“Hey,” he said. “They gave in and offered me the partnership here. They’re sending someone else to run the San Francisco office.”
“Oh, how great, Chandler.”
“We have a helluva lot to celebrate tomorrow. What are you going to do after work today?”
“Some shopping I’ve put off.”
He was silent.
“Stop worrying. I’ll be fine.”
“Yes, you will,” he said. “I love you, Pru.”
There it was, almost like throwing down the gauntlet, not that he was challenging me to do something deadly to one of us. Sometimes marriages turned out to be more like duels, but I truly believed this was going to be different, this was going to be like being reborn. We change so much from childhood to adulthood. Becoming Mrs. Harris had the ring of a real deliverance.
“I love you,” I said. I hadn’t said it much in my life to anyone, and when I did, I was never sure I was convincing. I immediately wondered if I had sounded too matter-of-fact. Either sound like you mean it or don’t say it, I thought. It’s not the same as “Have a good day.”
“Love you,” I trailed into good-bye. Good rewrite.
When I hung up, I saw those roses on the coffee table in the living room. I had nearly forgotten them and how they lay there at my door.
Why punish them? I thought, and went to fill a vase with water.
Then I showered and dressed. When I put on my uniform, I thought about my affair in nursing school.
My revelations last night had vividly restored the memories. It was truly like putting your life on replay. Chandler regretting making me do it, but it was like releasing a bird from its cage. It was too late to change your mind.
Her name was Natasha, but she was known as Tasha. From the start, I could see how hard it was for her to take her eyes off me. Before long, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. At night, I’d see her eyes in my sleep, see her soft smile and the way she held a cup or tossed her hair before she stood. The whiff of her cologne lasted for hours and hours in my mind. I thought green was her color and told her so. I told her she didn’t need lipstick, not with those natural ruby lips. Eventually, I counted the freckles on her cheeks and advised her not to powder them until they were unseen. “They’re really not unattractive.”
Her parents were relatively recent immigrants from Estonia. She was only two when they had come over, so their accent was more influential than the accents of children her age as she grew. She couldn’t lose it. She was quite self-conscious about it, but I told her I loved it.
“It makes you exotic.”
She had silky Capri brown hair and startlingly beautiful green-blue eyes. An inch or so taller than I was, she looked like a ballet dancer, with her long legs, small waist, and beautifully proportioned breasts. There was something sexy about her long neck. I recalled the first time I touched it and then brought my lips to it.
Right from the start of our friendship, my compliments encouraged her gestures of affection. We were attending Emory University’s Neil Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing in Atlanta, and we each had a one-bedroom apartment at the Exchange, an apartment complex there. Only a week after we had met, we talked about the possibility of sharing a two-bedroom as soon as one became available. We had lunch together daily and separated ourselves from the other girls. When we were together like that, I heard no other voice but hers. I thought it was the same for her.
The first time my fingers entwined with hers, my heart raced. Our mutual laughter was a classical melody. Our groans were equally deep. Emotionally, we were duplicates. I began to have no doubt that she dreamed the same dream. Even our silhouettes clung to each other.
So despite how insignificant I made it all sound to Chandler, it was an experience that had a profound effect on me. I was always challenged by my sexuality, my inclinations. Any failed relationship with a man afterward was most likely mostly my fault. That was why I found Chandler so refreshing, so important. It was truly as if he had restored my confidence in my heterosexuality, not that I wouldn’t have had a gay relationship, maybe even a marriage, if that was what I was inclined to do. But I would never say that, never even hint at it now. I was afraid to do even the smallest thing that might put a dent in our relationship.
I had already said too much to him. My father was right. Every reference to someone else you were attracted to was like a needle to the heart of the one you loved and who loved you. Jealousy was an insatiable monster, never weakened, never put aside. It rode unseen on your shoulders and raged in your ear any chance it had.
When I arrived at the hospital today, I said nothing to anyone about my engagement. However, the moment someone saw the ring on my finger, the news was spread. Ironically, it was Belinda Spoon who first approached me, looking like she thought I had succeeded in a major accomplishment. She was genuinely impressed, but the more she asked about it, the more I understood what she was really thinking.
“No one knew you was seein’ someone steady like,” she said.
They didn’t think I was capable of a relationship, I thought.
“Yes.” I smiled. “No one knew.”
“That looks expensive.”
“It is.”
“Where’d ya meet him?”
“In the hospital.”
“Thought so,” she said, smirking. When she smirked, she ballooned her already quite ballooned cheeks.
“He wasn’t a patient or a relative of a patient, Belinda,” I said pointedly. “I didn’t exploit anyone to get engaged.”
“So who is he? An administrator or somethin’?”
“No. He’s an attorney and has nothing to do with Cedars. What else did they send you to find out?”
“No one sent me nowhere,” she said indignantly. “I just come to say congratulations.”
“Thank you.”
“Yeah,” she said, and sauntered off to report.
