by Tina Welling
Perry said, “The blond may be symbolic of it all—my real hair tends toward a dull rusty brown and the rest . . . You’ll see. And I’ll explain everything at lunch on Tuesday.”
What could possibly need explaining? She looked content and happy.
“Alex.” Perry waved. “Come meet my friends when you can.”
It was a beautiful day and a beautiful place. The house was huge, painted pink and yellow, its gabled roof tiled. It stood against a blue sky and was surrounded by lush, deeply green grass on three sides. The mirror of ocean stretched behind it, where sunlight sparked on the waves over the dune, like mysterious signals from beyond the sea oats. I checked my friends’ faces, and they were all enthralled by the physical beauty of Perry’s home . . . and her husband.
Alex jogged over, looking invigorated, while his partners slumped on a bench, looking exhausted. Up close a long, raised scar beside Alex’s hair line was visible, but didn’t deter one bit from his handsome, perfect features. His teeth flashed bright as the sunlit waves when he smiled at Perry, then at us. Perry made the introductions.
When Alex learned I had just come for the winter, he asked, “Have you gone to Disney World yet?
“No, I haven’t. Probably won’t,” I added.
“Oh, you have to go; doesn’t she, Perry?”
“Alex loves Disney World.”
“I love it,” he said simply.
“I have a business at home where I deal with lots of tourists, so I don’t usually go places with crowds.” I expected him to ask about my business now; I was looking forward to telling him. Something dramatic-sounding to Florida people, I had learned, about a ski shop in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. All those snowstorms, cold temperatures and steep mountains. I was happy being in Florida, but I missed Jackson Hole enough to want to talk about it every chance I got. Giving the weather report back home was a sure way to stir reaction. I had come prepared: snow three feet deep on the valley floor, thirty feet in the mountains. Temperature: eleven below zero.
“Disney World, though . . . ” Alex looked to Perry for the words. Perry glanced to each of us, as if gauging something, and I wondered if perhaps not everyone liked to talk about Disney World in Florida. I checked Sara and Marcy for their reactions. There were none. They were just smiling at Alex and Perry, eyes expressionless. Much as I was doing. Maybe the family’s obvious wealth—I glanced toward the enormous Key West-style house rising above the beach, with pool and gardens—was making us all stupid.
When Perry didn’t step in to supply the words, Alex said, “Disney World has Space Mountain.”
“Space Mountain?” Marcy spoke as if taking her first verbal step out of a trance. You could feel her gathering herself together and trying to pretend that she had been part of the conversation all along, not off somewhere trying to put two and two together and coming out with five.
“And you can get married at Cinderella’s Castle,” Alex said.
“My girls used to dream of doing that when they were little,” Sara said. “Hope they’ve gotten over that by now.” Sara tucked both lips between her teeth, realizing that she should have omitted that last sentence. She added, “Because it’s so expensive.” And she dashed a look around the circle to see if she had reclaimed her good manners.
“That’s what we did; we got married at Cinderella’s Castle. Perry was Cinderella, with just the right color hair. And I was Prince Charming. I carried the ring in a glass slipper.”
“You mean . . . ?” I didn’t even know where to go with this.
“They really do that down here,” Perry said. “I was surprised, too, when I first heard about it.”
“It’s the dream of a lot of Florida girls,” Sara said. Her lips disappeared between her teeth again. Then she added, “And boys.”
Marcy, still looking a bit dazed, right when we needed her brashness for asking all the questions we were afraid to ask, said, “Well, it’s all just perfect, then.”
Alex said, “It was perfect. The fireworks went off at just the right time in the background.”
Perry said, teasing him, “And you were so busy watching them, you almost missed saying your vows.”
“Perry poked me.” Alex grinned at us. “Then we went on a Mickey Mouse honeymoon.”
“Better go shower and change your clothes now.” Perry raised up on her toes and kissed Alex on the cheek. “They’re all laid out on the bed.”
“I’m okay.”
“We’re going to eat soon. See? Mr. Raul is grilling.”
“I don’t need to change.”
