Saturday Night IV
If I knew the way, I would take you home.
–The Grateful Dead, “Ripple,” 1970
by Joel Deutsch
I.
” I’m back, Counselor.” Jacqueline was standing there on the other side of their little table, in her sleeveless blouse and short cotton skirt, hugging herself and glancing around with an annoyed expression as if she were looking for the moronic maintenance person who’d set the thermostat of this outdoor amphitheater SO ridiculously low. She took a stylish cashmere sweater hung from her chair, pulled it over her head and sat down. The sweater was the same green as her eyes, it seemed to Daniel, although it was hard to tell for sure in the dim light. She flipped her long, artfully tousled hair out from under the sweater’s collar.
Comfortable now, she smiled. She was in her incandescent mode. He liked her calling him Counselor. That was cute. Maybe even flirtatious, a good sign. He was trying to relearn the signals.
“Enjoy your little nap?” She apparently had been standing there, watching him, for awhile.
“I wasn’t asleep,” Daniel said,a touch defensively. “Just thinking. More wine?” he was grateful to have been jolted out of his depressing reverie about what it must be like to be blind, and the relief of opening his eyes and finding everything still visible as usual, made HIM FEEL that a drink was in order.
“Please,” said Jacqueline, tugging at her sweater cuffs to straighten the sleeves. “Why not?”
He reached down and felt for the gray Cordura nylon wine carrier on the floor beside his chair, unzipped it, and took out a half-finished bottle of Chianti Classico. After pouring, he recorked the bottle and returned it to the carrier, which stood against the wicker picnic basket holding the remains of their dinner under its hinged wooden lid. The basket was from a gourmet deli he’d stopped AT on the way to PICK her UP, the repast a perfect late-summer spread: A block of Sonoma Jack cheese, an eight-ounce chub of Italian dry salami from San Francisco, a Styrofoam cup OF briny purplish Kalamata olives, a hefty cluster of fresh Thompson seedless grapes and a couple of half-size sourdough baguettes. The glasses were acrylic tulip stemware, versions of the real thing, not the usual cheap picnic tumblers. Daniel had wanted to do this right. Because the lovely Jacqueline was 36 to his 57, and he was fairly smitten, and because this was his first date since the split with Sheila back in June, his first date after all those years of marriage, as many years as separated the two of them in age.
Sure, over all that time, Daniel’s eye had wandered, but that had been the extent of it. Lusting in his heart, as President Carter had so ingenuously and unfortunately put it in that notorious old Playboy interview for which the man, nearly 30 years later, was still mercilessly mocked. It hadn’t really required the national humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis to deny him a second term in office and open the white House door to Ronald Reagan, who knew how to play his cards much closer to the vest. Which was what America actually preferred in its chief executive, no matter how much lip service was being paid in some circles then to the feminist ideal of the self-revealing, self-critical, “evolved” new Age male.
until Melanie had left for college, home and hearth had exerted a steady and sufficient gravity to keep Daniel from straying, to keep the small head under the control of the big one. Even after she’d moved to Berkeley, habit, familiarity, and the comforts of domesticity had been good enough. They both had their work, Daniel at the law firm and Sheila at the Westwood psychology clinic where she was now the senior shrink, a mother hen to the younger therapists in the group practice. They had the airy hillside Silver Lake house, just minutes from major arterials and the 101 freeway. They had their daughter, even if she had removed herself some 400 miles to the north. They had Max, the rotund, excitable Dachshund Daniel had brought home as a puppy to reward Melanie for one of her all A report cards. Max was eight years old, now. Same age as Daniel, in dog years, and obviously happier with his lot in life than Daniel was with his.
Especially since that night in June when Sheila had gotten him to take her to dinner at a new Echo Park Italian restaurant where they’d dined twice before, a place that was part of the area’s transition from its most recent incarnation as largely Latino working class, a modicum of gang action unfortunately included, toward a gentrification that was bringing in everything from hipster creatives attracted by the low rents to affluent Westsiders in the market for a single-family home but priced out of Santa Monica, Mar Vista or Los Feliz by the Los Angeles area’s crazily inflated real estate values.
