He must have been surprised the night she’d approached him. In the year and a half they’d been acquainted, the most intimate conversation they’d ever had involved an analysis of the pretzels being served at a party they’d both attended. Brad had argued that they were stale, and Daphne had maintained that they were still edible. From such dialogues great love affairs rarely blossomed.
What they’d had wasn’t a great love affair. It was one night, one truncated, vaguely sordid night, the kind of night that left you with a hangover not just in your head but in your soul.
It all began with the call Daphne had gotten that afternoon. Her parents had phoned her with the splendid news that Helen was engaged to be married. Daphne wasn’t the type of woman to begrudge her sister such happiness, even if Helen was two years younger than Daphne. She was in no hurry to get married; if Helen wanted to tie the knot before she turned twenty-one, that was all right with Daphne.
What demolished her was that Helen’s fiance was Dennis Marlow. Dennis, the boy next door, the boy—and then the man—with whom Daphne had been madly in love ever since the day his family had moved into the house next to hers when she was twelve. She and Dennis had done everything as a twosome: walked, and later driven, to school together, collaborated on science projects, swapped comic books and perused copies of girlie magazines purloined from Dennis’s father’s night table. They’d shared each other’s rock-and-roll CD’s, helped each other with their homework, provided alibis for each other when one of them was in trouble.
As they got older, they’d discovered the facts of life together. They’d kissed, they’d touched, they’d experimented. They’d been such good friends, such inseparable pals that it had seemed perfectly natural for them to learn about their bodies together.
But for Daphne, it had been more than simply youthful experimentation. She had loved Dennis. He’d loved her too, she supposed, but as far as he was concerned, it hadn’t really been a romantic love. Daphne had been his buddy, his fellow explorer. The incestuous implications notwithstanding, he’d ultimately come to think of her as a sister.
Or, more precisely, a sister-in-law. After all they’d been through, Dennis decided that the woman he truly desired wasn’t Daphne but her kid sister. Daphne, he would later explain to her, was the greatest, terrific, one in a million, the best friend a guy could have. What he didn’t need to explain was that she wasn’t petite and pretty, aspiring to devote her life totally to a man and ask only for his affection in return. Daphne wasn’t Helen.
The news of Helen’s engagement agonized Daphne. She shut herself up inside her dormitory room, refusing to speak to anyone until Andrea and Phyllis picked the lock and forced their way inside. When she told them what had happened, they supplied her with tissues and compassion. They hugged her, they commiserated, they fed her M & M peanuts. They took turns inventing gruesome ends for Dennis—to which Daphne would object, “But then Helen’ll wind up a widow!” or “But then she’ll have to go without sex for the rest of her married life!”
“Forget about Helen,” Andrea exhorted Daphne. “Forget about them both. Eric’s frat is having a party tonight. Come on, get smashed and forget about the whole thing.”
“Men aren’t worth it,” Phyllis added knowingly. “Look how many times I’ve had my heart broken—and how many times I’ve recovered. I know whereof I speak, Daffy—men suck, and they aren’t worth crying over. Come to the party with us, Daff. It’ll do you some good to get out and shop around. A few beers, and you’ll be saying, ʻDennis who?’”
Daphne let them talk her into it. After dinner that night, she accompanied Phyllis and Andrea across the hilly, frozen campus to the fraternity house where Eric and his friends lived. In the rec room in the house’s finished basement, the jukebox was blasting lively dance music and kegs of beer were being emptied at a rapid clip. Daphne rarely refused a glass of beer during her college days, and every now and then she’d indulge in a second or even a third glass.
That night, she didn’t bother to count how many glasses she indulged in.
The air in the frat house basement was warm and humid, and the lighting was kept to a minimum. Bodies gyrated on the dance floor at the center of the room, where all the furniture had been cleared away. The volume of the jukebox was cranked way up, causing the chairs and benches shoved up against the walls to tremble slightly whenever a bass riff was played.
Thinking back on it, Daphne would remember little else about the party itself. What she would remember most vividly was that the basement was stuffy and noisy, that the only two solutions to these problems she could come up with were to drink more beer and to leave the party, and that when the first solution began to pall she turned to the second.
She staggered out the door and down a short hallway to the stairs. Brad Torrance was seated on the bottom step, rolling up the sleeves of his shirt. “Hey, Daffy,” he greeted her amiably, craning his neck up to view her. He didn’t bother to stand in her presence.
“How come you’re out here?” she asked, pleasantly surprised that she wasn’t slurring her words.
“It’s too hot in there,” he said. He lifted a sweater from the step beside him. “Can you believe I was wearing this? I came out here to cool off.”
“It’s much more comfortable out here.”
“Yeah.” Belatedly, Brad rose to his feet. Daphne noticed that he’d opened the top two buttons of his shirt. He had a nice neck, she reflected, strong but not too thick, rising elegantly from the horizontal ridge of his shoulders. All in all, he was a knock-out. A bit too good looking for her, but she definitely wouldn’t kick him out for eating crackers.
It dawned on Daphne, as she contemplated Brad’s wonderfully proportioned physique and dimpled smile, that Dennis Marlow wasn’t the only man in the world. In her besotted condition, this thought struck her as a profound revelation.
