Right Place, Wrong Time

by Judith Arnold

  “I wanted to see you,” Gina said. “If I canceled tonight, it would be months before we could get together. You’ve got all those sick kids interfering with your social life.”

  Carole laughed. She loved her pediatrics work at St. Vincent’s Hospital. She’d been in her final year of residency when Gina had met her; they and three other women had shared a two-bedroom apartment when Gina had first moved to Manhattan. The other three women, one of whom had slept on a sofa bed in the living room, had been monumental slobs, leaving dirty clothing on the floor, food-caked dishes in the sink and open, oozing tubes of toothpaste on the bathroom counter. Carole and Gina had united in their horror, and from that a friendship had blossomed.

  Amazing how friendships could flourish when strangers found themselves sharing living quarters.

  She and Carole had already discussed Fashion Week, the stretch of days in September when all the major designers came to New York and held runway shows in a huge, glamorous tent in Bryant Park to display the following spring’s collections for the fashion columnists and buyers. It wasn’t as big a deal for shoe designers as for clothing designers, but Bruno always pushed to get his shoes onto the runway models’ feet. The city filled with European royals, American socialites, film stars and cover girls. Parties abounded. Gossip ran rampant. It was like Mardi Gras for the fashion world—exciting but exhausting, requiring an abundant intake of headache remedies.

  Gina would much rather have talked about Carole’s patients, but Carole wanted to talk about Gina. Specifically, she wanted to talk about the phone call Gina had gotten at work earlier that day. “I’m really sorry about the screwup with the time-share,” Carole said. “I still don’t know why Paul told those people they could stay in the unit after he told me he wasn’t going to use it.”

  “You’ve apologized a zillion times,” Gina assured her. “It was obviously just a big misunderstanding.”

  “It was more than that, if Paul’s friend wants to see you.”

  “Why do you keep talking about Paul as if you know him?” Gina asked.

  Carole’s usually pale cheeks turned pink. “Well, I do know him.”

  “You do?”

  “After you phoned me from St. Thomas, I called him up and tore him a new one. Called him seven different kinds of idiot. I was a little rough, I guess.”

  “A little?” Gina recalled how Carole, a sweet, soft-spoken native of Ann Arbor, Michigan, used to light into their piggish roommates in that East Village walk-up four years ago. She could be pretty fierce herself, but she’d always been glad to be on Carole’s side in those fights. Carole was not a woman you’d want to have angry with you.

  “The next day, he showed up at the hospital, looking for me. He works down on Wall Street as a fund manager downtown. He said he wanted to set the record straight….” She faltered, her cheeks growing rosier.

  “So?” Gina goaded her. “Did he?”

  “Well, once we stopped screaming at each other, we…we kind of felt an attraction. We’ve been seeing each other.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “I didn’t want to tell you over the phone, Gina. I thought you might be angry. His mistake practically ruined your vacation, after all.”

  “No, it didn’t.” It had altered her vacation, but ruined it? Not even close.

  So now Carole was seeing Ethan’s friend Paul. “Do you like him?”

  “We fight a lot. It’s fun.” She grinned. “He’s a little too suburban, but I’m hoping that’ll change.”

  “Do you think it can change?” Ethan was too suburban, too. Gina’s last boyfriend, Kyle, had been too suburban, even though he’d lived in Queens. She’d hoped he would change, but he didn’t. He couldn’t.

  Why had she agreed to meet Ethan tomorrow? Why did she allow herself a glimmer of excitement at the prospect of seeing him? He was way too suburban. Look at the woman he’d almost married—blond, gorgeous, a walking, breathing embodiment of suburban.

  “I changed,” Carole said, spreading her hands in display. “I grew up in the Midwest, which is like one huge suburb. And here I am in New York.”

  “Yeah, but you’re a woman. And brilliant. Ethan…”

  “Is he brilliant?”

  Gina ran a polished nail along the edge of the label on her beer bottle. “He’s smart. When it comes to environmental stuff, yeah, he’s probably brilliant. But he’s definitely not a woman.”

  “That could be a plus,” Carole said, grinning mischievously. “Give him a chance, Gina. He might surprise you.”

