Goddess (2 page)

She saw him as often as she could, experimenting with every sexual variant she could think of, though they never grew tired of his greatest talent. A year and countless orgasms later, Dave was accepted at Colorado State University. She had encouraged him. It was for the best. One day, when she was financially secure, she would divorce Trent. But she didn’t want the responsibility of Dave putting his life on hold for her.

When I met Van, she had gone two years without Dave’s services. A few days after her confession, I handed her an elaborately wrapped gift. She opened it, staring wide-eyed at the small red device resting on a velvet cushion. She gingerly picked up the vibrator and turned it over in her hand. “It’s already charged,” I said.

~*~

Van scrutinized me over the top her martini glass. “Before you figure out what you want to do, you need to figure out who you are.”

“I don’t have time to go on a vision quest.”

She drained her drink. “Then you’d better hope your spirit guide makes house calls.”

~*~

When four o’clock came, I was standing at the bus stop while CC, our excessively hyper dachshund, tugged on the end of his leash, attempting to urinate on a dead bird. (Mackenzie christened the dog Captain Chaos after she watched
The Cannonball Run
on some obscure cable channel. She mercifully agreed to shorten it after he escaped our backyard and I was compelled to walk around the neighborhood shouting his name.)

The school bus pulled up and I saw Mackenzie’s blonde head make its way unhurriedly towards the door. She gave me a little smile as she hopped off the bottom step. “Can Skyler come over for a play date?”

“Who’s Skyler?” I inquired, letting CC lead us home.

“A friend,” she said, annoyed by my ignorance.

“Is she in your class?”

Mackenzie rolled her eyes. “She’s in ‘fifth grade,’” she said, adding unnecessary quotation marks using four fingers in the air.

“A fifth grader wants to have a play date with you?”

“We both have Elizabeth. She wants them to meet.”

Elizabeth was Mackenzie’s American Girl doll. Thanks to it, her knowledge of life just before the Revolutionary War was extensive. I shook my head. “I’ve got a PTA meeting. Isabelle’s coming over to watch you.”

As we turned up our front walk, past our yard badly in need of attention, she took my hand and looked up at me with knowing eyes. “Isabelle’s a basket case,” she said with adult-like certainty.

After homework and what passed for dinner at our house (hamburger with pickles for Mackenzie, soy bacon sandwich with no accouterments for Anna, who was deep in a vegetarian stage, and a note for Lily suggesting she eat her leftover Panera sandwich after practice), I was in the Prius, making the ten-minute drive to Fremont Elementary School for the first Wednesday of the month PTA meeting.

The meetings were held in the library, where we could sit and admire the new beige carpet and the mural created by students with help from a professional artist, all funded by the PTA. Titled simply
Kids!
,
the mural featured a multi-ethnic panorama of children playing traditional games. (One evening, after too many post-PTA cocktails, Van and I made up an accompanying call-and-response, sung to the tune of “War.” (“Kids! What are they good for? Absolutely nothing! Say it again!”)

I called the meeting to order, then sat back while Helen Bartow, the PTA secretary, went through the minutes. It was an unusually warm fall evening and I was wearing a simple brown dress—comfortable, if not terribly stylish. I crossed one leg over the other, letting a sandal hang languidly from my foot.

The majority of the small gathering was the usual suspects who accounted for the bulk of Fremont’s volunteer hours. Most of the women here didn’t work, or had part-time jobs as realtors or yoga instructors. There were also a couple of faces that I recognized from the school hallway who hadn’t attended a meeting before. We always snagged a few new PTA members this way, though most of them subsequently disappeared back into the great, dark mass of parents who occasionally showed up for activities but never volunteered their time.

I’d already lost track of what Helen was saying so I continued to scan the room. That’s when I noticed a young woman sitting in the far corner, away from the other parents, under a poster featuring a cat improbably holding a book with “Read!” written underneath in bold, capital letters, as if it was an edict from a totalitarian government.

