Out of the Blue (4 page)

Outside, I leaned on Grant’s arm to let him know I regretted being so snarky. “They won’t fire me. They can’t.”

“You just watch your back, Anniekins.”

“So, anybody drop dead on you today?” Ma asked first thing in the door.

“Nope.” No way could I tell her about Chubb. First, she’d be on the phone with Duncan Reese demanding that the guy be canned, and next she’d be plotting out the most exquisite method of turning Chubb’s life into a living hell, starting with getting him expelled from the Harvard Club.

“What about that Spanish kid from the Bronx?”

“Holding his own, but it’s hard to understand how. He works two jobs after school every day.” She saw I was so tired that talking was an effort. I took a quick cool shower and went straight to bed. My phone rang at ten-thirty. Joe’s voice poured into my ear and down through my body like warm honey.

“Oh. Joe,” I said through the fog of sleep. “I was dreaming about you.” It was a wonderful dream and I almost felt it slipping out in the form of an entirely inappropriate declaration:
Joe, I love you. I do.
Instead I said to myself, What’re you, crazy, woman? Get a
grip.
I sat up. “Where are you?”

“Sioux Falls.”

“Idaho?”

“Iowa.”

“I knew it began with an ‘I.’ When are you coming home?” Too grabby. He shouldn’t have called me when I was asleep—no good his hearing my needs hot off the old unconscious.

“Next Thursday. I want to see you, Anna.”

“Isn’t that early? I thought—”

“I’m stopping in the city overnight on my way back upstate.” In my trancelike state, I could convince myself he was dropping out of the sky solely on my account, maybe with a parachute. “What was your dream?” he was asking me.

“Oh, no.” In fact, we were naked. Actually, I was naked and standing in a frame like one of the Dutch portraits. He was looking at me with his hands on his hips, assessing. Then he gave me this huge delicious smile and reached out his arms. God, I only hoped I could step back into that one. I can do that sometimes, push the dream-video “Play” button and start it up again.

“It’s lonely out here in the heartland,” he was saying. “Tell me about your life.”

“Today was Report Day but I don’t think I can go through it again right now. What’s up in the amber waves of grain?”

I could hear him smile. You can’t always, like I could never hear Grant smile over the phone. “I’m working on a new airlink, but we’d have to do it jointly with another company. It’s a good organization except that the CEO’s a cocaine addict.”

“A minor drawback?”

“I told him we’ll do the deal if he checks into rehab. When can I see you?”

“The minute you get home.” So much for playing hard to get.

“My flight gets into LaGuardia at four-twenty Thursday. Have dinner with me?”

“Sure.”

There was a long silence.

“I’ll call you,” he said. I knew he didn’t want to say good-night, but he could hear I was worn out.

As soon as I closed my eyes, I slid back into another dream. There was an enchanted forest with moss hanging from the trees, and ferns and wildflowers blanketing the ground. A creature appeared, a type of wildcat only smaller. It was sleek and black, but as it slipped through the sun-dappled undergrowth, I saw it was dragging one leg. Suddenly the mood changed from a kind of magical delight to apprehension. The forest darkened and the hanging moss turned to vines, twisted and thick as snakes. Sensing danger, the creature began to run, but it was hampered by its lameness. Finally, it fell exhausted in a clearing. From above, there was a shriek and the muffled beating of enormous black wings. A giant bird swooped down, caught the helpless creature in its talons and flew off.

I woke in a sweat with my heart pounding and my left leg aching and cramped. The shadows through the window cast a sinister web against the ceiling. I lay quiet, breathing slowly. Out of predilection and habit, a teacher of literature becomes an interpreter, and it was clear that this dream was no
Finnegan’s Wake.
First, the forest, a fairy-tale paradise, grew increasingly perilous. There were a couple of ways to go: my job and my attraction to Joe Malone. Both were filled with promise, but danger lurked. The animal: well, the cat not only had silky dark hair and a limp, but I also knew in the strange conviction of dreams that, like me, it had a beauty mark on its stomach. And the winged creature was Chubb, of course. As I pinned each element of the dream to something tangible in my waking life, I calmed down until my heart had settled into its normal rhythm and the shapes on my ceiling looked familiar again. Nightmares ordinarily release me once I’ve subjected them to scrutiny, but this time I couldn’t shake it off. Something kept nagging at me. Obviously, I had been more unnerved by Grant’s news than I’d imagined. I twisted and flopped around, unable to find a comfortable position. My pillow felt like a hunk of concrete. Then it hit me. The bird. It wasn’t Chubb at all, it was a falcon. Lola Falcon! I laughed out loud. I felt like waking Ma to tell her what a sap her daughter was. Instead I sat up and snapped on the light. My bed looked as if a major war had been fought in it.

