Next To You (2 page)

She’d slept a lot in the last two years. Really she’d been hibernating for the last two years, sheltering in a den of her own making. Now she was waking up, wiping a kind of brittle sleep from her eyes, stretching her unused limbs to take on life again, except she was doing this backward. Hibernating creatures came out in the springtime and this was two weeks into autumn. After such a long, long sleep, she was finally aware the hunger she felt was a literal hunger for food. It had taken a good while before her appetite had returned. This wet morning she’d woken up ravenous, with breakfast the only thing on her mind. Unfortunately, there’d been no slow start, no time to ease back into gentle dawn, because a state of wakefulness kicked in immediately.

The Wellington Diner had been the ultimate food seduction. She’d found the place last week, when she had a walk around to get her bearings of the neighborhood. The place was a cross between the thirties-era corner diner Robert Redford frequented in
The Sting
and the deli where Meg Ryan did the fake orgasm scene in
When Harry Met Sally
.

She’d liked the coffee, the cinnamon twists they had that tasted like the ones her husband used to make, the little booths beside the window, and the fact the establishment, like the local cinema, was only a few blocks from home. Yeah, she was starting over. Yeah, she’d started to grab life by the balls, like Julie said she ought to. Yeah, she’d been about to sit in one of those booths, but that was before everyone in the diner had turned to gape at Alex screaming in her face.

Alex made everyone look at her. The couple closest to the door had
tsked
and shaken their heads. The yuppie pair watched to see what would happen next, eating their scrambled eggs with their fingers as if it was popcorn, while the older couple looked at each other uncomfortably, and then looked at her.

The big man with satiny, bleached-platinum hair and pretty eyes sat at a booth by himself, holding his newspaper at an angle as if he were examining a
Playboy
centerfold. He’d given her a smile when she first walked inside. That little smile had lit up his lovely eyes, but then he’d stared too—undoubtedly annoyed by the chocolate milk that had sprayed all over his expensive Italian shoes.

A simple quest to forage for food had turned her into the center-ring act in an embarrassing circus and she did the only thing she could to avoid the unapplauding, unaffected audience.

She ran home like a chicken.

‘
Bock-bock-bock
,’ she muttered under her breath, as she drew a Tupperware cupcake tray from the box marked
bath towels
. ‘
Bock-bock-bock
…’

That’s what she hated most about starting over, about everything that had happened, that she’d turned into a chicken. She hated second-guessing how she felt, hated being tentative, unsure about decisions and the choices she had to make—unless fear reared its head and then she was off like a shot—because one decision had altered so many lives.

The specter of that one choice, the spectacle of her life with Drew and Alex, had been interred in the mausoleum of her past, and she yearned to simply fade into the background like the past. She needed to be average, to have average with a capital
A
life. Some people strove for greatness, pushed themselves to reach the stratosphere, and craved recognition for the mark they made. What she wanted, more than anything in starting over, was to be in that seventy-fifth percentile, C+, middle of the bell curve.

Yeah, she was almost there. She was close to ordinary, even if she missed being average height by almost three inches. Maybe she was thinner than most women her age, and pushing her way through to the other side of forty-five hadn’t seem to slow her metabolism down; in fact in the last three years it took off sprinting, leaving her skinnier than when she was in her mid-teens, but she had the average cellulite and stretch marks. Those were lines near her mouth, crow’s-feet at her eyes and her skin was losing its elasticity. Those average things were a comfort; she was glad she wasn’t a head-turner who worried about fading prettiness. She knew her looks were average and average meant she could fade into the background. Getting older was a bonus too, since older women often went unnoticed in society.

All right, there was one hitch to aiming for average and she knew it. She dressed well, and although it was problematic when it came to average, it was a distinct advantage for someone in her profession to be chic.
I am old-school Hollywood glamor. I am the Jean Louis, Edith Head, Adrian, and Givenchy of personal shopping
.
Edith Head was stylist to classic Hollywood. I’m stylist to the busy urban professional.