She was Asian. I guessed she was probably in her late twenties, which made her the youngest person in the room. That wasn’t surprising; a fair percentage of parents were graduate students or contract employees at the local university. Most of them didn’t live by the current middle class American norm of marrying late and having children at the last possible minute.

I suddenly realized she was staring intently at me. In the library’s bright fluorescent lights, I could see her dark eyes never wavering. Her youthful features were delicate, her skin unmarked by age. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She wore a neatly pressed, knee-length skirt and a blouse bleached to a blinding shade of white. She appeared completely harmless, yet she made me very uncomfortable.

“Julia?” It was Helen. She was watching me, amused. Evidently, she had finished the minutes and was waiting for me to call for their approval.

“Sorry,” I said, hopping up. “Senior moment. All in favor of accepting the minutes as written?”

“Aye.”

“Motion carried.” I stepped to the front of the room. “Mona is running late—she’s waiting on her sitter—so let’s skip the financials and move on to the fall carnival. How’s the volunteer sign-up coming?”

As various women (and the one man in attendance—Frank Branford, currently unemployed) went back and forth over the reasons why volunteers were down this year, I avoided glancing over at the woman in the corner. The way her eyes were riveted on me made me feel like I was somehow different from the other moms in the room—that I merited special attention. It was ridiculous, but her presence rattled me. For a moment, I had become unmoored from the comfortable world of school fundraisers and was drifting into choppy, unfamiliar seas. Over the next hour, as I hurried us through the agenda, the young woman never spoke. I doubted whether anyone else even noticed her.

When the meeting ended, two mothers immediately made a beeline for me. I focused intently on our conversation about the cafeteria recycling project as the room slowly emptied. I avoided locating the mystery woman, afraid that it would encourage her to remain behind. Finally, when I sensed that we were the last three left in the room, I excused myself. I knew if I didn’t get home soon, Isabelle would have to face the battle of getting Mackenzie ready for bed. I turned to pick up my notes.

She was standing behind me, a sparrow waiting soundlessly on a branch. I almost jumped back.

“Thanks for coming,” I said, a little too enthusiastically.

Her eyes were two calm pools. She smiled demurely and held out her hand. “I’m Nina Hwan.”

Her hand felt surprisingly strong. “Are you a new parent?” I inquired.

She nodded. “My son’s in first grade. Mrs. Stinson’s class.”

“She’s a good teacher. Is your husband at the university?”

“We both are. I’m a Ph.D. student in archeology.”

It was a stupid, sexist slight. “Welcome to Fremont,” I said, trying to cover my
faux pas
. “Let me know if you need anything.”

Her expression never changed from one of deep curiosity. “I’m wondering, may I ask you something?”

“Sure.” I was expecting an inquiry about teachers, classes, or the PTA. Instead, she looked down.

“The design on your ankle. Where did you get it?”

My eyes followed hers. The tattoo that had drawn her attention had faded over the course of more than twenty years and I rarely gave it a thought. At its center was what some people assumed was a moon, with two sloped lines above it like a roof. Two more lines of different thicknesses, one to the right, one underneath, completed the image. The lines looked vaguely Chinese or Japanese, but I’d never been able to ascertain if they meant something. “A tattoo parlor in Boston, where I went to college,” I said.

“That’s where you saw it?”

“No, I…” I hesitated. I usually explained to the curious that it was an abstract symbol I had made up, but something in her demeanor told me she wouldn’t buy that. I had never told anyone the full truth, not even my husband. “I don’t remember where I saw it. It was a long time ago.”

“Do you mind?” she asked. Without waiting for a reply, she knelt at my feet to get a closer look. I glanced around. One of the mothers I was talking to was still there, pretending to be engrossed in a flyer for Family Math Night. “It’s very unusual,” she said. She reached out an index finger as if to touch it, but she refrained, letting her fingertip hover an inch from my skin. “Are you sure you can’t remember anything about it?”

“Sorry, no. Does it mean something to you?”

