The Appetites of Girls (34 page)

Aside from the nights Ruth or Setsu or Fran phoned, I could lose myself in these pursuits for hours. Always their calls caught me off guard,
as each one of them checked in with me at the beginning of the month. But this was what we had agreed, to stay connected, to keep the bond of friendship that would not be cracked by distance. The easier thing would be to drift apart, but after all we’d survived at one another’s sides during our four years of college, hadn’t we become part of each other? Hadn’t we made ties that should not be frayed, or carelessly allowed to unravel? These were the things we’d said to each other. But I knew people found it hard to make promises last. So I suppose I hadn’t believed as much as they that closeness would continue. “I miss you,” Ruth told me in the first days of September—her voice familiar enough to be part of my own thoughts, leaving me, after she’d hung up, with a twinge like homesickness, but for where I wasn’t sure.

I decided what was best for me was to avoid outside distractions, to keep myself busy—with running, with work on my sketches, with Amara’s books. So when Bethany, my neighbor across the hall—a premed student and summertime fitness instructor at Gulf Coast Sports Club—slipped a folded card under my door, inviting me to a party, I returned a scribbled note of apology. For over a week, I ignored the recorded messages on my phone from Kimberly, who had returned from a family vacation along the Outer Banks and was now back in her parents’ Coral Gables home until her courses at Emory began. And I waited some days before responding to new messages from Setsu. In a couple of months, she would be in Fort Myers for a four-day work seminar: “I could easily drive to Naples. Can we get together?” But despite our pledges of friendship, over the past year and a half the rift caused by my accusation about James had never entirely closed. Repeatedly Setsu had insisted we no longer need let petty arguments come between us. Still I’d sensed her covered resentment. I had seen it in her eyes, the set of her face when I bumped into her with James at the student post office, the library. I had heard her stiffness with me when talk in our suite turned to men. I imagined a visit from Setsu now would be vaguely uncomfortable. And I had new priorities.

•   •   •

I
n mid-September, three months after I had begun working at Art of Life, was my twenty-second birthday. That morning Amara surprised me with a small potted fern, its container wrapped in gold foil. “So, what are you doing tonight?” she asked, the thought seeming to occur to her at that moment. “I have a million leftovers from a gathering last evening. Any interest in dinner?”

“Yes. Sure, that sounds great!” I hoped my lack of plans was not quite as obvious, the words sounding not quite as eager to Amara as they did to my own ears.

She had invited me for seven o’clock. Her house was within walking distance of my apartment, so at six-thirty, after finding the perfect spot on my windowsill for my birthday fern, showering and changing, I exited the gates of Emerald Cove. With a half hour, I would have enough time to stop at the gift shop on Morning Drive. But to my disappointment, nothing in the store seemed quite right. The shop’s scented soaps were full of chemicals I knew Amara would dislike. The printed hand towels looked cheap. In the display window was a pretty sapphire-blue crystal vase, but I worried it would appear an overly expensive present. Finally I chose a set of cork-bottomed coasters painted with tropical fish but fretted during the remainder of my walk that they were not her taste.

Amara’s home was a white-shingled ranch bordered by palmettos. A path of smooth round stones led to the front door. Two mobiles of iridescent seashells hung from either end of her small porch. “Come in, come in,” she called from the other side of her screen door. “Make yourself comfortable. I’m in the kitchen. I’ll be right out.”

Inside, I recognized the sweet, slightly musky fragrance that sometimes emanated from Amara’s clothes, but here it was stronger; I could taste it on my tongue. Her hall opened into a wide living-dining area, where I imagined she wished me to wait. The walls, as I had expected, were white with only a few sparse hangings, but the furnishings were
surprisingly cozy—a deep-cushioned sofa and matching chairs, two curtained window seats. In one corner of the room, thick maroon pillows, intended for reclining, formed an intimate circle around a low table.

Amara, in a flowing turquoise shirt and pants, her feet bare, greeted me with a kiss on either cheek, and I was aware that I had dressed too stiffly in my pressed slacks and collared linen blouse. Her hair smelled of the perfume that was everywhere in the house but also of cooking scents, spices I couldn’t quite place. “Ohh, is that for me?” she asked, glancing at the wrapped package in my hands. “You really shouldn’t have, and on
your
birthday.”

