“I’m good. You?”
“Busy like a bee. Dropped off your car?”
“Yep. Brian said it’d be ready this afternoon.”
“For sure.”
“If you’re too busy, Brian said he can have one of his guys give me a ride home…”
Kai shook his head. “I
am
one of his guys.” He grinned. “You ready?” He was less pale today. He took his keys. “I’ll be back in ten,” he called out to the business office crew, who were gawking at them in a way Larissa didn’t appreciate.
“It’s not you,” Kai said. “They just love giving me a hard time.” He led her outside and around the corner. “I’m parked over here. They keep torturing me that I never give the men a ride home.”
“Is that true?”
Outside was warm and sunny. It was promising to be a good spring. The Ducati was parked on the side of the white building.
“Perhaps,” he replied with a shrug. “I admit I don’t often have men on the back of my bike behind me.”
She looked at it. He looked at her.
“We’re going on the bike?”
“It’s the only wheels I got.” He looked her over. She was wearing jeans, boots, a leather jacket. She was certainly dressed for the bike. He hopped on first, handing her his helmet. “You take it. I only have the one.”
It felt too loose on her head, and she couldn’t get the strap under her chin to close. Kai had to climb off the bike to help her. Adjusting the helmet with both hands, he put his fingers under her chin to clip the buckle shut. His face, tilted close and near her chin, was clean-shaven, smiley, friendly. His breath smelled of coffee. “It’s going to mess up your hair,” he said. “But you don’t mind, right? You hardly think about hair.”
“Har-de-har-har.”
He was back on the bike. “Hop on, and hold on,” he said. “That’s the most important thing.”
“The hopping, or the holding?”
“The holding.”
She hopped on, like onto a horse, one leg over, the other
in the stirrup. She’d never been on a horse or a bike. She wanted to ask him what she was supposed to hold on to; nothing to hold on to but the rider and his brown leather. Larissa grabbed the sides of Kai’s jacket. Her knees were flanking his denim-clad legs. It was weird, too close, inappropriate. She would never hop on the back of Gary’s bike, or Brian’s, with his unwashed hair.
“You gotta hold on,” Kai yelled to her, revving up the engine. “Once I push off, you’ll go flying if you don’t grab on tighter.”
“Well, don’t push off, okay? Go very slow.”
He pulled out onto Main Street and zoomed down the road. “Go slower!” she squealed, the wind whipping her hair under the helmet. She wasn’t sure he could hear her.
“If I go any slower,” he yelled back, “we’ll lose our balance and fall off.”
“God, why does it seem like a jet plane?” she said when he had stopped at a red light.
“All right, peanut the speed demon. I’ll walk the bike to your house.” He revved the idling engine. “Tell me where you live again.”
She directed him as best she could with the road over his shoulder. She smelled the leather of his jacket. Not wanting him to ride through Summit where the owner of the Summit Diner and Ricky’s Candy knew her, where all the gas station attendants, candy sellers, ice cream makers, shoe purveyors, dry cleaners could wave hi to her strapped to the back of a black and lava-bright Ducati Sportclassic, Larissa took him instead on a roundabout route, down Route 24 service road, avoiding town. She wasn’t doing anything wrong, and yet she didn’t want to ride through Summit with his helmet on her head. Because there was no difference in the
appearance
of things between wrong and right. Both looked exactly the same. A young man in a leather jacket and jeans, whizzing through
a small suburban almost greening town on his flame Ducati, while a long-haired woman of a certain age, married with three children, a possible member of the Women’s Junior League of New Jersey, was astride the back of his bike, both hands gripping his waist, her face close to his back, close to his jacket.
On the open road, he accelerated. She gasped for breath. For a moment Larissa saw herself from the heavens, from the blue sky, saw herself as the birds saw her, on the back of a bike behind a young man, her hair in a swirl, riding fast, near fresh April. The sensation of speed, unable to catch her breath, of danger, of exhilaration, of fear mingled with spring and sunshine, of the undeniable life-yell of Wow, made her miss her right turn on Summit and in a mile, or three, she had to nudge him to turn around. Another blazing moment behind his back.
Finally Kai turned onto Bellevue, coasted down the gentle slope, and Larissa saw herself once again as she was, not as she wished she might be, because he pulled into the driveway of her gray, black-shuttered house.
