Making Waves

by Catherine Todd

  It had, apparently. After the play, Steve nodded briefly to me, as if I were someone he had once run into at the car wash, and then exited the row without speaking. We had barely spoken a word to each other the entire evening, and although I realized this was not the time to bring up putative fishing excursions in my garage, I was frustrated by his stony silence. I have to admit that I was scarcely in the mood for a drink with Jeff. Or anyone. From two rows back, I saw Meredith giving me the eye and bending over to whisper something to Jonathan. His expression didn’t change, but his head swiveled my way as well. Henry Eastman and his wife, Pamela, approached me anxiously, the senior partner eager to shower kindness on the lost sheep.

  Henry took my hand and whispered, “How are you, my dear?” with so much courtly compassion that I almost lost my composure. Sympathy is often harder to handle than derision, however much I might have needed it. Oh, great, I thought. I was giving serious consideration to disappearing out the side door and into the park when Jeff leaned over the back of my chair. “Where are you parked?”

  His breath was warm in my ear. It tickled. I tried not to squirm in my seat. “The organ pavilion.” I hoped he would not take it as an invitation.

  “So am I. Do you want to follow me?”

  “Where are we going?”

  “It’s a surprise.”

  If he had leered or half-closed his eyes or given a suggestive little chuckle, I would have backed out right then and there, but his smile was perfectly frank and genuine. “Okay, but—”

  “I know,” he said. “You have to get home early.”

  Mission Hills is where old San Diego money lives if it doesn’t live in La Jolla or Rancho Santa Fe (new money lives in Fairbanks Ranch, plus everywhere else). It is a charming area, near the park and downtown, and full of beautiful old trees. What it is not full of is places to get a drink.

  I wondered where Jeff was taking me, but since I had no way of asking him, I had only two options: keep following his BMW or head for home. I didn’t want to be rude, so I kept behind him. My manners were impeccable. If he’d driven all the way to Tijuana, I probably would have followed him right over the border.

  Somewhere short of Margaritaville, he stopped the car. We were in the middle of a residential area, quiet as a rodent siesta. Dark, too. He got out of the BMW and came round to where I sat in my Honda, the lights still on. He put a hand on the door handle. “Coming in?” he asked.

  “Is this your house?”

  “Yes. I have something to show you.”

  “What is it?” I asked, hoping I didn’t sound as if he’d offered to show me something nasty behind the shed.

  He laughed. “Books,” he said.

  I switched off the car lights.

  The last Mrs. Grayson, a brittle blonde whose years in the sun (before all the skin cancer warnings drove everyone to sun block) had left her with a perpetually parched look, had received the Point Loma house where Steve and I had once attended a party for summer associates. The associates, many of them from the harsher climes of the East where a bug zapper is de rigueur for enjoying even a ten-minute sojourn out-of-doors, were always impressed with beachside living and the mildness of the San Diego summer. It was usually the top selling point for the firm, since you could scarcely make the case based on great artworks or riotous nightlife. (The zoo is outstanding, though.)

  Jeff’s new house was vintage Old California on the outside, but the inside was nouveau bachelor—polished hardwood floors, buttery Roche-Bobois leather couches, Navajo rugs on the white walls, high-tech entertainment center. The kitchen had soft mauve tiles and was as big as an operating theater. It was also very attractive. “It’s great,” I said admiringly.

  He took my hand. “I want you to see my study,” he said, drawing me through the door.

  I was expecting a tufted leather couch with metal studs, an oversized desk, and acres of law books. When he switched on the light, I saw that the only thing I’d been right about was the oversized desk, which was French and exquisite, instead of massive oak or rosewood. The rest of the room looked like the library at a stately English home—imposing, but inviting. And the books! Instead of all the dingy, capacious volumes of case law I was used to seeing around lawyers’ offices, there were shelves and shelves of English novels all the way back to Defoe, most of them beautifully bound and deckle- or gilt-edged. There was not a paperback in sight. There were also old travel books, a particular passion of mine, from every era and on every area imaginable.

