I had made it clear to everyone in my new home that I wasn’t looking for any romance, not even for a good-time onetime date, and yet, just as Ava had predicted, it was important to me, to my well-being, that I look as beautiful as possible. Obviously, Ava had been right about this. I just hoped she hadn’t been right about everything else. I pushed it all out of my mind
before I left my room and descended to wait for Julia Dolan.
Jim and Mr. Brady were in the living room. They heard Mrs. Winston and Mrs. McGruder complimenting me on my hair, and both came hurrying out to see.
“You look great,” Jim said.
“Very beautiful, my dear,” Mr. Brady said. “I’ve taken note of how perfect your teeth are, by the way. Are you using anything special to keep them that white, because I have a new product . . .”
“No, nothing special. I’ve always had good teeth.”
“No cavities?”
“No,” I said, smiling.
“I have about a dozen,” Jim said. “Ate too much candy when I was a teenager.”
“You know, we have this new mechanical toothbrush I mentioned,” Mr. Brady told him. “I can give it to you wholesale.”
Jim nodded but kept his eyes on me. His obvious longing made me uncomfortable. I was happy when Julia Dolan opened the front door. She was right on time. I thought she looked very pretty, too.
She spent a few minutes talking with her great-aunt Amelia and Mrs. McGruder, and then we left. I could feel Jim Lamb’s love-sick eyes on the back of my neck.
“How long did you plan on staying there?” Julia asked, nodding at the Winston House as soon as we got into her car. She had seen the way Jim was looking at me, too.
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.”
“My great-aunt’s very nice, but the two of them
daily would make me a little nuts. Jim Lamb was practically busting out of his skin gaping at you,” she added.
“Tell me about it. Maybe I will start looking for a small apartment.”
“Good idea. I’ll help you look when I have time,” she said. “Clifford found a very nice apartment in a complex called the Forefathers’ Gardens. Maybe there’s an opening for another. I’ll have him check.”
“Thank you.”
“So, tell me about yourself and about California. I haven’t been there yet. Is it as great as everyone claims?”
“I don’t know what they claim. We lived in a few places other than California.”
“Where?”
“Well, I lived in upstate New York and then Nashville before we moved to Los Angeles. The best thing about Los Angeles was that we weren’t far from the ocean. You can be swimming one day and drive up to Big Bear and go skiing the next. The traffic’s depressing, though.”
“It’s not bad right here, but it’s no walk in the park to drive to Boston and back during rush hour, either. And besides,” she said, “even in a smaller city with less traffic, what’s the first thing that happens to you? A car accident.”
I was silent.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Let’s not bring up one sad thing tonight. I’m not going to ask you one other thing about your past. I know you had a painful time with your father and his new girlfriend—who I understand is now his wife?”
“Yes. But I agree, let’s not dwell on the past. You have your burden, too.”
She beamed a smile with her eyes wide with excitement, the sort of smile that can be contagious. “Exactly. Let’s just let loose a bit and enjoy ourselves. Moving into a new town must be like getting into a hot bath. You’ve got to do it very slowly.”
I laughed. “It is, especially for me,” I said, and left it at that, even though I could see that she was dying to know why.
The Underground, the dance club and restaurant Julia took me to, was larger than any I had ever seen, not that I had seen many. It had a huge horseshoe-shaped bar composed of some translucent material. Multi-colored lights thumped and rotated beneath it. In fact, the entire place seemed to move in sync with the rhythm of the disco music. Against one side of the club were tables and booths for those who wanted to eat farther away from the frenzied activity at the bar, and on the other side of it was a floor made of the same material as the bar and with its same rainbow of colors thumping and rotating beneath the feet of those dancing, if you could call it dancing. Some of them looked as if they were in some sort of convulsion, trying to toss their arms and hands off their torsos. Waitresses in abbreviated rainbow-colored uniforms glided somehow gracefully through the crowd and around the tables, carrying trays of drinks and plates of food. We stood inside the entrance, taking it all in.
“What do you think?” Julia asked, shouting to be heard over the music. I could see that after a few drinks, most people didn’t notice or care about the volume.
