Some Kind of Miracle (19 page)

“Forget about me?” she asked. Hoping at least there would be the hint of chagrin on his face.

“Not at all,” he said, looking at her chest. “How could I ever forget about you, you hot little tootsie? But I have a screening in ten minutes, so you’d better move that blight you drive out of my way. You still get to oil up a naked guy, because I offered your services to my houseguest, who’s hoping you’ll throw in a blow job.”

Dahlia didn’t laugh at his feeble joke. “You mean, he’s there now?”

“Yeah. He owns an ad agency in New York. Grew up in my old neighborhood, so move the van before I call a tow truck, and then go inside and make him happy.”

Great. Now he was trading her services off to a friend without even asking her if it was okay. She got into the van and parked it as Marty drove the Rolls off into the dusk.

“Mr. Kroll is in the shower,” Victor told her. “I can hear the water running, but he’ll be out soon. I already set up the table for you in the guest room.”

Dahlia made her way through the upstairs hallway, passing the photos she sometimes stared at when Marty was late. Marty with Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, Marty with Sidney Poitier, Marty with Julia Roberts. In the pretty green guest room, she sat on the bed, then jumped to her feet when the bathroom door opened and there stood Danny Kroll. He was a vision of a man, slim and dark-haired and tan, wrapped in a white terry-cloth bathrobe, hair wet and flyaway, and his beautiful brown eyes were taking her in.

“Lily, right?” he asked.

“Dahlia,” she corrected him, and he grinned a white-toothed grin.

“I knew it was some flower, but I don’t know from flowers. I grew up in New York City. I’m Danny. Nice to meet you.” He was a strikingly handsome man in his late forties. “So you have the pleasure of massaging Melman every week? Gee, there’s a dubious honor. I hope you charge him by the pound,” he said,
and they both laughed as he unself-consciously dropped his robe on a nearby chair.

He was perfect-looking, and Dahlia found her heart running a little too fast. She loved the expression on his face, the self-assured way he sat on the table, pulled up the sheet, and grinned at her. She felt as uncomfortable as a teenager, with that rattled feeling of rushing hormones. Oil, where had she put the oil? Danny was lying on his stomach now, and she pulled the sheet up over his fantastic rear end and started working on his left leg.

“Marty tells me you’re a songwriter,” she heard him say with his face down on the faceplate. Now, there was a surprise. She figured Marty would have told him something sleazy about her. “Said he felt bad about not using your song in his new picture.”

She was rubbing the back of his left calf. He must be a runner, she thought dreamily, imagining him jogging in Central Park with his pretty wife, and then she glanced up at his left hand lying outside the sheet and smiled to herself when she saw he wasn’t wearing a ring.

“He changed the title of the movie. My song was the same as the original title of the film. That’s why I brought it to him in the first place,” she said.

“What was it?”

“‘Stay by My Side.’”

“How does it go? Can you sing it?”

Dahlia’s heart fluttered, and her old shyness took over. “Oh, it’s kind of a sweet little melody. Nothing profound. It’s catchy, though.”

Maybe she should shut up now. Usually men clients
didn’t like to talk or be talked to during their massages. Most of the women clients blabbed away from the minute they got onto the table until the minute they got off. Sometimes the men would shush her even if she were just asking them a question that could help her know how to adjust her touch.

“That firm enough?” she asked Danny.

“Perfect,” he said. “So go on and sing it for me. I use jingles every day in my business. If it’s catchy enough, maybe I can use it in a commercial.”

“Oh, that’s nice of you but—”

“C’mon!”

“My voice is—”

“Hey, Barry Manilow got his start writing jingles for commercials. Don’t sneer at it.”

“Oh, I’m not, it’s just that—”

“No excuses,” Danny said, lifting himself up onto his forearms to look at her. God, he was handsome. Dahlia flushed. “I insist.”

She cleared her throat. “Stay by my side forever. Stay by my side, my friend….” She sang the whole song for him, hearing her own voice sound nearly as childlike as it had on those tapes when she was eleven, probably because she was so taken by this amazing-looking man that she felt like a child. When she finished, he sat up to applaud.

“It’s perfect,” he said grinning. “I’ll bet I can find ten clients who’d love that. A pet food, a kid’s teddy bear, a Band-Aid commercial. The song is just right for my uses. I’ll be over at Marty’s office tomorrow and get him to give me the CD you gave him.”

