She’d offered him her Florida room as a workplace, but it was far too cheerful, with tree-lizard green walls and a trio of windows. Aaron preferred to work in garret-like quarters, so her walk-in closet was near perfect. (It smelled of lavender potpourri, but he’d learned to live with that.)
At five p.m. when Laurie came home from her temp job, she’d go into the kitchen and prepare elaborate girly cocktails complete with plastic umbrellas. Aaron had developed a taste for them. Currently his favorite was a Pink Lady.
One afternoon she came home to find him eating his typical snack of bread and peanut butter.
“Why didn’t you put jelly on it?” she said.
Aaron shrugged. “When I was a child there was never jelly in my father’s house. I always went without.”
“You can’t have a peanut butter sandwich without jelly. Not in this house, mister.”
She showed him where the jelly was stored in her pantry. She had a jar of apricot; not a favorite of his. Displeasure must have registered on his face, because Laurie left to run an errand. When she returned, it was with ten flavors of jelly. She said, “As long as I’m around, you’ll never eat a peanut butter sandwich without jelly again.”
Aaron had eaten sandwiches with only peanut butter for such a long time, he preferred them that way. (Also jelly had an off-putting viscous quality, like a chemical masquerading as a food.) Still, Laurie was so proud to have brought jelly into his jelly-less world that Aaron now prepared all of his sandwiches with it.
At night they snuggled in her four-poster rice bed with her soft sheets, a perfect end to a perfect day. He held her in his arms and gazed into her eyes, feeling as if he might fall into them and never emerge.
One night, after Aaron had been living with Laurie a month, he woke up and she was gently shaking his shoulder. Dusty was licking his foot.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” Aaron said. He sat up in bed.
“You were having a nightmare.”
Aaron was glad it was dark so she couldn’t sense his embarrassment. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“It’s okay. You were reciting that hymn again.”
Aaron swung a leg out of bed. “I should probably sleep on the couch. I don’t want to keep you up.” When he had nightmares with Emma she always made him leave the room.
“I don’t mind.” She slipped an arm around him. “Do you want to talk about it?”
Aaron was silent. Then he said, “It’s a recurring nightmare.”
“About what?”
“My mother’s death.”
“Oh.” Her voice dropped slightly.
“It’s pretty grim. I shouldn’t—”
“No. Please tell me.”
The concern on her face was so genuine it loosened something in Aaron. Suddenly he wanted to share this very important part of his history with her.
“My mother died in a tornado. That’s why I’m nervous around bad weather. I was seven at the time, and I was with her.”
“What happened?” Laurie asked gently.
Aaron raised his hand to push up his glasses, but they weren’t on his nose. “There was a tornado warning, and like usual, my mother and I went down to the basement. She turned on the radio, but it wasn’t working because the batteries were dead and the extra batteries had gone missing. We stayed in the basement until seven p.m. when the warning was supposed to be over. Seven o’clock arrived and we climbed the stairs. It was quiet. Calm. My mother turned on the electric radio in the kitchen. No music. Instead there was this terrible metallic voice. It said, ‘Take cover now.’”
He paused and Laurie said softly, “Go on.”
“It was too late to take cover. I heard the roar. Glass broke, a deafening crack followed. It sounded like the whole world was splitting in two. My mother screamed, and she lunged for me but didn’t make it. There was a thud so deafening it drowned out the screaming wind.”
“Oh my God,” Laurie whispered.
“That was the last time I ever saw my mother.” Aaron nearly choked on his words. “Afterward it was dark, like being in the belly of a large beast, and the smell of sap was overwhelming. I was buried in leaves and branches, and one of the branches trapped my leg. I couldn’t see or hear my mother, although I called out for her several times. The silence seemed to stretch on for a long while, but at some point I heard a sound. It was faint at first, and I had to stay absolutely still to hear it. It was my mother; she was reciting poems from Words of Comfort. She must have been in agony. The tree fell directly on her torso, and she was surely bleeding internally, but she kept reciting poems from Words of Comfort.”
“Oh, Aaron.”
“She didn’t stop until help arrived. As soon as she knew I was safe she…” Aaron swallowed hard. “She let go.”
Laurie touched Aaron’s leg. “And that’s how you got your limp.”
Aaron nodded.
Laurie embraced Aaron, and he could feel wetness on her cheeks. “It’s going to be all right,” she said. “No matter what happens. That’s something I’ve always known.”
He wished he could adopt her attitude. He was always waiting for the worst to happen. But when he was in Laurie’s arms he could almost believe everything would turn out well.
Laurie laid back down and fell asleep, but Aaron stayed awake for a long while. The moonlight seeped in from the window and bathed her beautiful face.
“I love you,” he said.
She stirred a little, which caught him by surprise. He hadn’t meant to wake her. Groggily she said, “I love you too.”
Aaron’s heart soared; Laurie Lee loved him! She’d said so even though she was half asleep. He couldn’t have been more elated.
