All for a Story (30 page)

His eyes raked through the pages, but few of the words registered. He glanced up at the clock. Two more hours and she’d be here. Then another glance fifteen minutes later. The excitement of the book’s final chapters held no fascination for him. He’d read it before. He knew how it ended —the angry mob descending on the Invisible Man. The mob beating him to death, and his slow reappearance, vein by vein, to show him pitiful and weak.

The room had grown nearly dark around him, so much so that he’d moved the book clear up to the end of his nose, absorbed in the act of reading if not the story. The knock at the door was more surprising than startling, though he did momentarily lose his grip on the book.

She knocked again, and from his vantage point he could see her in full profile, one hand poised at his door, the other straining to hold a large covered basket.

The cat.

He closed the book, ran his fingers through his hair, straightened his glasses, smoothed his shirt, took a deep breath, and opened the door to find her now holding the basket with both hands, offering it across the threshold.

“I present to you,” she said with exaggerated grandiosity, “Paolo the cat.” Without any other hint of invitation, she walked across the threshold of his home and set the basket on the floor.

“Please,” he said. “Come in.”

She was already unbuttoning her coat, which she handed over along with her hat with the clear expectation that he had some sort of a plan for what to do with them.

“Isn’t this cozy?” Her eyes were taking a slow spin around the room, but her whole body turned when her gaze fell upon the bookcase, and her face took on an expression of near awe. “Look at those!”

“It is an impressive collection,” Max said, unable to keep himself from feeling an undeserved sense of pride. “He has everything —history, biography, atlases, travel guides . . .”

She’d stepped closer and was running her small, tapered fingers along the exposed spines of the books.

“They’re not in any sense of order right now.” He felt himself babbling but couldn’t stop. “When I first got here, they were a mess. Just crammed every which way on the shelf. We’ve worked to just get them facing one direction. I guess organizing them into categories will have to wait.”

Resting her hand on a book, she turned to look over her shoulder.
“We?”

“Zelda and I. Mostly Zelda.”

She made a sound indicating she needed no more information.

A muted howling sound called Monica’s attention away from the books and Max’s attention away from Monica.

“Is he vicious?” Max eyed the basket warily as it made a tiny scooting path.

“Not usually. But then again, as far as I know he’s never been stuffed into a basket and hauled around on a bus before. Let’s just hope he’s forgiving.”

“I’ll let you do the honors,” Max said, giving her a wide berth. “It might be best if the first face he sees is a familiar one.”

“How —thoughtful of you. And not at all cowardly.”

She knelt down, slipped the basket’s leather thong out of its closure, and opened the lid. Two green eyes stared from its depths.

“Vieni,”
Monica urged, with a soft clicking sound.
“Vieni qui.”

“You speak Italian?”

“No. But Paolo does, I think.” And again she cooed,
“Vieni.”

What emerged was a gray tabby cat, wholly unremarkable save for the fact that each of his feet looked to be encased in a fat, furry mitten.

“
Ciao,
Paolo,” he said, playing along.

Monica softened her voice to something identifiably feline.
“Buona sera, signore.”
She was petting the top of the cat’s head, and he purred loudly in response. In fact, he walked his mittened feet right up Monica’s leg and touched his whiskers to her face.

“He looks like he doesn’t want to leave you.”

“Don’t be fooled.” She touched her nose to Paolo’s. “He leaves me all the time.” She gathered him in her arms, kissed the top of his head, and set him back on the ground. “Help me up?”

She was stretching her hand up to him, and he took it, resisting the absurd urge to gather her into his arms in just the same manner. Once she was on her feet, he let go, and they stood, not quite side by side, not quite facing each other, but awkwardly angled. She took another deep breath and a quick look around; he stuffed his hands into his pockets and rocked on his heels. Paolo made his way to the stove, gave his back one good arch, then curled up on the braided rug in front of it.

“I think he’ll be fine,” Monica said. He couldn’t see her face, but something in her voice caught his attention. He reached out, touched her chin, and turned her toward him. Tears pooled in
her eyes. “It’s silly, I know.” She shook off both his touch and her tears. “I’ll just miss him is all.”