Like Louis and Head, she knew ways to disguise wide hips or play up the best assets of a figure by using colors and styles of clothing best suited to an individual’s frame, and make that person look better than average. While some might remember the fashions she chose for them, or remember the style tips she gave, or possibly the skirt she wore, few would actually remember
Caroline
. It was that precise the Jane Doe quality she wanted. After all, no one remembered what Jean Louis looked like, but they sure as hell remembered the dress he designed for Rita Hayworth in
Gilda
.

She sang ‘Put the blame on Mame’ to herself and pulled a waffle iron from the box, instantly perplexed the device was in a carton that was supposed to house towels.

She shrugged, Batman yawned again and made a curious little noise, drawing her attention. Last night, in this new place, camped out on the floor, she’d slept soundly with the dog snuggled under her elbow. It had been months since she’d woken to the imagined sound of crying, and crawled out of bed, bumping, stumbling, believing she had to ease that weedy, distressed infant sound. The auditory hallucination and anxiety had been gone for a long while, but the
expectation
had plagued her at times. It had taken forever for the stage between sleep and awake to lengthen from a few minutes, to a few hours at stretch, to an uninterrupted night. The last dark traces beneath her eyes had disappeared and a routine, restful sleep pattern had finally emerged.

She found a yellow bath towel—
finally a towel
. She took it out of the carton only to see that it was wrapped around a ceramic trinket box full of costume jewelry. She sifted through the stuff, hoping to find the ugly mood ring, the one her husband had given her because he said her eyes were green or a weird blue depending on her mood. How she wished she had that silly rock now. The little barometer could tell her how it was she was feeling. She was hungry, but she was also frustrated and some other weird emotion that seeing Alex had triggered. She hoped the ring was stuffed in a jewelry bag and crammed inside a box labeled
Pajamas
or
Winter Clothes
.

So much had been in storage for the past eighteen months. No, it had been over eighteen months. It had been over eighteen months away from Alex and even longer without Drew. She took a very deep breath and exhaled as long as she could, trying to push out the lingering fear … and shock, anger, excitement, or whatever else came from thinking that a red-bearded hoodlum was assaulting her in a public place—before she realized it was Alex.

And here comes the self-doubt
… Why had she let Julie convince her she was ready for this? Why had she let her uncle talk her into returning to the city to live, instead of staying in the safety of the northern suburbs, working as an assistant for a bachelor rabbi who farted a lot and ate nothing but tuna?

Uncle Sly Fox had lured her from the self-imposed exile, coerced her into buying this palatial twenties-era three-bedroom apartment with water views. And as he persuaded her, she had fanciful images of fixing up the Art Deco place in the swanky style of
My Man Godfrey
and
The Great Gatsby
. She ran with that daydream while Uncle Sly made a big deal of saying that she was his only family, and with her parents gone and Drew gone the apartment was a solid investment, which was important to have and
blah, blah, blah
…

She’d come back to town under the misconception the transition from sleepwalking to bustling would be undemanding and involve painting walls and redecorating. She assumed there would be a settling-in period over a few weeks or couple of months, but in sixteen hours, things went from zero to a hundred before she even got a coffee buzz.

Coffee. She wanted coffee.
Where’s the damn coffee maker? How can I grab life by the balls without coffee?

A paw padded softly against her calf and she looked down. The brown eyes on the little dog sitting at her feet peered up at her, his black and white face bat-like and dotted by tan eyebrows. His usually erect, pointy ears lay back against his little head like soft rabbit ears.

Caroline smiled. ‘What do you think, Batman, are we going to find the coffee maker?’

Batman cocked his head. He stood and poked his tongue out of his pointed snout. Then his ears snapped upright as the door buzzer reverberated, a hive of bumblebees humming through the apartment.

Dog at her heels, she went to the intercom for the downstairs entry. ‘Yes, who is it?’

‘Hi. It’s Carlo and Doug from Schildkraut’s. We’re early, but we’ve got your living room suite and bed.’

‘I’ll buzz you up. I’m all the way up at the top on the left.’ She pressed the downstairs buzzer to let the men into the foyer and opened her door. She caught a brief glimpse of her white-haired neighbor as he went into the apartment across the landing.