You could see the changes. On the boulevard, a sweet-smelling panadería where generations had come for their fresh-baked bolillos, cuellos and pan dulce would disappear and be replaced by a funky, faux-homey coffee house with the requisite overstuffed couch for loungers and WiFi Internet connectivity for the laptoppers. A vintage clothing boutique would replace a family shoe store, a white-walled art gallery the neighborhood farmácia.
On the hill called Angeleno Heights,, dilapidated Queen Anne Victorians fronted by overgrown yards and defiled by aluminum siding were being rehabbed, swarmed over from dawn to dusk by crews of day laborers from Guerrero, San Salvador or Guatemala city, overseen by contractors who reported to the property’s new owners. Who were obligated, in their turn, under city code, to subject every detail from external paint colors to balustrade newel posts and widow’s walk railings to the approval process of the Los Angeles Conservancy.
Down in the flats, one-story stucco houses were being demolished and replaced by swank condos and apartment buildings. Where the families thus displaced were supposed to go, and how they were supposed to hang onto the hard-won semblance of a civil environment that had made Echo Park a meaningful step upward from the more crime-ridden barrios of Boyle Heights and South Central, were persistent questions raised at rancorous neighborhood association meetings, where real estate developers and starry-eyed first-time homeowners and their upscale attorneys were arrayed against defiant longtime residents supported only by the pro bono assistance of a community legal clinic and the occasional advocacy of a local politician.
Through all this, the professionals, musicians, artists and entrepreneurs kept coming. Pretty soon, inevitably, Starbucks would arrive and the transition would be complete, from blue collar to bohemian to post-Yuppie trendy and then right up against the inevitable wall of franchise-homogenized anywhere America.
There was something about the situation that struck Daniel badly, made him a little sad, but after all, the restaurant, with its Southern Italian menu awash in regional seafood dishes, a well-chosen wine list, and attentive but not smothering service, was good, and a shorter drive from home than any comparable place, which in L.A. was a factor in every dining decision. Although the reason Sheila had lobbied for eating at Trattoria Palermo tonight was to have a safe venue where she could notify Daniel of her changed position, that as far as she was concerned, their marriage was over, and yes, there was someone else, with the assurance that he wouldn’t make a scene in public. Which hadn’t kept him from exploding with rage, disbelief and impertinent questions the minute he thanked the valet for bringing his car around and they drove off.
Afterward, with the state of his marriage perfectly clear and plainly terminal, he had camped out for a couple of weeks in Melanie’s old room until he found the apartment. Lying awake late one night, the bedside lamp casting a dim glow and a half-read novel of Sheila’s open face down on his chest, he had allowed himself to wonder, not for the first time, at the room’s androgynous décor. Tacked to the wall alongside the bed were two huge posters of near-naked bodybuilders in competition poses, oiled up and glistening, one male and one female. On Melanie’s vanity, centered at the base of its framed mirror, sat a weathered cow skull she’d brought home once from a middle school trip to Joshua Tree, a mournful thing with smudges of mascara darkening the sun-bleached bone beneath its vacant eye sockets. Stacked on one corner of the desk at her window was a formidable collection of motorcycle and tattoo art magazines.
The coarse, mud-brown woolen blanket he was lying beneath, with Max snoring and farting on top of it, Melanie, at 17, had lugged home in Sheila’s Honda Accord hatchback from an Army navy surplus store in East Hollywood along with a pair of calf-high combat boots, a wide black leather belt with a big brass buckle, half a dozen gray T-shirts and a moss-colored field jacket featuring a drawstring waist and four huge flap pockets
The posters, the skull, the magazine, the blanket– all of it was so ridiculously incongruous with the girlish white bedroom set that Daniel and Sheila had bought Melanie as a gift for her 12th birthday. Then, her pre-adolescent angularity, her artlessly direct and sometimes startlingly vulgar speech, her resolute preference for jeans and slacks over skirts and dresses, had all seemed like nothing more than a tomboy phase, or so Daniel and Sheila had preferred to tell themselves.