“I’ll come with you.” Perry turned to us and said, “Please help yourself to canapés and more wine. I’ll be right back.”
Not one of us said a word or even exchanged a single glance. We were Perry’s friends; she’d tell us what she wanted us to know during lunch this week at the Green Bottle Café. We moved together toward the tables set with food beneath colorful umbrellas and then, as if it were too great a burden not to look at one another without question marks in our eyes, we each reached for a canapé, turned and sauntered off in three different directions.
I struck up a conversation with a woman in her twenties I had seen knitting beneath a bottlebrush tree on campus one morning last week.
“You made me remember I really liked knitting,” I told her. “But I’ve only done square things. Well, dishcloths. It looked as if you were knitting a sweater.”
“A summer shell. It soothes me to knit and helps order my thoughts,” the woman said. “Mostly, though, I’m just hooked on it.”
We talked for a while, exchanged names; hers was Caridad. She said she was also a student at the college, her family was from Cuba and she had recently moved up the coast from Miami. She gave me the location of her favorite yarn store and the phone number from her cell, which I copied into mine. The desire to hold knitting needles in my hand rose suddenly and urgently, a physical thing. I wanted to knit right now. Caridad invited me to sit under the bottlebrush tree and knit with her between classes; then we parted when people were called to dine. I headed toward the patio, with fingers that itched to hold beautiful yarn and a pair of those bamboo needles that I’d seen Caridad use. Like her, I needed soothing. I needed to order my thoughts.
Urges seemed to come on hard and fast for me lately, as though my inner landscape were cleared of brush and tilled for seeds. I thought of my new bird, and before that Bijou, my college classes, those sudden longings for the beach, in which I dropped whatever I was doing and left. When was the last time I felt this much in touch with myself? For the past two decades I had held down a full-time job, along with mothering two sons and trying to keep a marriage together. Breakfasts and lunches were eaten at my desk. I smiled to myself; it was a nice surprise to discover I still had urges.
Marcy, Sara and I carried our plates, heaped with lobster thermidor, shrimp, crab cakes and colorful fruit, to the upper deck of the pool house, overlooking the ocean. Perry popped by our table in between hostess duties and perched on a chair to join our talk. The water stretched before us, calm and silky, a navy blue against the softer blue of the sky. Once our empty plates were collected by a waiter, Perry led us to the dessert table, and I hung back a bit, stepped behind an oleander and called the yarn shop to see how late they were open on Sundays.
The four of us sipped coffee, talked lazily and tested bites of one another’s dessert choices until the colors of the sunset faded from the garish shades resembling the sherbets dolloped beside our small cakes to the soft pastels of our dinner mints. Discreetly I checked my watch, discovered it was a quarter after five; the yarn shop closed at six. I hugged my friends goodbye. I found Perry’s in-laws and offered my appreciation for the wonderful afternoon, then hurriedly jumped in my car and headed for town. Who but me would be so eager to knit another dishcloth?
Monday morning I phoned the store. A young woman answered in a little-girl voice with a deep come-on to it.
“Could I speak to Jess?”
&nbs
p; “Like . . . who’s calling?”
“His wife.”
“His wife?
“Yes,” I said, and mimicked the young woman, “his wi-ife.” Then I changed my mind. “Let me speak to Hadley.”
I heard the young woman call Hadley and say before handing the phone over, “Jess is mar-ried?”
“Annie?”
“Does she look like she sounds?”
There was a pause, the clunk of a door shutting; then Hadley answered, “Bustier.”
“Oh, dear.”
Hadley said, “Come home.”
“Oh, dear.”
Jess had said our phone talks were our mating calls. Like birds, he’d said, calling from tree to tree:
“Are you there?”
And answering, “I’m here.”
“Are you there?”
“I’m here.”
This time, no answer from Jess.
He wasn’t there.
Eighteen
Jess
I stared out windows so often at work lately that several times a day Hadley tapped me on the shoulder to get my attention. I was going to have to give her a raise for adding one more job to her list of duties as store manager. If I was correctly reading the footsteps approaching my office door, she was about to catch me daydreaming again.
