I gulped down some tea. “He’s been cyberstalking me?”
“Well, why not? You are the point at which his life could have taken a very different turn—if he’d come to Paris. Why wouldn’t he Google you? And once he saw what you look like, why wouldn’t he want to know everything about you?” Zelda grinned. “I rubbed it in—told him he blew it by ditching us in Paris. And guess what he said to that?”
“Something about his Park Avenue apartment and how successful he’s been without us?”
“No, he asked me whether you were seeing anyone.”
I was speechless.
Zelda leaned forward. “I think you’ll like him. He’s splendid-looking. Very personable too. According to Frances, he made an absolute fortune out west. Not to mention he’s a Somerset—your father would have been tickled.”
Pater would indeed have enjoyed being connected to the Somersets, who were English aristocracy transplanted to New York. I gave Zelda a sideways glance. “You’re not hearing wedding bells, are you? That would really be putting the cart before the horse.”
“A little, I’ll admit. But I get the sense the boy is seriously interested in you.”
And the boy could take his serious interest and shove it. A man should know his place, and this man belonged firmly in fiction.
“Maybe I’ll meet him after I get tenure, but not before.”
And maybe after I was offered tenure, I’d find some other excuse to not meet the Somerset boy.
I pulled out my phone and brought up the image of Aragorn and me, together in one frame. “Now come here. I’ve got something that’ll blow your mind.”
TEN DAYS LATER, ZELDA LEFT for her trip to the Turquoise Coast of Turkey. I worked more or less day and night, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day included. The day after Christmas I woke up late, did laundry and dishes, and went for a walk in the afternoon.
It was a bright, crisp day, almost not cold under the sun. Central Park was crowded with tourists who wanted the Christmas-in-New York experience. I smiled at couples taking selfies together, and bundled-up toddlers riding on their fathers’ shoulders—and wished Zelda were already back.
On the other side of the park was Fifth Avenue. The moment I set foot on it, someone called my name. “Dr. Canterbury!”
I looked across the street and couldn’t speak for a moment. It was none other than Bennett, in a beautifully cut grey overcoat worn over jeans, a blue scarf around his neck, too stylish and gorgeous for someone not fronting an advertising campaign for a major Italian fashion house.
“Hey!” I found my voice somewhere.
It wasn’t Munich. But I’d take it. I’d totally take it.
He crossed to my side and kissed me on my cheek. “You look almost too pretty.”
I had on head-to-toe black and no makeup. His compliment stoked my vanity in all the best ways. I couldn’t help smiling. “You, on the other hand, look only regular pretty.”
“Medical school sucked all the hot out of me.”
I laughed. “How are you? And what are you doing here?”
“Out for a walk. I live around the corner.”
From where we stood, Park Avenue was only two blocks away. I raised a brow. “Don’t tell me you’ve succeeded in becoming a Park Avenue trophy husband.”
“No, I had to buy my own apartment on Park Avenue. But the maintenance fees are atrocious, so I’m still looking for a sugar mommy.”
I’d figured he probably had independent wealth of some sort—the house in Cos Cob couldn’t have come cheap—but an apartment on this stretch of Park Avenue too? A teasing question was on my lips about whether he worked at a mob hospital and knew where all the bodies were buried, when gears started turning in the back of my head.
The boy came back in grand style, bought an apartment on Park Avenue and all that.
Park Avenue apartment. Check.
According to Frances, he made an absolute fortune out west.
The area code of Bennett’s cell phone number was 510. Berkeley, California—I’d looked it up.
And there were whispers of a most unsuitable older woman.
What had Bennett said to me when I told him that my age in binary was exactly one hundred thousand? I have been known to like an older woman.
I goggled at him, thunderstruck. Could it be? “Bennett, what’s your last name?”
“Somerset.”
He was the one who didn’t show up, the one whose absence set off—
I stopped. That was and had always been an irrational chain of thoughts. Nothing would have been any different had he come to the ball. And he didn’t have to account for a misstep from almost half his lifetime ago.
He did, however, have to answer for his more recent actions. “What were you doing e-mailing and having lunch with Zelda?”
“You were my only score since I came back to New York,” he replied cheekily. “I figured it would be easier to get you to put out again than to convince someone else from scratch.”
I was taken aback—I hadn’t expected him to be up-front about it. “You should have told her that was all you wanted.”
“Right. Next time I see her, I’ll tell her that I have the biggest hard-on for you.”
He said it with a smile, his tone perfectly casual. My reaction, however, was anything but casual. Now that the shock of his identity was beginning to wear off, all the sexual fantasies I’d woven about his raging hard-on for me flashed across my mind’s eye, a highlight reel of ferocious kisses and frantic disrobing.
I inhaled, a shaky, shaky breath. “You could have just told me. Zelda heard wedding bells.”
He was unchastened. “Come to think of it, I’ll marry you any day of the week.”
Even though it was abundantly clear that he couldn’t be less serious, the playfulness of his tone, peppered with affection, somehow made my heart turn over, a sensation at once delightful and terrifying.
This man was more dangerous than I’d remembered.
