Breakfast in Stilettos

by Liz Kingswood

  Nothing sobers you quicker than someone else’s pain, especially when that pain is so much greater than your own. Even Frank looked abashed.

  David grabbed his keys and waved as he passed us. “I’m going out to dinner and then a little dancing. You two play nice.”

  He was out the door a moment later, and Frank and I were left in our uncomfortable silence. I took another sip of wine and then set my glass on the table. I was tempted to leave, to run away as was my wont in the midst of an argument, but I stayed put, looking at Frank expectantly. I wanted something different to happen.

  Frank’s gaze met mine. We stared at each other for a long moment. His eyes were honey brown, and never ceased to draw me in.

  Finally Frank moved. He stood up and moved behind me. After giving me a kiss on the top of my head, he took up massaging my shoulders. “OK. You’re right. No arguing.” His fingers found all the knots, releasing some of the tension that had gathered there. “Tell me what’s up.”

  Maybe it was because I felt a little woozy, but I suddenly realized that although I’d always wanted Frank to be honest with me, I had never really been honest with him. I needed to tell him what I was feeling. I sat, letting his fingers loosen years of repressed emotions. “I’m confused. I keep thinking we’re over and then hoping we aren’t. It’s like my heart and head are playing ping-pong. I don’t want us to be through, but something is wrong. I just can’t figure out what it is.”

  He stopped his massaging for a long moment—just letting his hands rest on my shoulders. Finally, he took my hand and pulled me up, leading me to the panoramic window. He wrapped one arm around me, and we both stared into the darkness of the Sound.

  Tilting his head to mine, he sighed. “Em, I was being honest in my card. I do want to go with you tomorrow night. I’ve been a few times and I always thought it would be fun to take you. I just didn’t think you would go.”

  I felt a tug of discomfort. He was probably right in not asking me to go. I didn’t understand why I would want to go if I was in a happy relationship. Why did I need a sex club if I had sex at home? At least, that was how I saw it. Maybe I’d feel different when I got there. How would you know you hated okra until you’d tasted it?

  “Is that why you broke up with me? Because you didn’t think I’d go?” I sensed him stiffen and start to pull away, that telltale sign of his uneasiness. He covered it by pulling me close again.

  I watched the ferry cut its way slowly across the blackness as I listened to the slow in and out of his breathing. He was quiet for a long time.

  “Maybe that was the reason. I never thought about it, but maybe that is true. Things have been happening to me over the past six months or so. Things I can’t describe very well. I guess I didn’t think you’d understand.”

  It didn’t take much imagination to see what he was trying to say. And I wasn’t sure I really wanted to hear it. Frank had a fetish, or was exploring some part of BDSM or wanted sex outside the normal parameters of a missionary-position relationship.

  “Ah.” I said with a bit of Frank’s own inelegance. “That explains some things.”

  I could see the corner of his mouth twist into a smile, but I didn’t want to look right at him. I’d want to kiss those lips, and who knew where they had been lately—kissing something animal, vegetable or mineral? I didn’t know what to think.

  “S-o-o-o …?” I stretched out the word with the questioning upward arc at the end. “All that information you’ve been giving me—the names, web links. Has that been a bread crumb trail to Frank’s little secret?”

  “No. No. I was trying to help.”

  “Liar.” I hip-bumped him.

  “All right. A little.” He turned to face me. “I was just so surprised that you took it all so well. I thought maybe … you know.”

  I didn’t know. “So, are you going to tell me? What you’ve been figuring out? Or is it still a work-in-progress?”

  At that moment my cell phone rang, the most unobtrusive ping ring I could find to download into my phone. Frank gestured that I should get it. He was probably happy to avoid having to answer my question. I pulled my phone out of my purse and looked at the glow from the LCD. It was Sal. I showed it to Frank. He knew she never called me casually. “Go ahead. I’m going to get some more wine.”

  He got up as I answered the phone. “Hey. What’s up?”

  “Emily? Is that you?” There was an edge of fear in her voice and I pressed the phone to my ear to hear her over the drone of traffic in the background.

