Tall, Dark And Difficult

by Patricia Coughlin

  “It certainly doesn’t seem to have discouraged you very much,” she observed in a wry tone.

  “I’m a slow learner. That’s no reason for you to give up, though. In fact, you probably ought to come over here wearing this dress every night until I get the message through my thick skull.”

  “Nice try, Griff. But as soon as I get home, this dress is going back into retirement.”

  His eyebrows lifted.

  “It’s from a former life,” she added, which only moved him from puzzled to downright intrigued.

  “Really?” He traced the edge of the dress where it slashed from her throat to the side of her waist. “What sort of former life?”

  “Nothing worthy of that look you’re giving me, I assure you.”

  He remained silent, waiting.

  She fidgeted, then rolled her eyes. “You really want to know what sort of life? Married life. There, now are you satisfied?”

  “That’s the wrong question to ask me, about now,” he countered dryly. “You were married?”

  She nodded, clearly irked with herself for allowing the conversation to veer in this direction. He, on the other hand, was downright mesmerized. Married. He’d never considered that Rose might have been married, that Mr. Saturday Night might be an ex…or maybe a not-yet ex…maybe simply an estranged husband with every right to—

  “Divorced?”

  She nodded again, and he felt relieved.

  “Kids?”

  “No.”

  “Probably for the best.”

  She shrugged. “So I’ve heard.”

  “How long?”

  “How long married or how long divorced?”

  He considered. “Both.”

  “Five years married. Five divorced. Has a nice symmetry, don’t you think?”

  “What happened?”

  Her laugh had a weary edge to it that almost made him sorry he’d asked.

  “Lots of things happened,” she replied. “Ten years is a long time.”

  “And you’d rather not talk about it.”

  “Yes,” she said, sighing. “But I also realize it’s probably inevitable now that the subject has reared its ugly little head. So, in order to get it behind us, I’ll give you the highlights—or, more accurately, the lowlights. I met Jonathan Sheffield at a Brown University fund-raiser. I was a grad student, working part-time in the Alumni Office. He was the pride and joy of the Medical School, an up-and-coming plastic surgeon with the most prestigious firm in the state.”

  “A match made in Ivy League heaven,” he observed.

  “More like a mismatch,” she countered, her tone sardonic.

  “How so?”

  “I was full scholarship. The Sheffields have been bleeding blue for generations. Believe me,” she said with a small laugh, “they did not think I was heaven-sent.”

  “Was it his family that broke you up?”

  “Oh, no. Jonathan considered their opinions the same as he did everyone else’s—when it suited his purposes. That was one of the things that first drew me to him. He was always so certain of who he was and where he was going.”

  She shrugged, as if to shed the hint of wistfulness that had crept into her voice. “Anyway, we met, fell madly in love—or what we took for love. Turned out to be just plain old madness. But as luck would have it, by the time we realized that, we were married. We worked at it for a while—hence this dress,” she added with a self-derisive shake of her head. “But ultimately it was a lost cause. End of story.”

  Not by a long shot, thought Griff, weighing his wish to know more against her obvious reluctance to rehash it. A reluctance he understood all too well. Still…

  “What was it about Sheffield that made you fall in madness with him?” he asked, hoping that by keeping it light, he could lure her into opening up a little more. “Aside from the fact that he didn’t give a twit what his family thought about his choice in women. A serious point in the man’s favor, I am forced to admit. From where I’m standing, he won that one hands-down.”

  “Thanks. I think.” She yawned. “What was the question…oh, right, what made me fall for Jonathan?” She pursed her lips. Shrugged. “A simple case of mistaken identity,” she said at last.

  “Mistaken identity?” he countered, his eyes narrowing.

  She nodded. “Right. You see, I’ve always known exactly what I wanted out of life.”

  “Which is?”

  “Everything,” she retorted with a self-effacing laugh. “Everything I didn’t have growing up.”

  “Such as…”

  Again he heard in her laughter that edge of sadness that tugged at his insides in a peculiar way. He wanted to tell her to forget it, it didn’t matter, and at the same time, his desire to know everything about her grew stronger.

  “Where do I start?” she said without a trace of her usual spirit. “The basics, I suppose…food, heat, school clothes that fit and were reasonably clean.”

  She wasn’t joking. It took a second or so for Griff to process that fact and catch up with what she was saying.

  “So I created a world I did like. You were right about that. You just don’t know how right. I would beg folks for their old magazines and I would make scrapbooks of my life. Not the usual kind of scrapbook. Mine weren’t filled with mementoes of the life I was leading,” she explained. “My scrapbooks told the story of the life I was going to lead. Someday.

  “I would cut out bits and pieces and use them to build rooms on the pages. Then I’d fill the rooms with the perfect furniture and accessories. When I got a little older, I figured out a way to make closets, with doors that opened, and behind the doors were perfectly arranged shelves of groceries or linens or crystal bottles filled with perfume and bubble bath.”

  She closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead. “I know what you’re thinking.”