Now that it was known, however, what little information Belinda had wasn’t enough. The questions began coming. How long were you seeing him? Where does he practice law? Why kind of law? How old is he? Do you have wedding plans set? Is he from here? Wherever I was on the floor, there was someone remarking about my ring and following it with one of those questions. I wasn’t one to be chatty before, and I wasn’t going to be chatty now. Like always, I was focused on my work, my patients.
Someone told Dr. Moffet, one of the cardiologists, who seemed truly happy for me. He was very efficient and intolerant of mistakes, minor or otherwise. I thought he had the highest regard for me. When others saw him congratulate me, they seemed to soften. It was as if my getting engaged proved I was actually human or something. Maybe a few were hoping I’d get married and quit.
Almost the moment I ended my shift, Chandler called my mobile. I was almost to my car.
“Hey, how did it go?” he asked.
“Nothing about my work has changed, Chandler. No worries. Except your ring was a hit.”
“You mean your ring,” he said. “I’m glad. I have a dinner meeting in the Valley.”
“I’m off to do some shopping.”
He was silent.
“Everything is fine.”
“I’ll be over as soon as I’m done. I’ve already packed my things. We’ll try to get to Palm Springs for lunch, okay?”
“Okay. I’ll get my overnight bag done before you’ve arrived.”
“Pre-honeymoon coming up,” he said.
I was looking forward to the getaway. The desert promised sunshine, warm fresh air, and lots of spontaneity. It was good to have days with no schedules. It was like unlocking and discarding chains. Right now, I was off to do the shopping I’d told Chandler I was going to do.
I needed some new panties, new walking shoes, perhaps something nice to wear in Palm Springs, and some toiletries. Unlike most women I knew, I didn’t like shopping. I hated to be presented with choices. There seemed to be more and more variety of everything, and I didn’t trust the salespeople to give me a truth
ful reaction to my choices. Everything looked good on me as long as I bought it.
Most of the women I knew went on shopping sprees with friends who reinforced their decisions. They had lunch together and shared much of their lives. It was more of a social event. For me, it was more of a chore, something I did rather quickly, focused, with purpose, but from time to time, I envied them, despite how critical I could sound about their chatty gossip and what I considered to be wasted time. I thought about my friends in high school and how different I was from just about all of them. It was never easy for me to make friends, especially a best friend.
On my way home, I found myself actually singing along with Cher and then Pink, until I parked and started up the stairs to my apartment. There was just the slightest hesitation in my steps. I held my breath until I reached the second floor and looked anxiously at my door. There was nothing there and no one waiting, but I didn’t take a breath until I opened the door and stepped in. I breathed out but along with a small, birdlike cry that stung like needles in my ears.
The light was blinking.
Chandler would hear her voice for the first time, I thought. Maybe that would be good. I put my purse down and pushed the Play button.
I know what he did to you. He’ll pay.
I actually felt myself freeze in place. I seemed incapable of raising my arms. How could she know? Did she follow him and see him come here? Did she approach him afterward? Did she have a way to make him confess? What did she mean by “pay”?
One thing was quite clear to me.
If Chandler heard this message, he would have to be told everything. What would that do to our newborn happiness? How could we go anywhere to celebrate anything? What would he think of me? I had let Douglas Thomas in. I had drunk the champagne with him. I still had his pearls. Did I enjoy his coming on to me? Was he the only patient with whom something like this occurred? I could see the pained expression on his face as he thought aloud, “Do I really know you, know who you are?”
I glanced at my watch. Chandler would be here any minute. “Was there a message?” would probably be his first question when he entered the apartment.
No, I thought. She will not ruin things for me. NO!
I erased her message.
Now the only light blinking came from the embers of rage and fear that burned inside my chest.
Scarletta
CHET PALMER WAS eager to talk to me when I arrived at school the day after Jackie’s invitation. I suspected that she had probably come close to setting his mobile on fire with her exaggerated description of how eager I was to have sex with him. If he really wanted to be with me at her party because he had genuine feelings for me, why hadn’t he said anything to me first? Jackie had said he wouldn’t come to her party if I didn’t. Why hadn’t he ever tried to get to know me before this, even a few days before this? It smelled like a conspiracy. I knew I was the brunt of so many jokes she and her girlfriends often made about me.
If he wasn’t part of a plot, perhaps after the first five minutes with me, Chet would realize that Jackie was simply using me as a means to guarantee her path to Sean Connor and that most of what she had said about me wasn’t true. Chet knew he was good-looking enough to have any girl in our school, or at least he believed he could.
Maybe I had been too eager to accept her party invitation. I had to seriously consider what Jackie might be telling him about me, possibly describing me as my father had suggested other kids, especially boys, think of a girl from a broken home: an easy girl to seduce. Of course, he might have already convinced himself that was true.
Was it true? Was I so broken and vulnerable that I was easy pickings? Could everyone tell? Was I so oblivious to how I appeared to others? Could anyone read the pain that swam in my eyes and my desperate need to stop it?
When the foundation of your world crumbles, you reach out for anything that will keep you from falling deeper. Would I be like someone so depressed that she turned to heavy alcohol or drugs? Was sex just another drug now? Was that the way it was for other girls in situations like mine? It seemed a natural turn to make once you had lost faith in family and real love. The world was full of hypocrisy, and right now the biggest lie of all uttered seemed to be “ ’Til death do us part.” Why believe in anything more than quick pleasure and satisfaction?