In her senior year at high school, Melanie had joined the Gay-Straight Alliance and proclaimed herself a Hyper-Punk anarchist dyke, queer as hell, out of the closet and in your face, and damn proud of it, although she didn’t seem to have a special girlfriend anymore than she had had boyfriends up until then. Not that they knew of, anyway. According to Sheila, Melanie might be going through something like a second sexual latency period complicated by peer-group fashionable but ultimately meaningless homoerotic fantasies. “‘Bi curious,’ they call it,” she’d explained. “it’s sort of a fad, apparently.” She had read an article about this trend, she told him, in one of her professional journals.
“You mean it’s all just some kind of a head trip?” Daniel had asked.
“head trip?” said Sheila, rolling her eyes. “Okay. Whatever. I guess you could call it that.” She could never get over the way her husband’s hippie-era jargon, forget the literature degree, forget the three years of law school, forget the decades of functioning in the standard-English-usage world, would often resurface like this in stressful moments.
Sheila, once she recognized the inconvenient reality of her daughter’s professed sexual orientation, was accepting and supportive, although Daniel sensed a lingering trace of regret, and who could blame her, he thought. So it had fallen mostly to Daniel, the challenge to prove himself an enlightened and unconditionally loving father instead of a threatened hetero troglodyte.
Which at first hadn’t been that difficult. With considerable poise, he had fielded Melanie’s rants about how patriarchal, bloodthirsty straight white men had oppressed humanity and ruined the planet’s health, how a world ruled by women would be collaborative rather than adversarial, ecologically robust instead of toxin-despoiled, a perpetual global Dionysian festival of nurturance and creativity instead of an Apollonian left-brain death march to the karmic gas chambers. The truth was that he’d heard most of this already, way back when Kirsten, his college girlfriend, had joined her first women’s consciousness-raising group as the 60s were segueing into the 70s.
He even managed to keep his cool pretty well the time Melanie, home for winter break her freshman year, had explained to him over a Saturday lunch at a Thai restaurant she’d lobbied for in the gay part of West Hollywood that the word “cunt” was now being reclaimed and rehabilitated by the Queer community as the proud Anglo-Saxon term it once had been, and how loud and frequent utterance would obliterate its former shamefulness and drive every one of its female-trivializing and female-pejorative euphemisms , from pussy to gash, into total disuse.
Daniel asked if she wouldn’t mind saying things like that a little more quietly. It felt as if half the other diners in the restaurant must be looking at them.
“No,” she’d insisted. I’m not going to say it more quietly. I’m sorry, but I’m just not. The people have to hear it. They have to get used to it. Repetition is the only way to break the old taboo and bring about the change . Cunt. Cunt. Cunt.” He found the nerve to glance around. Yes, indeed. They were being stared at.
“Okay,” he said. “Fine. I’ll have to take that under consideration.” He wrote in the tip on the check, totaled everything up, and laid his credit card on top of it.
“Which means you don’t believe a thing I just explained to you.”
“No,” said Daniel evenly. “What I meant is that I’ll have to think about it, that’s all.”
“You’re no better than the rest of them,” Melanie accused, bitterly. “you’re all the same.” Men, Daniel imagined she meant.
“Sorry you feel that way,” Hon, he said, immediately regretting having called her by that simultaneously affectionate and belittling endearment. At least the meal itself had worked out, he told himself. Her Pad Thai, his beef panang curry, their salads, the Thai iced teas they’d both had to wash everything down.
But even Daniel’s hardy equanimity and paternal forbearance were finally challenged when he logged onto Melanie’s Facebook page one night in early July from his new bachelor quarters, just to see what was up with her. She’d chosen to stay in Berkeley for the summer, and hadn’t called or emailed him very often lately.
