said, kissing her. “You just made an incredible first sale. It’ll take me a few minutes. Find some you really like.”
Maybe a special providence watched over him after all. Avoiding a painfully awkward social/marital situation is worth $130 any day of the week. She went into the shoe store and he hustled back to La Bon Table.
Coughing up great gobs from the brisk walk back, he knocked on the window and waved to Eileen, who still worked at the counter on the day’s totals.
“Did you forget something?” Eileen asked him after she let him in and relocked the door.
“Is Sam still here?” he asked, looking around.
“She went home to dress the bird. What is it?”
“I may have given you the wrong impression earlier,” he said, catching his breath and formulating his approach. “When you asked me about that woman I was involved with, I thought you meant Leslie, and maybe you thought…” He ran out of words.
“That Leslie used to call herself Maja the way I used to call myself Sarah?” Eileen offered.
“Right,” he said gratefully.
“I admit, the thought crossed my mind for an instant—”
“I saw that look on your face.”
“—but then I realized Leslie wasn’t the type to do the sorts of things you told me about Maja,” she finished, then added, “But that isn’t what that look was about.”
“Oh?”
“No,” she said, looking down. “Remember what Sam said, about how lucky you were? Well, I was thinking how lucky Leslie is, about how easy it would be for her to get pregnant.”
“Oh.” That would never have crossed his mind. He didn’t know what else to say so he said “Oh” again.
“So you came back here because you were afraid I would tell Leslie…”
“I just never told her…”
“Well, rest assured, your secret’s safe with me,” she said. “As far as that goes, Sam doesn’t know a whole lot about that time of my life either, so if you could…”
“’Nuff said,” he assured her.
“For what it’s worth?” she offered.
“Yes?”
“You were my last man.”
“I had a feeling I might be,” he said, trying not to sound conceited. “For what it’s worth, you were my last floozy.”
She laughed. “Well, what do you say we keep it that way?”
“Deal,” he said, relieved. “So we’ll see you in a little bit.”
“Looking forward to it.”
Rich felt hugely relieved as he walked back to the shoe store. No matter what happened between him and Leslie, raking up all this muck from long ago would only make matters more difficult.
In fact he felt pretty good about himself. He saw the possibility of feeling either humiliated or flattered at being Eileen’s last man, and he chose to feel flattered in spite of the fact that they hadn’t actually had sex. Even the brief thrill he had given her had made the thought of any other man absurd. Or something along those lines.
To his surprise, for the first time in several days Uncle Wiggly stirred. Rich faced, after all, the prospect of an evening with three women, none of them wearing bras. He pictured first Eileen and then Sam without clothes. While both looked good enough in his mind’s eye, he wouldn’t trade the pair for Leslie’s ample charms.
Leslie, for that matter, had demonstrated some charms of which he had been unaware until today. He saw her waiting in front of the shoe store with a box under her arm, and he pictured once again the way she had just flung her blouse open in front of those other women. He had a feeling that image would inspire him for some time to come. Maybe he’d been fooling around in the shallow water this whole time, and had never really ventured into the deep end.
But fantasizing about several women making him happy was one thing. Trying to keep several women happy in real life is something else entirely. Nevertheless Leslie, his woman, his wife, could evidently turn the heads not only of other men but of other women as well. He fairly beamed at her as he approached.
“Did you get there in time?” she asked him, returning both his smile and his kiss.
“Yep,” he said proudly.
“Where is it?”
“Where’s what?”
“The zester! Isn’t that what you went back there for?”
He maintained his smile to the brink of idiocy while his brain scrambled one more time. “They were out,” he lied grandly.
“What? A place like that and they didn’t have a zester? I don’t believe it.”
“What does a zester do, anyway?” he said, trying to steer away from this Charybdis.
“Oh, it scrapes off the outer layer of a lemon or an orange,” she said, clearly vexed.
“And that’s important?”
“It’s where all the flavor and color is,” she lectured him testily. “I thought someone as superficial as you would grasp that easily.”
At the moment he didn’t feel like arguing that point. “You can’t scrape it somehow else?”
“Oh, I suppose…”
“You know what?” he said, putting his arm around her. “It doesn’t matter. We’ll stop and get ice cream or something. The snow pudding just is no big deal.”
He knew that last sentence was a lie he would regret and live with forever, but desperate times call for desperate measures.
“In fact,” he went on, his hand sliding down her back and onto her ass, “it’ll give us enough time to fool around before we go over there.”
“Evidently someone took the kryptonite out of Clark Kent’s pants,” she said, that corner of her mouth curving into a smile again.
“It must have been that spunky Lois Lane,” he said, running his fingers up the back of her neck to give her goosebumps.
“Do we have time for a drink?” she asked as they passed the Lighthouse.
“Really?” he asked in disbelief. This almost never happened.
“Maybe we’ll get that cute waitress again.”
If he were a trout he’d be looking up at the surface of the water, thinking, That’s a real fly, right? It’s not, like, one of those artificial, feathery things concealing a barbed hook. No, it twitched like it was real. Out loud he said, innocently as possible, “You thought she was cute?”
“You know who she reminded me of? Sharon Scoville.”
His idiotic smile froze on his face again. “Sharon Scoville? From the office? I didn’t realize you’d met.”
“Remember the day we had lunch at the Pink Door? You were away from your desk when I got there.” She smiled nonchalantly at his astonished features. “If I were a man, I’d be all over her.”
This was too good to be true. The only question: take her back to the motel right now and sow his seeds in her fertile furrow until she had quadruplets, or stop here for a drink and some Sharon Scoville fantasies before taking her back to the motel etc., etc.
“You know,” he told her, gaga over all the delectable possibilities that had suddenly appeared, “if I live to be a thousand, I’ll never understand women.”
“Really?” she wondered, the heels of her new shoes clicking assertively down the walk. “Because men are so easy.”
The End