I could almost feel Chet’s self-confidence as he was approaching me. Sean Connor had nodded in my direction the moment I came through the school entrance. Chet had instantly broken away from the huddle he and Sean had formed with their friends in the hallway just before homeroom began. They looked like a football team planning their next play. When they all turned toward me and leered, I was convinced I was the new hot topic for their locker-room conversation.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him coming, but I didn’t slow down or divert my attention from my homeroom doorway. I wasn’t going to be some fish on a hook. A part of me wanted to run out of another exit and keep running and running until I had escaped my life as it now was. Since our community had learned what my mother had done, I knew I would feel the sting of eyes on me wherever I went. I thought that at any moment I’d break out in hives, and a chorus of ridiculing laughter would follow me everywhere today, maybe follow me forever.
“Hey, hold up, beautiful,” Chet said, and I paused so I wouldn’t look like some pitiful, fearful little girl terrified of boys, a wallflower who was asked to dance and would tremble in the arms of any boy.
I turned slowly and tried as hard as I could not to look even slightly impressed and grateful for his attention. “Excuse me?”
“Why are you in such a rush to get in the cages?” He laughed at what he thought was his cleverness.
Despite my effort to be unenthusiastic, I knew I would have to be a stuffed doll not to react to his exquisite grayish-blue eyes. Sexy wasn’t an adequate description of his way of looking at me. It was as if we were beyond looks and words. Polite preliminaries had been skipped over long ago. Anyone looking at us would easily believe we were already an intimate couple.
Maybe I was being too sensitive, or maybe I was being too hopeful. I could feel that in his mind, he was already seeing me naked. His gaze moved like fingers up my legs to my stomach, hesitating and then going to my breasts as he drew closer, practically bringing his lips to mine. For a moment, I thought he really did mean to cup my face between his hands and kiss me as if we had been going together for months. What would I do then? Be outraged or be flattered? I was in a full-blown argument with myself.
At six foot two, Chet Palmer was a star on our basketball team. Girls might swoon over him, but I believed that most boys would be envious and compete for his attention even more. Maybe they couldn’t help wondering why they didn’t have his build, his confident gait, his athletic abilities and his good looks. Scholastically, he was an average student, but from what I had witnessed, even his teachers fawned over him more than they did over their better students. He swam confidently through wave after wave of jealousy. In fact, he welcomed all of it.
Why was I surprised at my indecision? He was charming. His smile twinkled with his captivating eyes. You felt more important when he spoke to you, even if it was to ask a simple question, as simple as “What time is the school assembly?” There was no doubt about all that, but I couldn’t stop remembering what my father had warned me about, and then I imagined how my mother would react to someone like Chet. Perhaps she would always be my touchstone, and I would never stop measuring myself against her standards. Admittedly, it was comforting.
Arrogant men set off alarm bells in her. She was a woman who always wanted the upper hand, even in a chance meeting on the sidewalk, in a mall, or in a restaurant. If she was in my place right now, I had little doubt that she would give Chet Palmer that side glance and wink at me the way she did when men would come on to her, their compliments cascading around her. Sometimes she would tease them, pretend she was soooo appreciative and even overwhelmed, and then she would turn away and l
augh, bringing a smile to my face.
“Men like that are the ones who are easy, not us,” she would tell me. “You draw them in by pretending you are so dazed by them, and then you sting them with a truthful criticism or a biting comment about their looks, their clothes, or their obvious intentions, and leave them stuttering and stumbling. Honesty is often too big a pill for them to swallow. Unless,” she added with that casual swipe of her hand, “you want him. Then you keep your real thoughts behind your smile like a geisha girl keeps her face behind a pretty fan.”
Once she even went so far as to confess that was how she had won my father’s love and devotion. Can you love someone you have deceived?
“I’m not in any particular rush,” I told Chet now, “and I don’t see my classrooms as cages.”
Chet widened his smile and moved even closer. The toes of our shoes practically touched.
“Glad you’re coming to Jackie’s party. I thought you were ignoring me this past week. It almost gave me a complex,” he said.
This past week? I thought. Would it break his heart right here and now for me to say I had never noticed, that I had never really thought about him until Jackie mentioned him on the phone? It would certainly give him pause. Maybe that was what he needed, a little weight on his shoulders to bring him back to earth.
“Ignoring you? What would make you think that?” I asked, looking sincerely interested.
“C’mon. Every time I smiled at you, you turned away.”
“Probably didn’t see anything different from the way you smile at other girls,” I said. Good sting, I thought, and imagined my mother smiling.
His smile lost some of its brightness. “Well, what do I have to do, light up like a sparkler?”
“That would capture my attention, yes. Work on it,” I said, and he laughed.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw all the girls with Jackie looking our way. They giggled and grinned at each other like they knew my inevitable future with Chet Palmer. It annoyed me. The whole school was involved in this little scheme, all of them confident of my gullibility.
The Silhouette Girl Page 17
