Authors: Clare Willis
The park ended at Highway One, and on the other side of the road were Ocean Beach and the Pacific Ocean. Marking each corner of the park at that end was an old windmill. One of them had been restored and one was a complete wreck. As the driver approached the restored one Richard asked Sunni to close her eyes. The car parked, Richard slipped out one door and opened the other one for her. As she emerged from the car Sunni couldn’t suppress a gasp of astonishment.
On the green lawn in front of the windmill, flanked by hundreds of red, purple, and white impatiens, was a gazebo that had been newly erected for the occasion of their picnic. Inside was a table covered with a white cloth, laid with china and crystal for two. A uniformed waiter stood behind one chair, holding a bottle of champagne.
“Richard, I don’t know what to say. This is beautiful.” Sunni was whispering, although she didn’t know why.
“I’m glad you like it.” Richard held out an arm and Sunni slipped her hand into the crook of his elbow. He escorted her to the gazebo, where the waiter handed each of them a glass of champagne. Richard lifted his in a toast.
“To new beginnings,” he said.
Sunni blushed and looked away, unable to counter the boldness in his gaze.
They sat on opposite sides of the table and the waiter began serving. The dishes appeared in gourmet profusion: imported cheeses, caviar, melon wrapped in prosciutto, grilled and marinated vegetables, and perfect strawberries dipped in chocolate.
“How did you know these are all my favorite foods?” Sunni asked, topping a tiny triangular piece of toast with a dab of caviar.
Richard turned his champagne flute this way and that, causing the bubbles to float to the top and pop. “You are a woman of refined and delicate tastes,” he said. “So I simply extrapolated from that.”
Two hours later Sunni was lying on her back on a plaid blanket, staring at the shifting patterns of light formed by the branches of the towering eucalyptus tree above her. Richard sat somewhat stiffly at her side with his legs straight out. He had frowned slightly when Sunni found the blanket, but he had followed her gamely. The hulls from the chocolate strawberries lay in a pile next to Sunni’s hand. The waiter was quietly packing the remains of lunch into the back of a van parked unobtrusively across the street. Sunni was feeling comfortably full and just a bit tipsy.
Wisps of fog were starting to drift in from the ocean, bearing the smell of brine. The wind blew Sunni’s black hair over her eyes. Richard leaned over to tuck the hair gently behind her ear.
“Your hair is beautiful,” Richard murmured. “Black as a raven’s wing. It’s rare to see this color occur naturally.”
Their faces were very close together. Sunni looked at Richard’s extraordinarily pale complexion. Normally a person with skin of that hue would have freckles, sunburn, or broken capillaries, but Richard was like a marble statue. Impulsively she reached up and touched his cheek. His skin was cold to the touch, but soft and smooth as silk.
Richard must have interpreted her touch as an invitation, because he kissed her. As soon as his soft, cold lips touched hers Sunni felt that something was very, very wrong. She pulled back as abruptly as if she’d been stung by a bee.
He sat up straight, contemplating Sunni. He didn’t look angry, just confounded and a bit disappointed, as if she was a jigsaw puzzle that he’d worked on for days, only to find one piece missing.
“You didn’t want me to kiss you?” he asked.
Sunni lurched to her feet and smoothed her hair. “No, it’s not that, well, it’s just, I feel …” She shook her head. “I don’t know what I feel.”
And she didn’t. The sensation she’d experienced when his lips touched hers was a powerful one, and it had come from deep inside her, but she couldn’t readily identify it. Was it guilt because of Isabel? Guilt because of Jacob? Or something that had to do with Richard himself?
She picked up the strawberry hulls and tossed them into the bushes. Richard folded the plaid blanket into a neat square.
“I guess I just wasn’t ready for that,” Sunni said.
“That’s all right,” he replied with a small smile. “I have all the time in the world.”
Isabel gave a high-pitched wail of despair. “I don’t have anything to wear!”
Given that they were standing in the middle of Isabel’s walk-in closet, which contained what seemed like acres of clothing—folded on shelves, hanging on rods and even packed in shopping bags still wrapped in tissue paper—Sunni had to laugh.
Isabel glared at her.
“I’m sorry, Izzy. It’s just that you have so many clothes here. There must be something that you really like.”
