Passing Through Paradise

by Susan Wiggs

  Having a glass of wine with a woman was such an alien concept to Mike at this point in his life that for a moment he didn’t know what to say. He didn’t want to think about how long it had been since he had sat beside a woman, listening to music and drinking wine. “Thanks,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind a glass.”

  She looked so amazed that he nearly laughed. “Really?”

  “I never saw anyone get that worked up over a beverage.”

  “It’s been a long time since someone’s wanted to have a glass of wine with me.”

  “It’s been a long time since anyone has offered,” he admitted, relaxing. “The certification papers came from the historical society. Your house qualifies for a special designation.”

  “Yeah? Then I guess we have something to drink to.” She went to the dining room. Glass panes rattled as she opened the ancient buffet and took out a wineglass. She poured, then handed him the glass. It felt brittle and fragile in his hand. “Have a seat,” she said, indicating the old sofa facing the hearth. She touched the rim of her glass to his. “What else shall we drink to?”

  “You’re the one with the imagination,” he said. “You decide.”

  “To pressure washers,” she said.

  “You can do better than that.”

  “Not lately. You try it, Malloy.” Keeping her eyes on him, she took a slow sip.

  “To dancing lessons.” He tasted his wine, liking it. Liking the feeling of sitting beside her.

  The song changed, to one about losing a best friend.

  He pretended not to notice the words, but it was hard to ignore the slow slide of the tune through the silence. He took a gulp of wine. Sandra, however, had a head start on him. She’d downed a third of the bottle.

  “My parents are getting a divorce,” she said, the statement seeming to come out of nowhere.

  “What?”

  “I said, my mom and dad are splitting up.”

  Whoa. Mike broke out in a nervous sweat. Why would she confess such a personal matter to him, of all people?

  “Sorry to hear that,” he said, feeling awkward. The emotions seemed to be spilling from her in invisible waves, and he knew he couldn’t be the one to catch them, contain them. He offered the only honest statement he could think of. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “I didn’t mean to dump it on you.” She turned to him on the sofa, tucking one leg beneath her.

  “How long were they married?”

  “Thirty-six years.” She swirled her wineglass, watching the liquid slip around in a circle. “Seemed like forever to me.” She sighed. “I keep asking myself how long they were unhappy, how long they carried on, day after day. And why didn’t I know?”

  “There are a lot of ways to hide unhappiness,” he said.

  She looked at him sharply, then said, “I know.”

  Mike was hardly an authority on marriage, but experience taught him more than he wished he knew. He’d never been able to pinpoint the precise moment it ended for him and Angela. It was a gradual thing, growing by subtle degrees. There had been no electric shock of horror and betrayal, only a dull sense of failure, its rusty edge roughened by the knowledge that only one of them would get the kids.

  “With my ex-wife,” he said, “I guess I saw it coming from a mile off. But as long as neither of us said a word, we didn’t have to do anything about it.”

  “You could have gone on indefinitely that way,” she said.

  “An Irish divorce, my old Granny Malloy would have called it. Two strangers, living under the same roof, keeping up appearances for the sake of the neighbors and children. “ Forgetting caution, he took a healthy gulp of wine. “I was willing to do that for my kids, because I knew Angela would claim custody of them.”

  “So you would have stayed for the kids.”

  “Kevin and Mary Margaret would have preferred that,” he said bluntly. “Kids always do.”

  She studied his face. “I don’t know anything about your situation. But I do know that life is short, Malloy. You only get one shot at happiness. When you reach the place where my parents are, you don’t want to look back and regret the previous ten or twenty or forty years. Your kids might not be able to see things that way right now, but they will. I guarantee they will.”

  Her words brought a rare ease to his chest, something he hadn’t felt in a long time. “Either you’re full of shit or full of wine,” he said.

  Sandra stared down into her glass. “Some of the former, a little of the latter.” Lifting the bottle, she refreshed his glass.

  “So what are you doing with your one shot?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Your shot at happiness.”

