The Cinderella Deal (17 page)

Linc loosened his tie and started up the stairs. “Well, we can’t.”

Daisy folded her arms and called after him. “She keeps undressing you with her eyes, and he keeps groping my rear.”

Linc turned back. “In that case, I’m a lot more worried about him. I’ll say something to him tomorrow.”

“No.” Daisy let her arms drop. “Forget it. I was just kidding. How was it, do you think? Was it all right, the stew and all?”

“It was great.” Linc started back up the stairs. “You really pulled it off. Good going, Daize.”

“Thanks,” she said a little sadly to his retreating back. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to hear from him, but somehow, what he’d said wasn’t enough. Maybe a pat on the back. Maybe a big hug. Maybe…

Forget it
, she told herself.
He’s cold, cold, cold
.

She washed the dishes and checked to make sure she’d finished her list of things to do for the day before she went up to bed. She felt very organized and very adult and very alone, and she missed Daisy Flattery more than she could say.

Daisy’s life after the party fell into an easy rhythm, and she began to lose her Daisy Flattery regrets.

At six they’d jog, Daisy eventually building up enough stamina to keep running for the whole hour. Then they’d have breakfast, and Linc would work on his book, and Daisy would go back to bed, crawling into the rumpled sheets with a pleasure that was almost sexual. Linc left for the college every day at nine, and Daisy got up again every day at noon and worked on the house, painting secret things in the garlands on the walls and furniture that first appalled and then amused Linc. They had dinner together at six, talking about her paintings of driven women and his book of rebellious women. It was Daisy’s favorite part of the day, and she thought it might be Linc’s too, because he was never late and he never tried to hurry her through the meal or took his food upstairs on a tray. She was learning so much from him, not just about his book but about her own work. He brought her home pictures of Rosa Parks so she could finish the painting, and he talked with her about the ideas she wanted to use, what they meant to him, which helped her figure out what they meant to her. They talked about his book too, about birth control and what it meant to women, and he asked her questions and listened to her answers, even once saying, “Wait a minute, I want to write that down,” and leaving the table for pencil and paper while she went dizzy with pride and pleasure.

She’d never known conversation could be so intense and so satisfying and so ultimately frustrating, because making conversation with him told her what making love with him would be like, just as intimate and intense.

After dinner Linc worked on his book until eleven, and Daisy took her frustration upstairs and painted until three or four in the morning, first Rosa Parks and then, inspired by Linc, Margaret Sanger. The Sanger painting was different somehow, angrier in the reds and blacks she found herself using and the sharp forms with which she surrounded the intense central figure draped in gray, her tiny black eyes like tiny black holes in the canvas.

“That’s amazing,” Linc said when she showed it to him in November. “That’s my book. If I sell this book, maybe we could use it for the cover design. Would you mind?”

And Daisy had shook her head no because she was too dazzled to talk.

“I like your other stuff too,” he told her before he went back to his room to write, “but this is something different. You’re really growing here.”

I am,
Daisy thought. Not enough yet, she still wasn’t where she should be, but the Sanger painting was stronger than her earlier work. The deal was working.

Except I want it all
, she told herself.
I love the intellectual stuff we have, but I want the physical stuff too
.

Maybe one night when they were talking, arguing passionately about some idea, she could just lean over and kiss him. She tried to tell herself the story, how Linc would sweep her into his arms and say, “My God, how could I have been so blind?” but it wouldn’t come out true somehow. That wasn’t Linc. He’d be embarrassed and pull back and he’d take his meals on a tray and she’d lose the wonderful conversations she counted on. It was the first time she couldn’t make a story come out right, and it rattled her a little.

You have more right now than most women have ever dreamed of
, she told herself.
Don’t get greedy
.

Linc wasn’t sure when he first realized he’d lost his grip on his story. The realization came gradually, built up in short encounters like the day he answered the front door to find a little old lady dressed in three different brightly colored cardigans and a lime green skirt. She handed him a pie and said, “This is for Daisy. You must be Linc. You have a lovely wife.” She peered up at him. “Reminds me of myself when I was young.”

She dresses like you too
, Linc thought, but all he said was “Thank you, Mrs.—uh…”

“Armbruster. You tell Daisy I said thank you.”

“I certainly will.”

He took the pie into the kitchen and put it on the counter in front of Daisy. “Who’s Mrs. Armbruster?”

“Our next door neighbor on the right. She’s very nice. I helped her with her lawn mower yesterday. She said she was going to make us a rhubarb pie.”

This is not what I had in mind,
Linc thought, but he didn’t say anything and Daisy went on. “Mr. Antonelli lives on our other side. He used to teach romance languages at the college before he retired. He said we needed to put potassium on our dogwood or it won’t bloom. And Dr. Banks lives across the street. He helped me catch Annie when she got out the other day. Next to him is…”

“Daisy?” Linc gritted his teeth to keep from saying something tactless like
Please don’t let people know how weird you are
, but Daisy read his mind anyway and flushed.

