Improvisation (11 page)

She knocked the thirteen ball into the side pocket with a confident whack, followed by a tricky bank shot to drop the fourteen. Tina’s attention returned to the game as two more stripes fell in succession.

“And a little physics,” Jan added as she put some backspin on the cue ball so it snapped to a halt on the edge of a pocket instead of dropping after the nine. Lining her up for an easy shot on the ten, and then the eleven.

“Eight, corner pocket,” she said, pointing with her cue. “Might want to get that twenty out.”

Tina stared at her, openmouthed, as she made the shot. Jan was sexy. Jan leaning over a pool table was incredibly sexy. Jan handily winning the game took Tina’s breath away.

Peter and Chloe walked over just in time to witness Tina’s disgrace as she gave Jan a twenty. “Looks like she trounced you, Cousin,” Peter said. He looked at the table with most of the solid balls still scattered on it. “Did you sink
anything
?”

“Shut up,
Cousin
,” Tina said, jabbing him in the ribs with her stick.

“You played a good game,” Jan said. “I thought the strategy of leaving all your balls on the table so they got in my way was brilliant.”

Tina was tempted to chase Jan around the table, but she wasn’t sure she’d be able to control herself once she caught her. “Is the music starting again?” she asked instead.

“In a minute,” Peter said. “Some people are going to Coeur d’Alene this Saturday to see a local Irish band play. The Boise Banshees. Chloe and I thought the four of us could go.”

Tina stayed quiet, expecting Jan to be the first to back out of anything resembling a double date. “I’m in,” Jan said instead. “I’m teaching a seminar for some grad students at U of I in the morning, but I can hang around town until you get there.” She shrugged at Tina as if to apologize for accepting the invitation. “Dad won’t be home until Monday at the earliest, so I’d rather be out than sitting at home.”

“We’re leaving after I’m through with work in the afternoon,” Peter said. “So we can take you with us, Tina.”

“Oh, our first road trip,” Chloe said, in the same cooing voice Tina and Jan had mimicked earlier. Tina groaned. She was starting to like her cousin. But her cousin in love was a bit much to take.

“Or you can drive with me,” Jan suggested. “We could get lunch or something after my seminar.”

“Thank you,” Tina said with relief. A few hours with Jan—in the safety of a public place and broad daylight—plus a chance to hear a new band sounded oddly appealing. Only because her previous weekend had been so boring, and she was anxious for a chance to get out of Spokane, even if only for one day. Jan’s company was a minor inconvenience, and certainly not the reason Tina said yes.

*

Jan let herself into the dark, empty house and leaned against the closed door. Her dad had only been with her for a week before he was back in the hospital, but already the place seemed lonelier than it had before he had come. She’d survive the loneliness, though. She always had. And once she had all the pieces of her life in place, she would start the search for someone to share it with. Not before. Not while everything was so topsy-turvy she could barely make it through a single day without a feeling of vertigo.

Too many loose ends. The house was a great investment if she had the time to do the renovations on her long to-do list. If she had to sell in the near future, so she and her dad could move to a better city for his care? Then it was nothing more than a liability, a huge setback in her plan to build a real home. She moved through the house, turning on as few lights as possible while she prepared for bed. She didn’t want to see the harsh lines of reality tonight, when the memory of the dimly lit bar and Tina’s presence were so clear in her mind. A night or two with Tina would be a pleasant side trip, a break from her fruitless attempts to reach her goals, but how much more lonely would this place feel when Tina inevitably moved on? Tina wasn’t looking for anything permanent—and neither was Jan right now—but the thought of touching her and then watching her walk away was too much to bear.

Jan slid between the sheets and let images from the evening replay in her head. It had taken monumental effort to focus on the pool game instead of on Tina, but it had been worth it to see the expression of stunned appreciation on Tina’s face after Jan won the game. She hoped she had made it appear effortless, but with Tina standing so close behind her, she’d been afraid she wouldn’t even be able to hit the cue ball, much less run the table. All Tina would have had to do was take one step forward while Jan was leaning over to take a shot, and their hips would have been pressed together. Jan felt warmth spread from the point of imagined contact through her whole body. Tina’s music drifted through her mind as she slid her hand over her tense stomach muscles. In real life, she couldn’t let Tina get any closer, certainly not close enough to touch. But in her fantasies? She could go all the way.

