Chandler had long, sinewy legs. He had been a star soccer player at UCLA. He stepped in and lowered himself between my legs. I lay back, smiling. His sapphire eyes had a way of brightening like bulbs on a dimmer you could ease up slowly. His upper body was tight from years of exercise, swimming, and tennis.
“I got you your favorite, orange chicken,” he said. “Lots of brown rice and fortune cookies.”
“Will mine promise another unforgettable night?”
“Sure. I put that one in yours myself.”
“Well, don’t stop with putting things in there,” I said, and deliberately exaggerated like a coquette, tapping my eyelids together.
He laughed, and then he leaned forward. I went halfway so we could kiss. His hands slipped under my rear end smoothly, and he lifted me like someone bringing a bowl of soup to his lips. He began by kissing my inner thighs and working his way up. I leaned back and moaned. His lips pressed gently as he touched me deeper with the tip of his tongue. My excitement twirled up my spine and had the room spinning. I had my hands on his head, holding him, keeping him prodding.
Then he pulled back and gracefully moved his legs under his body like a double-jointed gymnast, lifting my legs just enough to bring his erection forward like a torpedo. It made me laugh at first. He tilted his head, surprised, and then I moaned, and we began our slow, rhythmic motions. We had done it in pools, and we had done it before in my tub. He was extra gentle, because I wasn’t leaning on something soft. There were men who made love, and there were men who made love with consideration, compassionately, and were just as concerned with your fulfillment as with their own. Chandler was the latter. Sometimes he also kept his eyes open and looked at me so hard that I stopped moving.
“What?” I asked the last time.
“You fascinate me. It’s almost as if your face changes right before my eyes. I love the way you ride into ecstasy.”
“Sounds like you’re boasting,” I said, and he laughed.
He watched me now, but then he closed his eyes and looked like he was the one riding into ecstasy. He looked so pleased that I was actually jealous.
“Hey.” I shook him. “Remember me?”
He laughed. “I was just thinking that it probably feels this way in the womb,” he said. We had both reached a climax.
“Are you suggesting male and female fetuses make love?”
“No. I just meant the warmth around us, the way I felt like we were floating. Leave it to you to come up with prenatal incest,” he said, and I feigned being insulted.
He sat back. “Turn over, and I’ll wash your back,” he said.
I did. He moved the sponge over me sensuously, pausing to kiss me on the neck and shoulders.
“Have I told you lately how beautiful you are?”
“I’ll check the DVD recorder,” I said.
“Wise-ass.” He reached down to stroke mine. Was he ready to go again?
I turned slowly. He kissed me but sat back instead and reached over the tub to pour some of the Pinot into my empty glass. After he took a sip, he handed it to me.
“The last time I was this pleased, I was in the womb,” he said.
“You men are always trying to get back there.”
I handed the wine back to him. He sipped and smiled.
“A nurse was probably the second person I saw in the delivery room. My father wasn’t there. He was in court with a big divorce case, multimillionaire. And here I am again, with a nurse.”
“Lucky you.”
“I think every man fantasizes about making love to a nurse at one time or another. There’s something about the combination of tender loving care and raw sex,” he said.
Good time to bring it up, I thought. Catch him at the right moment.
“A patient gave me a gift today. I had to take it, or he would have had a setback from disappointment for sure.”
“What kind of gift?”
“It’s in a box in the bedroom. Pearls,” I said. “Expensive pearls, a necklace.”
“And you took it?”
“I told you. He was insistent. I didn’t want to create a scene. This was the patient who was given the wrong medication. Remember? I spotted it before he had taken it. I told you about it.”
He thought a moment. “This gift? It was on discharge?”
“Yes.”
“Well, they can’t get you on giving preferential treatment. Patients have left money to nurses in their wills and to their doctors especially,” he said. “Still . . . I wish you hadn’t taken it, Pru. Maybe you can report it when you go in and ask that it be given to a charity. That would be cleaner morally.”
I nodded. And then smiled. “I knew you’d figure something out for me.”
“How expensive do you think they are?”
“Thousands,” I said.
His eyes widened. “Yeah, get rid of it. I mean, you can be appreciative, but . . .”
“You’re not just jealous, are you?” I teased.
“Maybe,” he said, nodding. “Should I be? How old is he? Is he good-looking?”
“He’s forty-four. No. He’s just a lonely guy who needed a heart bypass.”
“What’s he do?”
“Accountant.”
“They can be lonely,” Chandler said, and rose to step out of the tub. “I’m starving.”
He held up a towel for me, and I got out, too. We dried each other’s back.
“What about your day?” I asked.
“A boring estate negotiation, but my client was quite satisfied.”
“We spend so much of our waking hours satisfying others,” I said.
“As long as we satisfy each other.”
I laughed, and he gathered his clothes and followed me to the bedroom. After we had put on robes, I reheated the food, and we sat at the dining-room table rather than in front of the television as we more often did. I could see Chandler wanted to talk.
