“Really? So what are you doing now?”
“Cleaning my own house.” When Ezra looked at her incredulously, Larissa said, “What, you don’t think I can do it? Think I’m afraid to get my hands dirty?” She rushed out of the cafeteria.
“Larissa, wait!” Ezra caught up with her in the hall. “One more thing.”
“Quick, Ezra. I gotta run.”
“I don’t want to do
Saint Joan
unless we agree on the lead. She has to be right.”
“Okay. How about Megan?”
“Megan! You’re joking. You’re not paying attention to me.”
“I am.” She was nearly running.
“She is pampered and overweight. How is she going to be the dynamo that frees France and restores the King to his throne? She is
round
!”
“What, round people can’t be martyrs?”
“Larissa, you’re not taking this seriously. Megan is wrong for the part.”
Larissa shook her head, speeding up. “How about Tiffany?”
“No Tiffany!” Ezra called to her departing back. “No running in the halls!”
She was
running
out.
“Megan will be fine, Ez,” she called back to him, waving. “You’ll see. We’ll play her against type, she’ll be fantastic. Soft and chubby on the outside, lethal on the inside.”
She was early, and he was late. She sat in her car, and waited, wondering if she should use her key and go in.
What’s the key for? Jared had asked a few weeks ago and Larissa replied she didn’t know. Huh, he said. Odd. A nervous Larissa was going to give it back to Kai, sensing trouble brewing, but he said, no, don’t give it back. It’s your key. I can’t give you jewelry, cars, pretty things. I can’t give you anything. But I give you the key, like a key to me. As long as you have it, you know that my door is always open. If she could’ve put the key around her neck on a gold chain, she would’ve. The best she could do is drive around clutching it between her fingers. She bought a gold-plated key ring for it, with red Swarovski crystals, and when Jared saw, he said, “Is that Swarovski?”
“No, darling. Costume jewelry at the trinket kiosk at the mall.”
“Ah. Looks pretty authentic.”
“Doesn’t it, though.”
But what if I used the key to come in when you’re not home?
she had asked Kai.
“And do what? Snoop?” He grinned naughtily. “That’s
so
hot. What are you looking for? Naughty things?”
“Well, I don’t know.”
“What do you want to find? Old love letters?”
More like new love letters
, she replied quietly.
His mouth was in her neck, his hands in her hair. “Well, tell me,” he murmured, husk, husk. “Have you been writing me much?”
So now Larissa waited. It had been snowing and freezing for two months. Yesterday they had their ninth snowstorm. Today was fifteen below. After another minute, she heard his Ducati revving up on Samson. He pulled up next to her in the driveway and hopped off, helmet still on, a ski cap under it.
“Man, it’s
freezing
out. Come on,” he said, smiling. He kissed her through the open window. “You’re like my good luck charm. I sold three Jags today, last one just five minutes ago. That’s
why I’m late. Couldn’t leave. I have another appointment with the couple right after lunch.” He worked full days at the dealer in the frigid winter, taking a break from masonry. From his small trunk he produced a large paper bag and a bouquet of supermarket-bought flowers. “For you,” he said. “Also the sushi.”
“I have things for you,” she said.
She had a box for him, beautifully wrapped at Neiman’s.
She had a cake for him, his favorite, a cheesecake. She wanted to make it, bake it with her own hands, but since that was out of the question, she went to the best bakery in Chatham, bought the cheesecake and left it in the back seat of her Jag. She brought candles, and matches to light them.
They didn’t eat first. They never ate first. Afterward they ate, still in bed, naked, the sheets pulled up over her, pulled down on him.
“Now,” she said, taking the matches from her purse. “You’re finally old enough to drink.”
“Isn’t that awesome,” he said, popping open the Cristal. Champagne and strawberry cheesecake for his birthday lunch. She bought him an Armani jacket, classy greige, size 42 long. She thought with jeans and a white shirt he would look splendid.
“Blow out the candles with me,” he said when she asked him to make a wish. The cake was on the bed, between their legs. And after the blowout, with champagne on his lips, he asked her what she had wished for.
“It’s not
my
birthday.” She was lying in his arms, rubbing her hair against his chest. Seventeen minutes left. “What did
you
wish for? To be able to shave?”