  “Sal, is something wrong?” A spike of dread shot through my stomach.

  “I had an accident.” She sounded winded, as though she had been running. “I’m fine, but my airbag deployed and it broke my glasses. The car’s banged up. They called the tow truck.”

  I heard her tell someone, “It’s Emily.” before coming back on the line. “Can you come get us?”

  And so I left Frank’s without an answer to my question. Instead we made a hasty decision to meet up at the Salon the next night, promising to finish the conversation then. I wasn’t sure it was a good idea—too many opportunities for disaster—but I suspected that Sal would need company for the rest of the evening, and my day tomorrow was already packed. Not to mention that I needed time to get my thoughts together.

  Frank and I shared a brief hug and an awkward full-on-the-lips kiss before I headed out, a bit blurry from the toxic combination of the Pope’s wine, Frank’s roses and abs, and the lingering aftermath of Dr. Steiner’s fetish interrogation.

  Chapter 12: Sal’s Accident

  Sal and her car were over in Bellevue, Seattle’s doppelganger city on the other side of Lake Washington. I rarely made the drive east across the 520 floating bridge. Or rather the Governor Albert D. Rossellini Bridge. It was the longest floating bridge on earth, named after the oldest living former Governor in the U.S.

  More than anything, the bridge marked a cultural divide. While Seattle was the bastion of leftist leaning funk, Bellevue was the land of right-wing Republicans, Microsoft (and its millionaires), and all their corresponding soccer moms. It was the home of giant shopping malls, fancy wineries, outrageously expensive garden nurseries and all that was new, modern and snobbish.

  Not that there is anything wrong with it!

  But I had nothing whatsoever in common with the eastside. Sal did. I expected her at any moment to find a rich, well-educated, beef-loving husband and build their McMansion on a nano-sized lot. Yes, Bellevue-ites would say I was jealous. Fair enough.

  The wind was blowing hard, kicking up spray from the lake onto the windshield. I took 405 south and then took the exit for downtown Bellevue. Sal was easy to find as I drove up to the dazzling flare of lights from a police car, ambulance and a big tow truck. Sal was speaking to the tow truck driver, who had already winched up her car for delivery. Sal was in a worse state than her car, which was saying something. She had a generic older Toyota something or other. A glance at the damage showed that she had been rear-ended, presumably by the Ford Expedition parked nearby. The soccer-mom-looking owner was speaking animatedly to a policeman writing on a pad.

  As I got out of the car, I saw that the Expedition hadn’t so much rear-ended Sal’s car as reared onto it. The trunk was smashed down and the back window shattered. Shards of crumpled glass littered the ground, flickering under the streetlights. I was amazed that no one had been hurt. Sal’s friends—four fellow molecular biology grad students—were all standing near Sal, shivering and shaken up. I tried to remember their names. The middle-eastern couple—Zaid and Najeea—were clutching each other in mutual support, fingering potential bumps and bruises. Catherine was absently combing out her long strawberry-blonde curls while Will, a tall nerdy guy with a butch haircut, was pacing back and forth as he spoke into a cell phone. I wondered how I’d get them all into my Jeep.

  Sal didn’t notice me until I came up beside her. Without her glasses she couldn’t see beyond her nose.

  “Emily!
” She squinted at me, gripping my wrist as though to steady herself. “God. I’m so glad you are here.” She held on to me as she finished telling the tow truck driver where to take her car. Sal’s forehead was bandaged, though a trickle of blood had escaped. She must have been treated by the paramedics, who were already packing up.

  Sal nodded to the tow truck driver, and we stood back as he got into the cab, gunned his engine and drove away with Sal’s smashed Toyota.

  “God. I’m so angry.” Sal turned and glared at the soccer mom. “Her truck-thing isn’t even dented. She could have killed us.” I felt her grip tighten on my arm.

  “Well, lucky she didn’t. You doing OK?” I motioned to her forehead, shuddering for an instant from both the cold and the thought of death averted.

