Denise forced a smile. “Maybe someday,” she allowed, mostly as a peace offering to her curly haired friend. “But I’m just not ready yet.”
Pacified, picked up her burger and took a bite as Denise took a sip of her tea. Denise knew that Presley was disappointed, but at this point in her life, dating had about as much appeal as going to the dentist — inconvenient, uncomfortable, and with a distinct possibility that you’d painfully lost a piece of yourself in the process. Men were inconvenient. Messy. Unreliable. Careless. Men could take a woman’s heart in their hands and break it like glass into a million tiny pieces.
Better to be an independent woman, Denise thought, than to risk that kind of pain again.
It was funny how the subject of romance novels never came up the following weekend. Dave had waited throughout the pre-game show, the Red Sox’s fall from ahead to defeat at the hand of the Orioles, two beers, and a half a bag of pretzels for one of the other two to bring up the subject, which Kirk and Ghoulie had avoided like the clap. They sat still, beer bottles in hand as the game ended and an infomercial came on, just staring at the screen, not meeting each other’s eyes. Finally, when Dave couldn’t stand it any longer, he got up, went to his room, fetched his copy of
Forever My Love
and tossed it onto the coffee table, between Kirk’s and Ghoulie’s feet. Cookie, Dave’s pet cockatiel, fluttered in alarm at the resounding
thwack
!
“Okay, let’s get it over with. Did you read them?”
“Yuh.”
“I read it.”
“So,” Dave began, trying to figure out where he wanted to go with this conversation. “What did you think?”
Ghoulie shrugged. “Mine wasn’t so bad. A bit too much of the girl, but I liked the end where they had the showdown.”
Kirk smirked. “I want to meet the girl in this book. Gorgeous, rich, easy, and dumb as a post. I don’t get why the hero wanted to marry her, though. I mean, other than a wicked physical attraction, I don’t think they had a damn thing in common.”
“But what was it about the men in the books that made the heroines want them?”
There was an awkward silence as Kirk and Ghoulie eyed each other. “Money,” Ghoulie mumbled at last.
“Really great sex.” Kirk smiled ruefully. “What about the guy in your book?”
“He saved her life and her farm and her dog. One after the other.”
Kirk pressed his lips together. “So what can we learn from this little exercise?”
“That this was a dumbass idea.”
“It’s not a dumb idea,” Kirk countered, irritated. “We just need to look a little deeper. They’re different books with different plots. We’re looking at this the wrong way. Instead of looking at the individual book, we need to see what they all have in common.”
A silly grin crept across Ghoul’s face.
“What?” Kirk demanded.
“I just thought of one thing they all have in common,” he explained.
“What?” Kirk asked again.
“The heroes all get laid.”
Dave rolled his eyes. “As pleasant as that might be, Ghouls, that’s not my primary goal here.”
Kirk looked at him strangely, but said nothing.
“Okay. What else do they all have in common?”
“Happy endings?” Ghoulie tried again.
“And?” Dave prompted.
“Well, gee, Dave. It’s hard to say what they all have in common when we’ve each only read one book.” Kirk pointed out.
Dave nodded. Kirk had a point. The obvious answer was to agree to read more books in the genre, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to do that. “Okay, then I guess we need to tell each other what happened in our books.”
Kirk and Ghoulie exchanged a look. “This is like high school,” Ghoulie replied. “You better have read the book or you’re going to be busted.”
Dave looked at him archly. “Did you read it?”
“
Desperado
,” Ghoulie recited, rolling his eyes. “This girl Savannah’s father has died and the banker wants to call in her mortgage, but he insinuates that he’ll take care of it if she marries his wimp of a son, because that will give him control of her farm, which is next to his. Just when things are looking really bleak, this stranger named Rafe passes through town and he agrees to bring her cattle to market so she can sell them and meet her debts. They fall in love during the cattle drive but he can’t stay because he’s looking for the man who killed his brother. Long story short, it’s the same guy who’s been causing all the trouble on the ranch. There’s a showdown and Rafe kills the bad guy, but he gets shot in the arm in the process. She cries and blurts out that she’s been pregnant since the cattle drive.” He shook his head. “I don’t know why they were surprised. There were something like forty pages of sex in the desert.”
