“Well, I guess it makes sense.” She dunks a teabag absentmindedly in the cup.
“I’m glad it does to someone.”
I slide onto my stool at the bar, and when Mac comes down to say hi, I tell him about Richard.
“How’s he doing?”
“I guess okay. It actually happened Thursday night, and she didn’t call me till four o’clock this morning.”
He leans across the bar for a quick kiss. “How’s she holding up?”
“Good. At least she sounds good. I mean, what do I know? I can’t believe she didn’t call me sooner.”
“Maybe she wanted to know something definite to tell you. So you wouldn’t worry.”
“She told me not to come home. Don’t you think that’s weird?”
“Mac! We need another pitcher of Miller.”
He goes off to take another pitcher of beer to a table of guys. When he comes back I say, “She wants me to come for Christmas.”
He reaches for a tray of clean glasses and starts polishing them with a towel and putting them upside down on the plastic shelf liner.
“I was wondering if you might want to come. I know it wouldn’t be terribly interesting, but I know she’d like to meet you, and there are a few fun things we could do in L.A….”
He doesn’t look up. “I’d like to, but I don’t think I can get off that long.”
“We wouldn’t have to stay more than a couple of days. I can’t take off too much time either, but maybe…”
“I’ll check with Harte and let you know.” When he sticks the empty rack under the rinse sink without making eye contact, I realize it isn’t going to happen.
“Forget it. I can tell you don’t want to go.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s just that the holidays are usually busy, and since I just started back again, Kenny’s got first choice. Besides that, it’s a lot of money just to go for a couple of days—”
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay. It obviously bothers you that I can’t go.”
“No. It bothers me that you don’t want to go and you can’t just tell me.”
He slaps his damp towel on the bar. “Okay. I don’t want to go to L.A. Is that what you want me to say?”
“I want you to say what you mean, not a bunch of bullshit excuses.”
“Fine.” He walks over to wait on someone.
I twirl my wineglass around and watch him talking to a couple of guys at the bar. Laughing as if we haven’t just had our first real disagreement. How do men compartmentalize everything so neatly? They file you away in that relationship box and nothing in there affects any other part of their lives.
Why the hell didn’t we just stay friends? That felt reasonably good. We had fun. I could tell him anything. Of course, he never told me very much about himself, but it didn’t matter as much then. Now look at us. Throw some sex into the mix and it’s like putting too much yeast in bread. It’s all very fizzy and light and wonderful, but then it rises too high and can’t support its own weight and the whole thing falls flat.
“Why did you do this?” Mac stands in the front door, looking around the apartment. CM has gone with Glenna to see the Queen Anne High School production of The Nutcracker, and since I’m leaving for L.A. tomorrow morning right after work, I’ve invited him over to celebrate our Christmas tonight. Or maybe I neglected to mention the C word when I said I’d cook dinner.
I follow his gaze around the living room. Okay, so it looks like Winter Wonderland. CM and I splurged on a huge tree, since she’s not going home. We hung stockings and draped the mantel with pine garland. There are candles flickering softly, Christmas music on the stereo, mulling spices permeating the air…and of course, presents piled everywhere. The presents are kind of misleading, because they include CM’s for my mom and Richard, and mine for her parents and her sister Katie and Katie’s two kids, Kyle and Kelsey.
“Why did I do what?”
“This.” A nod of his head encompasses the whole room. “I thought we were just going to have dinner. We agreed—”
“Mac, this is what CM and I do at Christmas. You won’t be forced to participate against your will. I just thought it would be fun to have a nice dinner and some Christmas cookies and—”
“Sorry.” He shuts the door behind him and kisses me.
“Ooh, you’re cold. Did you walk over?”
“Yeah.” When he takes off his coat and hangs it on the back of a dining-room chair, I notice how thin and worn the wool is. “Elky’s in the shop.”