A quiet, boring street. Nothing to see. Tina tried to distract herself with work or television, but she kept returning to the window and twitching aside the curtain. She was anxious to get going because she needed a day trip, a chance to get out of Spokane. Jan’s company was just incidental. Tina left the apartment, locking the door behind her, as soon as she saw Jan’s Prius pull up to the curb. A whole day together. Brooke would be thrilled, but Tina sure as hell wasn’t going to tell her about the outing. She felt safe assuming Jan wouldn’t, either.

“Nice car,” she said when she sat down. Her car might be a Toyota as well, but the similarity ended there. Jan’s was only a year or two old, and clean inside and out. No trails of sticky dried Coke streaking down the dash, or piles of sheet music, art supplies, and fast-food bags littering the backseat. And probably no emergency stash of napkins from McDonald’s and cardboard cup sleeves from Starbucks in the glove compartment. There were, however, two large Starbucks coffees in the cup holders.

“Thanks,” Jan said as she merged onto the street. She pointed at the coffee. “I hope you like sweet. Mocha on the left, vanilla latte on the right. You get your pick.”

Tina took the mocha and moved the latte to the holder on Jan’s side. She settled back in her seat and took a sip of her drink. Drops of rain freckled the window as Jan turned toward I-90.

“How far are we going?”

“About a half hour,” Jan said. “Coeur d’Alene is just over the Idaho border. It’s an easy trip, and there are some beautiful places to hike and camp around the lake. I used to go there a lot with Dad, and with friends when I was in college, but I haven’t been for a couple years. How’s your PR work for Peter going?”

“Not bad. The drapes for his home-and-garden show booth were the wrong color, so I had to spend a few hours begging and threatening before the company agreed to redo them. And I’ve been trying to convince Peter to set up a permanent booth at the farmers’ market, so he can sell herbs and vegetable starts there. And maybe some of the handcrafted things he loves so much.”

“What a great way to connect with the community,” Jan said.

“Exactly what I told him. How was your week at school?” Tina asked when it was her turn. She and Jan sounded like they had spent the evening before coming up with safe conversation starters. She hoped they wouldn’t be talking about the weather by the time the ride was over. It was supposed to be rainy all day, so the topic wouldn’t get them through many miles of drive time.

Tina listened to Jan’s stories about her students and was surprised to find she was interested in the unique projects Jan had devised to teach them about geometry and how it applied to architecture. She had really only asked to be polite, but she liked hearing how Jan tried to reach each student as an individual, to understand their struggles and triumphs. Tina knew firsthand from her orchestra experiences the difference a teacher like Jan could make.

She felt strangely comfortable with Jan today, quite a change from their first tension-filled meetings. She was accustomed to forming quick connections with women, but those relationships tended to be fairly shallow. Half an hour of sex was fine—or at least a good start—but the same amount of time stuck in a car with nothing to do but talk? Tina could only come up with a handful of people with whom she’d willingly take a long, sexual-agenda-less drive.

She attributed much of her newfound easy rapport with Jan to her research for the DVD project. The boxes in Jan’s dad’s apartment were stuffed with documents and pictures, giving Tina an intimate look at Jan’s whole life, from babyhood to graduation. Shuffling through the large stack of orders to report to various air force bases had given Tina a more concrete sense of the itinerant life Jan had spent as a child. And there were plenty of photos of Jan standing next to animals, taken in zoos or next to horse-drawn carriages or at fairs, but none of her with a pet of her own. A dog or cat would have been a logistic impossibility for such a mobile family.