She rose again, her cool eyes meeting mine. “It’s remarkably similar to a symbol at an archeological site where I was working this summer.”

“Really?” I said. “Where was it?”

“North Korea.” Her demure smile returned. “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you more.”

CHAPTER 2

“Weird.”

“Is that the best witticism you can muster?” I balanced the phone against my ear with one hand while I puttered around the kitchen, putting away the dirty dishes the girls had inevitably left out. I had called Van as soon as I returned home, relieved Isabelle, and dealt with two Mackenzie-related crises.

“It could be a recruiting ploy for the North Korean government,” Van said. “They want you to be Kim Jong-un’s mistress or Dennis Rodman’s sidekick.”

“There you go. My career problem solved.”

Van uttered a throaty chuckle. “I asked you about that tattoo once. You seemed kind of evasive.”

I had only known Van a few weeks when she made her inquiry. “It’s not the kind of thing you share on a first date.”

“We’ve been going steady almost three years now. It’s time you spilled the proverbial beans.”

I closed the dishwasher and pulled a half-empty bottle of wine from the refrigerator. “I saw it in a dream,” I said.

“We’ve officially entered the Twilight Zone. What kind of dream?”

“The recurring kind. I think I was fifteen when I first had it. It always featured the same guy.”

“Details, please.”

“I could never see his face, but he had a nice body. He’d slip into my bedroom at night and climb into bed with me. When he’d pull back the sheet, I’d realize we were both naked.”

“Nice. Did you do it with him?”

I took a swig from the bottle. No need to get fancy. “Sometimes. Other times we’d just kiss. It was weird, because when I first started having the dream I’d never had sex with a real guy, but my dream man knew exactly what to do. He’d give me the most amazing orgasms. I’d wake up suddenly, sure that I had made weird sex noises. I was afraid my parents had heard.”

“I am so jealous. What about the tattoo?”

“That was the strangest thing. Every time I had the dream, I would see that symbol, even though I couldn’t remember seeing it in the real world. Sometimes it would be tattooed on the guy’s shoulder, or I’d see it on the wall, or reflected in a mirror, or even in needlepoint on my pillow case.”

“That is totally bizarre.”

“I know. It kind of freaked me out, but I didn’t have anyone I could tell. I kept having the dream off and on into my twenties. Finally, one night in college, I was out drinking with some friends and decided to get the symbol tattooed on me. I thought maybe it would satisfy my subconscious. I guess it worked because eventually the dreams stopped. After that, I hardly thought about the tattoo unless somebody asked about it.”

“Like tonight.”

I heard Mackenzie upstairs arguing with Anna—something about taking a stuffed frog without her permission. I chose to ignore them. “It has to be a coincidence, like a room full of chimpanzees eventually writing
Hamlet
.”

“Was the tattoo artist a monkey?”

“I think he was Lithuanian.”

Mackenzie appeared in the doorway looking like the most tread upon eight-year-old in the Western Hemisphere. “Anna took her frog back. She gave it to me. She’s a crustacean giver.”

“Caucasian giver. Mackenzie, I’m on the phone and you’re supposed to be in bed.”

“I’ve got to go,” I told Van.

“Sweet dreams,” she said.

~*~

I spent the next few days honing my resume and LinkedIn profile, and scouring job listings on the Internet. The pickings were few: Spanish teacher at a private school almost two hours away; translators needed, up to $12 per hour; earn $$$ buying distressed properties. By the following Monday, I was the distressed one. Yes, I could probably find a job doing
something
, but would I be any happier than I was right now? Not that I was unhappy. I just felt… dissatisfied.

Matt left for week-long sales meetings in half a dozen cities. That night, I lay on my half of our king bed, thinking back to 30 years ago when I slept in a twin bed surrounded by pale green walls and posters of The Doors and Jon Bon Jovi. My bedroom occupied a second floor corner of our ramshackle Folk Victorian on the outskirts of Bicknell, Indiana, where town petered out to be replaced by endless rows of corn and soybeans. Back then my thoughts about the future revolved around escape from my church-twice-a-week mother and the suffocating ennui of small town existence. Until I could leave for college, my only relief was late night keggers at the reservoir, smoking pot behind the storage shed in the churchyard, and occasionally meeting a nervous, half-drunken boy in a cornfield where I would let him remove my T-shirt and bra and fondle my underdeveloped breasts. (But nothing more, not then, not yet.)

