Helen of Pasadena (17 page)

After the shocker at school, Patrick declared that we had to get “back to work immediately.” Candy was suspicious, I could tell by her stink eye. And by the text she sent immediately after I left the scene. Short and elegant: WTF?

WTF was right. WTF was I doing in a convertible, speeding along Pacific Coast Highway with Nubby Sweater? I was somebody’s mother, a recent widow. A member of Save the Deodars. This wasn’t me.

Patrick had pulled the bait-and-switch in the parking lot, after commenting that my friends were “a little intense” and “we needed a breather” after the success of the presentation. He tossed me a black baseball cap with a big orange “P,” the only reference he had ever made to his prestigious academic background, and declared, “Put this on. We’re going to the beach.”

I took the hat and hopped in the car. He was my ride and my boss. I had no choice, right?

“Why Laguna?” I shouted above the music, Elvis Costello circa 1985. Laguna Beach was a wealthy, artsy town tucked away on the coast of Orange County. Its charm was genuine, protected by an isolated location and incredibly high real estate costs. Sometimes the high cliffs collapsed under mudslides and fires, sending zillion-dollar homes into the ocean, but when the weather was good, it was hard to beat. Like today.

“It reminds me of home,” Patrick shouted back. He even looked good in a worn Arsenal cap. “What home?” He did live in several places: Athens in the winter and Troy in the summer.

“All of them.”

“A bottle of the pinot grigio and the sand dabs to start, please. Then we’ll have the steamed mussels and shrimp skewers. And a caprese salad to share. Can you make that a little bigger than usual? Oh, and some water?” Patrick ordered without hesitation, then as an afterthought, added, “Do you like fish?”

I nodded, because blurting out “Fish is good” would have sounded as juvenile as I felt, like a freshman girl at the senior prom. What was happening here? Boundary-infringement!

We were seated on the patio of Casa de Sol, a spectacular cliffside restaurant high above the main beach in Laguna. The water below was wine-dark; in the distance, dolphins bobbed in the waves. Once again, I was grateful for Tina’s help in putting together Work Outfit #2: navy blue wide-legged pants and a white boat-neck sweater, perfect for the setting and for my emerging collarbones.

Patrick put down the menu and looked out at the ocean. “I love this place. As a kid, I spent one summer here while my dad did some work in Irvine, and I’ve never forgotten it.”

That detail didn’t make his Wikipedia page. “I’m surprised. You’ve got some pretty great beaches in your part of the world.”

“Well, it was the place and the time. I was about your son’s age. And I discovered girls. And they don’t make ’em any cuter than they do in California.”

“I thought Homer was your only companion?” I teased, referring to the portrait of the lonely, studious boy he’d painted in the presentation.

“Busted. I had Homer, California girls and the Clash.”

The wine arrived, and while the tan, blond waiter made a show of opening the bottle, I studied Patrick, who chatted with the waiter as if they’d known each other for years. He had a quality I admired: being at home wherever he went. You can’t fake that. At least I couldn’t, not for the last fifteen years and not now when my insides were churning like the Pacific.

“Yamas!” Patrick said, lifting his glass in my direction. To our health.
Please don’t let mine include hyperventilation due to my extreme uncoolness.

He settled into his chair and his wine, then spoke. “How did you know what I was going to say in that presentation? The PowerPoint. I gave you some slides and a rough outline. It was like you read my mind.” He set his glass down and leaned forward, as if he wanted to gauge my reaction. “You seem to do that a lot. How?”

Cyberstalking. But that seemed like a bad answer.

“It was nothing. I did a little research. Used a little imagination.”

“But you nailed me. My story. You had just the right visuals, the right music, without knowing exactly what I was going to say.”

Cyberstalking again. And the fact that your story is my story: finding a place in another time. I had your dream, only I didn’t have your guts, so I bailed. Well, I bailed for love, but mainly I just bailed. But I couldn’t tell him all that. The disclosure would be too much and the sun and the wine were already making my face flush. “Hey, I saw
Raiders of the Lost Ark
, too. Every kid wanted to be Indy. You just actually did it. That’s an easy story to tell.”

“Could you read your husband’s mind, too? Did you have that connection with him?”

Whoa, not what I expected. “No, not really. Merritt wasn’t easy to read. His story wasn’t that familiar to me. Even after many years of marriage.”

Now I didn’t just
feel
uncomfortable, I
was
uncomfortable. Don’t talk about him! I wanted to scream. I don’t want to think about him now.

Obviously, Patrick perceived my discomfort. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked. You just seem very different than those women I met today. And I was wondering how you got to Pasadena, to where you are.”

“I’m not that different than those women. Well, other than the fact that I hatched from a giant egg.”

Patrick laughed sharply, “Ah, like Helen of Troy. Or at least, that’s how one of her origin mythologies goes. Nice reference. I had no idea you shared her unusual birth.”

“Yes, well, that type of thing still happens in central Oregon. My parents were very understanding. They seemed to have been conceived on another planet, so they didn’t mind the egg.”

Patrick laughed again. “Hence the name?”

“Actually, I was named after Mount St. Helens.”

“The volcano? You were not.”

“I was too. Only, it was just a mount when I was born. Top was still on.”

“Do you have sister named Vesuvius?”

“No, but my brother is named after a river. The Deschutes. Not Styx.”

Phew, subject changed. And mercifully, the waiter arrived with the sand dabs, lightly breaded and sautéed, to put the subject of Merritt away entirely. He refilled my wine glass despite my slight objections.