Her uncle told her two bachelors lived in the building. The nice bachelor neighbor next door had a skin condition and liked to sing. The other guy was a cranky, reclusive crime writer who lived one floor down. The dog darted out through the open door, tracking the unfamiliar scent of the ‘nice’ man next door. Caroline grabbed Batman before he got too far. She tucked him close under an arm and carried him down the hall to the kitchen, pausing to take a dog biscuit from a green jar. Then she moved through the French doors, out on to the partially covered terrace, and set him down outside with a pat to his slender back. ‘Stay,’ she said, giving him the cookie.

The voices of two movers arguing echoed up the hallway and grew louder as they came up the stairs. One of them said, ‘I bet you twenty he is.’

‘You just lost ten and now you want to make it thirty?’

‘I’m telling you he—lift that left side up a little higher or I’m gonna hit the railing—he is. He looks exactly like my cousin’s kid.’

‘Well, if you’re so sure, how come you didn’t ask him out front? What are you gonna do now, knock on all the doors in this place till you come to his, and ask?’

***

Sharp, vigorous, barking greeted Will the instant he set foot on the terrace. He shifted the basket of damp laundry under his arm and the woofing, or more accurately, the
warfing
, drowned out the music coming from the tiny hidden speakers on his terrace. The radio was tuned to an oldies station. Will wondered if the dog was barking because of the high-pitched voice of Melanie singing about a pair of brand new roller skates.

The
warf-warf-warf
followed him as he moved to the clothesline attached to the brick wall and began to hang up his washing. Once he’d pinned up sheets, towels, and a pair of blue and white striped pajamas, he turned to the noisy dog.

He liked dogs. A new neighbor with a dog was preferable to an old neighbor with three cats, especially cats that occasionally performed howling, midnight operas and left putrid smelling urine all over his BBQ.

Outside of his tinkling, yowling kitties, Reginaldi had been a fine neighbor. He had lived in the building since the forties. His wit was quick, and he was full of stories of days with pro golf tours, the Korean War, his two marriages, and his brief foray into television sitcoms, which was how Will placed him when they’d first met nearly five years ago. The man had been a well-known professional golfer. He’d played himself on an episode of the
Dick Van Dyke Show
, which led to appearances
The Beverly Hillbillies, I Dream of Jeannie
, and the Western
The Big Valley
, shows Will had seen countless times on cable. He was going to miss Reginaldi sharing bottles of his home brew with his ‘favorite neighbor.’ He was going to miss the TV gossip, the tales of golfing in the US Open, and all those stories about his family. He’d miss the beer, the stories, and Reg, but not the cats. Despite the dog’s yipping, canine whizz was infinitely easier on the nose than feline cologne.

The day had turned humid and warm as the sun began to shine between wide parted clouds. Will put on his sunglasses. The dog shut up and poked its tiny black nose through the crisscrossing, ivy-covered latticework. ‘Hey there dog,’ he said in a playful voice, moving closer to the lattice, crouching down to have better look.

The dog jerked back and let out double time
warf-warf-warf-warf
in an obvious display of territoriality.

Will placed the back of his left hand near an open spot in the vines and lattice. The dog growled. The little nose poked through the ivy again, black mouth pulled back over bared, sharp little teeth, but Will didn’t move his hand. ‘Hey there puppy,’ he said in the same friendly tone as before. There was a series of speedy sniffs and his knuckles were licked all over.

A small, white paw with short, black nails scratched and pushed through the lattice. Will stuck his thick fingers through to try to pat the dog’s black head. ‘Hang on, hang, on,’ he said. He stood, looked around the terrace, and grabbed a damp, old dishrag from the clothesline. He tied three knots in it and stuffed one end through to the other side of the terrace, wiggling it. ‘Hey! Over here!’

The dog was eager to play and latched on to the dishrag, pulling hard. For ten minutes, Will played a game of tug-o-war with his new little neighbor before he let the dog win and have the towel.

On the other side of the terrace, the dog shook the knotted rag like a captive rat. On his side Will hung up his laundry, singing ‘Black and White’ along with Three Dog Night on the radio. He caught glimpses of the puppy scampering about with his raggedy rodent and changed the lyrics of the song for the benefit of the dog and sang, ‘
Your face is black, your paw is white, you bark all day, but not all night
—at least I hope you don’t bark at night, little man.’