Judith Krantz (60 page)

Jazz’s gaze was mild, her voice neutral, her manner dry and matter-of-fact.

“My space!” Phoebe sprang up, her split ends flying.
“My space?”

“For the new Tostada,” Jazz said, as she turned and led the way out of Phoebe’s office.

“That went fairly well,” Jazz said as they regained Pete’s studio and she had accepted the men’s dazed, delighted compliments.

“Jesus, Jazz! What’s happened to you?” Pete exclaimed. “You’re beginning to scare me. Our problems are all solved and the food’s still hot!”

“Ah, Pete, honey bun, I’ve just been hanging out with some wrongos … picked up a few moves. Listen, I forgot all about Gabe. What are we going to do about his space?”

“Don’t worry, he’ll be long gone. He left for Russia on a big assignment, won’t be back for months. Where did he say he was going, Mel?”

“Who knows exactly? He went rushing off with his pockets stuffed with ten rolls of gaffer’s tape, muttering something about covering the impact of a major capitalist venture on the government of the Ukraine, something about staying with it till the bitter end, even if it took till summer. I wasn’t listening to the details. Wait! Now I remember—he’s going to Kiev, where the chicken comes from.”

“Was it … with Milos Forman?” Jazz asked, beginning to quiver all over with rising mirth, thinking of Sam and Gabe, each one with his unique instrument, dividing the available female filmmaking and local talent during the long Russian winter.

“Right! That’s exactly what he said, come to think of it … hey—why’d you ask, if you knew already?”

“Because … I … wasn’t … exactly … sure.”

“Jazz, stop laughing so hard—for God’s sake, you’re going to choke on the fried rice.”

“How was your trip to the big city?” Casey asked the next day, as Jazz came wandering in after lunch.

“Illuminating. I liked Steve Johnson.”

“Dad knew you would. Was the news good, bad or indifferent?”

“Sort of. I can become a major contributor to a lot of worthy causes, or I can spend the next two decades in litigation and make major contributions to members of the American Bar Association. I’m considering my options.”

“Something tells me that you don’t want to talk about it right now.”

“I just want it all to go away and leave me alone.”

“How about coming riding with me?”

“Who said you could ride yet?” Jazz asked suspiciously.

“The doctor. I saw him this morning, and he said I was as good as new.”

“How could he tell?”

“Oh, knock it off, smartass, and take off those
city clothes. I want to get out there while there’s still plenty of light.”

As Jazz and Casey reached the rim of the natural hollow in the upland mesa where the Fiesta was held each year, he slowed his horse to a walk and finally a halt, while he looked around.

“Remember?” he asked Jazz.

“The Fiesta? Of course.”

“Not just the Fiesta. This spot, this exact spot.”

“What about it?”

“This is where we met. This is where I deliberately, with malicious intent, threw a plate of greasy chili at you, this is where you first called me ‘dick-head,’ which, in some ways, I prefer to ‘fascist pig.’ ”

“Hey, don’t get all sentimental, all of a sudden.”

“I will if I want to,” Casey said stubbornly. “I’ll never forget that night.”

“No,” Jazz said, suddenly serious, “neither will I … I didn’t know it was going to be the last Fiesta … I’m so glad I couldn’t see into the future.”

“I wish I could have,”
Casey said with a fierce intensity, in a voice that held some strong, repressed emotion. He kicked his horse into a slow canter and took off, his horse climbing steadily sideways across the bowl toward its upper rim. She followed, watching him carefully, for in spite of his assurances that the doctor had told him he could ride, she was worried that Casey might not yet be fit. He sat in the saddle easily, with no trace of favoring the side that the bullet had entered. However, Jazz decided that on this first day back on a horse, he shouldn’t ride too long without a break.

“Follow me,” Jazz called, as she caught up with him at the rim and led the way across a wide, gentle plateau to the edge of an arroyo where she had discovered a gradual track to the bottom, one on which the horses couldn’t possibly slip. “Down here,” she said, showing him the easily overlooked natural trail. Leading, she let her horse pick its way into the deep fold between the mesas, where a cluster of majestic oaks
and sycamores grew in a thicket that made a gray-green, sun-splotched parasol overhead.