  “Do you?” Griff countered, certain she couldn’t possibly know, when he wasn’t sure himself what he was thinking…much less what he was feeling. He knew only that the picture she was painting in his mind stirred the brew of rage and helplessness and injustice that was always simmering inside him these days. Except that this time, it wasn’t himself he was feeling sorry for.

  She moved to lean against the porch rail, and he followed.

  “You’re thinking it’s no wonder I grew up to be the kind of woman who’d paint a truck to look like a quilt.”

  He grinned. “You did know,” he replied, his tone one of mock astonishment.

  “Of course. Did you think my psychic connections were limited to flamingoes?”

  “Silly me. So what did you do with these scrapbooks?”

  From the corner of his eye he caught the look of pain that flickered across her face, before she shrugged and said, “Hid them, so my mother wouldn’t rip them up in one of her rampages. She considered them a waste of time…like everything else I did. My mother was one of those people you just can’t please, no matter how long or hard you try.”

  “I’m sorry.” He touched the back of her hand, eliciting a quick smile.

  “Thanks, but that was a long, long time ago. And besides, the things I wanted most weren’t even in the scrapbooks. There weren’t any glossy magazine pictures of them for me to clip—only pictures of people who had those things. So I cut the people out and studied their faces and the way they stood and the clothes they wore, so that when the time came, I would get everything right.”

  “What sort of things?”

  “Things you can’t see…or buy. Stability—that’s what those people in the pictures had, and it was always very high on the list of things I wanted when I grew up. I wanted things to be right. I wanted to be…normal. And safe. And happy.”

  She hesitated. Griff was stunned. He wanted to say “stop,” to spare her from remembering any more…and himself from hearing it. Trouble was, he couldn’t think of the right words. The gentlest, most comforting words were called for, and such words were not his strong suit. It was as if his casual curiosit
y had opened a Pandora’s box which he now had no idea how to shut.

  “I don’t know exactly what to call it,” she finally said. “Predictability, I guess. I would have liked to be able to come home from school and just walk into the house the way I saw kids do on television…just toss my books down and grab a glass of milk and some cookies from the cookie jar—they wouldn’t even have to be homemade cookies, just Lorna Doones would be fine. It wouldn’t matter as long as I could go home without a knot in my stomach, without having to worry whether my mother would be there, and how drunk she would be, and if it would be a happy drunk or a—”

  “Rose, you don’t have to—”

  “I know. I’m rambling. Sorry.”

  “That’s not—”

  “None of this answers your question, does it. At least, not in a way you could possibly understand. The point I wanted to make was that I knew exactly what I wanted, and I planned and studied and worked my butt off to reach one goal after another. And then I met Jonathan, and to me, he seemed to have been heaven-sent. Handsome and intelligent and self-assured, just like the men in the magazines—from God’s drawing board to my private fantasy.

  “We married as soon as I finished graduate school. Jonathan was even more successful by then, and I was able to take a job where the pay wasn’t great but I really believed I could make a difference. It was very important to me to share the blessings I had been given, with my family, my clients, with others looking for a way out.” There was a distance in her gaze that suggested she was talking as much to herself as him.

  “By the time I was twenty-six, I had my career on the right track, the right house in the right neighborhood, and the right husband…respected, safe, predictable.”

  “Only he turned out not to be so safe or predictable?” he guessed, already despising the man for failing to live up to Rose’s expectations—for destroying her dreams.

  She blinked and met his gaze. “No. I did.”

  One of these days, he told himself, he was going to stop being surprised every time the woman threw him a curve-ball.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that in the end, neither one of us got what we bargained for,” she returned. “Me, because all that time I was cutting and pasting in my scrapbooks, I left out one very important element. And Jonathan, because while I saw him as the answer to my prayers, he saw me as a blank slate.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Think about it. It’s pathetically simple. The man is a plastic surgeon. He deals in perfection. It’s his obsession, his life’s work—and I was his private playground.”

  “In what way?” he demanded, prepared to be shocked.

  “In every way,” she replied. “And much to my surprise. You see, I naively believed in my own fantasy—that through education and determination, I could drag myself up to a social and cultural level where a man like Jonathan would want me. Me. Boy, was I wrong.” The words were simple, brutal, direct.

  “What Jonathan wanted was someone he could mold into his image of the perfect wife, perfect hostess and social secretary, perfect career-enhancing ornament. He wanted to play creator, and he was smart enough to know that he could never get away with it with a woman from his own class, a woman with social experience and self-assurance and her own ideas of how things ought to be done.”

  “Me,” she continued, bitterness and regret flashing in her eyes. “I was nothing more than a lump of putty. Pretty degrading when you think about it. Some women complain about being seen as a piece of meat, but at least that’s an acknowledgment that there is something admirable there. I wasn’t even that. I was nothing but…potential. An opportunity for Jonathan to perform miracles—a scalpel, elocution lessons, a few fashion tips and voilà.”

  Griff felt his muscles tense, his jaw clench. “You’re not serious?”

  “Quite. You see before you the new and improved version of moi.”

  “What?” he asked, unable to keep from studying her closely. Her face, her body. “What’s different? What did he do to you?” he demanded, squeezing her shoulders too tightly without meaning to.

