Bread Alone (3 page)

I scooped a cup of the
chef
into a bowl, stirred in a cup of water and a cup of flour, and left it to its orgy of feeding and reproducing. By tonight, it would be
levain,
the leaven. I had just put the flour canister back in the pantry when the doorbell rang. I figured it was Paula, dropping
by for a post-party analysis. I went into the living room and opened the door.

Richard Nixon stood on the landing, holding a brown pizza box that reeked divinely of garlic. Or someone wearing a Richard Nixon mask. A pinprick of fear tickled the back of my neck. “Pizza Shack Psycho Killer Claims Second Victim in Westwood.” Then I noticed the Italian loafers.

“I think this takes care of the pretty problem, but I can’t eat with it on,” he said.

Against my will, I laughed.

“Garlic. No anchovies. I hope you’re hungry.”

How did he know that flowers wouldn’t work? When I stepped back to let him in, I could have sworn I saw my life spinning away from me like the out-of-control space capsule in
2001.

We sat on the couch and he set the pizza box on the coffee table, pulled off the mask. He couldn’t resist running one hand through his hair to make sure it was adorably tousled, but even as he did it, he gave me a sheepish grin. Before I could decide whether to be bitchy or conciliatory, he said, “I think we got off on the wrong foot last night.”

A fairly generous assessment of my rudeness.

“I wanted to apologize if I offended you somehow.”

Unreal. All I could think of was how I was going to describe this scene to CM. I didn’t know what else to say, so I asked him if he wanted a beer.

“What kind?”

“I think all I have is Molson.”

He considered, then said, “Do you have any wine?”

After browsing my collection of four bottles, he opened a Ravenswood zinfandel. I got two plates and showed him where my mismatched crystal was hidden. He sniffed the air in the kitchen.

“What’s that smell?”

“Starter. For bread.” There are certain people to whom I avoid trying to explain the concepts of
chef
and
levain.
“It smells great. Yeasty.”

“That’s probably because it is.” It must have come out sharper than I intended.

“Would you rather I just go away?”

My own gracelessness made me blush. “It’s not that. I just don’t know what’s going on here, and when I’m uncomfortable, I get a bit … edgy.”

By that time, he’d located my dish towel and was polishing the water spots off two wineglasses. I wondered fleetingly if he was gay.

“Do I make you uncomfortable?”

“Well … yes.”

Back on the couch, I cut the pizza and served it, stringing cheese everywhere. He seemed to want to clean it up, but he managed not to. “Why are you uncomfortable? I mean—” He took a bite of pizza and chewed as if he were tasting
Caille au Citron avec Beurre Blanc.
“We were having this really interesting conversation last night, and I turned around and you were gone.”

“I was in the kitchen. It wouldn’t have been too hard to find me.”

He ignored the jibe. “And then when I finally found you again, you walked out and shut the door in my face. Did I do something totally disgusting?”

“No, it’s not that. It’s just—” Sitting in the friendly light of my south-facing window, munching on a really good pizza and drinking the soft, round wine, my apprehension was difficult to explain. I looked at him sideways. “Why are you here?”

“Because I liked you.”

“Why? You don’t know the first thing about me.”

“I know you’re very … attractive.”

I shot him a warning look.

“Well, maybe not in the conventional sense, but you do have a certain … I don’t know. You remind me of a camp counselor.”

“A camp counselor?”

“Yes. You know, sort of outdoorsy. Clean.”

I continued to stare at him.

“I’m not doing this very well, am I?”

I shook my head.

“You make me laugh. And you have an attitude.”

“Let me see if I have this right. I remind you of a funny camp counselor with an attitude. And this appeals to you?”

He nodded, as if this were quite the usual thing to say to a woman. “You just seem so different from most of the women I know.”

“You mean most of those beautiful, polished, wildly successful and sophisticated women you know.”

He almost blushed, but not quite.

I arranged myself sideways on the sofa so I could look at him without turning my head. His face was perfect. Not pretty, but composed of only essentials, nothing extra, nothing wasted. Blake’s fearful symmetry.

“You’re not giving me a lot of encouragement,” he said. “Are you seeing someone?”

“Not at the moment. Are you?”

“No,” he said.

“Why not?” It was totally not my style to conduct an interrogation, but I couldn’t stop myself.

“I’ve been busy.”

“Busy?”

“I work a lot. What about you?”

“I’m picky.”

His laugh was spontaneous, infectious. “I noticed that right out of the gate.”

“So now all of a sudden you’re not busy and you want to spend time with me?”

“If I meet your exacting specifications, yes. Is that so outrageous?”

“It’s not that …”

He leaned forward slightly, resting his elbows on his knees. “You keep saying it’s not that. So what is it?”

“I don’t know what it is.”

He aimed his most potent smile directly at me. “Neither do I. Don’t you think we should find out?”

Two

W
e did find out.

We found out that we both liked classical music. Even opera. That we both liked scary movies and we both shut our eyes at the bloody parts. We both loved French food and good wine, particularly when cooked, served, and cleaned up by someone else.

I learned that David was the statistical one man out of every seven million who actually enjoyed shopping. He didn’t seem to mind when I beat him at tennis and he liked it that I wasn’t always fixing my makeup.