“Nothing’s good enough. I want to look elegant, classy, and beautiful.” Isabel’s lower lip trembled. “I want to look like someone else.”
Isabel had long ago realized that people were going to stare at her, so she had decided to give them something to look at. She favored the designer Lilly Pulitzer’s Palm Beach collections, so most of her clothes looked like the hallucinations of an acid-dropping 1950s housewife. Sunni wouldn’t wear any of them unless she lived in the center of a highway, but she appreciated the bright insouciance that her friend projected. Now it appeared that Richard Lazarus was causing Isabel to question her own fashion sense.
Sunni sighed. “What do you want me to do, sweetie?”
“Find me something!”
“Well, where are you going?” Sunni stepped into the vast cavern of Isabel’s closet.
“The symphony.”
“Okay, so you need a nice dress.” After ten minutes of digging Sunni pulled out a Diane Von Furstenberg dress made of stretchy jersey. It was purple, but eggplant purple, not Barney the Dinosaur purple.
“How about this?” she asked.
“Is that sexy enough?” Isabel asked.
Sunni was stuck between a rock and a hard place. She didn’t want Isabel to look sexy for Richard Lazarus, but she’d been helping Isabel for sixteen years, and she wasn’t about to stop now.
“It’s classy, elegant, and beautiful, Izzy. Adjust the neckline a little bit and it’ll be sexy, too.”
“Okay, if you say so.”
“Put it on. I’ll find you some shoes.”
Sunni chose a pair of black suede pumps with sensible short heels and brought them over. “What about these?”
Isabel was standing in front of a tri-paneled mirror. Having put her arm crutches to the side, she was having difficulty maintaining her balance while wiggling into the tight sheath of stretchyjersey. She finally managed to get the dress on, but it was stuck in her panties in the back. Sunni put her hand on her friend’s shoulder as she pulled the skirt free and straightened it all around. Leaning on Sunni’s arm, Isabel slipped on the shoes Sunni had brought her.
Isabel sniffed. “Those aren’t sexy at all.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Sunni admitted. “But you don’t want to trip.”
“I guess you’re right. I’m not as stable as I used to be.” Isabel looked up from her feet and caught Sunni’s eye in the mirror. She gave Sunni a big smile.
“What? “ Sunni asked.
“Remember prom night?”
Sunni would never forget it. The humiliation of prom night had cemented her friendship with Isabel forever.
They had stood in front of the same mirror for hours that night, putting on makeup and arranging their hair. Dennis had given them both five hundred dollars for dresses, but Isabel had already begun her penchant for psychedelic clothing, so she was wearing a 1960s vintage gown purchased for eighteen dollars at Buffalo Exchange on Haight Street. It displayed a swirling purple and black pattern that caused vertigo if stared at for too long. Sunni had spent her entire allotment, plus one hundred dollars of Isabel’s, on a sleeveless red silk Armani cocktail dress with a plunging neckline and fishtail hem.
Her date that night was her boyfriend of one year, Ted Inman, a devilishly sexy boy who was both a member of the Chess Club and a star on the varsity basketball team. Sunni was terribly in love with him and had decided that she was going to give up her virginity to him that night. She was feeling especially warm toward Ted because he had risked his reputation to secure a date for Isabel, who had been treated alternately as a pariah, a best friend, or a maiden aunt by the boys in the class. Ted had convinced another boy on the basketball team, an extremely good-looking and popular kid named Chase Sweeney, to invite Isabel to the prom. Chase had recently broken up with his girlfriend and was available, but according to Ted it had taken some effort to convince him that his reputation could survive taking the crippled girl to the prom.
The boys had arrived in a limousine, bearing corsages, and whisked the girls off to dinner at the Hyatt Regency hotel. Isabel and Chase seemed to get along even better than Sunni had hoped, laughing, flirting, and teasing each other by the end of the meal. They all snuck into the women’s lounge and smoked some pot before continuing upstairs to the ballroom where the prom was being held. Swirling lights and pounding hip-hop music greeted them at the door.
“Do you want to dance?” Chase asked Isabel.
Sunni bit her lip. Isabel didn’t dance. She had told Ted to inform Chase of this fact beforehand so he wouldn’t embarrass her by asking.
A flicker passed over Isabel’s face, and then she smiled at her date. “Sure, I’d love to.”