“You all right?” He eased to a stop behind her Escalade.
She got off the bike, took off his helmet. “Sure,” she said, her face flushed from the speed, the wind.
Taking the helmet from her, Kai smiled infectiously. “There’s nothing like it, is there? Maybe some other time I can take you behind town, near the Watchung reservation and the Deserted Village. Like we did with your Jag. I can burn some serious rubber on that road. The Ducati’s nothin’ but engine.”
“See, the problem with you is you think
that’s
a plus.”
He laughed. “I’ll call you when the nav’s installed.”
“If I’m not here, just leave a message.”
“You want me to call you on your cell?”
“Oh. Uh—” A stutter. “Yeah. Sure.” And just like that she gave him her cell number.
Her back was to the house, but she saw him eyeing it, top to bottom, the skyscraper trees, the ebony shutters, the volume, the breadth of it, taking it all in, the fresh gray paint and the red tulips lining the paved walk, the manicured sloping lawns, the decorative lamp posts. “So this is where you live.” He whistled. “Wow.”
“Thanks. We didn’t always live here.”
“I imagine not. You have to earn a lot of pennies to live in a place like this.”
She assented silently.
“What does your husband do again?”
“He’s the CFO of Prudential Securities.”
Kai whistled again. “He must be pretty proud to live here.”
Again she silently nodded. “He says the only way he’s ever leaving this house is when they carry him out of it feet first.”
Kai blinked approvingly. “And what about you?”
There was a second’s pause. “Yes, me too, of course,” she said quickly. “Where could you possibly go from here?”
“And, more important, why would you want to?” Kai started up his bike, revved his engine. “Listen to how secluded it is. My bike sounds like an airplane with the echo off the golf course. Hey, is that your mall across the highway?” Lightly he laughed. “That’s
sweeeet
. Seeing the shopping possibilities from your sparkling windows.” He raised his gloved hand in a goodbye. “I’ll call when it’s ready, ‘kay?”
In the silence of her Bellevue life, Larissa heard his bike gunning it up the road away on Summit Avenue as she walked up her driveway and let herself into the empty house. Then she sat in her kitchen and waited. Not waited, just…sat in her house, clean, spic-and-span, at the island, cup of coffee in her hands, and tried to catch a glimpse of herself in the black granite, seeing only the glimpse of herself on a motorcycle at forty. She should go let Riot in from the backyard. She should start up the computer and compose the casting
call notice. She should call Ezra. She should take the Escalade and drive to Pingry and order the books. She should…
The phone rang. It was Maggie: would Larissa like to grab some lunch? Instantly Larissa agreed. Anything to get her mind off things. She met Maggie in the parking lot of Neiman’s.
“What, no Jag today?” Maggie’s hair was colored, curly, dark red. She looked good after having recently been under the weather; she was even sporting some light makeup.
“Nah, the kids have stuff in the afternoon,” replied Larissa, prodding her friend away from the truck. “Come on, I’m starved.”
“I heard you’re courting trouble,” Maggie said, all twinkly and ironic, as they sat down in the checkered cafe.
“What do you mean?” Why did Larissa sound so shrill when she asked? Neiman’s Cafe was empty. It was just the two of them and seven waiters.
“Ezra told me how you got into Leroy’s grill and into Fred’s. Well done.”
Calm down, Larissa.
“So why’d you finally agree to do it?”
“Because your husband begged like a pauper. He didn’t know how else to stop Leroy.”
“No one can stop Leroy.”
“Thank God differential equations are too hard for a ten-year-old.” Larissa ordered squash soup and a Waldorf salad with grilled chicken. Maggie got a Neiman’s sampler. While Maggie was ordering, Larissa surreptitiously glanced into her purse, to make sure the cell phone was on ring and not on silent.
“But are you really going to do
Much Ado About Nothing
?” Maggie shook her head.
“Yes, that’s my compromise. Apparently I have to compromise. I wanted the airy
Comedy of Errors
. But no. I had seven naysayers. They insisted on something other than what I wanted. Well, fine. They got their way.”
“But see, Ezra said Leroy and Fred don’t want to do
Much Ado
anymore.”
Larissa laughed deliciously. “Oh, they don’t want to
do
it anymore! As I suspected. Then why’d they suggest it?”