When Ma trailed into the kitchen at five-thirty
A.M.
, I was already sitting there with my herbal tea and one of her old
People
magazines, reading about a rock star who had works of art reproduced in tattoos all over his body.
The Last Supper
straight across his posterior. I swear.

“What the hell are you doing up?” she asked.

“’Morning,” I replied.

She laid her hand against my forehead. “You damn well better be in love because it’s either that or you’re having a relapse.”

“I’m perfectly fine and I’m not in love. I barely know the man.” I waved the magazine at her. “Did you see this? He’s wearing
Whistler’s Mother
on his pecs.”

She poured water into the coffee maker. “Don’t tell me. I wasn’t born yesterday.”

“I don’t think I’m going to like him,” I told Ma on Thursday afternoon.

She was lifting my right arm up over my head at the time. My father offered to pay for a physical therapist, but she wouldn’t hear of it. “What for?” she had told him over the phone. “If I can lift a twenty-five-pound bag of flour with one hand, I can put Anna through her paces.” And I have to say, of all the hands laid on me in the past five years, Ma’s are the strongest and the gentlest. Furthermore, we use my exercise hour to discuss the important issues of the times, as in whether or not a certain customer of hers has had another facelift.

“We’re back to Joe Malone as serial killer, are we?” Ma said.

“He doesn’t want to talk about himself.”

“I can’t
stand
that.”

“All he does is ask questions and sit there while I blab on and on. I have to drag everything out of him.”

“Sounds like the perfect match to me. Him listening, you talking.”

“Thank you.” I was quiet for a minute while she bent my arm at the elbow. It was a little stiff.

“Having trouble with this?” she asked. She always knows.

“Not bad.”

Ma raised her left eyebrow, signaling that she didn’t believe me. “Maybe you’ll be lucky and he’ll stand you up.”

“Shit,” I said.

“Watch your mouth,” she said.

“Oh, that’s rich.” I sat up and rubbed my shoulder. Everything hurt. They say weather has nothing to do with aches and pains, but they lie. Today, oozing out of a dank gray sky, there was rain just two degrees Fahrenheit short of sleet, in mid-October, no less. Whatever happened to global warming?

“I’ll make a deal with you,” I told her. “If you go out with Father Dewbright, I’ll consider giving this guy a chance. Assuming he calls.”

“Oh, thank you very much. All you have to do is stand within six feet of that old geezer and you’re an alcoholic by proxy.” Father Dewbright, retired from his parish on Eighty-ninth Street, was a faithful admirer of Ma’s. “Anyhow, you’re deflecting responsibility here.”

“No, what I’m doing is blowing this whole thing out of proportion. If he calls, fine. If he doesn’t, that’s okay, too.”

The phone chose this moment to ring. I twitched as if I’d been jabbed with a cattle prod.

Ma smiled. “Why don’t you just tell him something’s come up and you can’t see him?”

But I was too busy lunging for the receiver. I turned my back on Ma in a vain effort at privacy, and when I hung up and turned around, she was standing there with a smirk on her face. “Is ‘okay-okay-great’ code for ‘piss off, sucker’?”

“He wants to make dinner for me at his place. I’m supposed to bring my swimsuit.”

She narrowed her eyes.

“I told him I like to swim. He’s got a pool on the top floor,” I explained, then looked down at my body. “You wouldn’t have one of those Victorian things that covers everything?”

“Yeah, in the same drawer where I keep my bustle.”

Joe’s apartment turned out to be in a high rise on the West Side not far from Lincoln Center. I stood in front of his door and stared at the “8C” for a while, imagining that stepping through was like opening the cover of a novel. I had the same anticipatory feeling. A new story is pretty thrilling but what’s it going to cost me? How scared will I be? Will I cry? Will I like the ending?

The door swung open and Joe pulled me into the room and into his arms. He held me for a long moment. No kiss, but I wasn’t ready for that yet. My legs felt wobbly as it was. The place smelled truly awful, like when I was nine and set my hair on fire toasting marshmallows over the stove.

“I just burned the hors d’oeuvres,” Joe said.

I was busy checking the place out. It had the look of temporary occupancy. Generic furniture, everything in tans and grays, no plants, no knickknacks. But on the wall were a dozen of the most stunning photographs I had ever seen. The thought that Joe might be their originator made me catch my breath. I looked from them to him. “Yours?”