  I pulled one down from the shelf. It was a nineteenth-century guide to Rome, illustrated with beautifully tinted drawings.

  The library had to have cost a fortune. The firm must have been doing better than I realized, or else Jeff had inherited money. “Wow,” I said.

  He seemed to have read my thoughts. “My late Uncle Oscar was very big in a high-tech start-up company,” he said quickly. If he’d made it off of Naturcare, he had wit enough not to confess it to a partner’s about-to-be-ex-wife. “Like it?”

  “It’s fantastic,” I said sincerely. “I didn’t know you collected old travel books. Did you have them at the other house?”

  His expression wilted just a little. His jawline, I noticed, had become slightly puffy with the years, and there were the beginnings of pouches under his eyes. “I have to confess I didn’t collect them,” he said with a shrug. “My decorator bought them from a dealer in Los Angeles. Most of what I had before was business books and paperbacks. I still have those in the bedroom.”

  His sheepish look was somewhat disarming, though I had been far more impressed when I imagined him going through Volitions—a La Jolla used-book store where the clerks had meaningful discussions about Catholic guilt versus Jewish guilt, and Dickens would not have felt out of place—volume by volume. Fake libraries inevitably conjure up images of Jay Gatsby in his white suit, hungering after acceptance into East Egg. Still, it could have been worse. Jeff had at least furnished his shelves with a great reading selection rather than, for example, leather-bound copies of Gray’s Anatomy.

  “I remembered that you’re a writer,” he said, without the verbal quotation marks Steve always put around the word when it applied to me (in fairness, I put them there myself), “so I thought you might be interested in seeing what I bought. I wish I’d thought to ask your advice beforehand.”

  “Your decorator’s dealer did a wonderful job,” I assured him. It was so flattering to be taken seriously, even in this small capacity. It was even flattering that he’d remembered my interest in books. “Even Henry and Pamela Eastman don’t have a study like this.”

  He sighed happily, so I knew I’d said the right thing. “Drink?” he inquired.

  I nodded, and he poured cognac from a decanter on a silver tray into two cut-crystal glasses that screamed Baccarat. It was so Noël Coward. So what if you risked lead poisoning? What a way to go.

  “Do you want to go into the living room?” he asked me.

  “Could we stay here?”

  He grinned, a high-voltage smile full of boyish charm that had probably melted the defenses of countless females with armor tougher than mine. “I knew you’d like it.”

  I did. I also liked it when we sat on the couch sipping our cognacs, and he asked me about my travels, my writing, and, with the greatest of tact, my impending divorce. He wanted to know who was representing me, what my plans were, how I felt. He was persistent, but he probed so gently that I was not offended. He seemed to be offering a kind sympathy I apparently needed more than I realized. His gaze was earnest and sincere, his interest intense.

  I lost my head completely.

  You might wonder why the relatively simple act of paying attention to me should prove so seductive. It wasn’t that no one ever did; I was reasonably bright and an adequate raconteur at cocktail parties, so people usually listened to what I said. I wasn’t desperate for notice or anything like that. But when the man you’ve lived with for years, the person who knows you best in the whole world, d
ecides he doesn’t want to be with you anymore, it knocks a pretty big hole in your confidence.

  When we were first married, we used to talk about everything from apartheid to Zen, but over the years our conversations had increasingly become monologues. Sometimes Steve would read me a newspaper article from start to finish, without even asking whether the topic interested me or expecting any response. Now and then a subject of mutual appeal would animate a discussion, but Steve’s rhetorical posture was invariably argumentative, and I never excelled at debate. What I wanted from conversation was affirmation and sharing; what Steve wanted was to knock down every point I raised.

  Anyway, I was definitely vulnerable to a man who apparently hung on my every utterance. I started focusing on the little beads of perspiration over his full lips, the way his hair had grown down over his collar, the little freckles on the backs of his hands. I caught myself wondering if he would have a lot of chest hair, and if so, what color. I was definitely having trouble concentrating on the substance of the conversation.

