Beautiful Mess

by Herrick, John

  Nora leaned closer to him, her movements now silky. “What about them?”

  “Former talent scouts,” Del replied with a wink. “They founded gangsta rap.”

  Nora burst forth with laughter, a verbal gunshot which shattered the subdued atmosphere. Her hand flew to her mouth to stifle the noise. Her eyes widened as she realized she’d disturbed the tranquility. On the other side of the room, the older couple glanced in Nora’s direction, then resumed their conversation.

  “You’re a charmer, aren’t you?” she said to Del.

  “I aim to please.”

  Nora studied her drink and ran her index finger around the rim of the glass. “To answer your question, I’ve come here a few times. I enjoy the peace.” She paused. “When I sit here, I feel like I’m part of something bigger. Part of a continuum, like people started a tradition in this city, and I’m part of the club. I don’t mean a popularity contest, but a respectable club: Clark Gable, Ginger Rogers, Cary Grant, Marilyn Monroe. All the greats, the ones who made an imprint.”

  “You wouldn’t know it nowadays, but in another era, Morocco Night was quite the hot spot. All those people you mentioned? They frequented this lounge.”

  “Did you know them back then?”

  “Sure. Clark and Ginger were older. But when I was old enough to drink, Cary and Marilyn were in their prime. My career had just begun at that point.” He paused. “I knew Marilyn quite well.”

  “So you’re part of the continuum.”

  “As an artist, a part of you wants to find acceptance with the people who surround you and the people who see your work. You want them to know there’s a real you deep down inside.”

  “Or maybe it’s just daddy issues.” She shot him a wink over her whiskey sour.

  “Maybe so,” he chuckled, lifting his drink to her as if in a toast. When he swallowed, he noticed a longing in the way Nora surveyed him. He could tell he intrigued her: Her eyes focused on one aspect of him, which she studied before shifting her focus to another quality and repeating the process. She peered at the corners of his eyes, where crow’s-feet were at a minimum, then moved on to his cheeks. Women always noticed Del’s perpetual tan, which he credited to his early morning jogs as much as to his mother’s Mediterranean genes.

  Nora’s gaze lingered upon his large hands. His left hand, of course, lacked a wedding band—which, if Del’s plan had worked, Nora had already noticed when he’d lifted his drink.

  “You’re not married, I take it?” she remarked, as if on cue.

  “No, I’m not. Does that surprise you?”

  “I never know what to think. Some men try to hide it, but you don’t even have a tan line where a wedding band would be.”

  “No, I’ve never have been married.”

  “How does a charmer like you remain a lifelong bachelor?”

  He pondered her question. Oftentimes he asked himself why he felt so content without a spouse, but he had never arrived at an answer. “I suppose I’ve never met my soul mate.” Once again, his mind wandered to the fact that Nora Jumelle sat alone among the aging patronage of Morocco Night. “I could ask you a similar question. Why aren’t you involved with anyone? A significant other, I believe they’re calling it these days.”

  “Oh, that,” she said with a shrug. “Relationships take time. They’re messy. Besides, I don’t know if I want to get married.” She tapped her glass with her fingernail, which responded with a slight ping. “I guess I don’t know what I want in life.”

  “Not many people do.” Del grinned. “It’s what keeps Dr. Phil in syndication.”

  “I’m open to the options, though. I like to take chances, learn by experience.”

  “Meaning?”

  To Del’s surprise, Nora moved her hand forward and allowed her fingers to make contact with his. “The fact that I don’t know what I want in life doesn’t mean I don’t recognize a magnetic soul when it crosses my path.”

  And with that, she tickled his forearms with her fingernails. The alcohol lent an airy feature to her eyes.

  “Let’s talk somewhere else,” Nora said.

  CHAPTER 4

  THEY SAT ON Del’s living room floor, angled toward the fireplace, yet facing each other as they chatted. Though the January evening was cool, turning on the heat wasn’t necessary. Nora’s shoulders were bare amid her strapless dress, so she had wrapped herself in a fleece throw. Del had turned off the lights and so they could watch the flames flicker. He admired how the firelight brought a golden glow to Nora’s skin.