He wanted to tell her she could come visit anytime, but since she’d come into the room, coherence eluded him. How was it that within five minutes of arriving, both she and this cat seemed more at home in this place than he ever did? Already she’d returned to the bookcase, studying the gold-embossed titles.

“I finished
The Enchanted April
. I would have brought it back, but I was afraid Paolo might rip it to shreds.”

“Another time. Or you can bring it to the office.”

She gave no indication whether she’d heard him or not, as she remained engrossed by the wealth of Uncle Edward’s collection. “We had a library in our house,” she said, speaking as if her mind were as far away as any of these books would have taken her. “Not the house I grew up in, but the one . . . later. In Georgetown. At least, it was supposed to be a library, because it had all these shelves. Every wall, just lined with them. I remember telling my mother that I couldn’t wait to fill it up. With books. I had this image of myself lying in the middle of that room. No furniture, even. Just the floor, surrounded by books, and just reading and reading and reading.”

“Did you fill it up?” He regretted the question the moment he asked, even more when the droop in her shoulders and the stiffening of her body heralded her answer.

“Hardly. My mother wasn’t going to waste any of our precious money on books. Not when we had to buy expensive furniture and knickknacks to impress all those people who never came to visit.”

“Well, these are here for you. Whenever you like.”

She turned and looked at him with eyes that made him want to give her everything he’d ever own. “Can I even sit on your floor? Right here, next to Paolo?”

“You’ll have to,” he said, grateful for her little joke to ease the mood. “I only have one chair.”

“Is that where I’m going to have to sit to eat my supper?” She tilted her nose and sniffed. “It smells delicious, by the way.”

“Of course not. This way.” Not daring to touch her, he gestured around the corner into the tiny kitchen, which by now had fallen into gray shadow. Candlelight may have been in order after all.

“Well, isn’t this lovely?” Monica said once he’d flipped the switch to illuminate the kitchen in safe, bright light. Her tone oddly matched the identical phrasing of when she’d called the living room “cozy.” “Tablecloth? China?” She leaned over the table and inhaled the scent of the flowers.

“All the work of Mrs. Ovenoff, I assure you.” He busied himself finding a tea towel to protect his hands as he took the roast out of his tiny oven. Suddenly he felt like Paolo, with extra fingers and thumbs making his movements more clumsy than usual. The kitchen, while always small, seemed to have shrunk to doll-sized proportions. He bumped into cupboards, bumped into Monica, nearly dropped the roaster’s lid.

“Zelda trusted you with her dishes?”

“Hard to believe, I know.”

Somehow, he managed to get the roast and vegetables into a serving dish and then to the table, where Monica took over the task of transferring the food to their plates.

“I’m so glad you invited me over tonight. It’s Mr. Davenport’s night to cook, and he only knows one thing: corned-beef hash.”

“My father made corned-beef hash on nights when my mother had her ladies’ auxiliary meetings.”

“Is that so?”

There was something different about her this evening. She
seemed cool, restrained, almost distant. All the worries he’d had about being alone with her —here, in his home —quietly went away, only to be replaced by new ones. Had he so offended her in the church that she’d erected some barrier between them? Had the incident with that goon in the diner fed whatever embarrassment he’d initiated? Sitting across from him, poised to dig her fork into supper, she seemed politely disconnected from him. It took a few minutes for him to really understand what he felt at the moment, but then it came clear.

He missed her.

In fact, he’d been missing her all day. All night, even, since the diner. Before that, since the cathedral. Before that . . . And now, here she was. And wasn’t. Monica was in his kitchen, but something was missing.
Someone
was missing.

She’d left the Monkey behind.

That was it. Not once, not for a moment, had she flirted with him. He cut into his roast, took a bite, and pondered everything she’d said, every expression, every nuance since her arrival. No batting of her eyelashes. No pouting, no touching. Even when he helped her to her feet, when she teetered in front of him, just a bit of balance away from falling against him. No innuendo, just pure, stilted, bland conversation. Not unlike the turnip on his plate.