“I know. I’m supposed to lie low. But these are our neighbors. We have to be neighborly.”

He thought about saying,
no, we don’t,
but telling Daisy not to be neighborly was like telling Jupiter not to get fleas. They both meant well, but they just naturally attracted other living beings to them.

Then Evan came to him at school and asked if it was all right that he was dropping by the yellow house three or four times a week in the afternoon. He assured Linc his attentions were honorable, and Linc nodded, bemused by the thought of Evan seducing Daisy. Crawford mentioned that Chickie sure enjoyed having lunch with Daisy every day, and shortly after that Booker told him that Lacey was coming over in the afternoons to help Daisy paint ivy leaves in the bathroom so she could learn to do them in her dining room. “Do I want ivy in my dining room?” Booker asked him, and Linc said, “If Lacey wants it there, do you have a choice?”

He’d also lost his grip on keeping his professional and personal lives separate. Daisy argued with him about bringing his tutorial students home to work in the dining room like the other professors did, and he finally gave in just to end the argument. After that, students regularly stopped by and used the dining room as a study table, checking out the cookie jar to see if Daisy had felt like baking, baking themselves if she hadn’t. Linc worried that they’d bother her, cut into her painting time, but she told him that she liked them, and that they were very respectful of her work.

Olivia, one of the students, told Linc, “You think they’re just pretty pictures, but they have whole lives in them, wonderful lives of weird women who do something strong and important and dangerous. And they’re always true.” She’d stopped for a moment and then said, “You’ve probably already noticed this, but they’re all like Daisy.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” Linc had said a little stiffly. There was something so intimate about Daisy’s painting that discussing it with a student seemed wrong, invasive,
personal,
and Olivia had looked at him sadly before she went back to the study table.

Even though he was aware of what was going on, Linc didn’t realize the extent to which his house and his wife had become part of the fabric of Prescott, until a phone call sent him home unexpectedly one Tuesday in late November.

He met Chickie coming out the door.

“Hello, darling.” She hugged him and then stepped aside so he could get through the front door. “Daisy’s with Lacey upstairs painting the bathroom.”

Linc knew there was something different about Chickie, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. He watched her walk out to the sidewalk and realized she wasn’t swaying. She wasn’t drunk. It was the first time he’d seen her completely sober.

He shook his head and went inside.

Two of his students, Olivia and Larry, were working over their notes on World War II at the dining room table while Liz sprawled across Olivia’s lap and Annie batted at Larry’s pen. He started to tell Annie to get off the table, but Andrew, another student, came out of the kitchen with a bowl.

“Decide now. Nuts in the chocolate chips or not?”

“Nuts,” said a voice from the living room, and he turned to see Tracy, yet another student, lying on the couch with Jupiter on his back on top of her. She was scratching his stomach slowly, and Jupiter looked as if he were in ecstasy.

“You’ll probably break a tooth.” Evan came out of the kitchen behind Andrew, holding an apple. “Shell pieces. There’s always a risk.”

There were too many people in his house. Linc looked around a little frantically. “Is Daisy here?”

“Upstairs with Lacey in the bathroom.” Olivia waved her hand toward the stairs. “They’re finishing the ivy today. It looks super.”

“She’s going to do the kitchen in trompe l’oeil.” Tracy sat up. “She said she’d teach me.”

“Have you seen her last painting?” Evan asked him. “It’s Sanger. Daisy’s really got something. Of course, it will never be recognized. I tried to get her a gallery show, but Bill’s booked through next year.” He bit into the apple. “Probably covered with chemicals.” He wandered out the front door.

Linc watched him go before he turned back to Tracy. “There are a lot of people here. Is it always like this?”

“Pretty much.” Tracy lay back down, much to Jupiter’s delight. “That’s why we call it the Hive.”

“The Hive?”

“Little yellow house, always busy. The Hive.”

“Nothing about Killer Bees
³
” Linc asked suspiciously.

“No.” Larry looked up from his notes. “Are there any?”

“No.” Linc went upstairs to find Daisy.

“You’re much better at this than I am,” Daisy was saying to Lacey when he reached the bathroom.

“I like this.” Lacey gazed at the wall with satisfaction. “Teach me to paint something else.”

“Like what?” Daisy put her brush to soak. “We’re almost finished in here.”

“Roses, daffodils, tulips, irises…”

“Not in here,” Linc said from the doorway. “Have a heart. I brush my teeth in here. I have hangovers in here.”

“Well, hi.” Daisy smiled up at him, and for some reason he forgot to breathe. It wasn’t stress this time; he never felt stressed when he looked at Daisy now.

She stood up and walked toward him and he held out his hand to her. She took it and stood close and said, “What brings you home?”

Then he remembered and his stress levels rose again. “My mother called.”

“Oh, dear,” Daisy said.

“Don’t mind me,” Lacey said. “You go talk. I’ll stay here and finish the painting.”