  Since they left Morocco Night after their first drink, Del had mixed each of them another one when they arrived at his house.

  “Do you always bring strange women home with you?” Nora teased.

  “You mean to my crib?” he jested in return.

  With a delightful laugh, Nora tilted her head and leaned toward Del. Her white teeth gleamed beneath a muted shade of lipstick, which had all but worn off as the evening progressed. Their faces were inches apart. “Yes, your crib.”

  “Not always. Only the ones willing to humor me.”

  Another staccato laugh from the young woman who searched his eyes with a combination of desire and enthrallment.

  Although Del enjoyed her attention and found her riveting, he couldn’t ignore the signals his conscience sent to his heart. Damn honesty. He never admitted his age, especially not when entertaining someone this much younger than he, but Del detected a special quality about Nora Jumelle. Besides, he never took advantage of women. He didn’t want to feel shitty in the morning.

  Del broke his gaze and grimaced. “You realize you’re twenty-five years old and I’m…not, right?”

  With a shrug, Nora laid her drink on the hearth. She reclined upon her elbows. “I like to try new things.”

  Reading between the lines, Del grinned and sipped his drink, wondering how he’d gotten so lucky tonight. This young woman was more than stunning. She was intelligent. Witty. Someone who analyzed her options before making a move—which was why Del was fascinated to find her in his living room, inviting him to make the next move.

  Finally, she said, “You don’t need to feel like you’re robbing the cradle, Del. I date men of all ages.”

  “You do?”

  “Sure. Guys my age are enjoyable. They bring a sense of adventure. But older men intrigue me.”

  “How so?”

  “Remember when we talked earlier about the continuum?” When Del nodded, Nora added, “I haven’t found many men my age who think on that level. Yes, they have their careers and interests, but I come across very few who live beyond the here and now, who seek to fit into a bigger picture. It’s not that they don’t want to; it hasn’t occurred to many of them yet. But life is so much bigger than the big screen and its silver surface. Don’t you agree?”

  “Of course, but everything comes with a price.” Glass in hand, he gestured around the room. “I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t enjoy the good things in life.”

  Nora paused and gave his features another once-over. Squinting her eyes, she murmured, “You’re a very attractive man.”

  Del felt his confidence blaze. “You’re—”

  As he attempted to reply, Nora eased toward him, feathered his bottom lip with her own. Before he knew it, their lips were locked, their breathing had grown heavier, and Nora began to stroke his biceps with her thumbs. The throw slipped from her shoulders and pooled on the floor.

  Holy shit. Was she seducing him?

  He couldn’t resist her advances. Del felt himself stir below the waist. He’d never had a need for Viagra.

  Nora slipped her fingers between his shirt buttons and massaged his chest with her fingertips. Del glided his lips to his right, planting kisses behind Nora’s earlobe and making his way down her neckline. Her shoulders smelled like citrus and honey.

  “You haven’t lost your touch,” she whispered.

  CHAPTER 5

  A FAINT BREEZE, though chilly, tickled Nora’s senses and kept
her alert. From the darkness of Del’s balcony, beneath the light of a crescent moon, she saw nothing but inky blackness in the distance. On the other side of the glass door, Del was sound asleep.

  With her eyes halfway open, she focused downward, toward her chin. Although it had taken several minutes for her to release the tautness in her back as she kept her posture straight, she perceived, at last, tension melting from her muscles. She kept her mouth closed and inhaled through her nose.

  Slow.

  Deep.

  Searching for the fire she hoped was still within her.

  Cross-legged, Nora held her right hand in her left, the tips of her thumbs in contact, in front of her belly. A trace of breeze tickled her flesh as it wove between her elbows and the sides of her abdomen.

  How long had she maintained lotus position? An hour? Two? She had lost track of time, but it didn’t matter anyway. Sleep eluded her tonight, as it often did.