While he builds a fire, grumbling all the while about how a fireplace is a waste of wood because it’s just for show and doesn’t really heat a room, I fix two glasses of gluhwein, that sublime combination of warm red wine, sugar, citrus, and spices that my oma used to make in wintertime. The year I turned thirteen, just before Christmas, my father said that I was old enough to have one small glass. I remember how I hated the taste—it seemed sour after hot apple cider—but I loved the way it felt, the warmth radiating out from my stomach all the way into my fingers and toes.
We sit on the couch with our glasses, wrapping our hands around them to draw the heat, and he stares moodily at the flames.
“Mac, what’s wrong? Why are you so grouchy?”
“Sorry. I just don’t have a lot of warm, fuzzy feelings about Christmas, I guess.”
A laugh bubbles up in my throat, and he turns his face to me. “I wouldn’t say you have a lot of warm, fuzzy feelings about much of anything right now.”
His quick smile is like an unexpected present, warming me to my center, just like that first glass of gluhwein. “Except you,” he says. He puts down his glass and kisses me till all the little white lights on the tree seem to sparkle.
“Better stop that, or we’ll never make it to dinner.”
He kisses my throat, just under my chin. “Would that be so terrible?”
“Um, yes, because I made all this wonderful food.”
“Well, okay.” He nibbles my earlobe. “But you’re dessert.”
I drag myself away, into the kitchen, and he works the fire, stirring it into a roaring blaze. Then he takes the Christmas tape off and puts on the tape he made for me last year just before he went away. I smile as Dylan growls “Tangled Up in Blue.” When I come back to the living room, he’s standing in front of the bookshelves reading my birthday cards from my mom and Richard, CM, Tyler, Ellen, Misha, and Jen.
“Why didn’t you tell me it was your birthday? I didn’t even get you a card.”
“It’s not important.”
He looks at the cards all lined up on the shelf, then back to me.
“I think if that were true, you wouldn’t have them all on display. When was it?”
“The fifteenth, and CM’s the one who put the cards up there, when she was cleaning out the mail basket.”
Dinner, all modesty aside, is fabulous. The thinnest of veal scallops, sautéed in butter and white wine with mushrooms and prosciutto. Crusty roasted potatoes with rosemary, a salad of endive and arugula with walnuts and apple. Of course, pain au levain. To drink, a wonderful rosé champagne. And dessert is chocolate soufflés with chocolate-peppermint sauce and thin, crisp sugar cookies. We take our espresso into the living room, and Mac stretches out his long legs under the coffee table.
I wait patiently for him to make good on his promise that I’m dessert. CM’s spending the night with Glenna, and I’ve been entertaining myself with fantasies about her empty queen-size bed all day. But he sits staring at the fire.
“I know I’ve been kind of a pain in the ass lately. I’ve just been preoccupied. I guess ‘obsessed’ is probably a better word choice. Thinking about the agent. I hadn’t heard from him, so right after Thanksgiving I wrote him a letter and asked if he’d had a chance to read the manuscript.”
“And…?”
“I got a letter back right away. He apologized for taking so long, said he was still reading it, and that he’d get back to m
e. And I haven’t heard another damn word.”
“It hasn’t been that long since Thanksgiving,” I say gently. “And people are busy during the holidays.”
“Almost four weeks.” He draws a long breath and lets it out slowly. “It’s just making me nuts.” He looks over. “Sorry.”
“Have you sent it to anyone else?”
“No.”
“Don’t you think you should?”
“That’s what everyone says you should do. Blanket the earth with your manuscript.” He shakes his head. “I just had a good feeling about this guy.”
“I know it’s hard, but you have to try not to think about it. I’d say if you still haven’t heard from him by the end of January, call him.” I slip off my shoes and curl my legs up under me. “I wish you were going to L.A. with me.”
His eyes close and he rests his head on the back of the couch. “I don’t know. I just feel so damn useless.”
