by M. M. Mayle
Everything’s put back the way he found it, and he’s creeping out through the garage before he again wonders who LV is because the initials don’t match up with the owner’s.
SEVENTY-THREE
Early afternoon, April 11, 1987
Colin wakes with a start, uncertain of his surroundings till he sees Laurel’s face on the pillow next to his. Immediate pleasure is mixed with chagrin for subscribing to a stereotype by nodding off once the deed was done. He props himself up on one elbow to say his sorrys and she’s having none.
“You weren’t asleep that long, a little over an hour.”
“Did you sleep?”
“Perhaps for a little while . . . but not entirely.” She hems and haws, hesitant at first to admit she’s been watching him sleep just to get used to the idea of having him next to her in bed.
“I was going to go see about a noise I thought I heard coming from the attic—I’m afraid a squirrel did get in—but as you decreed earlier, fuck the squirrel, so I stayed here.”
“I’ll check the attic later.” He gets an arm round her and pulls her close with every intention of going slow and easy this time. That resolve takes flight when she flings back the sheet, goes astride, and rears back to regard him with half-closed eyes and an artless smile that rather contradicts what she’s doing. His hands are all over her, caressing, fondling, cupping, stroking, finally seizing onto her bum, enforcing a steady rhythm, accommodating her provocative little twists and swoops forward to brush his face and shoulders with her hair and lips. His mouth is full of words when it’s not full of her—words that never get said in any conventional way after he’s shaken by sensations that could have him bracing for aftershocks. She dominates his vision long after he closes his eyes and loses himself to unbelievable bliss and a seamless return to sleep.
Three hours later, after the inevitable knee-trembler in the shower, he wraps a towel round his waist, and she slips into a toweling robe. He’s used up in the best of all possible ways when he seats himself on the edge of the bathtub to watch her dry her hair. She smiles at him in the mirror, he smiles back; she switches off the hairdryer and without warning, drops to her knees dead in front of him.
“Good god, woman, pace yourself!” He’s more than half serious which gets him a big laugh because she’s only wanting a look at his legs and the pocks and grooves left by multiple surgeries and multiple insertions of rods and screws that make him a standout at security checkpoints. Again without warning, and without any word or gesture of pity or revulsion, she scrambles back to her feet and resumes drying her hair.
He drops the towel in the tub and wanders into the bedroom to contemplate picking up his scattered clothes with about the same enthusiasm he’d show for collecting animal waste. Not that there’s anything repugnant about the clothing put on fresh this morning, but getting dressed moves him one step closer to having to tell her goodbye and damned if he knows how he’ll get through it. This morning he couldn’t do it, and this morning he didn’t even know if he stood a chance; he didn’t even know if she would speak to him. And now—now that she’s declared herself and yielded to his fondest wishes and wildest dreams—how can he leave her?
Laurel comes into the room all dressed, groomed, and polished, and that gives him some idea how long he’s been standing there starkers, looking the part of the habitually rutting rock star. Other than for handing him his pants, she pays no notice and goes at stripping the bed with the sort of finality that makes putting his clothes on seem preferable. He’s still struggling into his trousers and casting about for his shirt when she finishes bundling the sheets together and asks him to bring the used towels as soon as he’s finished dressing.
“I don’t have to start the wash right away, but I should get started with the airlines.” She heads for the auxiliary stairs, leaving him to grapple with another harsh confrontation with reality.
To stave off the moment when he hears himself booked for departure, he takes his time finishing dressing and drags out the collecting of used towels as long as he dares.
Downstairs, he adds his armload to the laundry she’s dumped near the door to the basement, and ventures into the kitchen to find her poring over a yellow pages directory at the phone desk.
“Is there more than one Concorde flight on Saturday?” she says.
“Don’t know. Never had any need to know. And I don’t need to know now because I’m not in that big a hurry.” He retreats to the perimeter, gathers up the sheets and towels and heads for the basement and parts unknown. He’d rather do laundry in the River Styx than learn his hour of departure.
When he returns from the basement, where he probably overloaded the washer, skimped on the detergent, and selected the wrong water temperature, she’s seated in her usual place at the long table, chewing on a pencil and looking skeptically at a page of jottings.
“Am I safe to sit here?” He indicates the chair he was rousted from earlier, and his lame attempt to distract goes as unnoticed as his naked reluctance of a bit ago.
“Not much to choose from . . . Brit Air has nothing until Monday, Pan Am’s full as well. Maybe this TWA flight . . . no, this British Caledonian flight looks like the best bet, going out of Kennedy tonight at ten-forty-seven, arriving Gatwick tomorrow at ten-something GMT. However, the only available seats are in business. Is that a problem for you? I know it won’t bother me, but you might prefer—”
“Hold on, I’m not hearing you right. You’re talking like you’re going with me and that’s. . . .”