“Your patents on electroceramics are going to be worth a mint,” he added. “I’ll make sure to refuse to sign any prenups.”
“Huh,” I said. “I don’t date gold-digging groupies.”
He laughed softly. “Running into you, Professor, is the best belated Christmas present I could have asked for. Are you busy? Can I buy you a drink?”
And then what? We go back to his Park Avenue apartment for sex?
Part of me wanted that, a lot. But already I wished that I hadn’t run into him. Face-to-face it was impossible to discount the fact that he hadn’t reached out since August. That as much as I loved to romanticize our encounter, I’d been just an opportunistic bang for him.
“Don’t tell me you aren’t the least bit curious about why I never showed up in Paris,” he said, as if he heard my intended refusal. “You know there had to be a terrific scandal involved.”
“Is that what you’re going to divulge?”
“Only if you let me buy you that drink. This is a special one-time-only offer that expires in the next few minutes.”
He was also a lot more predatory than I remembered. It occurred to me that last time he’d handled me very carefully, a thought that was a blare of alarm in my head.
“If it was a real scandal, I should be able to Google it.”
“You can’t—not yet, as far as I know.” He studied me—this time not as a man looking at a woman he’d like to take to coffee—or to bed—but more like a physician inspecting a patient who presented puzzling symptoms. Or perhaps a DA considering a less-than-cooperative witness. “You know, it’s at the top of my to-do list to call Zelda after she comes back from her trip and invite the two of you to dinner. Her flight lands day after tomorrow, right?”
I remembered that he’d been in touch with Zelda for a while. In hindsight it was clear that he had been laying the groundwork for something. But what?
A few beats passed before I tilted my chin toward the grand Beaux Arts facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, just
steps away. “I was going to the Met. Would you like to come along?”
WE DIDN’T SPEAK AS WE walked up the steps to the museum, then across the great hall to check our coats and get our tokens. I was upset, and unsettled by the fact that I couldn’t figure out why I was upset. Was it because he had been scheming behind my back? Was it because not texting him—or even turning down a drink with him—was no longer sufficient to keep him out of my life? Or was it because some part of me was breathlessly, extravagantly thrilled that the matter was out of my hands, that he was here to stay no matter what I did or didn’t do?
“How was your Christmas?” he asked, as he secured his token to his charcoal jersey.
“I worked most of the time. Yours?”
“Taken up by a medical mission to Guatemala.”
I almost stopped in the middle of the grand staircase. “Doctors Without Borders?”
“No. There’s a Buddhist group that organizes missions to developing countries—and here in the States too. I’ve been going with them for years.”
“What do you do? I don’t imagine you can perform heart transplants.”
“No, but I can do heart valve repair. And I can serve as translator.”
“Now you are actually impressing me,” I said, not without some reluctance.
“I know. All that and a nice ass—it’s the pinnacle of modern manhood.”
I laughed in spite of myself. “Watch it, God Complex.”
He smiled back at me. The sight of those green eyes, their corners slightly crinkled, made my heart thud like a swooning Victorian debutante landing on the ballroom floor.
“Okay, enough small talk,” I said sternly. “Let’s hear about your scandal, and make sure you give me all the salacious details.”
“All the salacious details? Suuure,” he drawled, his voice full of mischief. “Let’s see. It started when I was sixteen. I was in Spain for a semester as an exchange student. My host mom was a professor at the University of Salamanca, and one of her colleagues was a gentleman by the name of José Luis Dominguez Calderón.”
“You say that name with a lot of relish,” I told him. “A lot of villainous relish.”
“You’ll see why.” He grinned. “One day my host parents invited Professor Dominguez and his girlfriend to dinner. The girlfriend was American. I missed speaking English, so I monopolized her that evening.”
“How old was she?”
“Thirty-eight.”
“So she was twenty-two, twenty-three at the time?”
“No, she was thirty-eight.”
My jaw fell. “No.”
“You’re thirty-two. You think in six years you’ll be of absolutely no interest to teenage boys?”
Come to think of it, some of the freshmen I taught were still teenagers. And from time to time one would develop a crush and visit my office hours with unwarranted frequency. But at least a nineteen-year-old was an adult. A sixteen-year-old was a minor.
“Besides,” he continued, “she was hot, and she didn’t look a day over twenty-six.”
I screwed up my face. “Did she pounce on you, cougar-style?”
I could only hope that in a few years I wouldn’t be going after tenth graders.
“No, not really. I hit on her.”
“What?!”
Bennett laughed. “Come on, Professor. I told you she was hot. Which part of that didn’t you understand?”
“But she was old enough to be your mother. And didn’t you say she had a boyfriend?”
“I was an obnoxious kid who didn’t see a fifty-year-old boyfriend as any kind of obstacle.”
I blinked. “Just how obnoxious were you?”
“Let’s see. When I was fourteen, I was pissed at my dad for something—I can’t even remember what now—so I paid a hacker friend to engineer a fake takeover bid for one of the family holdings, making it look as if someone behind an anonymous entity in Grand Cayman was trying to get a controlling share. Gave Dad heartburn for weeks.”
“That was obnoxious. But she was a grown woman. You could hit on her all you want—how did you get her to want to be with you?”