  She touched the bandage, looking at the blood that came away on her finger. “Yeah. The paramedics arrived just after the policeman. I didn’t hit my head or anything. When the airbag deployed, it broke the plastic frame on my glasses. The plastic edge cut into my forehead and raked across with the impact of the bag.” She pantomimed the trajectory of cut line. “Lucky it didn’t put my eye out.” She glared again at the soccer mom who was clearly trying to avoid Sal’s gaze. “God, I’m so mad.”

  I had the distinct impression that Sal had brought the woman down to nano-size with a fiery verbal flogging before the policeman had arrived. I felt a guilty pang for being relieved that Sal would have someone else to be mad at for a while and maybe I’d sneak under the radar with the Frank issue.

  A car pulled up as the paramedics drove away. Najeea waved to the driver and then to Sal. “Our ride is here.” Najeea and Zaid moved to the car. Sal let go of my arm and joined her friends for a bit, exchanging goodbyes.

  Will snapped his phone closed and turned to Catherine. “Jack should be here shortly.” Then he looked up at me, giving a distracted wave. “Hey, Emily.”

  “Hi. You two OK?” I smiled, stepping in closer, though I didn’t really feel like talking. Catherine glowered at me with that predatory look of one trying to protect her turf. She was either interested in or dating Will; I couldn’t tell. Her possessiveness made me a bit uncomfortable; I knew that Sal had dated Will and wasn’t sure whether Catherine knew. They had ended amicably and now acted more like brother and sister than ex-lovers. Sal had even countermanded her usual never-date-exes rule and said I could go out with him if I wanted. Apparently there was some interest on his part. But I preferred a distinct separation of church and state and had declined. Besides, one nano-techy in my life was enough.

  Possibly sensing Catherine’s concern, Will circled his arm around her, causing her to brighten like a fifty-dollar-Lotto winner. “Yeah, we’re fine. Just cold and a little freaked out.”

  I was momentarily jealous of Catherine. I was cold and a little freaked out as well, but I didn’t have a comforting set of arms attempting to make me feel better. Instead, I was hungry, tipsy and driving erratically toward my very own agonizing collision with Frank.

  Indeed, Will’s ride did arrive shortly and he spirited Catherine away. Sal yelled a bit longer at the soccer mom before the policeman insisted she leave. We got into the Jeep, the flashing lights of the police car switching off in my rearview mirror as we pulled onto the road.

  Sal sat in silence, pulling at the bandage on her forehead. She periodically squinted out the window.

  “How are you feeling? Do you want me to take you some place?”

  Sal shook her head. “I just want to go home. I’m not very good company right now. Do you mind?”

  “No problem,” I lied. I wanted to do anything other than go home. I wanted to talk about Frank. What did it mean that we were drawn to each other but always fought? Should we break up for good? Was there some way to fix us? Was I just being stupid? Of course, I knew what Sal would say to each of those questions.

  And Mom.

  And Kenner.

  We hardly spoke during the ride back home. Once in a while Sal would reiterate her anger. But even she was getting tired of hearing about it.

  I pulled up in front of the house. The rain had stopped and Asshole Bob was standing outside his gates, smoking a cigarette and surprisingly free of his usual stack of nasty-grams for errant cars.

  Sal fidgeted. “Just what I need. Another asshole conversation.” She didn’t like Bob much and, as I turned off the Jeep, she darted into the house.

  He waved me over as I got out. Apparently there was some neighborhood scandal that I needed to hear about. I joined him.

  Bob took a big drag off his cigarette and pointed as he exhaled down the street to an ugly old truck that had been parked there for about a week, clearly abandoned. “It’s that guy again. I called the police.”

  I had heard the story before. Apparently this wayward gentleman had a scam going that involved a bunch of old non-working cars he trailered around to various places in the city, leaving them until the police towed them away. Then he’d go in and claim that they had towed away a vehicle that he needed for his job (there was usually some company sign on the truck). They would not only give him his truck back for no charge, but also include a few hundred dollars to make up for lost work.

  Bob was on a mission to catch the fellow in the act. Bob clearly needed a job. Retirement wasn’t setting well with him.