“I could make a fortune selling cough drops at the exit,” I shouted back, holding my hand over my throat, and she laughed. “It’s fine.”
“I have a table booked.”
“Great,” I said.
We were led to a booth at the far end just before the bar started to curve. Julia opened the drink menu first.
“This is pretty good and potent,” she said, pointing at a drink called the Volcano. “I’ll order it, and you can taste it. If you like it, I’ll order another. No problem, as long as we order something to eat, too.”
“Fine with me,” I said. Alcohol never bothered any of us, not that I was much of a drinker anyway. “I think I’m just going to have an appetizer. I’m not that hungry.”
“Really? They have great burgers and sweet potato fries. It comes with a small dinner salad.”
“I’ll get the shrimp cocktail.”
“Okay,” she said, and ordered for us.
I looked around. It was hard to tell who were couples and who were not. Everyone at the bar and mingling around it looked more like groups of friends. It occurred to me that maybe this was the sort of place where you would hope to meet someone and start a relationship, rather than a place that established couples might frequent. I wondered if that made any sense, but I was afraid to ask Julia, because she might realize just how inexperienced I was when it came to the dating scene.
“Are you very serious with your boyfriend?” I asked instead.
“Clifford? It’s getting there,” she admitted. “I’ve been
seeing him longer than I’ve seen anyone else. He came to Quincy about a year and a half ago, and we started dating about six months later. What about you? Any long romances before you left home?”
“One,” I said. “It became impossible, however.”
“Impossible? Why?”
“It was complicated. We were from two different worlds.”
She just looked at me with her soft smile.
Some people can’t subdue their personalities,
I thought.
No matter what they wear, what they hear, where they are, their inner self shows itself.
Julia was what Daddy would call “a sweetheart, someone who almost always saw the glass half full and never half empty.” She didn’t look at the world through rose-colored glasses so much as she avoided looking at anything or hearing anything that would diminish her optimism. How she could do that and work in a hospital ER was a puzzle to me.
“Care to explain? I mean, was he very wealthy or something?”
“Something like that. He comes from one of those families who think they are tied to royalty. I didn’t fit the picture for his parents. Of course, he assured me that it wouldn’t matter, but it always matters. In the end, no matter what they say, blood is too strong to ignore.”
I thought that was a good mix of what was true and what was not.
She pursed her lips and nodded, impressed. “Daddy keeps telling me you seem like a woman twice, if not three times, your age. He keeps looking at your
application form to see if that one in front of the eight isn’t really a three.”
“Events have a way of aging you prematurely,” I said.
“Yes. Oh, damn.”
“What?”
“I said nothing sad, and here I went and made you talk about a sad love affair.”
Our waiter brought her the Volcano. She seized it and gulped half of it in defiance. “Here, try it,” she said. I laughed and emptied the remainder. She immediately signaled the waiter and ordered another. “Tell you what,” she told him. “Save yourself a trip. Bring me two.”
He looked at her with a smirk, looked at me, and went off to get the drinks.
“I hope you don’t get yourself in trouble or anything. I know this is a small town and—”
“Don’t worry about it. If you don’t flaunt it, no one makes a big deal, and don’t worry about my drinking too much. This place provides a taxi if needed,” she told me. “Something tells me we’re going to need it.”
The waiter brought us the two drinks. This time, she sipped hers and started moving with the rhythm of the music.
I drank from my glass and looked out at the crowd on the dance floor, who acted as if we were at the last ten seconds of a New Year’s Eve celebration. We could hear their cheers and cries as they delighted in abandon and bathed in the passion and lust that seemed to settle over the whole dancing mix of young men and women like an invisible cloud of pure sex. They danced as if each was on
his or her own private stage, but every chance they got, they rubbed bodies, caressed, and even kissed.
Suddenly, I thought that a young woman who had her back to us resembled Ava. My heart stopped and started. I sat up straighter and shifted so I could get a better view. The young woman moved behind two other couples, one quite plump.
“Something wrong?” Julia said.