He pinched her. “I do shave, smarty-pants. If you ever saw me in the evening, you’d see my five o’clock stubble.”
“No, wait, I know. You wished to be able to rent a car.”
He pinched her again.
“My mistake. You have to wait four more years for that.”
“Extra funny today, are we, Mrs. Stark.” He tickled her, not allowing her body to tighten. “You want to know what I wished for? There’s a town, in New Mexico, off Route 66. To call it a town is almost unfair, it’s a street with no name, a gas station, a general store…I want you on my bike behind me, and I want us to see it. I want to stay in a tiny bed and breakfast, all dusty and strange, and wake up where the sun is out three hundred days a year.”
“That’s a fun wish.”
“You on my bike, Larissa,” he whispered, climbing on top of her, “holding on for dear life to my leather jacket.”
“Okay.” Like a breath out.
Twelve minutes left.
“Or,” he said, his body gently rubbing up and down against her, rubbing his naked chest against her breasts, “I want to show you Maui. The red flame trees that grow in the spring on the black volcanoes. We’ll get up at dawn and take our bikes up the mountain, into the Maoloa.”
“Will you take me for a demon ride too, Kai?” She moaned, the nerves in her body raw with him, from him, spine tingling, skin burning.
“If that’s what you want. Would you like that?”
“So much.” She closed her eyes, not to see the merciless clock. The blue birthday balloon burst over her head.
I wish we could go to the movies
, she said to him.
I wish we could go to dinner at the swank Italian place down the street, and then bar hopping. I wish we could stay at the Madison hotel, white like a wedding, like a dream. I wish…
Don’t be sad, Kai whispered to her. I told you, I’ll take you any way you want to give yourself to me. And if this is how you give me you, then that’s how I will take you. Is this ideal? Many things are not ideal. What is ideal, though, he said, is you. To have
you
, I will have this. If you said to me, it’s either
this way or it’s nothing, I would choose this over nothing. It’s not sex with you I want. Don’t you understand? All I want is you.
All I want is you.
Eight minutes.
Six.
Three.
She got dressed as she was. She washed at home.
Kai put on his faded jeans, black boots, a white crisp shirt, the Armani jacket. He looked splendid.
Wetting his hands in the sink, he slicked back his growing-out kinky hair and smiled at her, ruefully.
“That is what I wished for, Larissa,” he whispered to her back, as she was
running
out. “I wished for you.”
Emily had a cello lesson at four and voice at 4:30. Michelangelo trooped along for his karate at 5:00 in Chatham. Asher was playing with his buddies in a basement band until six. On the way home, the kids discussed a teacher who pushed a kid, and Emily had forgotten her lunch and was
starving
hungry, and Michelangelo forgot his karate robe and they had to go back. The kid on the morning bus was, apparently, “simply vile” and Emily didn’t know how he was still living.
That night they had take-out Indian for dinner; Jared was happy to eat Tandoori and talk to her about Jan at work, who was just promoted to deputy company secretary, and Jared didn’t know what
that
was about, declaring Jan not yet reliably off the sauce, but whatever. They talked about their plans for the weekend, which apparently included going to South Mountain Reservation with Doug and Barbara on Saturday (“For some reason, Doug’s insisting we drive in
his
car. I think something may be up”), and on Sunday driving to Greenwich
to have brunch with Jared’s boss, Larry Fredoso and his new wife.
The kids were in bed by ten, and Jared had some work, thank God. Larissa sat in the den with her cup of tea, her hands shaking, and closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see the fire Jared built, or her books, or the house. She sat on her couch, legs drawn up, head thrown back on the pillow, squeezing shut her eyes so tears wouldn’t spill down her face like rain.
“Larissa?”
Opening her eyes, she found Jared standing, staring at her with concern. “You ‘kay? What’s the matter, tush?”
“Oh, nothing. Just tired.” She tried to smile.
“What?” he perched next to her. “Did the kids do something?”
“Of course not.”
“Did
I
do something?” he chuckled, with the giggle of a man who says the most ridiculous thing he can think of, because he knows he is beyond reproach.