Since his last visit, the page had changed radically. Now there was a big new photograph that showed Melanie leaning back against a gleaming black luxury sedan from the late 1920s with running boards and flared fenders, dressed like a Prohibition-era gangster. White spats, gray fedora, three-piece navy pinstripe suit with a gold watch chain drooping just right from a vest pocket, the whole nine yards, even the unfiltered cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth, trailing smoke. And in one arm she was holding by its trigger guard a Thompson submachine gun with a big round magazine, its barrel half-raised as if on the way up to firing position. A disabled replica, Daniel imagined.
Beneath the picture, filling the rest of the page, was a testimonial explaining that the person shown above was the new her, the real her, no longer her but him, actually. Now was the birth and emergence of the true human being who had been living within. And that human being was not a woman, but a man. Not a girly girl, not a tomboy girl, not even a stone butch dyke, but a male entrapped by some unfair and horrible genetic error in a female body. This new entity, now to be known by the gender-indefinite name Mel, was regularly being administered testosterone injections by a queer-friendly internist. Had taken daily to binding already-small breasts with elastic to mash them into invisibility. Had a voice half an octave lower. Was working out with free weights, stuffing the crotches of old Levis with anything from wadded-up tissues to balled-up socks. Was maybe looking forward to sex reassignment surgery, including a voluntary double mastectomy and the construction of male genitalia from repurposed tissue. Or maybe not. Such things aside, the site visitor was assured, beneath the roomy bootlegger’s suit lay a surprise of manly body hair where there had been none, angles where once had been curves, however slight, well-defined biceps and triceps, pecs and lats and washboard abs like you wouldn’t believe.
Daniel and the new Mel, nee’ Melanie, had emailed back and forth a few times, talked on the phone once or twice. She, or he, Daniel was still uncertain how to think it, now had a voice like a feminine-sounding teenage boy, which he hadn’t recognized on the phone the first time. There had been a single visit home, thanks to a few days off from a summer job at the organic grocery co-op and rides from Berkeley to L.A. and back again with two different drivers who’d posted on Craig’s List seeking someone to split the gas expenses with.
He had gone over to Silver lake to pick Mel up at Sheila’s for lunch. Sheila was handling the transgender thing better than Daniel was, so it was with her that Mel had chosen to stay. No surprise there. Daniel would have done the same, in her place. His place. Whichever.
The venue was Daniel’s choice this time, a dark old Mexican joint in Echo Park he’d always loved. The occasion had been mutually awkward. Mel had been self-consciously brusque, as if trying on a caricature of masculinity, and Daniel had been unsure how to react to his daughter behaving like the kind of guy he’d never cared for to begin with. Both times they hugged, the hello hug and the goodbye one, Daniel, feeling his daughter’s bandage-flattened breasts– he couldn’t stop thinking of her as his daughter, try as he might– pressing against him, he hadn’t been able not to flinch at the image of her youthful chest rendered desolately smooth and pitifully scarred.
They hadn’t really communicated after that. Daniel had electronically transferred funds from his bank account to Mel’s account online for most of the next term at Berkeley until he received notice, through Sheila, that Mel had dropped out of school to work full time at the food co-op. Even after that, he sent something every month to help out with living expenses. It made him feel a little better, and Mel didn’t object. But that was about the extent of their interaction, by now.
The wife, Daniel had come to understand, he could survive the loss of. Could even imagine replacing, someday. But the daughter, too? This was a bereavement he was completely unprepared for. It was Melanie he thought about, not Sheila, when he played Paul Simon’s song “Graceland” over and over to himself through headphones so as not to disturb the kerenskys downstairs while he drank a few more bottles of Corona than he knew he ought to. Losing love is like a window in your heart, the song went. Goddamn if that wasn’t exactly how it was. A wide-open window, thrashing curtains, a driving midnight rain.
II.
Daniel raised his wine glass and regarded Jacqueline in the glow of their own little candle in its netting-covered bowl. “To a fine evening in fine company , he said. They bumped their glasses together with a dull plastic thud and sipped. He tried to interpret her smile, but couldn’t.