“Okay,” Dave cut him off. “You did read it. Kirk? How about you?”
“Mine was stupid.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“Okay, there’s this guy, see? And he pretends to be a Tory by day but he’s really spying for the Sons of Liberty. And there’s this girl whose father runs a tavern and she doesn’t like him at all until he gets arrested and she finds out that he was really one of the good guys, and so she decides that all of the arguing they did was actually just sexual tension, and so she breaks into the jail to see him and they have sex … ”
Dave snorted when Kirk was done. It did sound every bit as bad as he’d imagined a romance novel could be.
“What about you?”
Dave shrugged. “It wasn’t bad. Wasn’t great, either.” He went on to tell them the story of the injured pro football player and the physical therapist who rekindle their passion several years after having sex together in high school.”
“And what can we learn from all this?” Kirk asked.
Dave shrugged.
Ghoulie ventured, “That women like sex?”
Kirk laughed. “Okay, we’ll take that as a given. What else?”
Dave sighed. “That just one book each isn’t enough to tell us what it is that women see in these things?”
Ghoulie smiled. “It may be that as men we are incapable of discovering what women see in these things.”
“Granted,” Kirk agreed. “But Dave may be right. Do you think we need to read more romance?”
Dave rubbed the back of his neck. “Well … It probably wouldn’t hurt. Would you be willing?”
Ghoulie shrugged. “I don’t have a problem with it. It was something to do at night when Shelby was out of town.”
Kirk nodded. “I’m still curious. I’ll read another one.”
Dave shrugged. “Okay. Can we raid Shelby’s collection again, Ghouls?”
“Fine with me. Just come over on Tuesday or Wednesday — she’ll be out of town then.”
“Okay.” Dave nodded. “But in the meantime, are there any conclusions we can draw from having read these books?”
There was a long pause, then Kirk hazarded, “None of them deal with the ordinary. There’s a certain excitement in being taken out of the everyday world. If you want to impress this woman, you’re going to need to get her out of the radio station every now and then.”
• • •
Presley Rosenberg stepped up to the side of the curb, stuck out a skinny leg and hiked up the hem of her shorts, plastered a big old “come hither” grin on her pointed face, and extended her right thumb. Seconds later, a large coach bus with
Cape Cod Charter
on the marquee pulled up to the curb, stopping so that the folding bus door opened exactly in front of the spot where Presley stood. “Going my way?” the driver called down to her.
Blowing him a kiss, Presley turned to the people collected on the sidewalk with her and executed a deep theatrical bow that made her dangling beach ball earrings swing wildly. “Ladies and gentleman,” she announced. “Your coach awaits!”
Standing near Dave, Denise laughed. “Presley, you nut! What did you do that for?”
Presley laughed as she bounced over to retrieve her tote bag from Denise. “Hey, if I can’t have show stopping legs, at least let me think that I have legs that can stop traffic!”
Keeping his comments to himself, Dave resisted the impulse to take another look at Presley’s legs.
He watched with dismay as Presley linked her arm through Denise’s and guided her toward the open door of the coach bus. “Let’s sit up near the front,” she suggested. “I get carsick if I have to sit in the back.”
Dave stood dumbly watching as Presley usurped the coveted seat next to Denise as a second coach bus pulled up behind the first. “Anybody with big stuff is welcome to stow it under the bus,” Paul Lund, the station manager was announcing, standing next to the driver, who had opened the cargo bay. It was their annual station outing, one of the perks to working at WMTR. The station owner held onto the belief that happy workers were more productive workers and that spending some leisure time together fostered more of a team atmosphere. So early every summer, he pared the station down to a skeleton crew for the day and sent the rest on a corporate sponsored outing. Last year they had gone to a park in the Berkshires. This year, they were all going to the beach.
Dave wasn’t a big beach person himself. He didn’t like the crowds and the litter and the unrelenting sun, but one of the other guys in sales had pointed out that this wasn’t going to be like a trip to a public beach — the station sponsored trip was to a private beach with a volleyball court, a pavilion, barbeque grills, and picnic tables. There would be no litter, no crowds, no yelling parents or crying children; and there would presumably be one drop-dead gorgeous evening commute deejay in a bathing suit.