  “He already did, just by calling me up.”

  “So go for it. What’s the worst that’ll happen? You’ll spoil your Saturday brunch?”

  Gina sighed. A lot of things worse than that could happen. Ethan could turn out to be nothing like the man he’d been in St. Thomas, quiet and gentle but steel spined, tough yet sympathetic when sympathy had been exactly what she’d needed. Or he could turn out to be exactly like the man he’d been in St. Thomas, and then she’d fall hard for him, and he’d hop on the train back to suburbia.

  The waiter arrived carrying platters of aromatic shrimp soup. Gina managed a smile. Okay, so tomorrow’s brunch might be spoiled by the invasion of Ethan Parnell into her life. At least she could enjoy tonight, in the company of a friend who was resolutely not suburban.

  ONE THING Ethan liked about Manhattan was that the streets were numbered, making it difficult for a visitor to get lost. He might have taken a cab downtown from Grand Central Station, but his train had gotten into the city a half hour before he was supposed to meet Gina, and the air was crisp, some midway point between summer and autumn, so he decided to walk.

  The city was easier to take on a Saturday morning. Traffic was marginally lighter, the sidewalks fractionally less jammed with pedestrians. All right, then—that made two things he liked about Manhattan. Numbered streets and thinner crowds at the start of the weekend.

  Still, he wondered how anyone could live in a city so big and overpopulated. A daily diet of New York would leave him too frazzled to think. Gina hadn’t seemed particularly frazzled, but she’d been under the influence of the lulling Caribbean atmosphere when he’d gotten to know her last July. Here on her home turf, he might find her as hard and headstrong as most of the New Yorkers he knew. After all, she was in the middle of Fashion Week, whatever that was.

  He must have been crazy to force this meeting. He should have contented himself with his sweet memories of Gina: Her intensely dark eyes. The undulations of her body as she’d snorkeled in the clear, warm Caribbean Sea—in one or another of her gloriously revealing swim suits. Her soft hair. The erotic pressure of her weight when she’d sat in his lap. He shouldn’t have placed those memories at risk by confronting the real, nonvacation Gina in her natural habitat.

  Too late. He was on his way to a coffee shop on Ninth Avenue. He’d see the real her, and maybe his curiosity would be satisfied.

  The distance between the avenues was longer than he’d realized. Hiking from Park Avenue west to Ninth took him longer than walking the fifteen blocks from Forty-Second Street to Twenty-Seventh. Somewhere in the vicinity of the Port Authority Building he shed his jacket; ten blocks farther south, he rolled up the sleeves of his tailored shirt. Had he dressed too formally? He’d skipped a tie, but his khakis were pleated and his loafers buffed. What if Gina met him wearing black leather?

  He’d probably be very turned on, that was what.

  At last he found the coffee shop. No one would mistake it for Starbucks. The sign above the door was faded to illegibility, and the glass windows were grimy, smudged with a thin layer of soot. From the exterior, the place could pass for one of those triple-X clubs that featured lap dancing by women whose chests were pumped full of silicone.

  Would Gina have sent him to a strip joint as a joke? Were strip joints even open at ten on a Saturday morning?

  Inhaling for courage, he slid his jacket back on as if it were protective armor and shoved open the door. />
  Beyond the door was a café, not a girlie club, thank God. A handful of women were inside, but he saw only one. She sat at a small, scuffed table against one wall, a massive ceramic mug of coffee steaming near her elbow and that day’s edition of the New York Times spread open in front of her. He saw her thick black hair sliding forward to obscure her left cheek, and a gold stud and a gold hoop adorning her exposed right ear, and her long legs crossed one over the other, her magnificent feet enclosed in bright-red canvas sneakers. Her faded blue jeans and snug white T-shirt were a hell of a lot more innocent looking than black leather.

  It didn’t matter. Gina Morante turned him on the way no one ever had.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “COME HERE OFTEN?” he said.

  Gina jerked her head up. Her vision of the New York Times, all those columns of tiny print enumerating the world’s countless disasters and dilemmas, was replaced by the magnificent sight of Ethan.