“I think I’m picking up on something in the journals,” I started to explain, but was cut off.

“You are a slave driver! You know, archaeologists like to talk about things other than archaeology.”

“I know. I’m not quizzing you on your trowel preferences. But I think this is kind of juicy.” Now I leaned forward to gauge Patrick’s reaction. “I think our boy Rudy is developing a thing for his uncle’s young wife.”

“Really? Are you sure?” “Think about it; it makes sense. Our Rudy is only 23, much closer in age to Sophia, who’s barely out of her teens, than his uncle. And he’s swept up in the whole adventure of the excavation. He appears to be dazzled by her, even before they officially meet. He fantasizes about what she’ll be wearing, how she smells. Then he describes the first meeting in great detail. He notes everything about her clothes, her skin. He describes her eyes as ‘liquid amber, burning into my soul.’ He is clearly taken with her.”

“Didn’t he give a loving description of the venison jerky, too?” Patrick said, giving me the business, reaching for a piece of rosemary foccacia that had just arrived along with the rest of the meal. “I mean, from your notes, the kid seems to go on and on about everything.”

I conceded, “Yes, he did enjoy the jerky. But he refers to her as “lovely Sophia” or sometimes just S.”

“Take it from me, men do a lot of really stupid things when they are 23.”

Obviously, a reference to his marriage to Artsy Wife, but I let it go. “Well, it’s very romantic, if you ask me.”

“There you go again with the romance. The qualifier ‘romantic’ goes over very well in academic journals. That’s persuasive research. I think if I was able to prove that Rudy and Sophia were having a fling, then the whole rest of my theory about Troy being a major trading center well into the Middle Ages would just fall into place.” Patrick was clearly having fun with this topic. “Have you been reading a lot of romance novels? Is that your inspiration for this?”

“Yes, that’s what lonely research assistants do in the middle of the night. Read romance novels and reinterpret history based on bodice-ripping fantasies.” Now I was having fun. Whoops, too much wine. “It
could
be important.”

“How? Why? The personal life of the archaeologist shouldn’t actually affect the archaeology.”

“What about that bogus Priam’s Treasure find? The stash of artifacts, the ones that included the gold necklace and earrings that Schliemann claimed to find at Troy and draped around Sophia’s neck. It was a classic PR move back before there was PR! It could explain why Schliemann might trump up something so spectacular. Maybe he had to win his wife back from hot, ripped Rudy. He planted the necklace, dug it up, plopped it on his young wife’s neck, took the photo that made Sophia famous all over the world and won his wife back. You never know.”

“It’s never been proven that the necklace was definitively bogus.”

“But I bet you’ll lay awake tonight thinking that it might be,” I said triumphantly, reaching for another mussel.

“Helen, my work is not the slightest bit romantic. It’s based upon ground-penetrating radar surveys, 3-D laser scanning and electromagnetic soil analysis.”

“So, Dr. Soil Analysis, how do you explain the tattoo of Achilles’s shield?” I pointed to his forearm, a celestial body peeking out from underneath his rolled sleeve. I launched into some Homer. “
The earth, the heavens, the sea, the untiring sun, the moon at the full
. That’s some heroic ink you have there.”

Patrick raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Too much ouzo.”

I carried on. “History is full of love affairs that altered the course of world events. You might not want to dismiss my theory out of hand. Let’s face it, you’d be out of a job if Paris hadn’t fallen so hard for Helen and kidnapped her and brought her to Troy.” I was feeling pretty smug about that comment. “There’d be no Troy at Troy. What would you be doing?”

Just then the waiter appeared, to clear our plates and pour the last of the wine into our glasses. “Can I get you anything else? More wine?”

Please God, no. It was 2:30 in the afternoon. And I was already over my limit.

Patrick piped up, “I think we’ll have the chocolate soufflé for two and some strong coffee.” “Just to let you know, the soufflé will take about a half hour,” the waiter said, in a tone that suggested he was scheduled to get off his shift and would prefer if we canceled our order so he could surf.

“Perfect. That gives me just about enough time to convince my assistant here that her feminist interpretation of
poor
Helen as a victim, kidnapped and dragged to Troy, is tired and tedious. She just got sick of her cranky, power-hungry husband and left with the young stud. So yes to coffee and yes to the soufflé.”

And yes to spending the rest of the afternoon on this patio, debating esoteric subjects with Dr. Patrick O’Neill.

It was well after 9 p.m. when we arrived at the Huntington after our five-hour lunch and the long drive back. We’d kept the top down on the dark drive home and didn’t say much. We were talked out in the best way. Patrick pulled in next to my car, alone in the vast parking lot.

We both got out of the car, slightly stiff from the drive and the walk down the beach after lunch to work off the wine. I felt sandy and salty with a touch of sunburn, the same satisfied feeling as when I was a kid after a day on the Oregon coast. Beach-washed, my mom used to call it.

Patrick looked and smelled the same. Beach-washed.

I handed him his baseball cap, “Thank you. That was … just what I needed.”

He took the cap and held my eyes for a second. Everything about that moment seemed slow and filled with possibilities. But I was paralyzed with the strangeness of the situation. It had been so long since I’d felt this kind of anticipation, this ache in my chest from wanting someone. But it seemed so soon, too soon. I couldn’t have made a good decision to save my life.

What happened next was all up to him.