“I’m not a big talker,” she told him truthfully, not wishing to find herself dissected in the pages of his next book. “I
am
a good listener, however,” she surprised herself by continuing. “If
you’d
like to talk about it …”
“The truth is,” he said, standing up abruptly, his words gaining speed and conviction, “that I
would
like to talk about it. The truth is that I’d like nothing better than to sit and compare notes with you, match you juicy tidbit for juicy tidbit until we were both too bored to care anymore, and then I’d like to take you to some motel, preferably the same motel they went to the first time,
definitely
the same motel they went to, preferably the same room with the same goddamn bed, and then I’d like to …” He stopped abruptly. “Maybe my intentions weren’t so good, after all.”
There was a long pause during which nobody seemed to breathe.
“That was quite a speech,” Lynn said after several moments, trying not to sound shocked or excited, though, in fact, she was both.
“Take that one for a walk on the beach.” He finished the last of his beer and deposited the glass roughly on the rattan coffee table between them. “Tell me, social worker, how you put that proposition in its proper perspective.”
“You said it yourself—you’re a very angry man,” she told him, not sure what else to say and feeling shamefully flushed from the heat of his words, hoping her face didn’t betray the disturbing emotions he had aroused. She felt
seized by the conflicting desires to either order this man out of her house or jump into his arms.
“And you’re
not
angry?” he asked as she looked away. “Oh, I forgot. You deal with things privately.” He lifted his hands helplessly into the air. “Look, I’m sorry if what I said offended you.”
“No, you’re not.”
“No, I’m not. You’re right. It’s probably
exactly
what I came over here to say.”
“Feel any better?”
“That depends on the answer.”
She couldn’t help but smile. “The answer is no.”
“I still feel better.”
“Good, then you can go now.”
He nodded, though he didn’t move. “I’m feeling a bit stupid at the moment …”
“If it makes you feel any better, I don’t feel so great myself.” She stood up, walking past him to the front door, opening it to the summer night and coming up against an immediate wall of heat. “It’s been a rare pleasure meeting you, Mr. Cameron. That’s a little further irony for you to appreciate,” she couldn’t help adding.
“I’d like to see you again,” he said. He was standing in the middle of her doorway, preventing her from closing the front door. Lynn felt the warmth of the summer night on her face, the coolness of the air conditioning on her back. “Look, I don’t always behave like such a cretin,” he was saying. “And I sensed that when I first came in here, well, I
thought
that I sensed a few vibrations. Maybe I was wrong. But the truth is that I like you and that I’d like to see you again. I think that we have a lot in common, aside from the obvious. And”—he hesitated— “maybe
I
would
like to talk to you. I’m not coping as well as you seem to be. I guess I don’t have the ‘proper perspective’ on things as yet.” She smiled. “Maybe the next time you go for one of your walks along the beach, I could go with you.”
“I don’t think that would be a very good idea.”
“I think I’ll call you again anyway.”
Lynn shrugged and kept her face resolutely blank as he backed out of her doorway and walked slowly down the front path to where his car was parked on the street. She watched him climb into the compact car, but she closed the front door before he could look back and see her watching. Hearing him drive off, she marched back into her living room, and was surprised to find it all in one piece. She felt as if a hurricane had just swept through. Her hands shaking, she retrieved the empty beer glass from the coffee table and brought it into the kitchen, where she quickly washed it out and returned it to its shelf in the cupboard, all traces of Marc Cameron suddenly gone. She then took a deep breath, and then another, and finally, checking the clock on her microwave oven to make sure the hour wasn’t too late, picked up the phone and put in another call to her attorney.
T
here were three messages waiting for Renee Bower when she and her husband, Philip, returned home at just past one in the morning. One was from her sister, Kathryn, in New York, and two were from a client, Lynn Schuster, whose husband had recently left her and who was being offered a fairly generous settlement to end the long-standing marriage.