  He had on a crisp white shirt, pleated trousers, loafers and a blazer—clothes that just about screamed Connecticut. He looked like someone scheduled for tea at the Plaza, cocktails at the Carlisle, dinner at the Harvard Club—anything other than brunch at a grungy Chelsea coffee shop.

  Yet his hair was the same tawny shade she’d found so attractive, and thick with waves. His green eyes were as bright with intelligence and generosity as they’d been in St. Thomas. He still had dimples. He was tall, lean, poised and exactly as attractive as she’d remembered—although her memories of him were dominated by their final night at the resort, when he’d been wearing a lot less clothing.

  Heat crept up the back of her neck as she recalled that night. She realized he was waiting for her to speak. She folded her newspaper and gestured toward the empty chair across from her. “Just about every week,” she answered his question. “The omelettes are great.”

  He glanced around him before lowering himself into the chair. The wall beside their table was decorated with a poster advertising a circus performing at Madison Square Garden—four years ago. Someone had carved the words “Domino rules” into the tabletop, the letters sharply angled because curves would have been difficult to cut into the varnished wood surface. A napkin dispenser and a cylindrical jar of sugar were as close as the table came to a centerpiece. No candlelight and fresh flowers here.

  A waiter Gina had gotten to know over the course of many Saturday brunches materialized at their table. His hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and a tiny silver hoop pierced one nostril. “You guys ready?” he asked.

  “I’ll have a mushroom omelette,” Gina ordered. “And a refill on the coffee, please.”

  Ethan studied the menu, which was posted on a wall above the cash register. “I don’t suppose you’ve got anything healthy here,” he muttered.

  “We’ve got whole-wheat toast,” the waiter said helpfully. “I can tell ’em not to smear any butter on it.”

  “Live it up,” Gina urged Ethan. “Omelettes are good for you. High in calcium.”

  He relented with a smile. “Okay. I’ll have a mushroom omelette, too. And a cup of coffee.”

  Apparently satisfied, the waiter abandoned their table. Gina grinned at Ethan. “Six mornings a week a person can eat a healthy breakfast. You’ve got to have an omelette every now and then.”

  “I’ve got to, huh?” His smile seemed to melt her organs. She felt a luscious warmth, sweet and liquid, seeping through her. This wasn’t good. She didn’t want his smile to make her so happy. “So,” he asked, “what exactly is Fashion Week?”

  She told him. While the waiter delivered coffee to Ethan and topped off Gina’s mug, while the tables around them filled and emptied and filled again, while the waiter returned once more with their omelettes, bright yellow and glistening with butter, and garnished with whole-wheat toast also drenched in butter, Gina told him about the runway shows, the parties, the frenetic planning and preparation, the competition among designers for the press’s attention, the taunting and schmoozing, deal making and scene making. She told him about the celebrities who attended the shows, and the rich old men who squired teenage supermodels around town in their limos.

  She described this season’s Bruno Castiglio line, which featured brightly colored patches of leather—purple vamps with lime-green bows and bright red heels, turquoise T-straps with orange toes. “They’re wild,” she said. “Everyone on the design team loves them.”

  “But you’re not wearing shoes like that,” Ethan noted, peeking under the table.

  “They aren’t in stores yet,” she said. “And once they are, well, they’ll be big, you know? Not big in size, but big in their ability to attract attention. A woman would wear them only if she wanted the world to notice her feet.”

  “If you want the world to notice your feet, you should go barefoot,” Ethan suggested.

  She laughed, even as she felt more of that syrupy warmth spreading through her, caused not just by his flattery—she was used to people complimenting her feet—but by the ease she felt talking to him. Whenever she reminisced about the week she’d spent getting to know him in St. Thomas, she thought mostly about the way he’d looked that last night, or in a swimsuit with his torso wet and sleek and his hair slicked back. She hadn’t remembered how much she’d enjoyed those nights they’d shared out on the terrace, just talking. But talking with Ethan had definitely been one of her favorite activities that week. How had she forgotten that?

  “Tell me how Alicia’s doing,” he prompted her before breaking off a chunk of omelette and forking it into his mouth.