Sunni and Ted followed them onto the dance floor. Isabel bobbed around on her crutches while Chase danced in circles around her. After a few songs Isabel looked so happy that Sunni allowed herself to turn away and pay attention to Ted. He swept her up into his arms and they kissed their way through a slow song. When another fast tune started up they broke apart and started dancing again, Sunni feeling loose-limbed and limp as spaghetti from her make-out session. She looked up at her boyfriend and saw that he was laughing at something. She smiled in response and turned to see what was so funny.
Chase Sweeney was dancing behind Isabel, aping her awkward movements in a broad caricature that had caught the attention of most of their nearby classmates, who were snickering behind their hands.
Sunni grabbed Ted by the arm. “Stop him right now,” she hissed.
“What? They’re just having fun.”
“That is not fun. That’s evil. Go over there and tell him to stop.”
Ted pulled his arm out of Sunni’s grasp. A dark look passed over his face. “Let it go, Sunni.”
“Fuck you. That’s my best friend.” Sunni stalked over to Chase and pulled on the back of his tuxedo. He turned around and gave Sunni a devilish grin, which she countered with a steely stare. Isabel swung around, looking as happy as a lark, and Chase’s evil grin expanded. He started to dance, and Sunni knew exactly what he was going to do next. So she punched him, aiming high because he had a good foot of height on her.
∗ ∗ ∗
The night had ended with Sunni and Isabel sharing a twelve-scoop ice-cream sundae at the Toy Boat Dessert Café. Sunni had broken up with Ted the next day and never looked back. As she gazed at all the angles of her friend in the three-way mirror, and at the ugly shoes she’d chosen so that she wouldn’t look lovely for her date with Richard, Sunni felt a wave of shame that caused her cheeks to turn flaming red. Her friendship with Isabel was far more important than any man. Her competition with Isabel over Richard Lazarus was over.
While Isabel took a shower Sunni went downstairs to talk to Dennis. Although there was an elevator that had been put in when Isabel received her diagnosis, Sunni preferred the elaborate curved staircase. Walking down it, sliding her hand along the rail, always made her feel like Scarlett O’Hara. When she reached the foyer she heard music from the living room. Someone was playing the trumpet, enthusiastically and rather badly. She quietly opened the door and crossed the cavernous room to the fireplace, where Dennis LaForge was perched on a stool with a music stand in front of him and a pen behind his ear. After a few chords he stopped and made some notes. Only then did he look up at Sunni, but he gave her a generous smile.
“Sunni, how are you?” His voice boomed across the short space between them.
Dennis LaForge loved jazz: he played it, wrote it, and listened to it nonstop. He had used his money and influence to make friends with many of the top musicians in the country, and every year he hosted a free jazz festival in Golden Gate Park that was attended by thousands. The only thing his money hadn’t been able to buy him was musical ability.
“Writing a new song?” Sunni asked.
He dropped the pen on the music stand. “Just noodling, polishing up a few tunes.”
Sunni didn’t ask to hear them. She had no musical ability, but she knew bad when she heard it.
“Take a seat, I haven’t seen you in a while. We miss you around here.”
“You saw me yesterday. ”
“That was in a professional capacity. I mean you haven’t been hanging out here like you used to.”
Sunni sat in one of the upholstered wing chairs that flanked the fireplace.
“Is Isabel all ready for her date tonight?” Dennis asked. He placed the trumpet in its case.
“Getting there. You know how women are.”
He chuckled as he sat down. “I sure do. Gloria and I were late to everything. She always looked beautiful, though.”
“Yes, she did. “ Sunni straightened the arm cover on her chair. “What do you think of Richard? ”
He paused so long that she looked up to see if he had heard her. He was looking at her rose tattoo, probably thinking about when she and Isabel were teenagers. He had been very upset when Sunni got the tattoo. She was seventeen and had forged his signature on the release form. When she asked him about the incident a few years later he said that he had been concerned that having such a constant reminder of her past might be painful to her. This has been a revelation to Sunni. All that time she’d thought he was angry that she had defied him and instead he was worried about her feelings. She realized then that she had a lot to learn about being an adult.
“What do
you
think of him?” Dennis’s tone was sharp.
Sunni chewed her lip. “I like him,” she said honestly. “He’s very charming.”