  I suppose I should have been grateful that that part of me, previously comatose if not vegetative, was waking up again, but as a matter of fact I was far more frightened than delighted.

  I looked at my watch ostentatiously. “I ought to be going,” I told him.

  His hand slipped down the back of the couch onto my shoulder. “Stay a little longer,” he said and kissed the back of my neck. Waves of delectable sensation traveled down my spine and arms, rendering me immobile and, apparently, inarticulate. All the warnings that were going off in my head—This is one of Steve’s partners!…you’ll make a fool of yourself!…Protection! AIDS! Herpes! Warts! VD!—didn’t seem to make it all the way to my mouth.

  “I’ve always thought you were so attractive,” he murmured, before he snaked his tongue into my ear. Oh, Christ, I didn’t want to fall for that. But I was clearly plummeting. In fact, it was more like free fall without a parachute.

  Jeff seemed to take my silence for consent and got busier.

  My lips opened, perhaps to form a protest, and were covered by his for their pains. His tongue filled my whole mouth, and I began to think about how uselessly restrictive all my clothing was.

  He had blond chest hair, touched with gray. Despite the workouts, racquetball, and tennis games requisite for a middle-aged man of professional status, there was loose flesh around his middle, and his ass was no longer kouros-boy firm. The lines were blurred and softened by the years. Since gravity had done its work on me as well, it made me like him better. So did the box of condoms in the bedside dresser, for all their implication of practiced seduction. At least I wouldn’t be playing Saturday-night roulette.

  If Jeff’s library was vintage Blenheim Palace, the bedroom was late space station: all high-tech and black lacquer. A second full-screen entertainment center took up one whole wall. There was a whole row of Kronos Quartet CDs. The bedspread looked like Paul Klee on a bad day, with little fishy things that were strongly suggestive of sperm.

  But I was too beside myself for details. Well, not so beside myself that I didn’t wish I’d spent more time at the gym attempting to subdue the parts of my body that tended to go one way when I went the other. Or so out of it that I didn’t fold my clothes neatly and put them over the back of an enormous, high-backed wooden chair. Whatever happened, I would still have to go home in them. But I couldn’t take much more. I was getting dizzy, and I wanted to lie down, but I didn’t know if you were supposed to wait for the host. Finally, I arranged myself as decoratively as possible beneath the covers.

  Jeff strode unashamedly around the bedroom, putting on music and setting the stage. At last he lifted the sheet—perfectly clean and soft as silk—and slid in beside me.

  I put a hand on his chest with little feathery movements that Steve had always liked in happier days. I felt sure that my sexual technique was horridly outdated, but years of monogamy are not conducive to staying au courant on such things. In fact, when I read articles or books that referred to “innovative practices,” I was never quite sure what they meant. Steve and I never did it with rings or hanging from baskets or anything like that. I never read the Kama Sutra. Maybe if I had, he wouldn’t have left.

  I started to descend to more productive regions. Jeff grabbed my hand and stopped me.

  “Wait,” he said, in a rougher tone than he had used all evening.

  Of course I stopped. He pulled back from me a little, and I saw what the trouble was. What had been rather awesomely tumescent before he got under the covers was now a shrinking violet in every since of the word. The only thing performing was the Kronos Quartet.

  He ran an experimental finger down my stomach and below. “Christ,” he said, “you’re too dry. At this rate it’ll take as long as the mad scene in Lucia di Lammermoor.”

  I wasn’t, but I wasn’t about to argue. They never cover this one in articles on dating etiquette, but I gathered I was supposed to offer up my readiness to salve his ego. Maybe I was supposed to be glad that it was a high-class put-down, evoking opera. Ha, ha.

  “It’s probably been a long time for you, hasn’t it?” he asked with just a slight edge of nastiness. I might have mistaken simple embarrassment for blame, but I didn’t think so.