  She listened to waves that crashed somewhere in the abyss of ink before her. Aside from that, Nora heard nothing but the silence of time as her life ticked along, second by second, inch by inch. Alone on this balcony, engulfed in an atmospheric shroud, with oxygen swirling in her lungs and coursing through her veins, Nora controlled her destiny. For this limited spectrum of time, when all held still, nothing could unearth her. Colors sprang to life upon the canvas of her mind. She could feel them, smell them. She could detect everything around her, including whatever might approach. Amid the calm, she knew what to expect to come her way.

  Nothing.

  A tear materialized from the melancholy in her soul. It pooled in the corner of her eye with a feverish heat and snaked down the middle of her cheek.

  CHAPTER 6

  SUNRISE.

  Del awoke on his side, so he plopped onto his back, too exhausted to open his eyes until another moment passed. As he recalled his companion from the prior evening, he grinned and reached out this hand, running his palm across the other side of the bed.

  He found the sheet cool to the touch.

  Curious, he sat up and opened his eyes, then noticed the cover and blanket turned halfway down the bed. He cocked his ear in the direction of the bathroom but heard nothing. No water running through the faucet. No swishing of a toothbrush. Nothing.

  She was gone.

  And judging from the temperature of the sheet on her side of the bed, she had slipped out long ago.

  Del swung his feet onto the floor. With a twist at the waist, he scanned the bedroom again. At the foot of the bed, he noticed Nora’s clothes scattered on the floor. Maybe she hadn’t left after all. A glance through the glass door to the balcony told him she wasn’t out there, either. Had she roamed his house?

  Assuming Nora was in the vicinity, he headed to the bathroom to grab his favorite bathrobe but couldn’t find it. He was sure he’d left it there. Then again, he hadn’t worn it in a week, so his memory might have failed him. Instead, he pulled on a T-shirt and pajama bottoms, then wandered down the hallway, toward the staircase. When he reached the bottom of the stairs, the scent of freshly brewed coffee jolted him and swept the heaviness from his eyelids.

  The aroma lured him to the kitchen, where he found Nora leaning her hip against his counter, sipping coffee as she stared at a decorative window near the kitchen table. Apparently, she’d searched the cupboard farthest from the sink—the one where he kept random items he rarely needed or sought—and had selected a mug he’d purchased at an airport in Zurich. German script flowed across a watercolor rendition of the Swiss Alps. With her face turned in the opposite direction, she didn’t see Del approach her.

  A thick, royal-blue robe—his robe—swallowed her frame. Since Del was several inches taller than Nora, it covered the full length of her body and brushed against the floor. Her shoulder-length hair, half of which hung over the collar of the robe, appeared tousled in the perfect spots. Nora Jumelle possessed a sexuality understated yet undeniable. When she crossed one leg over the other, the lower half of her leg, that porcelain flesh of hers, peeked through the opening of the robe, her toes curling upon the floor. Her toenails were painted cherry red.

  Del’s joint cracked behind his knee—many women had quipped that he couldn’t sneak up on them if he tried—and Nora turned. Most of her makeup had worn away; her lipstick was gone, and her eye shadow was a mere remnant of the prior evening’s incarnation.

  “I made myself at home,” Nora remarked. “Hope you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all.” Del wondered if she noticed the way his pectoral muscles shaped the sleeves of his T-shirt, even at his age. He still visited the gym each week.

  “Would you care for some coffee?” she asked.

  She’d found his red, plastic tub of Folgers. Del hadn’t bought into the gourmet coffee fad, whose product tasted like mud to him. He retrieved a mug from his collection of rarities, filled it from the pot, and stirred in a splash of soy milk. When the coffee hit his taste buds, he tried not to wince. The scent was familiar; the taste was not. Nora must have recognized this wasn’t a fancy dark roast and tripled the dosage. He hoped this stuff didn’t set his bowels in motion and send him scurrying to the bathroom.

  “Delicious,” he fibbed.

  “Coffee’s my specialty,” she replied with a wink and lifted the mug to her lips with both hands. She’d painted her fingernails the same shade of red as her toes.

  “Do you work today?” asked Del.

  “I’m between projects. We don’t start shooting until April due to schedule conflicts. Do you work today?”