The only time I felt satisfied was on the nights when my dream man slipped into my bed. He was strong and substantial, a marked contrast to the bony-armed boys I knew in real life. I would awaken, sweat chilling my body, an unfamiliar wetness between my legs. My body would pulse with the surprising and intoxicating aftermath of pleasure. For a brief moment, perhaps a second or two, the mysterious stranger would be as real as the katydids singing outside my open window. I felt so completely satisfied by him that it made my daytime existence even more dissatisfying.

~*~

On Tuesday afternoon my cell phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number.

“Julia?”

“Yes?”

“This is Nina Hwan. We met at the PTA meeting last week.”

My stomach tightened. I wasn’t sure why. “Hi. Yes, I remember you.”

“I hope you don’t mind me calling. I found your number in the school directory.”

I took a deep breath, hoping her call concerned some innocuous school matter. “That’s what it’s there for. Can I help you with something?”

“I want to invite you to dinner.”

“Dinner?”

“Every Friday night some of the graduate students from the archeology department get together at Dr. Ashland Stewart’s house. He was head of the excavation I was involved in last summer.”

“I don’t understand. I don’t have anything to do with the university.”

“I know, but I would very much like Dr. Stewart to meet you.”

“Why?” I knew the answer even before the question left my lips.

“I think he would be very interested in your tattoo.”

“I… I’ll have to check my schedule. Can I get back to you?”

“Of course. Please invite your husband too.”

~*~

“He’s definitely not your stereotypical academic.”

Van and I were lounging on my sofa. Her long legs curled under her, she looked over my shoulder while we perused the Wikipedia entry for Dr. Ashland Stewart.

“You were expecting a tweed jacket and pipe?” I said.

The accompanying photo was of a ruggedly handsome man standing on the Great Wall of China. His face was tanned, with subtle lines that gave it depth and character. His thick brown hair was touched with gray. He looked away from the camera, contemplating something far off in the distance. I couldn’t see his eyes clearly.

I read from the article’s summary. “One of the leading experts on early Asian cultures, Dr. Stewart received worldwide acclaim for discovering the lost city of Shicheng in China. The media has dubbed him a ‘real-life Indiana Jones’ for rushing in to protect archeological treasures facing destruction because of war or unrest. But his penchant for risk-taking and his popularity with the mainstream media has also garnered criticism from some fellow archeologists, including his one-time mentor, Dr. Anton Crusher.”

“Ask to see his whip and fedora,” Van said.

“You’re assuming I’m going.”

Van sat up, an animated look on her face. “You’re definitely going, missy. I mean, a hot guy, your tattoo… it all adds up.”

I rolled my eyes. “It adds up to nothing. It was just a dream.”

Van snatched the iPad out of my hand and scrolled down the page. “Wow.”

“What?”

“His wife was killed in 1995 while supervising a dig in Syria.” She looked up from the tablet. “She was kidnapped and murdered by terrorists.”

“That’s awful,” I said. I retrieved my tablet and turned it off. “This whole thing is just too strange.”

“You have to go, just to satisfy my curiosity.”

“Why don’t you go and I’ll stay home?”

She smiled. “As much as I wouldn’t mind a fling with your dream guy, I’ll find one of my own.”

~*~

“My plane gets in at two, but I’m going to be beat.”

I was walking CC along a path through the manicured, wooded campus that began only a few blocks from our house. I had happened to catch Matt in his hotel room between meetings. I told myself I wouldn’t go unless Matt did, but now I felt a twinge of disappointment. “I might go by myself. Can you watch the kids?”