  “He didn’t do all of it personally,” she explained. “He just suggested and arranged and orchestrated. Laser eye surgery to get rid of my glasses and a peel to get rid of the squint lines at the sides of my eyes. A small implant to enhance my jawline and liposuction to get rid of excess butt and belly.”

  Griff couldn’t explain the heat gathering in his head. It’s not that he had any complaints about her butt and belly as they were now. In fact, he considered them top-notch. But the fact that they had been altered, that she had come with another, different butt and belly that he would never get to see or touch, really bothered him.

  “New nose,” she added, as if struggling to remember it all. “The old one was wider and had a bump here.” She touched the bridge of her nose. “That’s about it, except…”

  “Except?”

  “Except for my birthday present,” she said with a humorless laugh. “A few weeks after my twenty-ninth birthday, Jonathan announced that he had already decided how we would celebrate my thirtieth—with a romantic getaway to Paris and the French Riviera. I was thrilled…not only was he actually planning something he knew I had always dreamed of doing, but he was going to take ten whole days off work to be with me—a miracle in and of itself. For about a week I was walking on air, and all the niggling little doubts about our marriage vanished.”

  “And then…” he prompted.

  “And then he brought home some pamphlets that he said would help explain the next stage of our trip preparation, the step that would make me worthy of appearing in a bathing suit on the Riviera. They were about breast implants.”

  Instantly, automatically, Griff’s gaze dropped to her chest.

  “Too late, Griffin,” she snapped. “I had them removed before the ink was dry on the divorce papers.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, gesturing uselessly. “Not that you…I meant I was sorry about looking. It was…reflex.”

  “Hmm. I know. That’s one of the main reasons I got rid of them. Life is a lot simpler when you don’t have to deal with male reflexes on every street corner.”

  He didn’t laugh, didn’t even manage a smile. He cupped her face in his hands and gazed at her as if she were a very elaborate work of art.

  “I never saw you in glasses, or with a bump on your nose, but I can’t even fathom the possibility that any part of you ever needed to be altered in any way. And I can’t understand how you could go along with his crap.”

  “God, I’ve wondered the same thing. I suppose that back then, I was so accustomed to inventing and reinventing myself according to a magazine photo or what I thought I was supposed to be, that it all seemed…natural.”

  She turned and faced him squarely. “Does that make sense?” she asked him.

  He thought for a moment. “I’m not sure how to answer that. No, it doesn’t make any sense at all that a woman like you ever believed you had to change yourself or be something other than what you are. I mean, you’re generous and talented and beautiful. But in spite of the fact that it doesn’t make sense, I do understand. I’m just glad you finally woke up and got away from that jerk.”

  “I woke up, all right,” she echoed, seeming to shiver. She shrugged. “For a long time after the divorce, I felt like a failure, like I’d thrown away everything I’d every wanted and was right back where I started.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I accept that it was inevitable. The bar kept being raised, and it was harder and harder to reach it and still hold on to some semblance of…me.”

  She folded her arms across her chest as if hugging herself. Or holding herself together, he thought.

  “When I was married, I sometimes looked in the mirror and had the eerie sense that it was a stranger looking back. I began to think of that woman as Jonathan’s wife. I began second-guessing everything I did, every thought I had. Even at work or when I was
alone, I’d hesitate and ask myself what Jonathan’s wife should do. More and more it felt as if the part of me deep inside that was still me was getting squeezed out of existence.”

  If there were words for what he was feeling, he didn’t know them. And he sure didn’t know what to do about this urge to somehow do something, anything, to make up to her for things that were lost forever. Like, for starters, a childhood where the visions dancing in her head at night were of prettier things than survival.

  He settled for acting on the far simpler urge to enclose her hand in his and bring it to his lips. “I’m glad that didn’t happen,” he told her. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  “I’m glad you’re here, too,” she said, squeezing his hand. “It’s like old times. Devora and I logged a lot of hours on this porch, talking things over…though I have to admit, we never pulled an all-nighter.”

  Griff almost squirmed. The last thing he wanted to get into was a discussion of Devora and his reason for being there.

  “One thing’s for sure,” he said. “This explains why you bit my head off when I came to your door earlier—bearing gifts, I might add.”

  “You mean when you came to the door with a partially thawed burrito and told me I had great ‘potential’?”

  “It has a different ring to it when you say it,” he acknowledged. “I meant it in the best possible sense. But, I see now how it must have sounded to you. What’s that they say about perception and reality?”

  “Perception is reality…but now you’re getting a little too existential for me. Especially in the wee hours of the morn,” she added, the words muffled as she buried a yawn in the palm of her hand.

  “Wanna sit and watch the sun come up?” he asked, half teasing, half hopeful. “I could toss a couple of burritos on the fire.”

  “A truly tempting offer, but I’ll pass this time.” She kicked off her high heels and scooped them up by the flimsy straps. “I’m going home.”

  “Not so fast. There’s something I need to know first. I wasn’t…misreading you earlier, was I? When I was kissing you?”