The Merchant of Venice Beach (23 page)

“So you’re saying ‘suck it up’?”

“Well, my sister would think that was a lazy way of putting it . . . but yeah.”

Fernando turned and went into his room. Suzanna jerked open her bedroom door. She was surprised to find Harri lying on the bed, face buried deep in the pillow. She looked up and squinted at Suzanna. Suzanna could tell she had been crying.

“I . . . I didn’t know you were in here,” Suzanna said.

“I’m sorry to bogart your room. I just needed a quiet place to go,” she said. “I know I should be downstairs working with Fernando or Eric.”

“Oh, no problem! Are you okay?”

Harri buried her face and started crying again. Suzanna, on guard, sat on the corner of the mattress and stiffly patted Harri’s back.

“I’ve had so much fun here,” Harri said. “I didn’t realize until today how much I was going to miss you guys. I’m going to graduate and be all by myself.”

“You won’t be by yourself, you’ll have . . . a prestigious accounting firm in Beverly Hills.”

“I know.” Harri sniffled. “But you and the guys have such a great life together. I know you get tired of them, but . . . I was just working away, laughing with Eric about something, and I just got so damn sad about leaving.”

“I guess the grass always looks greener on the other side,” Suzanna said, as she started to try on various little black dresses.

“Are you getting ready to go somewhere?”

“Andy and I are going salsa dancing tonight.”

“Oh? He has another hour and a half of work—”

“I told him to knock off early.”

“Well,” Harri said. “You’re the boss.”

“That’s exactly what I said,” Suzanna said.

She went to the dresser and started her makeup. Harri sat lotus style and watched Suzanna.

“Do you really think you should be dating an employee?”

Suzanna poked herself in the eye with the mascara wand. She turned and gave Harri a Popeye squint.

“A, I’m not dating Andy, and B, he’s not an employee.”

“That’s not the way it looks to me.”

“Well, things are not always what they seem.”

“Thank you, Confucius,” Harri said. “You’re paying him to work here. . . that makes him an employee.”

“No, he’s a freelancer. You’re an employee.”

“Same thing . . . and I don’t see you dating me.”

“We’re going dancing, that’s all,” Suzanna said, trying to sound cosmopolitan.

“It’s what we do.”

“It might be what you hope to do,” Harri snorted. “But it’s not what you do. Besides, do you even know how to dance?”

Suzanna tried to rub off the mascara that had splattered on her cheeks. She took a few shallow breaths as she realized how close she had gotten to giving away her secret.

“I . . . I’m not horrible.”

“What underwear are you wearing?”Harri asked.

“What?” Suzanna asked, relieved that Harri’s attention was diverted from dancing. “Afraid I might get hit by a bus and have to go to the hospital?”

“No,” she replied, “but I’ve always thought that if you put on your best lingerie, you were secretly looking to get laid.”

“Well, I can’t say I’ve ever thought about it.”

“I’ll bet you’re not wearing pantyhose tonight.”

“Pantyhose aren’t even in fashion,” Suzanna replied, adding mascara furiously.

“Did you shave your legs?”

“Of course I shaved my legs . . . that’s just good manners!”

Suzanna hoped Harri would drop the subject, because she had, indeed, not only shaved her legs but had put in a new blade to do so and had wriggled into her really small red bikini panties with a bow on each hip that actually untied. Not the best circumstantial evidence, for sure.

But none of this is really for Andy. I need to get away from Carla and Eric . . . and there’s always a chance Rio might show up at the club.

“I just want you to be careful,” Harri said, “I mean . . .”

Suzanna stopped with the makeup and looked at her. She looked decidedly uncomfortable.

“What?”

“Well, I was thinking . . .” Harri said. “You and Andy don’t really know each other. Do you really want to spend your birthday with somebody you hardly know?”

“What is with you, Harri?” Suzanna asked. “First you think I’m out to seduce him and then you tell me I shouldn’t be going out with a stranger.”

“Well, they aren’t mutually exclusive.”

“Look, it’s my birthday and I just want to do something a little different, that’s all.”

The bedroom door opened and Carla stuck her head in. She looked surprised.

“There you are,” she said to Harri. “We’ve been looking all over for you.”

“I better get back to work,” Harri said. She turned to Carla. “Suzanna is going dancing tonight. With Andy.”

Carla was silent as Harri left the room. She waited for Harri to be out of earshot, then looked at Suzanna, who was trying on various heels.

“You told Harri about dancing?”

“No . . . not exactly,” Suzanna said. “Can’t a woman decide to go to a club on her birthday?”

“I guess,” Carla said. “But some people might want to spend their birthday with their best friends.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Why are you being so short-tempered about everything?” Carla said. “We just want to celebrate with you, that’s all.”

“Who does?”

“Fernando, Eric, and me—who do you think?”

Suzanna tried to focus on the evening’s potential. She was not about to get into a decades-old argument with Carla. Not on her birthday. Suzanna tried to control her thoughts so she could put together a coherent sentence, instead of just letting loose.

“I think you and Eric can celebrate without me.”