Dave was startled to realize that Paul Lund had come up to him and was talking, thrusting a large cooler into his arms. “The cooler is supposed to be insulated, but I’d still feel better about serving the meat if it hasn’t been riding under the bus. You don’t mind keeping the cooler in the seat next to you, do you?”
He did mind, but because he couldn’t think of a fast reason why he shouldn’t be the one to sit on the bus with God knew how many pounds of raw meat next to him, he held out his arms and accepted the cooler. Climbing the stairs to the bus, he fervently hoped that by the end of the day Presley would have talked Denise into a state where all she wanted was peace and quiet, so that he could offer her the seat formerly occupied by the cooler.
• • •
It was worse than Dave had thought. Denise and Presley had installed themselves in the front seat right next to the door and were making animated conversation with Howard Kartstein, the station owner who sat with his wife behind the driver. The closest available seat — for two, himself and the cooler — was halfway down the aisle, across from one of the college student interns, who had himself plugged by the earphones into an MP3 player. He wasn’t quite singing a cappella, but his eyes were closed and his lips were moving. Whatever zone he was in, Dave had a feeling that it was a better place than sitting on a bus seat passing the time with meat.
About ten minutes into the trip, Presley suddenly got up into the aisle and grabbed hold of the microphone. “Are we there yet?” she asked cheekily. “No? Well, to help make the time go faster, I’m going to put on these home movies of last year’s trip to Mount Wamsutta, which were put together by Manny and Pat from engineering. Rock on, guys!”
It started out innocently enough, with scenes from the bus ride and Paul Lund grilling up some burgers. But then came a close up of Dave, brandishing a tall, overly garnished hamburger. Dave cringed, remembering what was coming next. Manny wouldn’t leave him alone and had filmed him as he ate every last bite. He raised the burger to his mouth, opened his mouth like a whale about to eat Ahab, and … the camera cut to a close up of a denim-clad, female backside that widened to reveal that the ass in question belonged to Presley, who whirled, and laughed saying, “Stop following me!” There was a shot of one of the programming directors making a diving catch for a Frisbee, followed a fast succession of three station workers fanning the softball. Then back to Dave, who was still chewing that first bite of burger. A shot of Paul Lund dropping a burger into the coals, then scooping it up with his spatula, glancing around quickly, then brushing off the cinders and slipping it onto a bun, followed by Dave, still chewing. Three more softball players went down swinging, followed by the secretary with the book, sitting in the shade and still reading. Back to Dave, who had just taken another bite, and Manny’s voice asking, “Hey Dave, is it good?” followed by a long pause while Dave held up one finger, nodded and sped up his chewing, caught like a diner whose waiter had a vendetta, unable to reply. Three more ballplayers who failed to connect, and then a shot of Presley executing a fantastic wind up before hurling the ball across the plate — she had been a starting pitcher at her community college. Then back to Dave eating. And finally back to following Presley, who turned to the camera, wagged a finger and warned, “If you follow me in here, you’re going to lose a testicle,” before disappearing into a hallway which was then obscured by a closing door labeled
Women
.
Dave sunk in his seat, mortified. He had as much of a sense of humor as the next guy, but he felt embarrassed, almost violated. He had been hoping for some way that he could attract Denise’s attention, but not by looking like a fool. The sales manager that ate New England. Some joke.
The trip to the shore took just over an hour, most of it spent in negotiating the crowded throughways of Boston. A cheer went up as they arrived and Presley stood up, took the microphone and said simply, “Ladies and gentleman, I give you …
The Beach
!”
Already responsible for the meat, Dave tossed his towel over his shoulder and disembarked. He didn’t need to linger by the bus, but he waited anyway. He hoped to land a spot not far from where Denise would be based and he couldn’t very well do that if he got there before her. He stood near the front of the bus, the cooler under his arm, watching while the others unloaded the gear that had been stowed in the bottom of the bus. He lingered until he saw Presley and Denise go by, carrying a small tote bag and a large boom box. He gave them about fifteen seconds’ head start, then followed them across the parking lot to the sandy path that led just over the rise to the beach.