“It’s only something small.” I shrugged, wishing she would wait until after I left to open it. But to my relief, she seemed to like the coasters. She had seen them at a friend’s house before, she said, and thought they were lovely.

“Thank you. Thank you, Opal.” She gave my hand a tiny squeeze, and a tightness below my ribs, which I had not noticed until that moment, began to ease.

“So how about some wine?” She had a bottle of merlot that had been made without pesticides or sulfites. “A healthy bottle!” she laughed. “What do you think?”

“Believe it or not, I actually gave up drinking in my junior year of college,” I told her. “My suitemates thought I was crazy! But now doesn’t research say there are actual
benefits
to wine in moderation? So how can I argue with a healthy bottle?” I laughed as she brought out two full goblets, placed them, with the tropical fish coasters, on the low corner table, then curled onto one of the dark red pillows, motioning for me to do the same.

The wine tasted of fruits and warm cinnamon. And after a time, everything seemed to slow—Amara’s voice and mine, the movement of our hands and limbs. Her pillows were more comfortable than any chair, and I felt I could sink into them until I became permanently attached.

Before serving our dinner, Amara lit candles, clusters of votives lining the bookshelves, windowsills, dotting the floor near the room’s
entry. She arranged two in frosted glass holders on the table between us, then disappeared to the kitchen and returned bearing a large tray holding several bowls.

“Have you tried Vietnamese food?” She shook a wisp of hair from her eyes, her silver earrings vibrating. “I have a
ton
.” She set the tray at the center of the table, then identified each dish: curried tofu, vegetable stir-fry, glass noodles, steamed rice rolls.

“It looks delicious,” I said, and watched as Amara’s chopsticks lifted a few small pieces of tofu, two rice rolls, some thin strands of translucent noodles and placed them on her plate. I was careful to take a portion no larger than hers, to chew unhurriedly as she did. As we nibbled, Amara added to our glasses, and it was not long before our talk turned to dreamier things—what it would be like to own a gallery on the Mediterranean instead of here, the vine-covered villas we could rent in Italy, the weekends we would spend in Morocco, the boats we would charter to southern France.

As the sky through the open windows melted from pink to orange to navy-black, the candles projected flickering shadows on the darkened walls, making the garnet liquid in our glasses glow. The flame closest to Amara pulsed across her cheeks and illumined her gray eyes, and as I gazed into them, I had the sense that I could see past them, through them, into something I had once belonged to.

When the last traces of blue faded from the night sky, scattered crystalline stars emerged, below them a sliver of moon. Leaning back into her pillow, Amara began to recite verses from a few of her favorite poems—Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” two sonnets by Shakespeare, Auden’s “Stop All the Clocks.” And a long-ago memory resurfaced of Mother and me sitting after dusk on a deserted beach, a blanket wrapped around us both for warmth as the water grazed our bare toes. “What do I need in this world but you, Opal?” Mother had whispered in my ear, hugging me close as she began to hum a lullaby. And I had breathed with such a deep contentment (a rare, almost foreign sensation for me during my childhood) and rested
my head on her shoulder and closed my eyes, believing, for the moment, that only the two of us existed.

“‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood/ And sorry I could not travel both/ And be one traveler, long I stood . . .’” Amara nodded, her hand drumming her knee in rhythm with the words. And with these few lines I knew, I joined my voice to hers. How I wished for a thousand more nights just like this.

“You’re lovely, Opal,” Amara said suddenly, her broad lips curving slightly. She tilted her glass for a slow sip, exposing the length of her neck, and closed her eyes. “Really lovely.”

“Oh—thank you. You too,” I murmured, my tongue swollen and dry in my mouth. What was she saying? When she opened her eyes again, she leaned forward, her elbows pressing the table. There was little distance between us now, so little I thought I could feel her breath on me. Why wasn’t she speaking? What was she waiting for? Would she . . . ? Did she think that I . . . ? Something in me was trembling, crackling. Never had I touched my lips to a woman’s. Perhaps if I didn’t look, if I didn’t think— If I could only swallow away the nervous, sick clog in my throat, I could make myself want what she wanted— It would be, I imagined, like kissing a man, only softer, warmer. But now the room was shifting, shifting, and Amara seemed to be listing to one side.