“Well, I’ve got to take this up to my room before somebody rips it off,” Brad declared, shaking the wrinkles out of the sweater.
“I’ll come with you,” Daphne invited herself. Sober, she would never have suggested such a thing. But that night, she was drunk and she didn’t care. All she wanted was to forget about Dennis, forget she’d ever loved him, forget that her sister was more desirable than she was. All she wanted was for Brad to prove to her that, despite Dennis’s rejection of her, she was still a woman worthy of a man’s attention.
It was a hell of a lot to want, but at the time Daphne didn’t think she was asking for too much.
Brad weighed her offer for a minute, then shrugged. “Sure. Come on up if you’d like,” he said, stepping aside so she could join him on the stairs.
His room was on the top floor of the fraternity house, in a converted attic room beneath the eaves. He’d gone to some effort to decorate it. A framed Modigliani nude gazed across the room from the wall above the bed, a rug had been thrown over the linoleum floor and matching curtains framed the dormer windows. The room was tidy, books and papers stacked neatly on the desk and toiletries lined up in a row on top of the bureau. The bed was made. In retrospect, it would occur to Daphne that Brad might have straightened up his room and made his bed because he’d been planning to pick up a woman at the party and bring her upstairs. He’d been planning to score.
In retrospect, lots of things would occur to her. But not then. She wanted to be beyond thinking that night.
Brad folded his sweater and placed it in a bureau drawer. Then he crossed to his desk and opened another drawer. “Would you like a drink?” he asked, switching on the fluorescent lamp above the blotter.
“Okay,” Daphne said stupidly.
Brad pulled an already open bottle of wine from the desk drawer and tugged out the cork. Then he turned off the overhead light, leaving most of the room in shadow. He led Daphne to the bed and they sat together on it, side by side. He filled two ceramic mugs with wine and handed one to her.
They didn’t talk. They sipped their wine, sitting so close on the mattress that
their thighs nearly touched. Daphne stared at the small pool of bluish light the fluorescent lamp spilled onto the surface of the desk. She wondered why she couldn’t taste the wine she was drinking, why she couldn’t feel Brad next to her. She wondered why she felt so cold.
Eventually, Brad set his mug down on the floor beside the bottle. When he removed Daphne’s mug from her hand to put on the floor with his, she didn’t protest. He slid his arms around her, kissed her, and eased her backward on the bed until she was lying underneath him.
She wanted to enjoy it—or else to block the whole thing out, to put her mind on hold and pretend none of it was occurring. But she failed on both counts. She remained painfully conscious of Brad’s weight on her, of his hands peeling off her clothing and his, of his warm, damp breath tickling the skin of her shoulder in a tortuous way.
Daphne suffered from more than just the constant, almost abrasive tickle of his breath. There was the scratchiness of his unshaven chin as he nuzzled her neck. The pain of his knee digging into the soft flesh of her thigh. The pressure of his hard chest smashing down onto her breasts. The stinging pinch at her scalp when his fingers got snared in the tangled curls of her hair. His aimless kisses, landing here and there, without purpose or effect.
Yet she remained where she was, doing her inebriated best to return his kisses and to shift out of the way of his bony knees. She remained in the hope that things would improve, that gradually everything would start to feel better. She stayed because Brad had such beautiful eyes and she hoped that somehow, perhaps, those beautiful eyes would transform the experience into something equally beautiful.
They didn’t, of course. It wasn’t beautiful. It was embarrassingly quick and bad, and when it was over, Daphne felt more sober than she’d ever felt in her life.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled, practically shoving him away from her and sitting.
“Hey,” he said hoarsely, extending his arm. “You don’t have to go.”
“Yes, I do,” she insisted, too chagrined to look at him. At that moment, she hated them both for having done what they did—and for having done it so poorly. She was unable to escape from herself, but she could escape from Brad, and her only aim at that point was to flee from him before he found out how much she hated him.
His hand alighted on her leg, but he couldn’t prevent her from leaving. She swung off the bed, resenting her sudden sobriety because it forced her to acknowledge the most peculiar details of his room, imbedding them in her memory so she’d never be able to forget. The wine they’d been drinking was a Mosel; the mugs had the college logo imprinted on them; the book on the top of the pile on Brad’s desk was Volume One of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. Brad’s blanket was the same heavenly blue color as his eyes.
Another thing she would never forget was that Brad didn’t beg her to stay. He didn’t even ask her to stay. All he said was, “You don’t have to go,” as if the choice were totally hers.
If it was, she was willing to make it. She left the fraternity house, went back to her dorm, took a long, scalding shower and then got into bed, burrowed deep beneath the blankets, and wept.
That ghastly night had occurred in late February, which meant Daphne had to spend only three more months on the same campus with Brad before they both graduated and went their separate ways. When they saw each other during those three final months, Brad did a better job than Daphne of acting as if nothing of any significance had ever transpired between them—which led Daphne to believe that to Brad, the incident had had no significance at all. But even when he was pretending friendliness toward her, he never looked directly into her eyes. He always steered his gaze to just above hers, as though he were fascinated with her forehead. And after he asked her one or two banal “how’s-it-going” questions, he always shifted his attention away, as if he couldn’t bear to hear her answers.