Which was frustrating. After all, in the ritual verbal dance of pre-trial voire dire, he could usually tell after only a few questions asked and answered whether he’d want a prospective juror impaneled or not. If you weren’t the kind of lawyer who could do that, who could guess a judge’s mood of the day the moment a clerk called the court to order, before your butt even hit the chair behind the defense table, then you needed to consider some other use of your J.D. like doing appellate research or teaching business law at a state college. But there it was. He had no idea how Jacqueline was appraising him as a potential lover, or a one-night stand, or whatever the hell it was that might be possible, .
The truth was, he knew nearly nothing personal about the woman. All those lunches at the cafes up and down Beverly Drive near the office, over all those months since she’d hired on at Brackman, what was it, a year at least, and what had he actually learned about her ? Baton Rouge born and raised, undergrad and an M.F.A. in Theater Arts at Louisiana State, a year or two on the regional playhouse and dinner theater circuit, a pilgrimage to Hollywood, a brief acting career consisting of nothing more than a little eye-candy rock video work and a few very small parts in low-budget independently-produced features. Then, as the acting dream frayed, the paralegal training, and finally this job. That was it. A curriculum vitae, not a life. Had she ever been married? Did she have a boyfriend? Or a girlfriend? Kids somewhere? He had no idea.
Daniel, on the other hand, had unburdened himself extravagantly to Jacqueline. Every noteworthy memory, every sorrowful regret. A very asymmetrical situation. If he wanted to fathom Jacqueline at all, wanted to get up to speed, he would have to begin from the beginning. As if he were getting a late start on pre-trial discovery for a case with a room full of boxed-up documents that had to be reviewed and he hadn’t yet even asked for the key to the door.
The program was all Hollywood movie music, notthe the kind of thing Daniel would have chosen, himself. But these were the tickets Jacqueline had. And box seats, no less.
The program was all Hollywood movie music, not the kind of thing Daniel would have chosen, himself. But these were the tickets Jacqueline had. And box seats, no less.
As the show began, Jacqueline took a cell phone out of her purse and swiveled back and forth with it held to one eye, taking pictures of everything in the dimming light, including a couple of shots of a self-conscious Daniel trying out a forced and tight-lipped smile,
One of the two video screens flanking the stage was showing shifting close-ups of the orchestra while scenes from the pictures for which the scores had been written appeared on the other.
Most of the movies in the first half Daniel either didn’t know at all or remembered only dimly from watching late night TV half asleep, except for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which he had seen at a repertory theater with Sheila years before. Naturally, the scene they showed was the one where Janet Leigh gets stabbed to death standing under the shower in her room at the Bates Motel, the downward thrusts of the flashing knife accompanied by a punctuation of shrieking violins and violas. As the shot focused on the blood circling down the shower drain, he stole a glance at Jacqueline and saw her gazing intently at her feet, unable to watch, which heartened him a little. Maybe she wasn’t so invulnerable AS SHE seemed.
Following intermission came music from films of more recent vintage, culminating with a rousing medley of blockbuster themes. Jaws. Star Wars. Raiders of the Lost Ark . E.T., the Extraterrestrial. Familiar images shone like cinematic dream wormholes in the night: The dorsal fin of the murderous Great White shark slicing the placid offshore waters of the summertime seashore. The agile rebel fighter spacecraft strafing the colossal Death Star with flashing proton torpedoes. Indiana Jones, after a few beats’ hesitation, pulling his revolver and neatly dispatching a sword-twirling Arab assassin. And finally, there was the schoolboy Eliot pedaling his bicycle up into the dark suburban sky and across the moon, borne aloft on swelling, triumphal orchestration. Phone home, the abandoned little space leprechaun had croaked piteously. Wherever home was. And now the kid was ferrying him there in his handlebar basket, safe and secure as a child in a grocery cart. Which never failed to stimulate in Daniel a Pavlovian tear-response, something about the inconsolable grief of existential displacement. He wasn’t surprised to feel it happening again, as if a switch had been thrown inside his brain, but he couldn’t do anything to keep from being shaken by a couple of silent sobs. Dabbing at his eyes with the corner of his used napkin, he looked over at Jacqueline to see how she was reacting to the scene, herself.