Reaching to touch his face, Larissa shook her head. “Of course not, darling.”
“I’ll be just another couple of minutes; almost done paying the bills. Want to watch
Seinfeld
at eleven?”
“Very much.”
And they did. She didn’t laugh once. Upstairs, Larissa spent so long in the bathroom that Jared was asleep by the time she stepped into the bedroom. She lay down, careful that no part of her would touch any part of him, and stared at the ceiling to find some answers there.
She had no one to turn to. All her friends had drifted away one by one, departed from her, detached. With them she had the regular things. My kid is flunking math. Do you want to see a movie? Can I borrow an iron; mine broke. I’ll tell you if your dress looks good, if you’ve got a tag sticking out, if
you’ve got lipstick stuck to your teeth. This is what friends do. But when you come to me because you actually need my help, I stop hearing you. I become deaf. You’re talking too low and asking too much of our friendship. I’ve got my own problems. You want to complain no one listens to you? Boo hoo. No one listens to us either. Join the fucking club.
That’s what it was. No one listened to anyone. At the heart of our life, we all walked around with our head hung low, or our eyes raised high, begging for someone to hear our prayer, to hear us speak to the deepest sorrow in us, to our deepest longing.
Dear Larissa, my friend,
I want to tell you about my life.
I’m sorry we got cut off the first time in years I got to hear your voice. The card ran out of money.
I was floating on happy clouds for three weeks. Nothing troubled me. Nothing could.
Lorenzo became the most protective of boyfriends.
He didn’t want me to work with him anymore. He said it was too dangerous. So I asked Father Emilio if I could help him out at the orphanage for a few pesos, and he let me, but the kids were always getting sick with stuff, and soon I got sick. I caught some awful fever swamp thing and started to bleed, and couldn’t work at all. I couldn’t do anything but lie in bed, and Lorenzo said he would work for both of us, and did. He was gone from the house morning till night. He never slept anymore, and you remember how much my Lorenzo loves his beauty rest. He distributed pamphlets, sold trinkets, was a cycle messenger and then a rickshaw driver. Lorenzo made us money, and Father Emilio came every day on his walkabouts and brought me fruit.
I was feeling better. And then the most awful thing happened.
Lorenzo was hired to protest against the Manila/MILF agreement. MILF is a faction group, a breakaway paramilitary organization, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. For years they’ve been raising Cain in Mindanao, where Lorenzo is from, claiming the island is theirs, wanting independence from the Philippines, but, Lorenzo’s parents live there, and millions of other native Filipinos. After years of arson and assault and street attacks, the Philippine government finally agreed to give part of Mindanao to the Muslims. You’d think that would be the end, but no. MILF kept asking for more. To get peace, the government has been giving them more. And more. More land, more resources, more autonomy—and still no peace. Over two hundred thousand lives have been lost in the fighting. So Lorenzo goes to protest handing over 712
more
villages in Mindanao to the Muslims, and not two days later, his mother’s uncle comes down to Las Pinas, finds San Agustin, finds us, and tells Lorenzo that both his parents,
both his parents!
, died a month ago when their village was torched during an occupation by the MILF rebels. They were killed at Sulu Sea on their boat in the early morning, while rowing to shore.
The rebels surrendered to the Filipino commander, and there were many other civilians killed but what good is that to Lorenzo? He has lost his mind. He is completely inconsolable. And raging at his poor Papi and Mama too, because he’s been begging them to leave Zamboanga for years, ever since the worst of the troubles started, but they kept saying it was their home and they wouldn’t go.
I don’t know what to do. My poor Lorenzo. Just at the time when we should be so happy. Instead, he is sick with grief. I draw a little sad face on my letter. Hope you’re
doing better. Can’t imagine you could be doing much worse.
I keep praying there won’t be any more trouble, but when I look at Lorenzo’s stricken face, I get so afraid, like all the trouble is still to come.
Thank you for your package, the clothes, the money. Money was most appreciated. The clothes, don’t be mad, but I think you forgot how tiny I am, they were all too big for me. Plus, they were winter maternity. And it doesn’t get cold here. I sold them, and made some money from your top-of-the-line American merchandise. I paid my rent for two months with those clothes. I love you.