Dahlia started to say, “Oh, no, you can’t,” but then
she stopped herself. What was the point in telling him that the song was written with a partner who wanted to keep her music to herself? He was probably just being polite anyway, and once she walked out of here, she’d never see him again. Danny rolled over onto his stomach, and Dahlia was sure it was just another phony showbiz promise that he’d use the song, so why bother to go into all the complications?

“Now,” he said, “let’s have some more massaging and then dinner.” Dinner. He said dinner, and Dahlia felt herself hoping he meant with her. “I want you to tell me all about the rest of the songs and the rest of your life, and then I can tell you what Marty was like when we were little kids—which was the same nasty, obnoxious jerk he is right now.”

Dahlia giggled. He
did
mean dinner with her. He was taking her to dinner. Or maybe just downstairs, where the chopping girls and Victor would fix them something. Then Marty would come home and find them together and pee in his yellow underpants to see that Dahlia, the masseuse, was his buddy’s date. Of course she’d have to bring a doggy bag home for Sunny, because Sunny was waiting for her to come home and make dinner.

Dahlia felt so good thinking ahead to their date that she gave Danny Kroll a brilliant massage, her hands and the oil kneading and manipulating, soothing and caressing, warming and coaxing and calming his body until, by the end of the hour, he’d fallen into a deep sleep. She decided not to wake him. Instead she’d leave her business card on his chest with her phone number on it and run home to shower and
change so she’d look great when she joined the gorgeous Danny for dinner.

All the way home, she imagined herself at a candlelit dinner, gazing across the table at Danny Kroll. She probably should have shaken him awake to tell him she was leaving. No, this was better. Stopping at home would give her a chance to make herself look good. She’d rummage through her old jewelry box full of fake and funky earrings, the box that used to belong to her mother, and dig out some sexy bauble. In her mind she ran through the possible outfits she would wear, as she hurried into Domino’s and ordered a medium pizza with pepperoni for Sunny, then placed the box on the passenger seat and propelled the van up Laurel Canyon.

Sunny was asleep in her room with the door open just a crack. Dahlia could hear her snoring. The phone was ringing, so she grabbed it.

“H’lo?”

“Stay by my side forever. Stay by my side, my friend.” It was Danny’s voice singing to her. “See how catchy it is? I know it already. I’m going to find a spot for it, pretty Dahlia, and make you rich.” He thought she was pretty. “Why didn’t you wake me? Should we meet in a little while for a bite?” He liked her. This was the kind of man she should have been with all along. “How ’bout if I come over? Tell me where you are. I know my way around L.A. I used to live here.”

“Not possible for you to come over,” she said as Sunny’s snores erupted in a series of loud spurts.

“Aha! You have a husband? A boyfriend? A few children?” he guessed.

An insane cousin probably wasn’t going to come up on the list he was running by her. “A sleeping relative,” she offered.

“I won’t wake him or her. I’m a stealth lover,” he pressed. A kind of heat rushed through her that she hadn’t felt since the early days with Seth. This sexy man seemed to have all the qualities she craved in a mate. All the qualities that Seth didn’t have. And somehow, even though she’d come in through the back door of his friend’s mansion, he still seemed to take her seriously. Didn’t talk to her in the condescending way Marty did and didn’t leer at her. The first thing he’d asked her about was her music. No wonder she liked him.

“Do you know where Laurel Canyon is? I live on a little street off Laurel Canyon. Here’s how you get here,” she heard herself say. Mistake, she thought, this is a terrible mistake for a million reasons. But she was so lonely and so in need of treating herself to some pleasure that she allowed herself to say yes. Sunny was a heavy sleeper. Maybe Danny could come over for a drink and they could just talk, and Sunny would sleep through the whole visit.

After she showered, she opened the turquoise silk jewelry box that used to sit on her mother’s dresser. It was filled with the odds and ends of costume jewelry her mother had always loved. Black jet-bead earrings, a cloisonné butterfly pin, crystal and silver bangle bracelets that looked as if the beads came from a hobby shop, a string of fake pearls, brightly jeweled rings, so fake their bands could be squeezed or ex
panded to fit any size finger, a jeweled choker made of paste stones, and a pair of gold hoop earrings.