“I wonder what that’s all about,” Renee said, sitting at the side of the king-size bed and pulling off the silver shoes which had been pinching her toes all evening. Were her feet getting bigger too? Could toes put on weight?
“You
know
what it’s about,” her husband told her from somewhere on the other side of the all-white room. “She just needs somebody to talk to.”
“I don’t mean my sister. I mean Lynn Schuster. I thought we had things pretty much wrapped up. I wonder why she’s calling me at home.”
“Whatever it is will have to wait until morning. Come to bed,” he urged, already undressed and under the covers.
“I don’t understand how you can be in bed so fast,” Renee marveled, walking into their large, carefully
organized closet and pulling off her black sweater and pants, leaving them on the floor where they fell. She threw a long nightgown over her head and quickly moved across the thick white carpet toward their en suite white-marble bathroom.
“I don’t spend twenty minutes on the phone at one in the morning checking my answering machine for messages,” he reminded her gently.
“Neither do I.” Renee stared at her reflection in the harsh light of the bathroom mirror, thinking her complexion looked sallow even under all her makeup. “Don’t blame me because
your
friend decided to throw his wife a surprise party in the middle of the week.” She put a large blob of cold cream on each cheek and one on the tip of her short, upturned nose.
“He’s not your friend too?”
“I don’t have any friends,” she joked, then thought this was probably true. All her friends were really his friends, and hers only through osmosis. She had inherited them when she’d married Philip six years ago. All her old friends—some of them friends from childhood—had somehow disappeared, lost to conflicting schedules and only so much time. She rarely thought about them anymore. They belonged to another era, to a world before Philip.
“Will you hurry up and come to bed,” he called from the next room, his voice sexy despite his stated fatigue.
Did he want to make love? she wondered, wishing there was a way to speed up her nightly routine, knowing there was not. She needed all the help she could get. She couldn’t afford to rush these things. With deliberate slowness, Renee began massaging the cold cream into her
skin, taking care not to rub too hard in the area around her eyes, wishing she were naturally more attractive, if not for herself, then for Philip. Though she was only thirty-four, she had noticed at the party tonight that the lines around her eyes seemed more pronounced than those of most of the other women present, including the birthday girl, who was a surprised forty and not very happy about it. Renee pulled a tissue from its marble case and gently began removing the thick cream from her face in a series of soft, steady strokes, studying her pores through tired brown eyes. “Why couldn’t I have green eyes like Kathryn?” she asked herself softly, thinking that her sister’s voice on her answering tape had sounded even more desperate than usual, desperation being the norm since her husband’s sudden death from a heart attack three months before. Still, though the number of phone calls had increased, Kathryn refused to leave New York, even for a short visit.
Renee studied her image in the mirror, trying to find traces of her sister’s face in her own. But there were none. Kathryn was the pretty one in the family, Renee reflected again, carefully wiping away the mountain of mascara she had painstakingly applied earlier in the evening. She might have inherited their father’s brains, but as their father himself had often pointed out, Kathryn had been the lucky recipient of their mother’s deep green eyes and fine, high cheekbones. Whatever cheekbones Renee had once possessed, she thought now, angrily slapping at them with night cream, had long since disappeared into what was at least ten too many pounds, pounds she didn’t need but had been carrying around for over a year now, probably closer to two, if she was being honest. Probably closer to fifteen pounds, if she was being
really
honest. She glanced over at
the scale—the enemy—she hadn’t stepped on in weeks, thinking that, at only five feet three inches, it wasn’t her weight that was the problem, but her height.
“You’re doing it again,” she told herself angrily, amazed that a woman in her position, with everything she had going for her, with everything she had achieved at a relatively youthful age, with all her supposed smarts, was just another obsessive throwback to the days before liberation when it came to her looks and her weight. She was a successful lawyer, she told herself, and a very good one. Her clients all thought her capable and shrewd, even tough. It didn’t seem to matter to them that she was a few pounds overweight. What difference did it make how much she weighed? She began to brush her teeth vigorously. When she was with Philip, nobody ever noticed her anyway. How many times had she heard, even tonight, even among their so-called friends, “You’re so lucky. He’s so gorgeous. How’d you ever manage to land him?” She had stopped being surprised by the insensitivity of such remarks. She’d gotten used to them after almost six years of marriage to a man who was not only handsome, successful, and distinguished-looking but perpetually boyish as well, an interesting combination at age forty-six.