She’s got that look about her again, that non-look where absolutely anything can happen. “Of course I’m going with you, adorable nitwit. That is what you want, isn’t it?”
“Jesus . . . Laurel . . . baby . . . you have to ask?” He has to swallow hard to get round the lump in his throat, then he’s beset by a swarm of negatives. “But . . . but what of your work, your family, your home, your . . . You can’t just blow everything off and walk away.”
“You’re my only current work, so that’s not an issue. As for family . . . I’ve accepted that nothing more can be done for my father . . . that he’s lost to me forever. You were there for that, you saw me tell him goodbye. And you were there when I effectively cut my brothers and sister loose. They don’t need me any more, at least not in ways that can’t be handled by a phone call or a transfer of funds.
“You know,” she says, drumming the pencil on the tabletop in that old familiar way, “I think I should mention that you witnessed those occasions at your insistence, not mine, and I think I should emphasize that I made those decisions before I allowed your influence to touch me. But that’s not true of my decision to resign from the firm and give up the practice of law.”
“Say what?”
“Yesterday, when I cleaned out my desk at work and left the letter of resignation for David, it was clearly your influence I was feeling—even though I didn’t know it at the time. It was only later when Nate spoke of becoming unrecognizable to himself that I remembered you’d said something similar about me and I realized—”
“Shit! I should’ve known. You were with Nate when I couldn’t find you. The one place you knew I wouldn’t look.”
“Yes, I was, and he set me straight. He told me what he’d done, showed me the evidence, and revealed that he was already planning to resign when you forced the issue. So I absolutely understand what happened there and why it happened, and I’m going to try very hard to understand about David. But I can’t promise I’ll ever feel comfortable about him being your manager.”
“You won’t have to. I wouldn’t be comfortable with him as my manager, either, something I was tryin’ to tell you when you stopped listening yesterday. And now that you and I are actually together, I’m not even dead certain I want to keep him on as solicitor.”
“Isn’t that a little extreme?”
“Maybe. Maybe when we’re not all on the same island I’ll feel differently.”
“How would you feel if we were
all on the same plane and the tradeoff was relative privacy among people you know and a flight schedule that conforms to your needs?”
“Not certain I follow.”
She crumples the page of airline notations and takes up the phone. “We both seem to have forgotten that Rayce and his cast of characters—including David—are leaving tonight on the Rajah Records plane to prepare for the European tour. Maybe they have room for us.”
“Bloody brilliant, you are. What day next week would I have remembered that? And it’s not like both Jeet Singh and David didn’t offer to ferry me across when I signed the interim deal with Rajah—with me rejecting the offer because I felt like they were crowding me. What in hell was I thinking?”
“You were thinking that you were about to break with Nate and didn’t want anyone else breathing down your neck.” She punches in a number. “Do you want to talk to David or shall I?”
He takes the phone and observes the usual protocols without producing detectable surprise at his whereabouts. When asked if the offer is still good and told that two seats are needed and Laurel will be occupying one of them, David is at his imperturbable best, framing responses that conceal any areas of ignorance and contain only the information requested.
“Got it,” Colin says, “If we do not hear from you within the hour—and it’s highly unlikely we will—we’re good to go and will deliver ourselves to the Franklin Aviation terminal at JFK no later than eight tonight.”
Laurel smiles and extends a jubilant high-five. The sparkle of her engagement ring reminds him he still hasn’t given her the other trinket she picked out on that red-letter day. He reaches beneath the table overhang for the duffle bag left on the next chair over and comes up empty-handed. A moment of worry passes when he sees that the bag is on the second chair over, where it must have been jostled during all the excitement earlier. He hurriedly opens it and takes out the glass owl, relieved to see that it’s still whole. He takes out the videocassette as well, even though its value has been downgraded from Rosetta Stone to mere love token.
She’s delighted with the owl that she thought he’d bought for himself and intrigued to know what’s on the videocassette he won’t let her watch till the donkeywork of moving her to England is begun.
“Where do you keep your travel gear?” he says.
“You’re looking at it.” She indicates the plastic garbage bags and pair of dilapidated roller bags littering the kitchen.
“Surely you jest.”
“Only a little. There are a couple more old suitcases in the attic, but I’d be ashamed to—”
“Looks to me like you recently checked out of a five-star hotel with a matched set of rubbish bags, so let’s not waste time talkin’ about ashamed.
Point me to the attic, and let’s get on with it . . . Oh, and there’s the squirrel business to see to.”
“The attic access is inside the cedar closet near the top of—never mind, I’ll show you the way. I need to get a few things from one of the garment bags in the cedar closet.”