I could hear someone else at his end. It sounded like a woman’s voice but I couldn’t understand what she was saying or if it was directed at Matt. “No, I’ll go.” He sighed. “I’m not up to spending the evening playing Big Fat Baby with Mackenzie.”

I laughed. “You make a terrible pregnant mom anyway.”

“I’ll be right there,” Matt called to the mystery person. To me he said, “I’ve got a meeting in five minutes. Tell the girls I love them.”

“Sure. See you Friday.”

I hung up just in time to pull CC away from a discarded pizza slice. I continued on, enjoying the solitude. The only sounds were distant traffic and my feet crunching the brown, red, and gold leaves blanketing the asphalt. I rarely came here. It felt too much like a foreign land where I didn’t quite fit in.

My mind kept coming back to the woman in Matt’s room. It could have been Jennifer, who often did sales presentations with him. Jennifer was a petite, snappy brunette with an exotic beauty that came from her multi-ethnic heritage. I was immediately jealous of her when I met her at a client event. But Matt assured me that Jennifer was an irascible Type A, always juggling too many projects and blaming someone else when she dropped the ball. Besides, it didn’t sound like Jennifer’s overly caffeinated voice. A few other women from his office sometimes came to these meetings, but none of them struck me as the type Matt would be interested in. Perhaps it was one of Matt’s clients, but most of the ones I had met were men from cities like Wichita, Akron, and Fort Wayne, where a client dinner still meant red meat and hard liquor. I rarely worried about what Matt was doing during all those long nights at the Hampton Suites or Fairfield Inn. He seemed too safe, too conventional.

Unlike my dream man.

No, that was ridiculous—just a mental hiccup. My dream was the kind of fantasy everyone, single or married, indulged in occasionally. We all feel dissatisfied at times, but that didn’t mean we had to act on our urges. I had never given Matt a reason to be jealous, and unless I had evidence that Matt was indulging in hookers and BDSM sessions, I didn’t need to worry about him either.

I caught up with two young women who were strolling ahead of me. They were a welcome distraction from my absurd conjectures, so I held back, staying a few paces behind them.

One was blonde, the other a redhead. They were dressed in sweats, their long hair unruly, as if they had just crawled out of bed even though it was almost lunchtime. But they were young and attractive enough to get away with it.

“Where were you Saturday night?” the blonde said loudly enough for me to hear. “I texted you like five hundred times.”

The redhead smiled slyly, as if she were holding a secret too good to keep to herself. “I was entertaining a gentleman caller,” she said in a passable Blanche DuBois.

They realized I was behind them and stepped aside to let me pass. They probably thought I was a professor or maybe somebody’s mother visiting from out of town—too conventional to even register.

I nodded a quick “good morning” as I let CC pull me onward.

~*~

By six o’clock Friday evening, pizza had been ordered for the girls, Isabelle was downstairs playing Uno with Mackenzie and Anna, Matt was getting dressed, and I was in the bathroom, toweling off after a quick shower. I wrapped my bathrobe around me and turned to the full-length mirror hanging on the back of the bathroom door. I rarely used this mirror unless I was already dressed and trying to determine if the outfit I had chosen actually worked. For a moment, I lingered there, considering the tattoo that stood out against my pale skin.

“Are you sure you really want to go?” Matt asked from the other side of the door.

“I already said we were coming,” I called back. I knew obligation would be the only thing to get us out of the house on a Friday night.

“All right, I’ll be downstairs.” I heard him clomp down the steps. He really was a good sport, most of the time.

~*~

Despite the warm evening, I wore slacks and socks to keep my tattoo hidden. As Matt drove, I gazed out the window at the enormous Tudor and Victorian homes that were ubiquitous in this part of town. When we first considered moving here, after learning we were pregnant with Lily, we visited this neighborhood. I had imagined living in one of these mansions, enjoying summers on a wide front porch, sipping iced tea and reading a book. The reality of mortgage payments, home maintenance, and a lack of anything remotely resembling leisure time quickly brought me back to earth.