So what if all his friends, all
their
friends, were always telling her how lovely she would be if she would only lose a few pounds? Like that woman at the party tonight, Alicia-call-me-Ali, the slender redhead with the low-cut dress who always seemed to be standing next to Philip, who’d told her that successful dieting was all a matter of willpower. The skinny twit had never had to diet in her life. She counted husbands the way other women counted calories, and if the husbands still had wives
attached, so what? A snack was often more satisfying than a full-course meal. “Isn’t that right, Renee?” she had queried, in reference to exactly what, Renee couldn’t now recall. Had the woman been snacking on Philip?
Reluctantly, Renee felt her mind drift back over the evening’s festivities. She had watched as her husband whispered tantalizing tidbits into the ear of an attractive blonde, watched while he danced suggestively with the birthday girl, felt her body bend in time to his as he leaned forward teasingly to confide in the skinny redhead with the low-cut dress. Renee had stood alone in a corner, sipping on her champagne and rooted as firmly to the Mexican tile floor as the potted palm beside her, trying her damnedest not to be jealous, to appear as if she was having a good time. Philip had cautioned her about her jealousy on more than one occasion. She had nothing to be jealous about, he had told her repeatedly, though it sounded more like a warning.
That part of his life was over, he had assured her. She was the only one he wanted, the only one he loved. The others had meant nothing. They were a thing of the past. She knew that. Hadn’t she supervised the dissolution of enough marriages over as trivial an issue as a meaningless fling? Did she want to do that to her own marriage? “Don’t push me into something I don’t want to do,” he had told her, and she wondered—though only momentarily—how she came to be responsible for his actions.
Still, there seemed no end to the attractive women he knew, to the
thin
attractive women he knew, most of whom were married to men at least several decades older than themselves. Florida was overrun with beautiful young women married to rich old men, men who fooled
themselves into believing that it was their charm, and not their wallets, which was the irresistible force in the relationship. Still, if the marriage fell apart before the husband, the young wife often found herself out in the cold. Florida money had a way of protecting its own, Renee knew, wondering how she would ever survive if Philip were to leave her, how she had managed before they met.
“Renee, for Christ’s sake, what are you doing in there?”
For some reason, she thought, marveling at the plump face staring back at her in the mirror, pulling at bits of cold cream which had stuck to the sides of her streaked blond hair, he has chosen me. For some unknown, unfathomable reason, I am the woman he chooses to call his wife.
“I am the lucky one,” she said aloud, and thought she was.
“What were you doing in there for so long?” he asked as she climbed into bed beside him.
“Should I lose twenty pounds?” she asked, speaking to his back as she carefully adjusted her body around his.
“I wouldn’t like you with one leg,” he said.
“Thanks a lot.”
“Can we go to sleep now?”
“Do you think I should go on that watermelon diet?”
“Why don’t you try counting watermelons instead of sheep? It’ll probably accomplish the same thing.”
“Philip, I’m having a crisis here,” she said, only half joking. “You’re the psychiatrist. Help me out.”
“Office hours are from eight A.M. till four P.M. every weekday.”
“Please.”
He flipped on his back and then propped himself up on one elbow to face her. “What happened in that bathroom? Who were you talking to in there?”
“Do you think I’m attractive?”
“I think you’re just fine.”
“‘Just fine’ is not exactly what I was hoping to hear.”
“Renee,” he said, his voice kind although she recognized a hint of impatience at its edges, “you are a bright, capable woman …”
“I know that. I know I’m a bright, capable woman.”
“You’re a lawyer.”
“I know I’m a lawyer. You don’t have to tell me I’m a lawyer.”