The Touch (14 page)

* * *

It was a gray morning in Charlottesville when Jones stepped out of the cab onto the airport tarmac and carried his overnight bag to the Blair jet. A slender young woman in a white shirt with epaulets waited at the ladder. “Dr. Jones, I'm Angelica, your pilot,” she said. “Since you're the only passenger you can fly in the cockpit if you'd prefer.” She turned and led the way up the steps into the jet.

Jones smiled.
This is gonna be fun
, he thought.

Two minutes later he had buckled himself into the seat beside Angelica, and they were taxiing on the runway. She pushed the throttles forward and the plane accelerated with a suddenness Jones had never experienced in an aircraft. “Where'd you learn to fly, Angelica?” he asked, not with the greatest of ease.

“The navy,” she said, pulling her radio headset off one ear so she could hear him better. “I flew fighters off carriers—'til I got bored.” She pulled back on the controls and the plane took off, shooting almost straight up.” Then she looked at Jones and grinned. “Just kidding,” she said. “I used to be a receptionist.” Angelica threw back her head and laughed. Jones, the doctor with the broad shoulders, gripped the leather of his armrests with hands that had turned utterly pale.

* * *

Instead of a cab waiting at the private airport where they landed, it was a limo, long, sleek and black, stopped precisely beside the spot where the plane taxied to a halt. As the plane door opened Jones staggered out, held up by a grinning Angelica. “Thanks, Angelica,” he said. “Anytime I don't like what I had for breakfast, I'll be sure to call you.” He even managed a smile.

The limo driver opened its rear door for him, and as he stepped from the daylight into the softly lit passenger compartment, he found Lara. Her legs were crossed; she was wearing high heels and a cashmere overcoat. She looked more than beautiful; she looked happy. “Thank you for coming,” she said.

Jones settled into the seat beside her and shrugged. “I wanted to try your jet. I've been in the market for a new one.”

“When you fix Roscoe you'll be able to afford one.”

“You're mighty optimistic.”

“And you're mighty confident.”

“I'm operating on a dummy.”

“Oh, but he's a very smart dummy,” Lara said, her voice musical as the limo rolled smoothly out the gate of the private airfield and the driver pointed its polished nose toward the highrise cluster of downtown Chicago. And it was not only Jones who recognized how newly happy Lara seemed; Lara herself noticed it too.

* * *

On the way into the city they chatted easily. She asked about the clinic in the mountains, and he told her about Sam. She probed for the specifics of his condition, her questions perceptive and incisive. Jones had known already that she was extremely intelligent but he had assumed her approach to medicine would be mostly theoretical since she worked in the field of research and inventions; now he saw that her knowledge was deeply practical as well.

Once again, something about all this reminded him of someone else he had known, someone he had loved more than he loved life. When he realized that he was thinking of Faith, he grew quiet and had trouble looking directly at Lara.

The limo stopped in front of a majestic hotel. Lara said, “I picked this one for you because it's elegant and full of great history; I assumed you'd like that.” As the limo driver stepped out quickly to open the door for Jones, she added, “We'll let you freshen up for a while, even work out if you want to—there's a great health club down the street. At four George will pick you up for dinner. Just you and me and two hundred of my closest friends.”

Jones stepped out, then glanced at the overnight satchel he had brought and turned back to her. “All I brought was a sport coat,” he said.

“You'll find a tux hanging in the closet of your hotel room,” she said. She watched him as the surprise soaked into his eyes.

“You didn't ask for my sizes,” he said, biting his lower lip so he wouldn't grin too broadly.

“I assumed those too.”

“You assumed a lot of things.”

“Yes, I suppose I did.” Then Lara spoke softly to the driver and the limo pulled away, leaving Jones smiling on the sidewalk.