“They said just to put something out there.”
The monkey bread came; the girls dug in.
“I knew it,” she said. “All that yackety-yak just to be contrary. Well, too late. And too bad. We’re doing it.”
They spent the rest of lunch talking about Bo, whose boyfriend, Jonny, was close to getting a job, and about Ezra, who was so overworked, with his three classes, running the English department and overseeing the theater department that the other day he actually forgot the name of his only child. “And I mean, forgot, Lar. He blanked at Dylan, as if he couldn’t understand why this cranky drummer boy was in his house.”
As they were paying, Larissa’s cell phone rang. The caller ID read
Passani, K
.
“Hello?” Was he calling her from his cell phone and not from work?
“Hi. It’s Kai.”
“Hey.” She fought the impulse to turn her back to Maggie so she wouldn’t have to talk to him with her face showing.
“Car’s ready,” he said. “Are you going to be able to pick it up? I know school must be letting out soon.”
“Yeah…and I’ll have my son with me.” She nodded to the waiter, to Maggie, to give her the receipt to sign, to leave a tip, to take her credit card, to close her purse, to get up, push the chair back, all the while on the phone with him.
“Well, look, how about I bring the car, and you two can give me a ride back. That okay?”
“That’s okay.” What else could she do? There was no way she could leave the car at the dealership overnight. What would she tell Jared? “On second thought, let me leave it
overnight. I’ll pick it up tomorrow. The kids have…things this afternoon.”
“You sure? You don’t need it?”
“I have my truck.”
“Well, fine. I’ll bring it to you in the morning then?”
She was about to say fine, all this with Maggie watching, listening—to everything! But then remembered she blew off theater today, and she couldn’t not show up again tomorrow. “I’ve got stuff to do in the morning. Noon?”
They agreed he would bring the car to her house at noon. He had a good phone voice. Of course he did. Of course he would.
Larissa hung up without saying anything, Maggie’s eyes interfering with her inane courtesies.
“Who was that?”
“Jag dealership.” How nice and passive! “They installed a nav system.”
“What do you need one of those for? Where do you go? Can’t find your way to the mall, Lar?”
“Oh,
funny
today, Mags.”
With the check paid, they traipsed across the black-and-white tiled floor.
“You didn’t tell me your car was in the shop.”
“It’s not like it’s
in
the shop. Nothing’s wrong with it.”
“So why didn’t you tell me about the nav earlier when I asked where your car was?”
Larissa sped up. If she wasn’t able to answer Maggie’s questions, how in the world was she going to answer Jared’s?
“You bought
what
?” said Jared, setting down his dinner fork, which signaled the heightened level of his commitment to the conversation.
Larissa shrugged—her most nonchalant shrug. “The car was
supposed to come with it. We got a model without it. But it’s
supposed
to have it.”
Jared was silent. “Larissa, it’s not what the car is supposed to have. It’s not whether or not you need it.”
“What is it then?” she said casually, her pleasant face on, the smile at her lips.
“It’s that you would, could, spend three thousand dollars of our money without even bringing it up in a five-second conversation first.”
“I know. I’m sorry about that. Honest, that was a mistake on my part. It was an impulse buy. I’d gone in for service, and then ordered it on the spot without even asking Brian how much it cost. I thought it would only be a few hundred bucks. By the time they installed it and I paid for it, I was as shocked as you, believe me, but I was already in for a penny.”
“Three hundred thousand pennies.”
“I know.”
“Do you have the receipt?”
“I do. It’s in my bag. You want to see it?”
“I don’t want to
see
it, but I do need it for our records.” His eyes were on her, not blinking. “Who did you buy it from?”
“What?”
“Who did you order the system from?”
“Brian, I told you.”
“Who’s Brian?”
“The service guy in the back.”
“Not Chad?” He paused. “Not Kai?”
“Never got to the front of the dealership, honey. I’m really sorry.” She smiled sweetly. “Jared, I know it’s a lot of money to spend all at once, but strictly speaking, what’s the difference between spending it all in one gulp, and buying four or five pairs of shoes or boots, which I do all the time without calling you up on the phone, interrupting your board meetings, saying, sweetie, I saw this awesome pair of Gucci’s; do you mind?”