She recovered. Daphne imagined that most people had done some horrendous, mortifying, utterly moronic thing at least once in their lives, and those people with a sane approach to life ultimately put the memory of whatever they’d done into deep storage and moved on. If it were possible to go back and correct one’s mistakes, Daphne would gladly do it. She’d go back to that night, refuse every glass of beer she was offered, talk for a few minutes with Brad about how stuffy the basement room was, and then, when he said he wanted to take his sweater upstairs, she would respond, “Okay, Brad. See you later,” and march back into the stuffy basement room in search of someone to dance with.
But it wasn’t possible to go back, so Daphne did what she could: she went forward.
“When are you going to show me a house?” Brad asked.
Daphne shot him a quick look. He didn’t appear bored as he lounged in the passenger seat next to her, but he was obviously eager to see some residences. “Right now,” she said, turning back onto Bloomfield Avenue and scanning her wristwatch. A few minutes past eleven o’clock. They’d have time before lunch to look at a six-year-old ranch house she’d recently listed. At $410,000, it was absurdly overpriced, but then everything in this part of New Jersey was.
Maybe Brad would like it. Maybe after looking at it and a few other houses Daphne intended to show him, he’d think of her as a woman who was much too sensible to drink a lot of beer and jump into bed with a man.
Not that Daphne gave a damn about what Brad thought of her, of course. Not that she cared the least bit.
Chapter Three
AS IT TURNED OUT, they managed to look at two houses before lunch. They spent less than fifteen minutes at the ranch house; Brad stalked through the six small rooms, poked his head into the narrow bathroom, and stormed out the front door, grumbling that anyone who’d pay in excess of four hundred thousand dollars for such a tiny house had to have a screw loose somewhere.
“I warned you,” Daphne admonished him. “The housing prices are really inflated around here.”
“It’s not that I’m unwilling to pay four hundred thousand dollars,” Brad defended himself. “But I’d like to get something more than a one-toilet shack for the money.”
His comment didn’t bode well. Around these parts, a second bathroom could add upwards of fifty thousand dollars to a house’s price.
Hoping to put him in a more receptive mood before they took a break for lunch, Daphne drove him to a townhouse she had among her listings in one of the elite condominium complexes. For a price comparable to that of the ranch house, he could get two full bathrooms there. The master bathroom even had a sunken marble tub.
“Four-twenty, and you don’t get a private yard?” he griped.
“That’s the concept behind a condominium,” she reminded him, her patience beginning to wane. “No private yard means you don’t have to mow your lawn or weed your flower beds.”
“What the hell do I need a marble tub for?” he muttered, marching out of the building and heading down the winding front walk toward Daphne’s car. “I never take baths. I’m a shower person.”
In an effort to mollify him, she brought him to one of the more expensive restaurants in Verona for lunch. They didn’t have to wait long to be seated, and as soon as a waitress neared their table, Brad requested a scotch on the rocks.
“Iced tea,” Daphne said when the waitress asked if she wanted a drink. The waitress left them with menus and departed.
“You’re going to make me drink alone,” Brad deduced, his tone laced with suspicion.
Given that Daphne no longer partook of liquor, her companions invariably had to drink alone. “I don’t drink when I’m working,” she explained. It wasn’t the whole truth, but it wasn’t a lie, either.
Brad leaned back in his chair and regarded her across the linen-covered table. “Is that your strategy? You get your client smashed, and he’ll agree to buy anything for any price.”
Daphne smiled demurely. “I have the feeling, Brad, that no matter how smashed you got, you’d still put up a fuss about a house you considered overpriced.”
“In other words, any
house around here.”
She held onto her smile, refusing to let him rile her. She knew that, given the comfortable income he’d be earning in his new position, he could afford any of the houses she planned to show him today. And he couldn’t be as shocked about the prices as he pretended to be—he’d insisted that he was aware of the inflated housing costs in the area. All of which meant that what was bugging him was something essentially unrelated to the house and the condo Daphne had shown him.
What was bugging him, she surmised, was the identity of the real estate broker showing him the houses.
The waitress arrived with their drinks and asked if Daphne and Brad were ready to order their meals. Daphne lifted her menu, skimmed it and asked for a bowl of gazpacho and a garden salad. Brad cast her an unreadable glance, then took her menu from her, handed it along with his to the waitress and requested a hamburger. “Are you on a diet?” he asked Daphne once they were alone again.
Daphne scrutinized him carefully. She studied the smooth fall of his glossy black hair across his high brow, the square shape of his jaw, the thin line of his lips, the brilliant blue radiance of his eyes, and finally his neck. It was still one of the nicest necks she’d ever seen on a man. It was the sort of neck that tempted a woman to graze it with her lips—if she was sober and responsible, and if he was more than passively receptive.
“What makes you think I’m on a diet?” she asked. She had hoped her voice would emerge sounding amiably detached, but it didn’t. She came across as petulant, as if she were eager to rise to Brad’s unspoken challenge and wear as big a chip on her shoulder as he was wearing on his.
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