In his hotel suite—it was not a room, as Lara had so casually designated it, but more of an apartment, with a sitting room complete with a wood-burning fireplace, and a bedroom attached to that—Jones found the closet, and the new tuxedo hanging there. Its fabric felt buttery against his fingers, and when he slipped the jacket on, it draped perfectly on his shoulders. He checked the label: a famous brand, made in Italy. And it had been altered to taper at his waist; he knew this for certain because no off-the-rack size had ever matched the span of his shoulders to the narrowness of his waist. Lara had not called his office to ask Janet for his sizes; Jones knew this too for certain because Janet did not know Jones's sizes; she had never seen him in anything except workout clothes and surgical gowns. Lara had appraised him, exactly, at a glance.

Hanging beside the tux was a formal shirt; on the closet floor were new shoes. Jones didn't need to try them on; he was already sure they would fit perfectly.

* * *

Two hours later Jones, feeling somewhat more elegant and significantly more awkward than he had ever felt in his life, rode alone in the back of the limo. George had been waiting for him when he had stepped from the hotel and had told him they would be going to “The Cottage.” George said nothing more after that; but as the limo rolled north along the Chicago freeways and then turned into the rolling countryside of the North Shore, along the edge of Lake Michigan, Jones saw that the driver kept glancing into the rearview mirror at him, and smiling.

Jones looked out the side window and saw that they had turned into a security entrance with a yellow drop bar that had been blocking the way, now swinging vertical and open, where a guard was waving them through. Jones looked ahead, past George through the windshield, and his eyes went wide: at the end of the long, tree-lined lane stood a three-story mansion. Its front door sat in perfect alignment with the lane, and between the lane and the door rose a pair of twin pinnacles supporting wrought iron gates permanently open to the outside; spanning the top were iron letters with the name of the estate:
Open Gates
. “So this is the
Cottage
, George?” Jones called, and he saw George grinning in the mirror. Parked in the circle surrounding the fountain that rose in front of the main door were dozens of elegant cars, mostly German. Flowers spilled from stone sconces on either side of the door. But what Jones liked best was the candles blazing in all the windows.

Car valets—young men and women in black vests with red bow ties—were parking the other cars, and one of them hurried up and opened the limo door for Jones, greeting him with, “Welcome to The Cottage.” So the understatement was not only George's private joke. Jones stepped from the limousine and moved with the other arriving guests through the front door and into rooms of sixteen-foot ceilings and antique furniture pieces that rose almost high enough to touch them. He passed servants, with trays of delicacies and flutes of champagne, and gowned ladies who looked him over; he followed the flow of the crowd out into the rear of the estate, where he found the grounds set with tables and a dance floor and orchestra arranged between the mansion and its gardens. He felt a growing discomfort, even as the novelty and excitement of the experience rose inside him.

Jones was used to having emotions that caused him to struggle. They darkened his mood when he opened his eyes in the morning, and they trudged through his brain at night, dream characters acting out dark tragedies in the ghost world behind his eyelids. But the emotions scraping in the center of his chest now were feelings he had never faced before.

He felt a rising sense that something far more than a business relationship was opening up between himself and Lara. He was already in the spiral of playing back their meeting in his mind and re-experiencing the emotions of each moment; he bounced between being sure she was intrigued by him to being just as certain that her interest was strictly professional. He knew that very game of emotional ping-pong was part of falling in love. And of course he had fallen in love before, when he had met Faith. Now she was gone, and for years, despite what his friends would tell him about time healing all wounds, he had been sure he would never again know anything that felt remotely like that kind of love.

Yet here he was, walking into this party, excited to see Lara and simultaneously telling himself that all that excitement was false, a dangerous delusion.

Still, he had told Lara about Faith; wasn't that a healthy sign? Didn't it mean that he could open up to Lara and therefore might find some sort of honest combination of his past with an unfolding present?

Then another thought hit him—a vicious, terrible thought, with the power to destroy every possibility of new love in his life: Jones wondered if he had used the tragedy of Faith's death as a way to make himself appeal to Lara's sympathies. He knew that thought was false—he
knew
it. And yet it made him resolve to say nothing more to Lara about Faith.