“Night, night, Jake,” she said. Then she rolled away from him. It took him at least another hour before he could go back to sleep.
Laurie started taking night classes at the International Institute of Nail Technology. Aaron thought that sounded like a pretentious name for a school that trained people to care for fingernails. She was taking classes like Fabric and Sculpting 101, Bacteriology and Other Nail Disorders and History of Nail Care. (Was the latter strictly necessary? Aaron wondered. Was it relevant, for instance, what Cleopatra did to her nails, or was the school padding the curriculum?)
In preparation for her first test, Laurie went around whispering the nail parts under her breath: “Distal free, distal nail fold, lunula, proximal.”
After she left for her class, Aaron grew restless. He was used to having her around in the evenings. He wandered the house like a lost man and caught his hip on a narrow table in her sun room, disturbing her display of photos.
Aaron hadn’t paid much attention to them before, but as he was righting them, he found it odd there were no pictures of her husband Jake.
Several photos featured Laurie and a pretty brunette with teased hair and heavy makeup whom Aaron assumed was Delilah. (Aaron heard Laurie talking to her on the phone all the time.) There were also photos of an unsmiling elderly woman with a stiff posture, whom he assumed was Laurie’s late grandmother, and photos of small children who probably belonged to Delilah. But not one photo of a man. Laurie surely had photos of her late husband, but for some reason she wasn’t displaying them. Were the memories still too painful?
The table had a drawer, a perfect place to store photos you’d rather not display, but if he opened it, he’d definitely be snooping. But the drawer was open just a little. So technically...
Impulsively he yanked it open all the way and just as he suspected, photos were stored there. All were upside down. He uprighted one and came face to face with a brawny Nordic-looking fellow with piercing blue eyes. His muscular arm was around Laurie’s tiny waist and she was looking up at him adoringly. If Aaron was prone to using clichés, he’d say they looked like
“a match made in Heaven.”
The contrast between himself and Jake was so distressing Aaron slammed the drawer. It got stuck halfway, and he couldn’t make it budge. He struggled with it for several minutes while Jake’s image stared up at him. Aaron could imagine him saying to Laurie, “This is who you ended up with? Some weakling who can’t even shut a drawer?”
Bang. It finally shut, but the impact knocked over the pictures again. Aaron righted them, hopefully in their former positions. He tried not to think about the photograph he’d seen, but Jake’s image and Laurie’s worshipful look kept popping up in his mind. Finally he decided to do a Google search to see if he could learn more about the man Laurie was obviously still mourning.
He found the obituary for Jake “Smiley” Parker, and his all-American looks matched his biography. Jake was a football star in high school, but a knee injury kept him from going further with the sport. Instead, he took a job as a salesman at John Deere and was swiftly promoted to district manager. He was an alderman at his church, a Kiwanis Club member and a board member of Habitat for Humanity. During his spare time he enjoyed participating in triathlons.
Laurie’s pink VW bug purred up the driveway. Aaron quickly closed the webpage with the obituary and deleted it from the history.
When she came inside, instead of greeting him with her usual squeal of delight, she limply waved and gave him a dry peck on the cheek.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
“I flunked nail anatomy and hygiene.”
“But you studied so hard.”
“I know, but I choked on the test. That used to happen to me all the time in school. It was a wonder I made it through. I almost got kicked off the cheerleading squad for poor grades.”
“You were a cheerleader?” Not a surprise. She was exceedingly agile.
“You bet I was. Captain of the squad.”
Yes. That’s the way high school worked. The football players went out with the cheerleaders. Aaron was president of the English club and never had a single date in high school.
“Do you mind if go in and write for a while? That always cheers me up.”
“It does?” Aaron didn’t look at writing that way. Not since his first year in the MFA program. He often repeated a popular writing quote to his students, “Writing is easy. You just open a vein and bleed.”
“Yes! I adore it. Writing’s so much fun.”
He was tempted to snort. It might be fun to write light, mindless romances but writing literary fiction was very serious business. She kissed him and frolicked off. Aaron was a little disappointed. He’d like her to spend time with him now that she was home.
Later she made enthusiastic love to him for over an hour. Aaron couldn’t help but wonder while her eyes were closed and she was screaming, “Yes, yes,” who was she thinking of? Him or Jake? Sometimes Aaron wondered what she could possibly see in him.
Nine
On Saturday Aaron suggested a visit to his favorite bookstore, The Spine, which was located in a mostly empty strip mall in Decatur. He hadn’t gone to The Spine since he and Emma broke up. Today it was safe to stop by because Emma always took Saturday off. That was the day of her coffee shop excursions.
They arrived at The Spine, and Aaron inhaled the rarified smell of books and wooden flooring. The store was dimly lit and had no cutesy bookstore feline, no knick-knacks at the cash register and no tables or end caps to display the latest slick-covered offerings. All the volumes were located in the forest of dark wood stacks that soared to the ceiling. Laurie said she was craving something sweet and wanted to know where the café was located.
“There’s no café.”