“Isn’t that simple? I was hot too.”
“Eww.”
He glanced at me askance. “You don’t think I’m hot?”
“That’s different. It’s not creepy for me to consider you hot.”
“If it will make your puritanical soul feel better, she didn’t think I was hot—at least not in the beginning. I called her a few days after the dinner and asked if she wouldn’t mind showing a poor, homesick kid around Salamanca. She agreed—because she was nice, not because she wanted to molest me.
“We spent the whole day together in the old city, had lunch and dinner. José Luis was livid and they had a fight over me—he saw what I was up to but she didn’t. Not at all. To get back at him, she asked me if I wanted to see some of the countryside too. So of course I exploited their rift for all it was worth.”
A sixteen-year-old who knew how to exploit the rift between a thirty-eight-year-old and a fifty-year-old? “That’s freaking scary.”
“I told you I was obnoxious.”
“So you just wormed your way into her heart?”
“More like I wormed my way into her bed at first.”
We were walking through the European halls. The Virgin Mary we passed looked quite constipated. In fact, an entire row of Virgin Marys were stiff with disapproval. “Why do I feel that I might be led away in handcuffs if I listen to any more of your story?”
“Hey, you asked for salacious details.”
“You were sixteen. That was illegal. She should have gone to jail for statutory rape.”
“The thought crossed my parents’ mind when they found out, but I was over the age of consent in Spain. They shipped me off to Eton instead, away from her reach.”
“But she still got through to you somehow?”
“No. We didn’t see each other for sixteen months. We met in online chat rooms. We wrote actual letters. I called her from phone booths with calling cards—remember those?—and waited for my eighteenth birthday.”
“Just waited chastely?”
He shrugged. “I was in love.”
My heart recoiled against an abrupt stab of pain. “What did your parents make of all this?”
“They were hoping the separation would do the trick. But the day I turned eighteen, I walked out of Eton and flew to California, where she was based.”
“And your parents just let you go?”
“No, they chased me to Berkeley and it was ugly. But since I was already eighteen they couldn’t do anything. Eventually they left.” His voice turned somber. “I haven’t seen them since—except once, at O’Hare. I don’t think they saw me.”
“Is that why you moved back here, so you could be part of the tribe again?”
He glanced at a painting we were passing, which happened to be a family portrait, three rosy children clambering over an elegant, serene mother. “If I said yes, it would be the first time I admitted it to anyone.”
A strange thrill shot through me. “That’s a yes, then.”
He didn’t answer immediately—I was reminded of the night we met, those few heartbeats during which he stood by his car, motionless, as if he’d acted without thinking the matter through, and must pause to reassess the situation.
“Yes,” he finally said.
My breath caught—did it mean anything that I was the first one to hear it? “You do know that you can ring their doorbell anytime and say, ‘Hey, Mom and Dad, I’ve missed you’?”
“I could. But that would require courage and maturity. Much easier to go on wallowing in indecision.”
“The new pinnacle of modern manhood.”
This made him laugh.
That great laughter, those green eyes…I simmered with a sharp emotion that I didn’t recognize at first.
Possessiveness.
“Sir, ma’am,” an attendant called to us, “the museum is closing in fift
een minutes and we need to clear the galleries.”
“Would you like a drink at my place?” Bennett asked as we made our way out.
My stomach flipped. Was this an invitation to sex? “Where do you live?”
“At Seven Forty.”
Manhattan’s most prestigious apartment buildings were known by their street numbers, and few were as storied as 740 Park Avenue, where Jackie Kennedy had lived as a young girl. “You couldn’t have bought something on Central Park West? It just had to be Seven Forty?”
“Of course. That was how I informed my parents I was moving back to the city.”
When an apartment at 740 changed hands, it made news, at least among a certain subset of Manhattanites. Even if Bennett’s parents didn’t pay attention, they’d have friends who did.
Outside the museum I stopped. If he was determined to have dinner with Zelda and me, that was fine. But I shouldn’t spend any more time alone with him.
In fantasy, he was perfect. In reality, he could only be trouble.
“I have something I’d like to discuss with you,” he said as I mustered the will to decline his invitation. “Something that is unrelated, or only tangentially related, to my inability to save myself for marriage whenever you are around.”
“What is it?”
“Let’s just say I’ve been cultivating Zelda for the same reason.”
I spent a moment pulling on my gloves, wondering whether I could at least postpone the inevitable for some time. Anything that concerned Zelda would eventually concern me, but did I have to deal with it tonight?
“I promise I’ll behave myself in the kitchen,” he cajoled. “There will be absolutely no copulatory acts against counters or cabinets.”
A very, very narrow promise—outside his kitchen I would be fair game. I shook my head. “Lead the way, then.”
He’d worn me down at last.
Chapter 4
740 PARK AVENUE WAS LESS than ten blocks from the Met. An unassuming entrance led into a foyer that had an Art Deco touch, to give it a glimmer of hipness back in 1929 without making the genteel folks of Park Avenue feel that they were being contaminated by too much of what was going on in Central Park West.
The One in My Heart Page 4