  With exaggerated care, she set down the bottle. “Well. I suppose I’d need to start by figuring out what would make me happy.”

  He became fascinated by the way moisture clung to her lips. He couldn’t take his eyes off her mouth. “What would make you happy?”

  She stared at him for a long time, the light from the stove fire flickering in the depths of her eyes. There was a whole world in there, he thought. A secret world. When it became clear she wasn’t going to answer his question, he said, “I have a confession to make. I heard on the evening news that the accident happened a year ago today.”

  “And you came over to make sure I wasn’t slitting my wrists.”

  “Something like that.” He swirled the last of his wine in the glass. “So you weren’t even close to . . . you know —”

  “Suicide.” She rescued him from having to say it. “No, Malloy. I have my idiosyncrasies, but being suicidal isn’t one of them.”

  He cleared his throat. “Good to know. But I thought you might be . . . missing him.”

  “You thought right.”

  He thought about his discovery in the attic—the hidden letters and computer disk. He didn’t know how it had been for the two of them, but he did know what it was like to be in a marriage full of secrets. “So you and your husband were happy.”

  Setting aside her glass, she crossed her feet at the ankles and propped them on the coffee table, clasping her hands behind her head. Staring up at a gaping hole in the ceiling plaster, where Phil had started a wiring repair, she said, “Did I think I was happy? Absolutely. Did I believe we had a good life together? Hell, yes. Did I love Victor?” She spoke with the unsettling cadence of a cross-examination. He remembered that she had just been through an inquest.

  But did she love Victor? Mike was beginning to regret bringing it up. Yet he knew he wouldn’t move a muscle until she gave her answer.

  She dropped her hands to her lap, twisting her fingers together. “With every bit of my heart,” she said, and he heard a disconcerting tremor in her voice. She cleared her throat. “Did Victor love me? Can you ever know what’s in another person’s heart? I used to think you could.”

  “What do you think now?”

  “That I don’t know a thing. You should know better than to have a serious conversation with a fiction writer who’s been drinking.”

  He set both their glasses and the now-empty wine bottle at the far end of the coffee table. Then he studied her profile, the delicate lines of her features and the way the firelight shadowed her skin with amber and turned her eyes to coffee-brown. “You aren’t speaking fiction.”

  “Whatever.” She shrugged, staring straight ahead at the glass door of the woodstove.

  He brushed a drifting lock of hair away from her cheek. He didn’t think about it, simply did it. Just to see if it felt as silky as it looked. It did. “You cut your hair.”

  She gasped softly and pulled back. “Mike—”

  “Shh,” he said. “I won’t hurt you.”

  “So you say.” She studied him intently, considering. Her skin glowed from firelight and wine. “But I think it might not matter.”

  He leaned toward her again, lifting her chin with his knuckles. Her full lips were damp with wine, parted a little. Bending, he touched his mouth to hers. Just
a touch. She let out a gasp of surprise, and a look of pure wonder suffused and softened her face. She leaned toward him in unstudied invitation. He sank his mouth deeper against hers, massaging her jaw with his thumb until her lips slackened and opened for him.

  The taste of her made him higher than any wine could have. She held herself rigid at first, but after a few seconds the hands pressing against his chest changed to fists clutching into his shirt, drawing him closer. A sound came from deep in her throat, and he felt her yearning, an echo of his own. Her reactions had the intensity of new discovery; you’d think she’d never been kissed before. A second later, he wasn’t thinking at all. He was simply holding her in his arms, kissing, tasting. She made the tension and desolate ache in his bones go away, and even if the feeling didn’t last, he didn’t care. It was as if the very muscles of his arms were starved for the shape and the texture and the essence of a woman. This woman.

  She was pliant in his embrace, her lips yielding, her mouth warm. Heat and need built inside him, shot down his spine, and he moved his hands over her shoulders to the inward curve of her waist, feeling a ripple of response from her. With a little more pressure, he might be able to maneuver her to lie down on the sofa. With a seemingly accidental brush of his fingers, he could slip his hand under her sweater. And he sensed, with every nerve in his body, that she wouldn’t resist.