She said, “Jess, I’m sorry to bother you.”
“When I’m this busy,” I added, and conjured up a smile for her, as I sat stretched out in my desk chair, feet on the overturned wastebasket. She and I were the only grown-ups, as I jokingly called us, who worked in the store this ski season. The rest of the staff was college kids taking the semester off to winter in Jackson Hole or kids who did that last winter and still hadn’t left.
Hadley shifted a pair of new skis that were about to fall across the doorway. Then she faced me.
“Lizette is crying in the washroom. She’s dropping heavy hints to the others that it has to do with a love affair she must keep secret.”
“Really? What’s that about, do you suppose?”
Hadley gave me a stern look and stepped closer to my desk, where I sat with my chair cocked back in order to see the ski slopes out the window. She said, “Jess, it’s none of my business.” She stopped and propped her hands on her hips. “But I do believe Lizette intends on making it my business and everyone else’s business who works here. I thought you could use the warning.”
“I don’t get it.” Maybe the window staring was dulling my wits, but the past few weeks since Annie left, I hadn’t been too sharp; no one’s words seemed to come through clearly the first time around. Annie used to accuse me of using stupidity to relieve myself from responsibility. What-I-didn’t-know-couldn’t-hurt-me kind of idea. Once she got angry and she said, “You know, Jess, your IQ could rise to intimidating heights if you didn’t try so damn hard to keep yourself uninvolved.”
I asked Hadley, “Warning about what?”
Hadley stared straight into my eyes for a breath—in, out. Then she stepped forward to the edge of my desk. Hands braced on my desktop, she leaned toward me. “Jess, if you’re not having an affair with Lizette, you’re in big trouble.”
“I thought the opposite would’ve been true.” My voice sounded sulky, like the voice of a little boy who had missed out on extra candy due to a misunderstanding of the rules.
“Well, I mean . . . either way.” Hadley stood straight. “She’s intent on making trouble. Either way.”
I had imagined having an affair with Lizette so many different times, in so many different ways and places, I felt guilty enough to question myself: did I lick that shiny round shoulder, or hadn’t I actually seen Lizette’s bare shoulder? Her pubic hair was light brown, wasn’t it? Or was I just assuming that her natural coloring was three shades darker than her light-catching curls piled so carelessly on top her head?
“Trouble, Jess.” Hadley pulled me out of my immobile, blank-eyed stare. “Either way.” She raised herself to her usual abbreviated but dignified stance, tugged the bottom of her wool vest over her hips and added again, “None of my business.”
“But you’ll kill me in my sleep if I’ve cheated on your angel friend AnnieLaurie.” I sounded a bit sour to myself. I wondered if I was mad about being accused of something I hadn’t enjoyed.
“Kill you with your eyes wide-open . . . if you’ve gone against your own best self.” Hadley took a breath and softened. “We can’t really understand somebody else’s bad spells. None of us acts our best during them.”
“This is a bad spell, all right. But I’m clear on this one, Hadley.” I sat upright, kicked the wastebasket aside. “I know where I want to end up. Annie and I . . . we’ll be okay in time.” I brought myself fully into the moment and stood. “What’s up with this Lizette deal?” I took a swig from my water bottle.
“You have to admit purple emanations have throbbed from this office since Lizette walked into the store last month. No one has been unaware of that, so this looks bad for you. She could turn into very big trouble, Jess.”
“Big trouble? I haven’t done a thing. The office door has always been open. Everyone should have been aware of that, too.”
“If you have no need to shut her up, Jess, then fire her.”
“Fire her? For crying?” I sat back down in my desk chair. That didn’t sound fair; besides, I needed Lizette to fantasize about. I’d go nuts if I couldn’t exchange purple throbbing emanations with Lizette. I swiveled my chair away slightly, folded my hands and pressed my lips with my index fingers. God, did this mean I was sexually using Lizette? She was a kid in her early twenties; I was a grown man in my late forties.
To give me time Hadley evened up the edges on a pile of invoices on the desk. I swiveled back toward her.
“Take a look at that one,” I said. “We never received those ski helmets.”