“I’ve never been in a bookstore without a café before…Oh well. My sweet tooth will have to wait. Where do they keep the cards? I need to pick out one for Ramona’s birthday.”
“No cards either. The Spine just sells books.”
“Just books?”
“Yes.” That was one thing he and Emma had always agreed on. Neither cared for bookstores that tried to be part toy store, part restaurant or part novelty store.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been in a bookstore that sells only books,” Laurie said.
“Then you’ve been to the wrong bookstores,” said a voice.
Emma slunk out from one of the narrow aisles, soundless as a cat burglar. Obviously she’d overheard the entire conversation.
“Hello, Aaron.” She didn’t bother to disguise the contempt in her voice.
“I thought you didn’t work on Saturday.”
“I’m filling in for my assistant manager who broke his leg.”
Emma cast a critical glance at Laurie, who was dressed in a red and white polka-dot dress with matching red pumps. Her dress emphasized her considerable curves.
His ex-girlfriend wore a black shirt, denim skirt and a clunky pair of clogs, chosen not for style—they made her ankles look thick as stumps—but for comfort. Her dark brown hair hung limply on her shoulders. (Aaron knew she washed it with Dial soap, thinking shampoo was a waste of money.) For a few awkward seconds nobody said a word, and then Laurie extended her hand to Emma.
“Hi. I’m Laurie Lee.” She seemed to have turned down her wattage, as if it not to overwhelm Emma.
Emma ignored the hand with five gleaming pink nails. She glared at Aaron, and her eyes were dark and menacing, like holes in a double-barreled shotgun.
Laurie read people well and by now, she had surely figured out this was Emma. “I think I’ll browse,” she said. “Point me in the direction of the romance section.”
It was the worst thing she could have said.
“We don’t have a romance section at The Spine,” Emma said in a haughty voice. “This is a literary bookstore. We only carry literature of merit.” She said the word “literature” with an affected British accent even though she’d lived in Atlanta all her life.
“Well then, I’ll browse among the books of merit.”
Laurie left, and Emma continued to glare.
“This is who you replaced me with? A romance-reading sex kitten.”
“I didn’t replace you. As you surely recall, you ended our relationship. And Laurie isn’t a sex kitten.”
Laurie was a bit of a sex kitten, but Aaron was compelled to defend her against Emma, who was definitely not. Although she did have claws.
“How long have you been seeing this little piece of cotton candy?”
“We met at the writers’ colony.”
“That bottle blonde is a writer?”
“She isn’t a bottle blonde. Her hair color’s natural and yes, she is a writer.” Aaron used the term “writer” loosely.
Emma’s brows were low as thunderclouds, and Aaron feared an outburst. Something flickered in her eyes. “Wait. Are you trying to make me jealous?”
“No.”
“You’re lying. I can tell. I know you like the back of my hand.”
Aaron had always thought that expression was imprecise. The back of his hand was generic-looking, and he was fairly certain he wouldn’t be able to identify it in a police lineup.
“But your scheme’s not going to work,” Emma said. “If I come back to you, and I’m not saying I will, I won’t be prodded into it. So you can take your fake chippy and—”
“She’s not a fake chippy. She’s my girlfriend.”
“Yeah, right. And I’m Margaret Atwood.”
“And we now live together.”
“What?”
Emma was extremely competitive. He probably should have kept quiet about his new living arrangements.
“Never mind.”
“Don’t you ‘never mind’ me. I heard you. And how dare you live with someone else just after we’ve broken up. Is this about sex? It has to be. I can’t imagine you have a
nything to talk about with this girl.”
Aaron didn’t care for the conversation’s turn. Time to change the subject. “I have news. I sold my novel. To Wilner. It’s not Featherstone, but I suppose it’ll have to do.”
Emma didn’t speak for a minute but darkness brewed in her eyes. Was it a mistake to tell her? He assumed she’d want to know.
“I suppose congratulations are in order,” she said. Her tone was not the least bit congratulatory, and her upper lip beaded with sweat, a very bad sign indeed.
“Thank you,” he said nervously.
“You were working on that novel for what? Five years?”
“Yes.”
“And we were together that whole time?”
“Yes.”
“That means five years of watching you write in your head while I’m trying to talk to you. Five years of curtailed social activities because of your novel. Five years of having to put up with your moping when the work wasn’t going well or even when it was.”
“Yes, but—”
“Five years when your overly precious novel dominated every damn aspect of our lives…”
Emma was using her pre-projectile tone. Time to make an exit. He glanced about for Laurie.
“And when you finally get a publishing contract…Who benefits? Not me. Oh, no. Instead you take up with this marshmallow fluff…”
Emma’s face turned red, and her breath was labored; she shot him a lethal look and stormed into the back room.
Aaron scanned the store, searching for Laurie. She was an aisle away pretending to read a Nicholas Windust novel. He knew she was pretending because the book was upside down. He wondered how much she’d overheard.
Love Literary Style Page 9