“Oh, come on. It’s a bad time, that’s all. The manuscript’s in limbo. It’s Christmas, which you’re obviously not into…”
He puts his arm around me and draws me against him, but he just sits there staring at the fire, which by now is mostly a bed of coals. After about ten minutes of silent staring, I get up and clear the dishes off the table. I load the dishwasher, and set it, and when I turn around he’s standing in the doorway with his coat on.
“I can’t stay,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
I want to tell him he’s being ridiculous, wasting our time, ruining the whole night, but what’s the point?
“Wait a second.”
From under the tree I grab the shopping bag that contains the Black Watch plaid flannel shirt I bought him, wrapped in silver foil and tied with a green ribbon.
“I told you not to do this.”
“I wasn’t listening. So just shut up and take it. It’s not a carved ivory chess set or anything.”
He takes the bag and kisses me. “I’ll see you next week,” he says, and makes his escape.
I zap what’s left of my gluhwein in the micro and sit on the couch listening to Christmas carols and wishing CM was coming home.
six
In spite of the red-and-green intarsia sweater, or maybe because of it, Richard looks pale and angular, a prototype for one of his own buildings.
“Hello, Wyn. We’re so glad you could come.” When I hug him, he feels frail, just skin stretched over a set of bones. “We’ve got your old room fixed up for you.”
I wonder briefly what that means. “I hope you didn’t go to a lot of trouble.”
My mother careens out of the kitchen holding a tray of glasses, door swinging in her wake. “Orange juice?” Her eyes glitter with forced brightness as her lips brush my cheek.
“How are you feeling?” I ask him.
“Pretty good.” He smiles. “Especially considering the alternative. How’s everything up north?”
“Oh, fine.”
“I’m sorry your…” My mother hesitates. “Do they still call them boyfriends? Anyway, I’m sorry he couldn’t come.”
I laugh. “He’s not a boy, and he’s not my friend. You can call him Mac. He couldn’t get enough days off.”
“What does he do?” Richard asks.
“He’s a bartender.”
“That’s an interesting job.”
“You said he was a writer, too,” my mother prompts me.
“Yes. He’s just finished a novel.”
“Does he have an agent?” Richard sips at his juice. Deep lines fan out around his eyes—lines I don’t remember seeing before.
“Someone’s looking at it right now, I think.”
“It’s tough breaking into publishing.” Richard crosses his arms. “You have to have the hide of a rhinoceros. Never give up. Jack London had a stack of rejections as tall as he was before he sold his first story.”
Thanks for sharing.
“But I’m sure Mac knows that,” my mother says quickly.
“Is he a Seattle native?”
“Actually, he’s from New York.”
“Really? Where did he go to school?”
“NYU.”
“I know some people there. Did he go through the creative writing program?”
“Actually, he dropped out after his sophomore year.” That lays a big, silent egg.
“Does his family still live in New York?”
“His father’s dead. His mother lives on Long Island, I believe. And his brother’s a lawyer. I think.”
I stare at the Christmas tree, a flocked one. Lots of the tiny white twinkle lights that are so trendy now. I don’t see any of our old ornaments. All these are made of metal or glass. My father would have hated it. The presents piled underneath are all wrapped in silver or gold with professional-looking bows or clusters of metallic stars and pinecones.
I drain my orange juice glass and stand up. “I’m really kind of tired. If it’s okay, I’d like to take a nap.”
“Of course.” My mother sounds relieved. “I’ll get you up in plenty of time for dinner.”
Richard stops halfway out of his chair, remembering that he can’t carry my bag upstairs for me. “I’m sorry.” He flushes deeply. “I’m pretty useless right now.”
His echo of Mac’s words is downright creepy.
I smile. “That’s okay. I’m used to slinging fifty-pound sacks of flour.”
When I drag my suitcase up the stairs and flip on the light in my room, my stomach contracts. It’s all gone. Everything that was mine. The place looks like some anonymous hotel room. An upscale hotel, to be sure, but it certainly doesn’t look like my room.