  “I’m between projects myself.” Eager to deter her from digging into the details, he added, “You really are a fine actress.”

  “Some would disagree.” Nora shot him a crafty glare. “I’m sure you’ve read what the critics say: ‘She’s box-office gold but not an artist.’”

  “I don’t understand why they would write that. Your latest performance was brilliant. Whether the critics agreed or not, the public loved it.”

  She shrugged.

  Del marveled at her nonchalance. Not that she didn’t care; rather, she’d managed to maintain a semblance of naïveté. He remembered how it felt for his career to skyrocket and couldn’t help but be thrilled for Nora. If she played her cards right, he estimated, she had the talent to build a career that would last until she chose to retire—if she chose to retire. Del saw in Nora an enduring presence, the next Diane Keaton or Meryl Streep. She was the type of actress who could reinvent herself in each stage of her life.

  “I hear a lot of Oscar buzz,” he said. “You appear to be the frontrunner.”

  “Surprise, surprise,” she chuckled. “I’m not banking on that one.”

  “They say it’s a virtual lock for you.”

  “All the more reason not to get my hopes up. Life has a way of kissing you on the mouth and shitting on your feet.”

  He fought to keep a straight face. “That’s one way to put it.”

  She stared at him. Her gray eyes reminded Del of winters in Nebraska: bleak and impenetrable. As a child, after months of stale winter temperatures and an absence of sunshine, what he wouldn’t have given to open a window and inhale fresh, balmy air.

  Nora ran her index finger along the rim of her coffee mug, studied its path, tapped the porcelain surface with her shiny, painted fingernail.

  “Do you know where I was five years ago?” she murmured in a skeptical tone.

  Del furrowed his brow. As far as he could recall, her breakthrough role had arrived only three years ago. “Can’t say I do.”

  “I was working in the butcher section at a grocery store.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. I learned every cut of steak. Veal, pork, sausage—you name it, these hands touched it.” She wiggled her fingers with her free hand.

  “I’d imagine that knowledge comes in handy…somehow.”

  “I’m a vegetarian now. I learned I can’t stand the sight of blood.”

  Why had she mentioned
steak? Now Del craved a filet mignon.

  “I’d moved to the City of Angels a few weeks earlier, had no job. This guy in the apartment downstairs got me a job at the store. They asked me if working with raw meat bothered me, and I figured, How bad could it be?” She shook her head and snickered. “I spent the first week feeling nauseous and the next three weeks feeling numb. Sometimes the money comes in handy and you think you can handle anything, but then you look around at the carnage and you say to yourself, What the hell am I doing here?” She tossed one hand on her hip. “Have you ever asked yourself that? What the hell am I doing here?”

  Tell me about it. “How long did you keep that job?”

  “Two months. I had to escape. After that, I went to work as your stereotypical cocktail waitress while I worked on indie film shorts. That breakthrough project, Faces, the one that got rave reviews? It was a full-length indie film that nobody should’ve noticed, but we gained a following at Cannes. Next thing you know, it opens on two hundred screens in the U.S. and sells out. They expand to a thousand screens and it cracks the top five at the box office that weekend. Suddenly, they’re dubbing me ‘Jennifer Lawrence 2.0’ or some nonsense like that. Is that how it was back in your day?”

  The speed at which decades could roll along, each one faster than the last, astonished Del. People Nora’s age spoke of fifty and sixty years ago as if teenagers hand-jived to Beethoven on American Bandstand back then. Granted, he could remember Michael Jackson as a kid with an afro in a perfect sphere, but that didn’t make Del old. Nora didn’t seem to understand what golden career coins she held in her hands. To be able to pick her projects! These days, the only roles Del turned down were of the Hallmark or Lifetime channel variety. Not even the indie people called him. Not that he would have said yes to a project like that, but nonetheless…

  “Options are a good thing,” Del noted. “Look at how it turned out for you: no more butchers or blood. And you have the option of turning down any roles that come your way.”

  Nora poured herself another cup of coffee, stirring in plenty of soy milk and sugar.