Tina had laid out all the pictures of Jan’s birthday parties, in chronological order. Jan, her dad, and two or three friends. A pink-frosted cake in front of them on the kitchen table. But the kitchen was different in each one, and so were the friends. She could understand why Jan wanted to find some stability after growing up like she had, but Tina wanted the opposite for herself. While Jan had been traveling the world during high school, Tina had been traveling between home and hospital. She would never regret the time she’d spent with her mom, but she no longer had any deep attachments to another person, and she planned to take full advantage of her freedom.

“I have a question about your dad’s career,” she said when the conversation about school ended.

Jan flipped the windshield wipers to a higher setting as the drizzle turned to a heavier rain. “Sure, what is it?”

“I don’t know much about airplanes, but I’ve noticed that all of the prints on the apartment walls are of a fighter, but all the pictures of your dad in uniform show him next to a bigger plane. What did he fly?”

“He was a KC-135 pilot,” Jan said, with the easy familiarity of someone who had grown up with military designations. “But he always had a thing for the F-15.”

“Okay, it’s all clear to me now,” Tina said sarcastically.

Jan laughed. “The 15 is a small fighter jet, the one in all the prints he’s collected. The 135 is a large tanker. So fighter pilots can refuel midair and don’t have to land when their tanks are low.”

“Like a flying gas station?” Tina asked. Jan nodded. “Sounds dangerous.”

“It is, even though Dad always joked that he just had to fly in a straight line, and the fighter pilots behind him were the ones who had to do the real tricky flying. He had a lot of respect for them.”

“But he flew fighters before the tanker, didn’t he? I couldn’t find any photos of him doing that.”

“No,” Jan said with a slight frown. “I’d have remembered him telling me about that. He started flying 135s the year I was born.”

Tina’s frown matched Jan’s. She’d have to go back through the papers because she must have read them wrong. She moved to the next topic on her list. “So, tell me about this seminar you’re teaching.”

*

If the weather had been more cooperative, Tina would have sat outside and read while Jan taught her two-hour seminar. But beautiful as the University of Idaho campus was, Tina didn’t feel like sitting in the rain with a soggy book. She had no interest in learning how to teach math to high school students either, but at least the auditorium was warm and dry. She had expected a small room and a handful of graduate students, not tiers filled with over a hundred people. She chose a corner seat and started to read as soon as Jan started to talk.

For about ten minutes, she alternated between pretending to read and actually listening to Jan’s lecture. Then she closed her book and concentrated on the completely transformed woman at the front of the classroom. Jan’s voice was clear and authoritative, where before it had been conversational. Her whole demeanor reflected the same confidence. Not just her words, but her body language and expression revealed her love of teaching, her belief in the importance of her job. She leaned toward the class, open and relaxed, slowing the pace of her lecture when she came to points she obviously felt were important, taking her time to explain them, as if sharing the knowledge she had was something special and vital. Tina had seen hints of the professional side of Jan in their earlier conversations, but she seemed to belong in front of a class.

Tina just watched at first, mesmerized by Jan’s conviction and passion. There was nothing stuffy or boring about her, and Tina felt such a strong attraction she decided she must have a latent teacher fetish. It had to be a general interest in teachers and not a particular interest in Jan that was capturing her attention. Eventually, Jan’s words started to penetrate her consciousness, reaching beyond her libido to her brain.

“We can’t simply offer our students chunks of knowledge,” Jan said, pacing back and forth and gesturing, as if to emphasize the importance of her words, “learned in isolation and discarded after the final exam. We need to connect each lesson to the whole subject and then draw lines from there to the rest of the world. To art and music and sports and literature. Geometry is everywhere, and it’s up to us to open our students’ eyes to the shape of their universe.”

Riffs on a theme. The same thing Tina tried to do with her music. Take a simple melody and make changes to connect it to other genres, to emotions, to life. To her own life. And it was also what she was doing in her PR work for Peter’s nursery. Finding a general theme and applying it to all aspects of a company’s image. Jan started talking about how she organized her lesson plans, and Tina’s thoughts continued to flow. She could tweak Jan’s organizational methods and use them to present her business proposals. Take her own fluid ideas and give them shapes. Pyramids, squares, circles, spirals. Whichever best fit the business model of each potential client.