Like me, he was an only child, but there the similarities ended. His parents, Martin and Estelle, had retired to Monterey, and he talked about them in a remote way, telling me more about their careers—Martin had been a political science professor and Estelle an education consultant—than about them. When he talked about them, it sounded as if he were reading a curriculum vitae. He listened to my rose-colored stories about my father with a combination of skepticism and envy.

One evening at a bistro in Santa Monica, I got his take on other matters domestic as well—and, more surprisingly, my own. David had just finished besting the waiter in his favorite game of wine-upmanship when a young couple with a toddler and a very new baby came in and were seated at the table next to us.

David’s glance fell on them briefly, but they hardly seemed to register in his consciousness. He looked back at me and we resumed our conversation about a new exhibit of black-and-white photography at LACMA. By the time the waiter reappeared with our wine, the woman had handed off the squirming toddler to her husband, and was shaking drops of milk from a plastic baby bottle onto her wrist. Suddenly David stood up, picked up my jacket, and indicated a table on the other side of the room.

“Lactose intolerant?” I asked as we made our way between the tables, waiter in tow.

“I just know what’s going to happen,” he said when we were settled.

We touched our glasses together and, as if on cue, the newbie across the room started to wail. David stuck his nose over the rim of the glass, inhaled, then took a sip and held it in his mouth for the requisite five seconds before swallowing.

“I’ve tried imagining myself as a father,” he said. “Somehow I can’t see it. Maybe later. After I’ve done everything I really want to do.”

That moment was a modest epiphany for me. I realized that I had never tried imagining myself as a mother. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe it stemmed from teaching school. There were times between classes when I’d find myself standing in the doorway of my room or in the faculty lounge or in the cafeteria when I had lunch duty, watching the barely controlled chaos before me, those children whose brains had yet to catch up with their bodies and some of whose brains never would. As I watched, I tried to pinpoint the stages of development in that awful metamorphosis from downy-haired cherubs to sullen, swaggering boys and noodle-brained, giggling girls.

It was no good reminding myself that CM and I had once been among those noodle brains, and had turned out reasonably well. The whole motherhood scenario just wasn’t something that sounded even remotely interesting.

I set down my glass. The unasked question hung in the air. I shrugged lightly.

“Quite honestly, I’ve never given it a lot of thought.”

His expression most closely resembled one of relief.

But I think the thing that clinched the deal as far as I was concerned was his attitude toward sex. I never felt as if I was being maneuvered or rushed. Ever since I’d finally managed to lose my virginity with Sylvie’s cousin Gilles just days before coming home from France, I’d found sex to be a hit-and-miss proposition—mostly miss. I always enjoyed the preliminaries a lot more than the culmination, and I’d about decided that was probably just the way it was, although I’d heard some of my friends go on like it was something special.

I’d also found out how completely it could ruin a relationship, because once you’d slept with a guy, he expected that every date would end in bed. If that wasn’t your destination of choice, you spent the whole evening trying to think of a way to decline gracefully. There were the inevitable discussions about whether to do it or not, accompanied by all the reasons. Sometimes you’d try being “just friends” but that never worked once the magic line had been crossed, and you ended up not seeing him again, never mind that you might enjoy his company.

I was reluctant to even start down that road, and David seemed to sense that. Maybe even to understand it. I allowed myself to think that he might be different.

Still, I couldn’t imagine that this was serious. It was an odd, though not unpleasant, sensation for me, going places with a man who turned every woman’s head. Sometimes when I’d look up into his smile, I’d have an impulse to turn around, as if the real object of that smile were standing behind me. Assuming that it would end, if not next week, then the week after that, I tried not to care too much and, failing that, at least not to show it. That became more and more difficult as fall turned to winter.

David continued to be thoughtful, attentive, and a perfect gentleman. The relationship hummed along, but didn’t seem to be humming along toward anything specific. I came full circle and began to worry about why he wasn’t trying to sleep with me. He was a great kisser, but
it never went beyond that. Then one night he took me to dinner at Beau Rivage, a wildly romantic little restaurant clinging to the edge of a cliff in Malibu. We drank champagne and stared out at the black velvet ocean, dotted with occasional twinkles of light from passing boats and the lacy white froth of waves under the moon. The steady stream of conversation we’d kept up for the past six weeks seemed to have abruptly run dry.

Afterward, his black T-Bird cruised slowly down the dark Pacific Coast Highway; he turned off the radio and absentmindedly opened his window, even though it was early December and the wind was wet and cold. It was late and there were so few cars on the road that the breakers roared in the quiet. He drove silently, focused on the curves that loomed ahead, while I huddled into my jacket, certain beyond all doubt that this was the end. He’d just taken me to this wonderful place to soften the blow. Now he was going to tell me it was over.

We pulled up the suicidally precarious drive of his little house in the Hollywood Hills. When he pulled the key from the ignition, I turned my face to the window, making no move to get out of the car.

“Just tell me.”

He said, “Let’s go inside. It’s cold out here.”

“You’re the one who had the damn window down. Just tell me.”

“Tell you …?”

“Don’t be a wimp, just say it. Then you can take me home.”

“What are you talking about?”

“That it’s over, of course.”

“Over?”

I turned abruptly. “Is this an echo chamber? Look, I’m not going to make a scene and get tears all over your squeaky-clean car. Just tell me you don’t want to see me anymore, and you can take me home. I’ll live.”

His laugh broke the silence.

“Is that what you think?”