Both her arms were extended under the table, and she was staring down there at something, totally engrossed, her right elbow jerking back and forth in tight little motions as if she were playing a video game. Daniel waited a couple of seconds to see if she’d come up for air, which she didn’t, then ducked down as if to get something out of the picnic basket and peered into the dimness.
She was holding her cell phone above her bare thighs, pressing its keys. In the faint glow of the device’s screen, he could see her alternating between using the side of her thumb and the tip of her forefinger , like an eccentric hunt-and-peck typist. She would punch in a sequence of characters, wait, then punch in a few more. She was texting with someone.
He sat up straight again, putting some leftover cheese and grapes onto his empty paper plate as if that was why he’d bent down. The orchestra was playing its climax to the blockbuster medley, and Jacqueline was looking at the stage and the screens, now.
Soon, the medley arrived at its predictably stirring conclusion, which was followed by a similarly predictable standing ovation. What next, Daniel wondered, as he and Jacqueline applauded, exchanged smiles. He had no idea, was the fact of the matter.
He thought of Bobby Bail again, of being stopped on the PCH last night for that closing time convoy of smoked glass windows and Free Bobby Bail bumper stickers. What was it that Bobby always used to tell him back then whenever he was anxious about something, whether it was an anticipated bad grade in some class at Fairfax High or a confusing girl problem?
No expectations, no disillusionment, my friend. That was it. Bobby had discovered the adage in one of his books about Zen, and had always delivered it with that same bemused, gently condescending smirk Daniel had seen on his face again lately for the first time in years, every day of Bail’s televised trial. And now the guy was fighting to avert the kind of conviction that could land him someplace like Soledad or San Quentin for life without parole. So where was that at, Daniel had to ask himself.
But the line still seemed like good advice. It had sure worked on a few young women back in the day, he had to admit, and, after all, it wasn’t some rice-munching, saffron-robed Zen master who’d run that investment swindle and gotten two greedy rug dealers in Tarzana and a Medi Cal-scamming Orange County pediatrician into the depths of Lake Tahoe with bullet holes in the back of the burlap hoods that covered their heads, manacled hand and foot like suspected Jihadists and weighted down by steel beams tied to their ankles with lengths of green perforated garden hose, the beams and the hose traced to the site of one of Bail’s under financed and never-to-be-completed construction projects. The hose wrapped around one of the beams had somehow slipped loose, freeing the pediatrician’s corpse from its ad hoc mooring and allowing his bloated remains to shoot to the surface and be sighted by a crowd of horrified tourists on the deck of a paddlewheeled cruise boat replica of something from Mark Twain’s time on the Mississippi.
III.
Jacqueline’s apartment was a spacious, lushly carpeted and expensively furnished one-bedroom on the top floor of a tower in a gated community that had seen better days, then seen worse days, and now had been rehabilitated yet again, this time quite lavishly. A little pricey for what he guessed was her salary range, occurred to Daniel, the thought crowding in with his surprise about the BlackBerry.
Jacqueline had taken off her sweater, and was sitting on her big couch sipping a glass of mineral water with a slice of lime, one leg folded demurely over the other, one sandal dangling. Daniel, cradling in a fat, proper red wine goblet another glass of Chianti from the second bottle he’d invested in for the evening, stood gazing out the living room’s picture window at the transverse shadow of the Santa Monica Mountains. Including that landmark of landmarks, the Hollywood sign.
She put a CD on the stereo, and then someone whose voice Daniel couldn’t place was singing Sam Cooke’s “A change is Gonna Come” in an angelic tenor with an endearing sort of warble.
“Who’s that?” he asked, turning around. Jacqueline had set her spring water on the coffee table and was leaning back, arms crossed on her chest, watching him with (was he imagining it?) a tender gaze.
“Aaron Neville, darlin’,” she answered in that pillow-soft accent of hers. “It’s the Neville Brothers “Yellow moon” CD. Good new Orleans music.”