He nodded.

“I don’t know what to say.”

He smiled. “I have faith that if I’m very patient, you’ll think of something.” He took my hand and led me to the couch. There was a plate of cheese and crackers on the coffee table and two goblets of red wine. He sat down so close that our knees were nudging one another. It made me dizzy that I could be so stirred up by somebody, and I was afraid my leg was going to start bobbing up and down, like a dog’s when you scratch its belly.

I stood and went to the window. “You shouldn’t have fussed,” I said. “You just got off a plane.” The unprepossessing view of the building next door calmed me down a little. But then he was behind me.

“I felt like doing something for you,” he said. Then he took my glass away and set it on the windowsill. He leaned down and gave me a long lingering kiss. Then another. Then I reached up and put my arms around his neck. Our mouths opened against one another and his hands reached behind to pull my hips against him. If he hadn’t been holding me, I would have sunk straight to the floor. I stepped back a few inches and took a breath. Then we grinned at one another, big toothy smiles of complicity as if we’d done something to gloat about.

“Come,” he said, and drew me into the kitchen. On the counter was a cookie sheet dotted with lumps of ash. He ignored it, and all one-handed opened the refrigerator and slid a dish with something resembling lasagne into the microwave. He had me in a death grip.

“Wouldn’t it be easier if—”

“No, you might get away,” he said matter-of-factly.

While we waited for the lasagne, we looked at his photographs which almost made me forget the pressure of his hip as he held me beside him. There was a dappled river scene, another print of the bridge in clouds, several of a brooding cliff veined with snow, a series of just the wing of an airplane and one shot looking down the urban wall of Park Avenue. He’d caught the shadows in such a way that if you squinted a little, you’d see a cubist construction reminiscent of Braque. Or an imposing natural formation like Monument Valley. Even soldiers standing in formation. It was a study in power and seemed very sexy to me, or maybe I was still reeling from those kisses. He was a potent magnet and I was a hapless little metal filing who had strayed into his force field. I wondered if most women responded to him that way, and I remembered the blonde jogger on Madison Avenue and the woman who’d tapped on the window at Jackson Hole.

“How come you don’t photograph people?” I asked. He had pulled my hand around his waist. I liked that he was lean and muscular. I’ve never been attracted to bulky men.

He pointed to the photo of the rocks in the river. “That’s Steve with a fly rod. Doesn’t he count?”

If I squinted I could just make out the minute figure of a fisherman the size of a deer tick. I rolled my eyes.

“Well, I don’t know how to do people,” Joe confessed. “They confuse me.”

I laughed. “Do I?”

“You most of all,” he said. He was lucky the microwave timer went off, but I filed that one away for future discussion. He pointed at the table. “Sit down. I’ll be right out.” When he released it, my hand turned cold.

“Can’t I—”

“Sit.” I kind of felt like Rover, but I obeyed like a good puppy. It was touching to hear him crashing around in there as if he were cooking up a banquet for two hundred people. Pots and pans, china, doors slamming—the kitchen at the Four Seasons.

“Who’s Steve?” I called.

“An old buddy. We grew up together.”

I wondered if Joe had told his old buddy Steve about me. The microwave timer went off again, and Joe appeared with two plates. He set them down, lit the candles, poured us each another glass of wine and lifted his.

“Courage,” he said.

“For what?” I ticked his glass.

“For eating this stuff.”

It was pretty bad. The lasagne was burnt on the bottom and gluey everywhere else. He’d made a salad out of pre-mixed pre-washed greens, but they’d passed their prime. There was something else that I think was supposed to be a kind of ratatouille. The bread was delicious, though. I filled up on that, and besides, I kept remembering his erection against my pelvic bone when we were standing by the window. The memory pretty much made dinner irrelevant.

“Why don’t you ever talk about your father?” he asked, shoveling the lasagne down. He was clearly not a picky eater.

I laughed again. “How about a little chitchat, a little how-was-your-day? First you kiss me until my legs fall off and then you want a psychological profile.”

“You kissed me back. Take some responsibility.” Then he just watched me, waiting.

“He left when I was sick. I mean,
six.
I haven’t
seen
him since way before I was sick.” Years before. I know, I know, unresolved crap. I didn’t feel like talking about it. “Come to think of it, you haven’t said a hell of a lot about your father either.” Or your mother, or your brother, or goddamn Lola Falcon.

“It must be your fault,” I said. “I never used to curse.”

“What?” He watched me take a big gulp of wine. “How come this is all burnt?” he asked, poking at my lasagne.