“Let’s rest for a minute,” Jazz suggested, and jumped down onto the ground, where thousands of years of drifting sycamore leaves had left a soft surface. Casey joined her and they both sat down, leaning against a tree trunk.

“Now,” Jazz demanded, turning toward him, “I want a full explanation of that last remark. Why do you want to see into the future? What’s the good of it? Isn’t it better not to know?”

Casey looked at her silently, as if he were trying, rebelliously but unable to help himself, to memorize her. The sun fell in shafts of diffuse brightness on her head, so that he could see even the tiniest hairs that separated themselves from the others, some brown-gold, some red-gold, some beige-gold, rippling wavelets of hair whose color he had never been able to name satisfactorily, even to himself. His eyes traced the straight, mysteriously satisfying lines of her brows, which were elevated in curiosity, the artless, independent impudence of her nose, the delicate, precise line of her upper lip that made such a fascinating contrast to the frank, all-but-outrageous fullness of her lower lip. Although he knew that skin couldn’t be gold, hers was, and her eyes were gold too, he thought, and she was a perfect little golden idol from some primitive past who had been set on earth to torment him, to punish him for crimes he would never dream of committing, to drive him around the bend, he who had always been sane and proud of it. She had been designed by the fates to teach him bitter lessons, to cure him of being cocky, to change the luck of the Irish, to let him know that he wasn’t in charge here, to inform him that he had never been appreciative enough of a past life in which he had had the incredible luck not to become acquainted with one Juanita Isabella Kilkullen.

“Stop looking at me like that,” Jazz commanded nervously. “And answer my question.”

“If I could have seen into the future, I would
never have written your father and asked him for a job,” Casey said slowly.

“I didn’t know it had been as bad as all that,” Jazz said, stunned and hurt by his words. “You seemed content … or at least you gave a pretty good imitation … of a man who liked what he was doing. You certainly had me fooled.”

“This is
exactly
what I mean! The perfect example! Every time I say something to you, it’s the wrong thing to say, I use the wrong words and you take everything the wrong way, every time I do anything to you it’s the wrong thing to do, if I dare to kiss you it’s wrong, if I try to seduce you it’s wrong, if I don’t try to seduce you, it’s wrong, if I even
stand
near you, I ruin your great-grandmother’s shawl! Oh, what’s the use?”

“You mean that you wish you’d never come here just
because of me?”

“There it is again! You’re twisting my words, as usual. You listen but you don’t hear. Or if you hear, you don’t understand. I’m not saying that anything is your fault, Jazz, I’m saying I wish I’d done the right things to … capture your attention. And I know you won’t believe me, but I’ve never had this problem before. Not with anyone, male, female or in between. It’s something about you—no strike that!—it’s something about
me
, I don’t know what, but I’m fatally clumsy around you, I make all the wrong moves, send out the wrong signals …”

“Let’s try to get this straight. You want to capture my attention, is that correct?”

“Yes,” Casey said miserably.

“You want to make the right moves?”

“Yes again.”

“You want to send the right signals?”

“Yes, guilty as charged.”

“Why?”

“Don’t be so damn dense,” he said gruffly, hanging his dark red head in frustration and embarrassment at the relentless interrogation, which made him sound even more like an idiot as she repeated his words.

“You’re saying the wrong thing again,” she warned, her voice saturated with well-hidden delight as she saw the pitiful state into which she had reduced him.

“I know. I’m … damn it, Jazz, I’m so fucking shy! You make me shy, it
is
all your fault that you’re so totally … whatever it is you are … oh, hell, I love you, O.K.? I’m crazy about you, madly in love, O.K.? I want to live with you for the rest of my life, I never want to let you go, I never want you to look at another man, I know I can’t have you but I’m stuck with it for life, loving you and needing you even though I know it’s hopeless, so go ahead and gloat, chalk up another victim.”

“O.K.,” she whispered.

“O.K.? Is that all you can say? Not even a gratified sneer?”

“I love you too, O.K.?” Her voice shook with glad, long-deferred release, and Jazz fought laughter as well as tears. He had been so gloriously oblivious of what any other man must surely have seen a long time ago. Of course, she had been as stubborn and elusive and frivolous and tantalizing as she knew how to be, but only because she didn’t want to make it too easy for him, didn’t want to fall at his feet, didn’t want to scare him off by premature surrender, and anyway, weren’t men supposed to make the first move, didn’t the laws of human nature still hold true?