  Even as every impulse urged him to do it, Mike held back. He was no prince, but he knew there was something blatantly cruel about taking advantage of someone this fragile, this vulnerable, on the anniversary of the worst day of her life. Ignoring the fire inside him, he disciplined him-self in a way he hadn’t known he could, almost shaking with the effort. Finally, he made himself stop kissing her, pull back, get a grip.

  She didn’t move. She sat there with her eyes shut and her mouth softly molded by his, her face tilted up, looking wistful and sexy at the same time. He wasn’t sure what to do. He cleared his throat.

  Her eyes flew open. Almost as quickly, her cheeks flooded with color.

  Mike couldn’t help himself. He grinned. “Guess I was out of line.”

  “Probably.”

  “Should I apologize?”

  She drew her fingertips across her lower lip as though to explore it for injuries. “For what?”

  “For coming on to you.”

  “Is that what that was? A come-on?” She laughed. “If it was, you weren’t very subtle. More like a full frontal attack.”

  She had no idea. What he’d done was mild compared to what he’d resisted doing. “It was only a kiss.”

  “Are you sorry you did it?”

  “Hell, no.” God, yes. He wouldn’t sleep at all tonight.

  “So much for the apology.” She shifted away from him on the couch, pulling her knees up to her chest and draping her arms around them. In that moment, she didn’t look like anyone’s widow, least of all Victor Winslow’s. The tabloids were wrong, Mike knew it. This woman hadn’t killed anyone.

  “Not only do you not get an apology,” he said, “but I want to kiss you again.”

  “I’m not sure you should do that.”

  “There’s one way to find out.”

  She moved back another inch, her eyes large in the firelight. “I’ve always heard it’s a bad idea to get personally involved with someone you’re doing business with.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It might turn complicated.”

  “In what way?”

  She laughed, flushing. “What if we get really intense, and then have a falling-out before you finish fixing up the place? I’d be left with a half-finished house and a broken heart, and you’d be too embarrassed or full of regrets or whatever to come back and finish the job.”

  Mike couldn’t help himself. He threw back his head and laughed, long and loud. “No wonder you’re a writer,” he said. “You think too much.”

  “I’m simply going over the possibilities of the situation.” She rested her chin on her drawn-up knees and glanced at her empty glass. “I think I need more wine.”

  “You want me to get you some?”

  “There’s another bottle in the kitchen.”

  He rose with care, with what he hoped was a natural, swift grace. In reality, he had an erection that didn’t seem to know he wasn’t seventeen years old anymore. He hoped like hell she hadn’t noticed. He took his time opening the bottle with a corkscrew on his Swiss Army knife. Bringing the wine back, he poured her half a glass and set down the bottle. “I signed a contract, guaranteeing my work. Doesn’t matter what happens between the two of us. I’ll get this place fixed up.”

  She sipped her wine. “Good. I feel better now.”

  Mike didn’t. She kindled a fire in him that wouldn’t abate, no matter what. “I won’t kid you,” he said. “I find you attractive as hell. I can’t help wanting you.”

  Her breath caught, and a startled look lit her face. “You mean it?”

  “Is it so weird, me wanting you?”

  “I have no idea. So what are we going to do about it? Have an affair?”

  The direct question startled him, so he tossed back one of his own. “Do you want to?”

  “I’m not really certain. I’ve never had one before, never been tempted.”

  He wasn’t sure why, but he believed her. She and Victor had run with a crowd of beautiful people, powerful people, people whose well-groomed appearances in Town and Country and Rhode Island Monthly had kept them in the public eye. Surely he wasn’t the first to find her attractive, the first to want her. The first to hit on her.

  “Are you tempted now?” he asked.

  She moved her gaze over him, its frankness unsettling. “Maybe. I might be.”

  He tried to think past the aggressive urges of his body, which refused to behave like it belonged to a responsible adult. He fought for common sense, and finally found it hanging by a thread. His custody lawyer had pounded the rule into his brain. Discreet dating was fine, even expected of the newly divorced. But his feelings were anything but discreet.