“You look pale, Opal.” She was patting my hand between hers.

No, no. It was my fault—I was just— It was just my low tolerance for wine and it was late and I was overheated. I stammered in the dimness as I fumbled about for my purse. Our cheeks pressed in a clumsy, hurried embrace before I dashed down Amara’s porch steps and into the humid night.

When I rose the following morning, I could see, through my bedroom window, that the sky was cloudless, almost lavender, weather that normally filled me with optimism, but on this morning made my chest ache. Overnight, a handful of the fern’s leaves had shriveled. Had I given it too much sun or too little? Unsure, I watered it, plucked the
dried sections, and after some consideration, found a new spot for it on my coffee table. I gulped a glass of vegetable juice, gobbled a small handful of berries, then rummaged through the embroidered cloth box where I stored baubles I had collected over the years until I found a pair of tiger-eye earrings Amara had complimented a few days before. When she mentioned them today, I would pull them from my ears and fold them into her palm, proof that there need be no awkwardness between us. “I do love you,” I would whisper. Then she would know that, though my feelings for her were different from what she had hoped, they ran just as deep.

Along my route to the gallery, I fiddled with the dangling earrings, my stomach beginning to churn. I tried to imagine how we would greet each other. The gift of the earrings would help heal any hurt pride, any discomfort, wouldn’t it? Still, until then, what would we speak of?

But I could have spared myself these worries because Amara, for the first morning in the three months I’d known her, was late for work. In fact, she did not appear until close to noon, and when she finally arrived, gave a hurried apology but no explanation for her absence. For once there seemed little time for chitchat; the gallery was busier than usual, the seats around the health bar filled, and Amara had to use the slower moments for the paperwork and phone calls she had missed that morning.

“Thank you, again, for dinner,” I said during a brief spell of quiet, offering a section of the apple I had just sliced, hoping to find some way to ease into a discussion of what I was certain had almost occurred between us.

But Amara only smiled and blew a stream of air between her teeth as if to say my expression of gratitude was an unnecessary formality, as though nothing whatsoever had happened. “Oh, you don’t have to
thank
me, Opal.” Then “Pretty earrings,” she added, as if she had never seen them before, and returned to her work too quickly for any further interchange.

At the end of the afternoon, Marco Everly came back in. Calliope had left hours earlier and Amara had disappeared again, too, driving to
Cape Coral to meet with a photographer friend whose work we would be exhibiting in late fall. I wished Marco hadn’t reappeared, showing up now when I was alone, interrupting time I needed to think.

“I’ve done a few new paintings. I thought it couldn’t hurt to ask if they might be of interest.” His smile was all sunshine.

But I disliked his new paintings more than those he’d shown me the first time. These were of carnival performers—jugglers, clowns, a tattooed man—all posturing in a Toulouse-Lautrec sort of style. The reds and yellows in the nighttime scenes jarred, and the exaggerated angles of the figures felt garish.

“You’re not a fan,” he said, smiling but with something sober in his cheeks now, amused and disappointed at the same time.

“To be honest, I find them a bit dislocating but not in a way that’s understandable.”

“Dislocating but not understandable? Wow! You’re a tough critic.” He tugged at his earlobe as if forming a thought, as if I had all the time in the world to muse over his artistic style.

“I’m sorry, but I’m just getting ready to close up,” I began to say. But he was talking again—

“I’m at a loss, I suppose, to prove my meaning. But are you going to tell me you understand
these
?” He gestured to Lee Claybourne’s watercolors currently on display, depictions of placid pine groves, of window-boxed cottages nestled behind sand dunes. “Do
they
mean something?”

“They don’t have to mean something for me to admire them.” I admired them for the mood they created, I was about to say. Instead I turned to the register, intending for him to leave.

“Okay. I can take a hint!” he laughed, and closed his portfolio case. “Are you always so serious, Opal?” He turned as he reached the door. “You are, aren’t you, but I’m fond of you anyway.” He grinned almost too brightly as he had the first time we’d met.