It’s all done in gray and white. My bed has been replaced with one of those daybed things that can be used as a couch. It’s made up with gray-and-white pin-striped sheets, a white knitted blanket, and a charcoal gray spread, turned back. The only color comes from a solid red, square decorator pillow. There’s a brushed-steel-and-glass table next to it that my ex-husband would love. A Tizio lamp and a clear glass vase that looks like a goldfish bowl, filled with red and purple anemones. The walls are upholstered in gray flannel and all my pictures are gone, my bulletin board replaced with black-and white architectural photographs in black frames.
“Isn’t it snazzy?” My mother is standing next to me, obviously proud of the transformation.
“It’s great.” I don’t look at her. “So where’s all my stuff?”
“Most of it’s in a couple of boxes in the closet. I thought you might—”
“Most?”
“Well, some of the newspaper clippings on the bulletin board just disintegrated when Richard took them down, so he had to throw them out.”
I swallow.
“He tried to save everything.” She lays her hand on my arm. “But some of it was so old…”
I turn to her. “It’s okay. I didn’t expect you to keep it like a shrine.”
I settle my bag on the chrome-and-black luggage rack, unzip the top and fold it back, resting it against the soft gray wall. I’m only half-listening to her saying she’ll wake me in an hour, telling me where to find the towels. She sits down on the edge of the bed, one leg tucked up under her long, black gabardine skirt. The evergreen cotton sweater accentuates the differences in her coloring and mine, makes her hair look even darker and her skin like porcelain.
“What’s the status with your divorce? Seems like it should be coming to some kind of conclusion by now.”
“Oh, it is,” I say vaguely. “Elizabeth is out of the office. I think she’s skiing in Austria or something. Of course that didn’t stop her bills from going out on time. I’m going to give her a call right after the first.”
She clasps her hands together around one knee. “You haven’t told me much about Mac.” I glance at her, trying to gauge exactly what kind of information she’s looking for.
“He’s…very different from David—”
“Johanna?” Richard calls from the foot of the stairs.
“Be
right down.” She stands up and kisses me on the cheek. “Get some rest. We’ll talk later.”
I wake up at four-thirty feeling stale and groggy. I turn the shower on hot, filling the bathroom with steam, and stand under it, letting water rain down on my back. By the time I’ve pulled on jeans and a sweater and brushed out my hair, it’s nearly six. I decide to forego makeup.
Perfumed with good food smells, the whole downstairs is an echo chamber of memories. There’s a fire burning in the fireplace, but no one’s in the den, so I shoulder through the swinging door to the kitchen and come face-to-face with one of my grossest lapses in judgment.
Gary lounges against the counter, sipping something out of one of those retro martini glasses that are suddenly back in vogue. Why am I so surprised? After all, he’s Richard’s son.
“Wyn!” When he kisses my cheek, I catch the drift of his subtly expensive cologne and a hint of gin. “You look terrific. Smell nice, too.”
“So do you.” It is the truth. Domesticity agrees with him. His sandy brown hair keeps getting shorter, his eyes seem bluer, his teeth more perfect, except for that endearing little chipped incisor that gives him the look of the roguish but essentially solid intern on a doctor-drama TV show.
He looks at me over the rim of his glass. “You obviously didn’t know I was coming.”
“Um, no. I didn’t, but I probably should have.” I open the cupboard where my mother used to keep wineglasses and it’s full of liquor bottles. Well, of course. Richard’s rearranged everything else in the damn house. Why not the kitchen? “Do you know where the wineglasses might be?”
He moves unerringly to the cupboard next to the fridge. “Red or white?”
“Red, please.”
He hands me an outsized bowl of a glass.
“Suppose I just want a drink, not a bath?”
He pulls the stopper from a crystal decanter and half-fills my glass with the garnet-colored wine.
“How are Erica and…the kids?” I’m embarrassed that I can’t remember their names. The soccer star and the cheerleader princess.
“They’re fine. Andrew and Katie are in a school pageant tonight.” He pronounces their names slowly and clearly for me. “I just came down to check on Dad, then I’m taking the red-eye back after dinner.”
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