“I thought I saw someone I knew,” I said, and continued to shift in my seat to get a better view. The young woman seemed to have literally disappeared. I looked everywhere I could.
“You want to go out there?” Julia asked, mistaking my interest in the dancers as envy.
“To dance?”
“It’s what people do here.”
“Yes,” I said, realizing that I might be able to see the young woman more easily from the dance floor.
We stepped away from the booth, me more slowly than her, and then she laughed, took my hand, and tugged me onto a clear spot on the dance floor. The music seemed to come up from the floor, through my legs and torso, driving me to move faster whether I wanted to or not. She was a good dancer. In moments, we seemed to be challenging each other with dramatic steps and moves. I was so into it that I forgot to look for the young woman, but soon I did.
There were a few who could have been the woman who had caught my attention. They were about Ava’s size, with similar hair. That had to be it, I thought. Relieved, I let myself go even more. We were attracting the attention of young men nearby, who tried to insert themselves between
us. For a few minutes, we let two of them do so, but then Julia looked at me, laughed, and nodded toward the bar, where our food was waiting on us.
To the disappointment of the young men, we hurried off. They kept beckoning for our return, but we went back to our booth. Julia finished her drink, and I finished mine. She ordered two more and began to eat. I was really only nibbling on my shrimp cocktail.
“Did you eat some of my great-aunt’s food before coming out?”
“No. I think I’m just a little nervous,” I said.
She nodded with understanding and held up her burger. “Delicious. You can always order one later.”
I smiled and looked around. The place continued to fill up.
“I guess this is the big hot spot here,” I said.
“I don’t come here that much. Clifford isn’t that fond of it. He likes it to be mellow when he eats, and he’s not into the club scene. Talk about your upper-crust people, he’s from one of those aristocratic Boston families, but he can let his hair down, too. When I inspire him,” she added with a wide smile. “And I do.”
“I’ll bet you do.”
“Forget me. You were inspiring quite a few young men out there.”
“So were you.”
“Not as much,” she said.
Was she right? Was that something obvious?
“It was like flies to honey,” I said, and she laughed.
“Look,” she said, leaning toward me. “I’m not trying to push you on anyone. I’m no one qualified to give
anyone advice about romance. I had two or three disappointments in college, and until I met Clifford, I wasn’t what you would call the belle of the ball. In fact, I think I was beginning to worry my father.”
“Why?”
“He’s never come right out and said anything, but I know he’s afraid that our growing up under the circumstances of his failed marriage, my mother running off, that sort of thing, would pollute any relationships we had. I know he’s been disappointed in Liam. They had a few bouts over Liam’s behavior, as you probably know by now.”
I nodded.
“Speak of the devil,” she said, and nodded in the direction of the entrance.
I turned and saw Liam Dolan enter alone.
“I didn’t tell him we were coming here,” Julia swore.
“It’s all right,” I said.
She finished eating. Liam moved to the other side of the bar. He did look a little lost and unsure of himself and not as if he knew we were there. He wasn’t looking around for us. Some women spoke to him, but he didn’t give them any encouragement. I saw him order a drink and gaze at the dancers for a few moments before turning and looking down as he cradled his glass in his hands. If anything, he looked sad and lost. Finally, he spotted Julia and me across the way in our booth. I saw his face brighten. I wanted to look away, pretend I hadn’t noticed him, but I couldn’t do it. Despite myself, I smiled back at him, and he immediately started in our direction.
“What’s this?” he asked his sister.
“What’s it look like, genius?”
“Two young women out on the town,” he said, smiling at me. He turned to Julia. “You never said you were going out with our newest employee.”
“Sorry, Dad.”
He smirked. “You know, my sister can be a pain in the rear, and not only when she gives someone a shot there, either,” he added.
Julia laughed. “No hot date tonight?” she teased.
“No. I’ve cooled down.”
“The feminine world breathes a sigh of relief,” she said.
I was truly enjoying the banter between them. It was loving, I thought. That was something I had never had with Ava. I could remember only tension, challenge, and a sense of competition.