  “I saw the guy and went over to confront him about it. He pulled out a big knife and threatened me, the fucker. I ran like hell, but of course, he knows where I live now. The fucker’s huge, a real redneck yahoo.”

  Bob was oblivious to the fact that he himself looked exactly like a huge, redneck yahoo.

  Bob went on, flipping off the abandoned car. “I hate it that piss-heads like him get away with that sort of thing. What’s the world fucking coming to?”

  Passersby might think that Bob was suffering from both the coprolalia and copropraxia versions of Tourettes. In other words, he liked to swear and make obscene gestures. The ironic part was that Bob was actually an extremely well-educated, well-read man. He was always analyzing some literary magazine or book. He professed to be a liberal verging on anarchist. Which explained why he slashed the tires of illegally parked cars at night with one hand while holding a copy of Dostoevsky in the other.

  I listened as he finished his rant and then told him about Sal’s accident. He was instantly sympathetic. “Goddamn gas-guzzler rich mall-roving bitches with cell phones stuck to their empty heads. Fucking fuel distribution should be based on IQ, not net worth. Like, you shouldn’t drive a big-ass truck unless you’re curing AIDS or solving world hunger.”

  I nodded, knowing that it never worked to contradict him unless you wanted a hell-bent rebuttal. Besides I did sort of agree with him. In theory anyway. I didn’t know what he thought of my gas-guzzling Jeep. I could only hope he thought me smart enough to warrant my gas ration.

  “What’s up with you these days?” He took another big drag off his cigarette, and then coughed. “I haven’t seen your boyfriend’s car lately. What was his name? He drove that black Karmann Ghia.”

  Bob knew everyone’s business by the cars that came and went. “Frank. Frank Trager.”

  “Yeah, the ‘writer’ right?” He made little quote signs with his fingers. Bob didn’t think most of what appeared in newsprint qualified as writing.

  So much for sympathy from Bob in the Frank department. “Well, he and I sort of broke up.”

  Bob swung around, focusing on me in his intense way. Whatever got Bob’s attention, got it entirely. “You two have been sweet for a long time. Right? What did the fucker do?”

  What could I say? That Frank had some secret fetish and didn’t want to tell me because he thought I was such a prude that I wouldn’t understand, so he broke up with me? “Well, he didn’t do anything really. Just the typical relationship squabbles. And none of my friends or family liked him much.”

  “Well, fuck them. Who cares? Only thing matters is what you want.” He shook his cigarette-holding finger at me in a very parenta
l way, spraying ash into the air.

  I let out a long sigh. “If I knew that, I could probably solve world hunger or something. I just don’t know.”

  “Oh for the love of Christ. You’re not some fucking crybaby, are you? Everybody knows what they want. They just aren’t always honest about it.”

  Bob’s wife, Helen, stuck her head out the window just then. “Bob, you aren’t pissing on the neighbor’s hydrangeas again, are you?” She saw me and waved. “Oh hi, Emily. Tell my husband that he better get inside and finish the dishes or I’ll burn his first editions.”

  Bob bounded toward his gate. “Oh shit. She’d do it, too.” He took a quick drag off his cigarette and stubbed it out. “Girl you get a fucking backbone. Go after what you want and fuck anyone who gets in your way. Oh, and here’s a stack of notices to put on cars.” He pulled some flyers from a bag he had left leaning against the fence. “Those church people have been parking on the street again instead of in their fucking back lot. Goddamn Mormons can’t read.”

  Then he was disappeared behind his gate with a loud click.

  I stood there with a stack of rude parking notices in my hand, thinking about Dr. Steiner’s assessment of my deficiencies and remembering the second-hand assertiveness book sitting unread on my nightstand. Bob didn’t have any issues with assertiveness. I clearly did. I felt a little like that man in the joke waiting for God to rescue him from the flood, where God sends a canoe, a boat and a helicopter, but the guy is still waiting for God to reach down and scoop him up in the heavenly chariot. I wasn’t satisfied with any of the obvious solutions to The Frank Problem. I wanted divine intervention.