“Well, isn’t this delicious?” she said, interrupting his thoughts.

“It is,” he agreed, adding that it was Zelda who deserved the credit.

From that point on, their conversation bounced between the texture of the roast, the flavor of the turnips, and Zelda’s hair. Monica, it seemed, had come armed with the table manners of a finishing-school girl on scholarship, leaving Max somewhere between amused and befuddled at her performance. She clipped her words and touched her napkin to her lips and barely raised
her eyes above the level of her water glass. Where was the girl who drank Scotch whiskey from a bottle? Or danced up close in Negro nightclubs? His mind was free to ponder such questions, as the conversation sat dull as butter on the table. No jabs, no jokes. She wore this persona like a duck in galoshes. Awkward, almost pathetic.

And yet a new frustration stirred within. His mind, now completely disengaged from the banality of her conversation, wandered, calling back memories of the steam that puffed from her lips on a cold winter morning, the feel of that tiny body tucked up against his, the featherlike softness of her hair. Desire so churned within him that he couldn’t speak, couldn’t swallow. His fork —newly useless —rested against his thumb. He watched her face, once again obscured by that stupid napkin, change as her eyes met his. They’d been dull all during dinner, but now they turned downcast. She dropped her napkin and stood.

“I think it’s time for me to leave.”

“No.” He stood abruptly, sending his chair clattering behind him. The noise attracted Paolo’s attention, and the cat came padding into the kitchen. Upon seeing him, Monica —without hesitation or permission —stooped to set her plate on the floor. There she remained, scratching the creature behind his ears as he lapped the juices and fed on the scraps from her plate.

“I do have food for him, you know,” Max said. “Sardines. Five tins of them, in fact.”

She didn’t look up. “Who would want sardines when you can have something as tasty as this?”

“Well, he’d better not get used to it. Most nights I have a can of soup.”

Monica bent to give Paolo a kiss on the top of his head, then rose and said, “Thank you for taking him in,” before attempting to brush past him on her way to the front room.

He didn’t touch her, but he stopped her with half a step to the side.

“You don’t have to go.”

“I do. I want to.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m not having any fun. Neither of us are.” She was daring him to contradict her, but her blunt honesty took him by surprise. “Look, I tried. Okay?”

Now, as he puzzled over what she’d said, she did slip by, leaving him to catch up in three long strides to where she was hurrying to put on her coat. He took it from her.

“Tried what?”

“To be
good
.” She said the word as if he’d served her the sardines. “To be appropriate and proper, like that Alice Reighly says.”

She made an attempt to snatch her coat back, and a folded piece of paper fell from the pocket. She retrieved it, unfolded it, and handed it over to him. “The rules.”

His eyes skimmed the mimeographed type. A list of directives to distinguish the Stranger from the One. Which was he?

“You don’t have to follow her rules, you know.”

“But even you —back when we were in that church, you said —”

“I said that you should be true to the woman you are. Whoever that woman was at dinner? She wasn’t
you
.”

She tugged. “How do you know?”

He held firm. “Because you make me laugh. And you make me furious. And you make me want to do things like I’ve never wanted before.”

Without meaning to, he’d pulled her closer, using the plain-spun wool of her coat like a lure, to the point where he could almost feel her body against his. Never before, he surmised, had
this garment ever been so charged to protect her from the elements of nature.

“Things like what?”

Nothing coquettish in her question. Her chin jutted forward, demanding an answer, and he knew what she wanted to hear. She didn’t care that he’d never been in a brawl with a stranger, or tasted liquor, or faced down gin-joint gangsters. Her eyes begged him to tell of his desire; her lips were parted, waiting for a kiss. She unclenched her fingers from the coat, wanting him to drop it to the floor, removing the last physical barrier between them. He listened to her, engaging all of his senses to do so. Their breath was in perfect unison as were, he supposed, their hearts. At least in their rhythm. His own pounded, and if he dropped the coat and drew her to him, they would join in the next beat. And perhaps every beat thereafter.