I tilted my head, my eyes narrowing with suspicion.
“What?” I asked, watching him work himself up for some sort of revelation. “Something’s up.”
“I guess you can read me pretty easily. Remind me never to negotiate with you.”
“Just give me what I want all the time. Okay, so what is rolling around in your head?”
“I think we have something special going,” he said, “and I don’t mean only because of the great sex, Pru. We have work schedules that would discourage most other couples, but we accommodate each other. We know the power of compromise. To me, that’s special.”
“Why is it I know you’re leading up to something very big?”
He laughed but nodded. “That really is another thing that makes you special. And I don’t mean your ability to read just me. But don’t get overconfident. I pride myself on the ability, too. We each have a hard time hiding something from the other,” he said. “It’s futile to try.”
I think I might have blushed, but not from a compliment, from fear. I know my heart started to thump harder. Did he somehow know about the telephone stalker? Had I left one of her messages on the machine when he was here and I was in the bathroom or something, and he had pushed the play button, perhaps out of curiosity or perhaps because he was afraid I was starting with someone new? Was this what it was about? I didn’t care about the motives. I cared about him knowing right now, knowing too soon.
I paused, my chopsticks raised. On the other hand, maybe he was about to tell me he had slept with someone else? I didn’t think him capable of being so loving and involved with me one moment and confessing to being interested in someone else right after, but I had learned something important in my young life: expect the unexpected, be a little cynical, and the shock of it won’t be as intense.
“What is it, Chandler? We’re eating. I’m worried about my digestion.”
He laughed. “You know I’ve been with Taylor, Barnes, and Cutler for nearly five years now. They made me a junior partner, and I’m on the verge of becoming a full partner.”
> “Yes?” I said, lowering my chopsticks. Was my heart pounding? Was he going to propose, show me a ring, bring me to a yes-or-no moment? I was still not ready for it. I thought I had made that clear, and for this long, at least, he had respected that.
“We’re opening offices in San Francisco.” He quickly raised his hands, palms toward me. “I’m not moving up there permanently, but they’ve asked me to take charge of the setup. It’s a quick flight back and forth. However, I’m going to be away a little more than I would be normally. The way you and I work, it might make for longer postponements.”
“Postponements?” I smiled. “Lawyers. How much longer are these postponements?”
“Longer,” he said. “I’m not ready to put a number on the days, but I’ll work hard to be here around your schedule. And make weekends work when you’re free, too. I suppose when you have some days off, you can join me in San Francisco.”
“Time and distance test the strength of a relationship,” I parroted. I was sure I had told him my father had said that to my mother when she complained about how much he was on the road selling dental equipment. But did I mean it as a warning? Had I embellished it? He smiled and shook his head.
“I agree. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, but I can’t grow any fonder of you than I am,” he countered.
I scowled with skepticism. “What’s to say they won’t make you stay up there once you’ve set it up?”
“They already know I won’t. Not unless you tell me you’re working for a hospital there.”
“Even if they offered you a partnership?”
“I’ve got a better one here with you,” he said.
Who would be sweeter and more loving? I thought. I almost told him the secret of my stalker just to please him, but now I thought it would make him even more nervous to go away and do his work. Besides, I could handle it, I told myself. Stop worrying.
Couldn’t I?
“Are you upset?” he asked.
“No. Yes,” I confessed. “But I’ll deal with it.”
“Just don’t consider it a STAT.”
“I won’t,” I promised.
“Or fill the empty space with some other distraction, especially one that wears a jock.”
I looked toward the front door and my answering machine. He looked in the direction I was looking.
“What?” he asked.
“I was just imagining you coming through that door after a postponement,” I said.
He smiled and reached for my hand.
I didn’t want to lose this. There was a promise of a better life coming.
She can’t make trouble for me with Chandler, I thought. Can she?
Scarletta
DADDY CRIED THAT night. His sobbing woke me, or what sounded like his sobbing, so I got out of bed and went to my doorway to listen and be sure. I thought it might have just been a dream.
All our bedrooms were located upstairs. Our spiral stairway with mahogany banisters was one of the few things my mother hadn’t changed. She did replace the dark brown carpet with a light brown twist pile that was softer, something that terrified my grandmother when she first saw it. “My heels could get caught!” My father had to walk her up and down when she went up to see the changes my mother had completed in their bedroom.
My father and mother’s bedroom was on the east side of the house. She refused to use the bedroom my grandparents had, so now it was a room without furniture. She had removed all of it after my grandparents stopped coming to our house because they couldn’t travel anymore, even for a short visit. She claimed she was going to order a new bedroom set for guests, but she never had, and since we never had an overnight guest, Daddy didn’t pressure her to do so.
The room my mother had chosen for them was smaller, but there was no afternoon sun pouring through their windows. She didn’t like keeping the curtains closed in the afternoon and said she would have to if she had kept my grandparents’ room. She claimed the morning sun wasn’t as intense, but you still had to be cautious.