Appreciatively, He took in the flex of her crossed-over calf, the press of thigh and hip against the fabric of her skirt. The Chianti’s tannin had left his mouth feeling as dry as the Mojave. He hadn’t expected to be nervous like this. He wondered if he could get it up. Absurdly, desperately, He wondered if he and Sheila should have at least tried, instead of just letting things fall apart . he wondered if darling was something women from Louisiana just said all the time, the way the English semed to call everybody “love.”
“Beautiful,” was all he could think of to say. Could jacqueline hear his lips making those dry smacking sounds ?
“You’re such a dear heart,” she smiled, patting the sofa beside her. “Why don’t you just bring yourself over here and be company?”
In the glow of jacqueline’s nightstand lamp, with the window drapes drawn apart like open stage curtains and so in plain view of God and the Hollywood sign and every 747 descending or ascending along a flight path into or out of LAX, they made love late into the night. And when the morning came, they rolled and tumbled all over again. Which was quite something, compared to the once or twice a month, on average, Daniel had grown used to. And at his age, no less.
The intensity of the second time nearly overwhelmed him, left him drained and dazed,, his pulse gradually decelerating, his heart flooding with a confusion of gratitude and grief. He watched Jacqueline cross the room to her closet for something, noted the dense full wobble of her breasts, the firm sway of her buttocks, the taut swell of just enough of a belly to make him think of infants and fatherhood all over again for the first time in years, except for his unexpectedly nostalgic reaction to hearing Miguel and Nora’s baby crying from within their darkened house trailer little more than 24 hours ago.
And the legs, Jesus, the legs, entwined with his, or clasped about his back, or with her knees pressing against his shoulders for dear life. He hated himself for it even as he remembered, but missionary position with petite, short-limbed Sheila had always made him feel like a sadistic entomologist pinning a still-living insect to a board with its tiny feet waving helplessly in the air.
“I’ll go make a pot of coffee,” said Jacqueline as she knotted around her waist a silk robe the same length as her skirt and yes, he could see now, the same green as her sweater, which had indeed been the same green as her eyes. “Then I’m going to go take a shower. If you’re hungry, there are some eggs and a loaf of multi-grain bread in the fridge. Or there’s some yogurt in there, too, I think, and some fruit in the fruit bowl on the counter, if that’s more what you’re into.”
So much for the showering together, the dreamy gazes across the breakfast table, the feeding each other bites of English muffins smeared with marmalade.
When she reappeared in the living room, still waring the silk robe but now with her wet hair wrapped in a turbaned towel, Daniel was dressed, standing again at the picture window, coffee mug in hand. There were the hills, there was the flat grid of streets and avenues, alive with traffic. Immediately below, cars entered and exited a parking lot where he could see his Camaro slotted into one of the visitor spaces, and beyond that there were people playing tennis on what looked from this height to be a well-maintained two-net court.
“Great view, isn’t it?” she said. “It took me months to get over it. I kept the couch in the middle of the room so I could just sit there and look.”
She padded into the kitchen to get a cup of coffee for herself, then sat down on the couch and began sipping the coffee and paging through a copy of People magazine that Daniel hadn’t noticed the night before.
“I’ll have to get dressed in a few minutes and go over to my gym for a session with my personal trainer,” she said. “So I’ll have to kick you out. But you can sit down and finish your coffee, if you want.”
The invitation didn’t sound exactly fervent, let alone cozy and affectionate.
“I think I’d better get going, actually,” said Daniel, and took his empty coffee mug into the kitchen to rinse it out. A civilized thing that felt good to do. At his apartment, he left things everywhere.
“thanks for last night,” he said, as he came back into the living room. He bent over her, expecting a kiss on the lips, most likely a lingering one as she recalled the passion of their nocturnal acrobatics. But all he got was a coffee-scented peck on the cheek and a brief glance away from a spread in People about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.
“See you at the office Tuesday, okay? Was all she said as he let himself out.
To be continued…