While she spoke the few uncomplex words, Casey’s downcast glance was on her hands, and he watched them unfolding toward him as if they were accepting a gift or giving a gift, it didn’t matter which. She wasn’t making fun of him, he realized, looking up into her startled, revealing eyes in which a great alchemy had transformed mockery into a clear, unflinching declaration even he couldn’t fail to understand. The world turned over and righted itself, time stopped and started again.

“Will you marry me, too?” He spoke hastily, as if he were afraid she’d change her mind.

“I’ll marry you
also,”
Jazz assured him as he
grabbed her, not clumsily but triumphantly, and pulled her toward him so that her upturned face lay just under his chin. “We’d better get a dictionary. Let’s not try to talk. Oh, darling, just kiss me. It’s the one thing we never get wrong.”

J
azz struggled reluctantly out of a deep sleep, completely disoriented. She didn’t know what day it was, she didn’t know what time it was, she didn’t even know
where
she was. The only thing she was entirely sure of was that it was finally raining, a downpour that beat so heavily on the roof and windows that it had roused her from the most satisfying sleep, a sleep she tried vainly to reenter for a few seconds until she became aware of the fact that Casey Nelson was in bed with her, not her bed but his. Once she had registered the warm, steadily breathing, solid and permanent substance of Casey, everything else rushed back into her mind and she closed her eyes the better to savor the completeness of her happiness.

It was so clear and strong, this happiness, so free of ambiguity, of overtones, of questions. It didn’t just “feel” right, it
was
right, an element of nature that must always have existed, waiting for her to stumble into it. Well, it had taken them long enough to get it straight, she thought, months and months when it
should have been hours—or minutes—but of course they were too civilized for that, too blinded to the games people played, the disguises people wore, the suspicions people had, to simply look at each other and know—for they
must have known
right from the beginning—and admit to each other that they knew.

She might be the only woman of her age group who had agreed to marry a man who had done nothing more than kiss her, but since yesterday they had more than made up for it. Casey was … she searched her mind for the right word and finally found it with a private shiver … a
virtuoso
. He made her wish she’d never known another man, but if she hadn’t, how would she know he was a virtuoso, Jazz asked herself virtuously, muffling herself under the covers so that she could inhale the smell of his body. Was it wrong for a man to smell so good? In so many different places? She should really wake him up, for his own good, because he was wasting his smell while he slept when he could be awake and making love to her again.

Trying to decide if it was too early to decently rouse Casey, Jazz looked at the clock and discovered that it was almost noon. Either that or it was almost midnight. They had still been awake last midnight and they couldn’t have slept for twenty-four hours. So it must be noon, and an exceptionally dark and wet one. Fortunately it was Sunday, when Susie didn’t come in, otherwise she might have checked the hacienda for hungry people, discovered them in bed together and been shocked. Jazz giggled softly at the thought of Susie, so worldly-wise that the only thing that might genuinely shock her would be their innocence.

A drop of water struck Jazz’s forehead. She jerked her face out of the nest of blankets and looked indignantly at the ceiling. More drops followed, becoming a trickle and then, as Jazz shook Casey briskly, a miniature waterfall.

“What … darling, darling …”he mumbled.

“The roof’s leaking!”

“Damn … I’ll move … the bed …”

“Wake up, city boy!”

“No, you promised never to insult me again … come here …”

“Casey, darling, please! It hasn’t rained for weeks—it’s an old roof, there could be leaks all over the place, we’ve got to go check out the house …”

“Do we have to?”

“We don’t have a choice.”

“Let’s find another bed and let my bed drown. Oh, my God, the fax will drown too!” His drowsiness vanished.

“Casey!”

“All right, all right, but you’ll have to make it up to me.”

“My pleasure,” Jazz promised fervently, trying to find her clothes, while Casey unplugged his fax and put it on a high table in the living room.

Rapidly they raced around the veranda, checking the many rooms of the hacienda, and found no more leaks, but Jazz was uneasy. She had a peculiar impression that rain was coming in somewhere, and not just in Casey’s room.