When he met Faith he knew the relationship was special—even in the initial stages of attraction and friendship, he sensed she was unique; she appealed to a place in his heart that no one else had ever touched, and even if their togetherness never went past that early connection he believed he was no more likely to forget her, ever, than he was to see a day when he could not recognize the melody to his favorite song.

And even when that connection continued to deepen, he did not find it easy to ask her to marry him. No, that was not quite true. Asking her was easy; it was deciding to ask her that was hard. There seemed to be so many ways to ruin a relationship. Even while in medical school, in his early twenties, he felt he had seen most of them already among his friends. The infidelities, the pride, the selfishness, the fear. And those were not just the failings of men; he knew as many stories of girlfriends and wives being unfaithful as of boyfriends and husbands cheating.

He had never betrayed a girlfriend. If he was in a relationship, he was in until he was out. Still it worried him: could he be faithful? He already believed that to betray Faith would be the worst thing he'd ever done. And what if he were to do the worst thing in the world? What if he were to fail at loving? So even after he knew he loved her, it had taken him a long time to propose.

And then she said yes.

And they had three months together before she died.

He had no sense of having in any way caused her death; his sense of guilt was not over that. Jones felt no temptation to indulge in the classic cliché of trying to make himself responsible for the fact that they were on the road that night. In every logical sense, Faith had led all those choices: she was the one who'd had the idea to found the clinic, she had made the plans to go that night, she was even driving when the accident happened. Jones felt responsible for many of the events in his life but he did not feel responsible for that.

The guilt, when it came, was about his heart—that he had not appreciated her enough, that he had been given a gift he failed to acknowledge, failed to respond to. And so it was taken back.

Lara, Jones already knew, might ask: God took it back? Or fate? Or chance?

Whatever gives gifts as big as she was,
Jones thought.

* * *

Lara owned three black formal dresses and they all looked the same; she had bought them several years apart and did not realize how each was similar to the last until she had brought the new one home and hung it in the closet next to the previous dress she had purchased in an effort to stay current. The truth was that Lara did not care about dresses; at least she had not cared until she was preparing for this evening, when she tried on each gown, one after another, until she could not remember what she had liked and what she had hated about any of them. Now she stood with Brenda and Malcolm and smiled at each guest as best she could—she had met them all at other events in the charity circuit of Chicago and recalled the names of none of them—and she watched the doors through which she knew Jones would be coming. “Quit fidgeting,” Brenda hissed beside her.

“I'm not fidgeting,” Lara whispered through a fixed smile.

“If you were operating on Roscoe, all the alarms would be screaming,” Brenda said, speaking like a bad ventriloquist, through an even broader smile.

“Behave yourselves, ladies,” Malcolm said quietly, from Lara's other shoulder. “Half of Chicago society is here.”

Then Jones stepped out onto the veranda and down the stairs toward the gardens. He and Lara spotted each other at almost the same moment. Lara could hear Brenda gasp. As Jones smiled and moved toward them, Brenda coughed and said behind her hand, “He looks like James Bond! Like James Bond
ought
to look!”

“He looks just like his pictures,” Malcolm said.

As Jones reached them, Lara shook his hand and said, “Brenda, Malcolm . . . meet Dr. Jones.”

Jones shook Brenda's hand, and Malcolm's—and Brenda, behind Jones's back, gave Lara a bug-eyed look of joy.

* * *

Jones's place card at dinner positioned him between Brenda and Malcolm. Lara sat opposite him; flanking her were two ladies that Lara introduced as officers of a group called Children's Charities. During dinner Jones and Lara made eye contact several times but did not converse. She ate little and smiled often, nodding as the guests praised her for her graciousness in hosting the event. After dinner one of the women who had dined next to Lara rose and moved to a podium perched on a low platform beside the main table, where she delivered a speech that ended with: “. . . And for the generosity of the Blair Foundation, we at Children's Charities extend a heartfelt thank-you to Dr. Lara Blair.”