“Did you put a layer of sauce on the bottom of the dish?”

“Oh.” He grinned at me. “So how was your day?”

But the wine was kicking in at last, and besides, I was touched by his sensitivity in retreating from my boring wounds, i.e., dear old dad. Which, of course, only served to make me feel like confiding. “I suppose it sounds like a rationalization, but I don’t know as I missed out. I see so much of it at school. Single-parent families or even intact families with two clueless parents. They can inflict a lot of damage. On the whole, I consider myself lucky.”

“Your mother?”

I nodded. “Unconditional advocacy along the lines of Attila the Hun.”

“I want to meet her.”

“You’ve already had a lovely tête-à-tête over the phone. That’ll do for now.”

He was smiling. “When I couldn’t reach you at your school, I hit the yellow pages. Do you know how many bakeries there are on the Upper East Side?”

He took a swallow from his glass. I liked that he stretched it out. I was having such a good time.

“No luck,” he went on. “Then finally I got to the N’s. When I asked for you at Norma’s Crust, this person said, ‘Who wants to know?’ I figured, pay dirt.”

“I’m not ready to submit you to Ma yet.”

“Will I need a lot of documentation? Birth certificate, tax returns, negative AIDS test?”

“Just a simple DNA evaluation will do.”

“How about some dessert?” he asked. I must have looked alarmed.

“It’s from Sarabeth’s,” he reassured me.

I said fine. When he went to the kitchen, I took the opportunity to nose around, not that there was much to see. It was about as personal as the furniture display at Bloomingdale’s. But there was a bookshelf. Some photography anthologies: Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Paul Strand. What surprised me were the cookbooks, three of them. I removed one called
The High-Rise Health Nut
and flipped it open.
Falcon Publishing.
There was an inscription in bold black ink:
For darling Joe—I could never have pulled it off without you! Thank you, thank you! XXXXX Lola.
Burnt lasagne couldn’t have produced a more sickening jolt to my gut. First of all, I hate people who overuse exclamation points. Then I took a look at the cover flap and there was this sunny blonde smiling at me from a mountaintop. She had a backpack slung rakishly from one shoulder. The credit at the bottom read
Photograph by Joseph Malone.
I thought he didn’t do people.

He emerged from the kitchen with a plateful of cakes and cookies. He saw what I was holding and his face did something I couldn’t read.

“That relationship you mentioned?” I asked, tipping the book at him.

He nodded. Holding back is not the same as lying. I knew he was the reticent type, but this was different. I slid the book back into its slot on the shelf, sat down and tried to make my way through a slice of lemon cake.

“Nice thing about Sarabeth, you know you’re not going to get a hunk of kumquat in your pound cake,” I said.

“It really is over, Anna. She’s just a very persistent woman.”

“I like a girl who knows what she wants.”

“You would like her, as a matter of fact,” he said.

In a rat’s ass, I thought. More and more, I’m becoming my mother’s daughter.

“Our parents are friends. They live fairly close to one another.”

I pictured the Mothers up in the night woods, cloaked and cackling over a steaming cauldron, dropping newt’s eyes into the brew to bind Joe and Lola together through eternity.

“Lola’s a publisher. Well, you see that. Health-food cookbooks. She’s a self-made woman, very accomplished.”

You want to dig yourself in a little deeper, bub, just keep talking, I thought. I seemed to remember that summer’s day we first met, a sense that Joe wasn’t entirely available. There had been a gap before he’d tried to reach me. I felt myself filling up with questions. My inclination would be to ride the topic of Lola Falcon straight into a cement wall along with a perfectly respectable evening. I heard brakes squeal in my head as I reversed direction and changed the subject. To me.

“So in what way do I confuse you?” I asked him.

“You’re beyond confusion,” he replied. “Think seismic.”

There it was again, matching metaphors. I congratulated myself on not asking where Lola Falcon registered on the Richter scale.

“How come?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I don’t know if there’s an answer to that.”

When anybody suggests there’s no answer, I open my mouth. It’s Pavlovian and simply out of my control. This applies to issues ranging from Ma telling me there’s no perfect way to roast a turkey to the conundrum of the Big Bang Theory. Of course there’s an answer; we’re just not trying hard enough. Possibilities titillated my tongue: a shared aesthetic experience, familial similarities as yet undiscovered, simple chemistry. There was nothing I enjoyed more than wrestling a mystery to the ground and beating it to death with half-baked psychology.

Joe was looking at me, waiting. “Did you bring your bathing suit?” he asked finally.