  She was touched that he wanted to know. “She’s doing well. So’s Ramona—my sister.”

  He nodded.

  “Once Jack moved out of the house, the tension level dropped way down. It made life much more pleasant for everyone. Mo was no longer cooking and cleaning up and doing the housewife thing for a guy she was totally pissed at, and she stopped being so resentful. And Jack’s been really good about seeing Ali and sending money. Don’t get me wrong—he’s still a schmuck. But he’s turned out to be a responsible schmuck. So things are going okay. I try to get up to White Plains at least once a week for dinner with Ali and Mo—although with all the Fashion Week hysteria, that’s been impossible lately.” She sipped some coffee, then continued. “Ali wants to take scuba lessons for her birthday. I looked into it, and the scuba schools said she’s too young. But in a few years, we’ll see. And Ramona plans to go back to work, which is something she probably should have done when Ali started kindergarten, instead of sitting around the house feeling useless and maybe taking it out on Jack a little. So yeah, they’re all right.”

  “I’m glad.” He nodded again. “Alicia’s a terrific kid.”

  “Terrific is an understatement. She’s a goddess.” Perhaps she didn’t seem so to others, but to Gina, her spunky little niece was as close to perfect as a seven-year-old could get. “Now—” she took another sip of coffee, hot and deliciously bitter “—it’s your turn to tell me about you, Ethan. Tell me what’s going on in your life.”

  He launched into a description of his current work. The Gage Foundation would be hosting an important fund-raising dinner in November, which was a major undertaking. He was also preparing position papers on logging in old-growth forests for a couple of senators to use in hearings in Washington. Gina listened, fascinated. But his work wasn’t the part of his life she’d most wanted to hear about.

  “How is Kim?” she asked.

  He lowered his fork and reached for his mug. His expression implied that the question didn’t surprise him. “I haven’t seen her since this summer,” he said. “I assume she’s fine. I think I would have heard if she wasn’t.”

  “She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met,” Gina blurted out. She didn’t want to talk Kim up to him—she certainly didn’t have to. He wasn’t blind; he knew how beautiful Kim was. But the words seemed to erupt from her without any forethought, perhaps to test him, to make sure his relationship with Kim was truly dead
and buried before Gina allowed herself to give in to that deep, thick attraction she felt for him. “I know lots of models, Ethan, but they’re all so, I don’t know, thin. And striking. They don’t look real. Kim looked real.”

  “She was real. And beautiful.” He offered a crooked smile. “Why are we talking about her as if she were dead?”

  “Well…she isn’t in my life anymore,” Gina rationalized.

  “Nor in mine.”

  “Don’t you miss her? When I broke up with my boyfriend last year, I missed him for a long time.”

  “Maybe you really loved him.”

  “You didn’t really love Kim?”

  He drank some more coffee, then lowered his mug and let out a long breath. “ assumed I did—but I never really thought about it the way I should have. Mostly I thought about how beautiful she was. That’s not love.”

  “So you don’t miss her at all?”

  He shrugged. “I wish her well.”

  “Jeez, you sound so civilized.” Gina wasn’t sure she believed him. In her world, when people broke up, they most certainly didn’t wish each other well, at least not for the first twelve months after the breakup. As peaceful as life had grown at Ramona’s house, Gina was sure that before her sister crawled beneath the covers and turned off the light at the end of each day, she prayed for God to rain curses down upon her estranged husband’s head.

  And if Gina were Kim, she’d probably pray for Ethan to be drowned in a cloudburst of curses, too.

  Well, she wasn’t Kim. She wasn’t a fancy-schmancy debutante suburbanite. She’d never be almost-engaged to someone like Ethan. No point even contemplating such an eventuality.

  The waiter returned to their table with the coffeepot, but Ethan waved him away from his mug. “Do you want any more?” he asked Gina.

  She’d already had three cups. “No, thanks.”

  “Just the check, please,” Ethan requested. The waiter dug it out of a pocket in his apron and handed it to Ethan, who barely glanced at it before pulling out his wallet and handing over a twenty-dollar bill. “Let’s go,” he said.