As she touched each of them, she silently asked her mother to help her choose the bauble that would transform her into the kind of woman Danny Kroll could fall for. In the end she settled for crystal clip earrings with pearls hanging from them that her mother adored, and for a flash, as she leaned in to the mirror to check the angle of the earring on her earlobe, she thought how much she looked like her mother.

“Rose and Dahlia. Two flowers together in the vase,” Rose Gordon would say to her as she pulled her little girl onto her lap. And Rose even smelled like a flower, always dusting herself with Shalimar bath powder and then using the cologne, too. Rose and Dahlia never argued, and Dahlia never got tired of her mother’s hugs or had the thoughts she heard coming from teenage girls at school who referred to “my bitch mother.” Maybe, Dahlia thought later, it was because Rose was always so busy at work and not waiting at the house for her daughter to bring home triumphs at school so she could live vicariously. Maybe it was because Dahlia was an only child, so prized that everything she did was perfect in Rose’s eyes.

Mommy, Dahlia thought, look down and make this man appreciate me. Then she heard Danny’s car driving up to the carport.

When he stepped inside the front door, he took her into his arms for what began as a friendly hug, but then, unexpectedly, he kissed her. His kiss tasted like mint mouthwash. It was a deep, searching, earth-
shattering, knees-turn-to-jelly kiss, and then, as if he’d been in the house before, he began moving her toward the bedroom.

“That massage was so incredible, I thought I ought to return the favor,” he said.

Dahlia let herself be led, delighted that it was dark and the house was in shadows, so everything looked quaint rather than dilapidated. And then he was removing her sweater, fondling her, and kissing her everywhere, moving her gently onto the bed. Dropping his own clothes to the floor, gracefully extracting a condom from his pocket, and placing the car keys he still had in his hand and the sunglasses he removed from the top of his head on her bedside table.

“Dahlia, you’re so beautiful.” He was exquisitely expert, so smooth, so sure of every move. His hands pressing and touching her seemed practiced and part of a routine he knew very well. But she didn’t care if this was a con. She wanted it to work, needed to be swept away, so she relaxed and soon felt herself sinking into that other world where all that mattered were his hands, his breath on her, his taste. With Seth it took her so much longer to get to this fever pitch, maybe because he was so tender and this man was so aggressive, coming at her, moving with her, and she had a fleeting worry that their sounds would wake Sunny.

But in an instant Sunny was forgotten, and Dahlia exploded in a blaze in Danny’s arms, and he collapsed on top of her. She wanted to say something but had no idea what. Maybe now he would put on his clothes and leave. She wasn’t sure what was supposed to hap
pen now. Seth was the only man she’d been with in years. Seth. What a funny time to miss him. She was already feeling the regret creeping through her that she’d tried not to think about earlier. Why had she allowed this stranger to come over here? And then she remembered Sunny telling her, so long ago, that she was too young to understand what it meant, that the best way to really get to know a man underneath his façade was to have sex with him.

“
That’s when you see the primitive them, without the act they put on for the world, and I live to see that…. They turn into these bright red devils, all stiff and hard and tense and panting,
” she’d said many times. But though Danny had been stiff and hard and panting, he wasn’t at all primitive. His lovemaking had been methodical, orderly, systematic, and now that it was over, it made her long for Seth. Seth who always fell asleep wrapped around her, kissing her back and the back of her neck and her hair as she drifted off. Danny rolled to the other side of the bed, grabbed the pillow that was Seth’s favorite, and was asleep in a minute.

Dahlia, feeling sad and very lonely, pulled the comforter up over herself and set the alarm for six so she could wake him and shoo him out the door before Sunny got up in the morning. At dawn, when she remembered in a dream that he was next to her, she opened her eyes to check the clock and gasped in horror when she looked right into the eyes of Sunny.

“Oh, baby!” Sunny hollered. She was in the bed, between Dahlia and Danny, completely naked and grinning in Dahlia’s face.

“You had sex with a stranger!” Sunny said, then let out a loud peal of laughter. Dahlia sat up and looked over at Danny, who sat up and looked at Sunny and then over at Dahlia. “The best kind!” Sunny shrieked out. Then she sang to some improvised tune. “Sex with a stranger. The very best kind…” so loudly that Danny’s face filled with horror at this lunatic in the bed next to him. “When you were little, you used to think that sex was going to be yucky. Ooooh, weren’t you wrong? He’s sooo cute.”