  The most powerful objection of all came from deep inside Mike. Since the divorce, he’d gone out with women now and again, but Sandra was the first one to remind him of the things that really mattered. There was a huge hole in his life, and he wasn’t ready to face that yet. He sure as hell didn’t know how to fill it.

  “You need a friend more than an affair,” he forced himself to say. “You’re alone too much of the time. It can’t be good for you.”

  She drained her wineglass and set it aside. A flash of hurt glinted in her eyes; she had learned to be distrustful. “Why the heck do you think I’m so keen on selling this house? I need to be someplace where people don’t hang garlic on their doors when they see me coming. Where I can go out in public and not worry about being called the Black Widow.” She listened to the music for a moment, then gave a delicate shudder. “The fact is, I never had much of a social life. Victor was my first true friend.”

  He tried to picture a life without friends. What the hell kind of existence was that? He’d grown up carelessly, surrounded by friends, never questioning their presence, but always knowing he could pick up the phone, find someone who wanted to go for a beer and shoot pool. He couldn’t imagine not having that.

  “You know what Victor and I used to do sometimes, on stormy nights?” Sandra asked.

  Mike didn’t want to know. But he sure as hell knew what he ‘d do with her.

  “We’d count our blessings,” she said, “and for each one, we’d eat an M&M. It’s true—we’d sit there and run through a whole list—everything from the fact that my tulip bulbs came up to his latest endorsement from the local union. That probably sounds silly to you.”

  “I ‘d put it more in the category of insane. If I had a beautiful woman alone on a stormy night, the last thing on my mind would be counting anything.”

  She laughed without humor, as though she didn’t believe him. “I can’t even remember what an M&M looks like.”

&
nbsp; “I’ll make a note to get you some. They’re not that hard to come by.”

  “It’s not the M&M’s, Malloy.”

  “I know.”

  “Does it bother you, my talking about my husband?”

  “No,” he lied. He knew he had to let her, tonight of all nights.

  “We shared so much. Everything from our political views to our habit of doing the crossword in the Sunday Times. We ended up having to get two issues of the paper so we could each have our own puzzle.”

  He pictured her in the morning light, working the crossword. He wouldn’t let her get past square one.

  “We loved trying out new recipes and restaurants. We liked museums and concerts and playing tennis. Now that he’s gone, I have all this stuff inside me, the kind of thing you share with someone, and it has no place to go.” Her words moved like a slow, dark river, as though Mike wasn’t even sitting there. Then she turned to him, and her eyes cleared as if she’d suddenly remembered his presence. “Does that make sense?”

  “Yeah. I guess.” He couldn’t stand museums. He thought tennis was a bad joke. And crossword puzzles? He shouldn’t be here at all—he couldn’t be what she needed.

  She tossed back the last of her wine. “I lost two people that night, a year ago. My husband, and my best friend.” Lifting her hand, she shoved a thick lock of hair back from her face. “I don’t think I’m ready for an affair yet. I may never be.” She gave a crooked, borderline-drunk grin. “I like you too much as a person to have an affair with you.”

  “I see,” he said, pretending to understand. But he still wanted to get her in bed.

  Chapter 19

  A late-model, dollar-green Lexus spat oyster-shell gravel as it wheeled into the drive in front of the house, taking the curve a little too fast, stopping a little too abruptly.

  From the tasteful wood grain and leather interior of the car sprang a human dynamo, armed with a pocket digital camera, a pager and cell phone attached to her purse and a clipboard crammed with MLS printouts. Her suit was Armani, her pumps were Prada and her jewelry undoubtedly genuine.

  Sandra stood at the front door, waiting to greet the real estate agent, but the visitor didn’t come to the door. Instead, she assessed the property. Pacing back and forth in front of the house, she took a couple of snapshots, made some notes into a handheld tape recorder. She walked around to the other side of the driveway to inspect the view.