“The ultraviolet ages you,” she told me. “Even if you’re standing inside and it flows in through windows, it still washes over you and damages your skin.”
She didn’t walk about outside with an umbrella on sunny days like other people sensitive to sunlight, but she always wore a wide-brimmed hat. She was famous for it. Her favorite was a Maison Michel stripe band fedora. My friends would tell me they were positive they had seen my mother because they had caught a glimpse of the hat when they had driven by some shopping mall or store. Sometimes they would just catch a glimpse of the hat as she was getting into her car.
“Scarletta’s mom!” they would scream, as if they had just caught sight of a movie star.
Often she would wear it on cloudy days as well.
“The sun’s rays still come through,” she told me. “You’re never too young to protect your skin. It has memory, and years later, it will remind you what you have done to it. I want you to protect yourself, Scarletta. You’ll thank me when you’re my age.”
I knew my friends would laugh at me if I wore a hat anything like hers. At least she let me wear the hat that advertised our school’s football team. It had a long enough brim to satisfy her, but many times she made me put on sunscreen, even to go out and play with other kids on the street or in their yards when she permitted it. If there was a smudge of it on my nose or under it, they’d groan and call it disgusting.
I continued to stand in my doorway and listen for what had awoken me. There it was again. It hadn’t been a dream after all. Daddy wasn’t crying loudly; it was more like moaning. I hadn’t cried once yet. I was still in disbelief. It was inconceivable to me that my mother was gone forever. Only people who died were gone for good, but when I looked in her closet after dinner, I saw that the gown she had worn for the portrait wasn’t there. That convinced me she was gone, more than anything Daddy had said. Yet I wondered, why take a gown you never wore again and probably never would? She might as well have put it in a glass display case like the gowns of kings and queens in museums.
I wanted to go to my father and get him to stop being so sad, but I decided he wouldn’t like me to see him crying again. I was about to turn back to my bed when I was suddenly sure that I was hearing whispering. Was my mother back? Had it all been some silly mistake?
Full of hope, I tiptoed to the doorway of my parents’ bedroom. The hallway was always dimly lit by two chandeliers my mother had bought. She had replaced the larger ones, declaring that the hall “looked like a shopping center.” Both my grandparents had wanted it that way because of their failing eyesight.
My parents’ bedroom door was partially opened. I pushed it softly so I could look further in. My mother believed in creating what was known as a feng shui bedroom, a room that would invite the harmony of sensual energy. I understood that my grandparents thought it was ridiculous, some sort of voodoo. Not many people knew about it. My father didn’t talk about it, apparently, and my mother never brought a dinner guest upstairs to see the bedrooms.
I remembered her convincing my father of the changes by telling him their bedroom should invite a good night’s sleep but also encourage the making of love, “something your parents rarely did.” I wasn’t sure what it all meant at the time, but I thought encouraging love had to be a good thing. Why wouldn’t my grandparents have liked that? Weren’t they in love?
My mother insisted that taking out the television set had to be done first. Daddy loved lying in bed and watching television, but if that was what she wanted him to do, that was what he would do. “Your mother is the captain of the ship when it comes to the house,” he told me.
She then had him remove all the plants from the bedroom and put in an air purifier. The biggest change she made was to move their furniture around so the bed was not in line with the door. She stripped away their bedding and had the sheets, pillowcases, and blankets all changed to what she called skin colors, sort of pale white. She replaced the art with pictures that
had men and women embracing and kissing. After a certain hour, she wouldn’t permit any light but candlelight, except in their bathroom. I really didn’t understand any of it but was afraid to ask any questions. She was still fuming from my grandmother’s comments.
At breakfast one morning, I heard my mother complain about my father’s leaving their en suite bathroom door open after they had both used it. If he came home late from some meeting and she was already asleep, he’d be quiet, but in the morning, she’d see he had left the bathroom door open and bawl him out for it.
“You’re letting the positive energy escape,” she said, her eyes big to emphasize how angry that made her. I remember thinking, Is positive energy something you can see? Why can’t I see it, too? Is it something only husbands and wives see?
He apologized and promised to improve, but occasionally, he forgot, and she pounced each time, her voice louder, sharper. She accused him of not wanting passion and love in their bedroom enough. I recalled her doing that recently and wondered now if that was a reason for her finding someone else and leaving. All the positive energy was gone. Why should she stay with him?
When I gazed into the bedroom, I saw the bathroom door was closed, and I heard the air purifier running. I shifted so I could see the bed. At first, because of the angle, I saw only my father, but he was on his side and turned, bracing himself on his elbow so he’d be looking down at my mother as if she was there.
Was she?
I quietly stepped into the doorway to get a better view. I was surprised that she had left her favorite hat behind. My father had placed it on her pillow in their oversize king-size bed that he’d had custom made in an elegant gold oak. It was modeled on a baroque bed she had seen in Italy. He used to sing an old song to her: “Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets.” She didn’t care if he teased her as long as he did or got her what she wanted.
The Silhouette Girl Page 5