  I looked at my watch, which I had placed on top of the bedside dresser. It read twelve thirty. I swung my feet out of the bed onto the floor. “Yes, it has,” I told him.

  He noticed my upright posture. “Where are you going?” he asked as I reached for my bra.

  “It’s late. I have to get home.”

  He propped himself up on his elbow. “That’s not very tactful, you know. And anyway, I think you should stay. I could help you with your problem.”

  My problem was that I had gotten myself into an embarrassing situation because of a moment of adolescent yearning, but I didn’t think he could help me with that. Though this was clearly the point at which one of us should have kissed the other gently and said “It doesn’t matter,” the atmosphere had obviously turned a little unpleasant. The moment had passed, and both of us knew it. It didn’t really matter whose fault it was. “I’m sorry,” I told him.

  “Maybe you should see a therapist,” he suggested.

  If he wanted to punish me, he would have to stand in line. “Do you mind if I use the bathroom?” I asked, gathering up my clothes.

  I didn’t wait for the answer. The bathroom gleamed at me when I turned on the light. I squinted into the mirror while I ran some water. Christ, it was so trite to examine your face in the mirror after you’ve just done something you wish you hadn’t, but I couldn’t help it. I wondered if my children would look at me in disgust. I didn’t feel disgusted myself, just very tired. And unsatisfied. I didn’t even want to think about what this would do for my future sex life, on the remote chance that there ever was one. I didn’t want to think what they would say about this one around the conference table at Eastman, Bartels, and Steed.

  I hunted around for a tissue. A pearl earring with a gold stud fell out of the Kleenex box when I picked it up. I doubted it belonged to the maid. I wondered if Pearl Studs had had better luck. I wondered if I should leave something of mine for the next one to find. I decided against it.

  I stayed in the bathroom a good fifteen minutes, until I knew every miniscule bit of overlooked mildew on the grout. It took a certain amount of courage to come out again, but I couldn’t hide in there all night. I turned out the light and opened the door quietly.

  “I’ll just be going,” I said in my breeziest voice.

  No answer. I looked over at the bed, where he was, apparently, asleep. I felt a momentary pang for the days of my youth, when your dates held your coat for you and walked you to your door.

  “You don’t have to see me out,” I called softly and closed the bedroom door behind me.

  The kitchen light was on when I got home. Looking right and left nervously as I left the garage, in case our unwelcome lodger had returned, I dashed up to the door, hoping my
innocents had remembered to lock it. They had. I fumbled with the key, expecting to encounter a sink full of dirty glasses, crusts from half-eaten pizza slices, and other detritus of the adolescent appetite. Instead I found Megan sitting on a stool by the bar, watching me, her eyes wide.

  “Megan, it’s after one in the morning!” When you’re a mother, such statements come out of your mouth automatically.

  She rubbed her eyes with her fist like the child she had been till very recently. “I couldn’t sleep,” she said wearily, but she looked as if she’d been trying to force herself awake.

  “Do you want to try now? You look tired.”

  “Mom…”

  “I could make you some warm milk.”

  “Yechh!” She made a gagging noise. “Why do people always suggest warm milk?”

  I shrugged. “Because it’s supposed to work, I guess.”

  “Mom…” she said again.

  I waited. Her eyes searched my face. I wondered what she saw there. I tried not to look guilty. “Yes?” I prompted her.

  “Were you with Dad?”

  I crossed what was left of the space between us in quick steps and put my arm around her. “Oh, Megan, honey, no…I sat next to your father at the play, but he left right afterward.”

  Her eyes looked up at me, dark, angry, and accusing. “Then where have you been?” She stressed each word, pronouncing them slowly and emphatically.

  I let out a breath. There were undoubtedly guidelines for handling this scene in some of those self-help postdivorce manuals, but I hadn’t had the heart to get around to them yet. “I was having a drink with Mr. Grayson, one of Daddy’s partners,” I told her, in the most matter-of-fact tone I could muster.