While she read the invoice, another thought hit. I stood back up and walked to the window. I was Lizette’s boss; this was the workplace. Men have been alerted to cringe in terror at that certain phrase: “Sexual misconduct in the workplace.” Shit, was I a depraved older man using young Lizette’s presence in the store like some guy might use a model in a porno magazine?
I wanted to hole up with a strong drink and think about this. I looked back over to Hadley. She laid down the invoice and raised her eyebrows at me. I wasn’t going to get that chance. I nodded. Hadley led the way out the door, and I followed her to the employees’ washroom.
Lizette sat on the edge of a bench with her face buried in a cloud of toilet paper held scrunched in her hands. Four other employees stood inside the washroom, watching her, and two others sat beside her on the bench, patting her.
“What’s wrong here?” I said, bracing myself in the doorframe. Nobody volunteered an answer, but six employees offered less than respectful looks toward their boss. Lizette had won their hearts with her muffled mewing. Hell, mine, too. I felt like beating up the guy who had done this to Lizette.
“Lizette?” I spoke gently.
“You know what’s wrong.” Lizette lifted her face long enough to shoot me an accusing glare from her pink-rimmed eyes, her upper lip swollen into a sweet pout. The six others glared with her. Saundra, darn close to being obese, was in her usual process of twisting one strand of her brown hair into a thin rope, which she kept tightening until it stiffened like a spike and stood straight out from the side of her head, before unraveling into limpness. She sat on the bench rubbing Lizette’s back with the hand that wasn’t busy twisting hair. On the other side, Molly sat patting Lizette’s knee and Tawnya leaned against a wall with the three guys. Hadley stood beside me in the doorway, her short, slender body just fitting under my left arm, which was raised level with my own head and gripping the doorframe so hard I could hear it creak, unless that was Lizette squeaking when she breathed.
I took a big intake of air myself and I cursed the day Lizette walked into my store and I cursed the day Annie walked out of it. Then I heard Annie accuse me of avoiding ev
erything unpleasant in my life by blaming it on something else, or refusing to notice it, or diminishing its importance, or forgetting about it altogether.
I ran through that list one more time to see if any of those responses might work here.
I had to hurry; the silence felt lethal. If this had been a movie, huge Japanese drums, big as a house, would have been resounding throughout the theater.
Finally, I decided I’d better just grab ahold of this one and see if I could bring us all out the other side. What other choice did I have?
“Lizette, we don’t know what’s wrong. You’re troubled. How can we help?”
“We,” she said, the sneer loud enough for all of us to hear, and I thought, Heck, there goes my first bright idea: to make this a community problem. But maybe I wasn’t forced to drop that position yet.
“Can you tell us, Lizette?” I used my best grown-up, man-in-charge manner, measuring carefully my warmth and distance.
“I can tell you privately.”
Trap, trap, my brain hollered. I shot a look at Hadley and her eyes yelled back at me, Trap, trap. But I read another thing in Hadley’s eyes as well. Hadley wondered if I was willing to step into this trap. I wondered a moment myself. Holding moist, limp Lizette in my arms behind the closed washroom door. Practically legitimate, because, heck, there was no sneaking here, everybody knew for God’s sake. I was Lizette’s boss; she needed my private authority. You heard her ask.
A noise came from the front of the store.
“Is there a customer out there?” I said. I thought about who to send. Saundra, twisting her hair? Nah, she didn’t have much fun in her life. She was practically in the spotlight right now; it would be cruel to remove her. One of the guys. Todd. He had a big crush on Lizette. No, that was mean, too. Rafe, he had a crush on Todd. Who didn’t have a stake in this? Casey. He didn’t have a stake in anything, even his own life, just rolled with whatever. “Casey, tell whoever‘s out there that we’re closed. Then lock the door and come back.”
Whether I wanted to or not, I had to get on with this problem, and I had to move from my safe place in the doorway, where I was neither in nor out of the room, if only to let Casey through. I dropped my casual stance of arms supporting my weight against the doorframe, like a coach leaning into the locker room to wish his players well, and I drew myself together and stepped farther into the washroom.