“Are we going to go over all this again? That’s ancient history!”

“Is it?”

“I’m not even going to dignify that with an answer.”

How convenient.

“Eric and I have always been friends,” Suzanna said. “And we always will. But I have to admit, having him around all the time has made me lazy. I always had a date for the movies if I needed one.”

Now he’s getting a degree and might be moving on.

Suzanna was as mad at herself as she was at Carla. But it was so much easier to be mad at her friend. She knew that if there had ever been a time when she could have been in a relationship with Eric, that time was long past. Suzanna tried to take comfort in the fact that she was too smart to mess with something as good as her friendship with him.

She thought back to an evening in Napa when she and Eric were watching Dick Tracy on HBO. They were seniors and the Carla-Eric thing was long past. Suzanna was thinking about hitting on him in a casual, friendly kind of way, when Madonna and Mandy Patinkin starting singing a torch song called “What Can You Lose?” As Suzanna inched closer to Eric’s shoulder, she heard Madonna’s warbling as she asked that age-old question: Should you spill your guts or hang on to the relationship you’ve got? Suzanna listened intently to every word . . . but Madonna just repeated the refrain, she didn’t come up with the answer.

If that wasn’t fate slapping some sense into her, then there was no such thing as fate. And she was a big believer in fate. Look at the whole thing with Rio! No, Eric was yesterday’s news, to be sure. Carla could have him.

“Tonight is not about Eric, I’ll tell you that much.”

“OK . . . but seriously, Suzanna. Andy is such a sweet guy.”

“This isn’t about Andy, either.”

“I know that. It’s about the dance teacher,” Carla said. “So it really isn’t fair to be using Andy.”

Hell!

“I just don’t want to see anybody get hurt,” Carla said.

Suzanna was flabbergasted. First and foremost, she loved the fact that Carla seemed to be viewing her as this siren who was tearing through Los Angeles with all these men at her heels. But was she using Andy?

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Suzanna said, summoning as much world-weary vixen-ness as she could muster.

“Come on, Suzanna,” Carla said. “Just stay home with us.”

“Not a chance,” she said. “I’m making some big changes and I’m starting now.”

She finished dressing, adding a necklace and earrings. She rooted around in her jewelry box for another watch, but decided against it. The sight of her naked wrist always came as an erotic shock and she rather enjoyed it.

She promised Carla she would behave (HA!) and dashed out of the bedroom. She practically smashed into Eric on the stairs.

“Hey, rocket, slow down,” he said, holding her at arms’ length to look at her. “Wow, you look amazing!”

“Thanks,” she said, feeling a flush creeping up her well-moisturized cleavage. “I gotta go, Eric, I’m going to be late.”

She wriggled free of his grasp and headed down the stairs to the car. He followed her.

“I was hoping we could have dinner,” he said.

Even as distracted as she was, she was surprised and intrigued by this statement.

“Well, sure, Eric, I’d love to,” she said. “But not tonight.”

“Hey, that’s cool,” he said. “But let’s do it soon. I . . . I really miss you, Suzanna.”

“I don’t know how you could miss me,” she said. “I’m right here.”

“Are you?”

Stalling for time, she dug through her purse, got out her keys, released the lock with the remote, and then looked at him. He was such a wonderful, caring man; she could see that. And she realized that this was the first birthday in twenty years she hadn’t spent with him.

“Where are you going?” he asked, holding the car door open.

“I’m going dancing,” she said, inching toward the truth.

“Looking like that?”

Suzanna couldn’t help but be pleased by his reaction to her tight black dress and heels. She got into the car carefully, arching her feet seductively. Eric smiled and kissed her softly on the cheek. “Happy birthday.”

He closed the door and stood in the driveway until she pulled out into the street.

Suzanna’s mind was whirling, but she decided to focus on the evening ahead. After all, dancing was supposed to be her stress reliever, not her stress inducer!

CHAPTER 19

Suzanna had heard that Monsoon on the 3rd Street Promenade was a bit tamer than some of the salsa clubs she’d learned about at the studio, primarily in that the patrons at Monsoon weren’t hostile toward either full-fledged adults or beginning dancers. Monsoon was primarily an Asian-leaning restaurant that, for reasons known only to the whimsical restaurant gods, turned into a salsa club on Wednesday evenings. One of the reasons Suzanna wanted to hit the club early was because she knew that, as the evening progressed, they would be outnumbered by better dancers and would look like a couple of losers. This way, she’d be warmed up by the time Rio showed . . . if he showed.

She parked in one of the behemoth municipal parking garages that dotted Santa Monica’s downtown and said a silent prayer that she would remember where her poor car was languishing when the evening was through. She had, on more than one occasion, come to the wrong garage, insisting to the beleaguered parking attendant, as he drove her around each floor in his golf cart, that her car must have been stolen. He would reply, through gritted teeth, that he was pretty sure she just left her car in another garage. It happened all the time, he would say. The parking garages all looked alike.

Suzanna opened the lighted mirror on her visor to do minor repair to her lipstick. She tried not to think about all the drama at the Bun. Was Carla right? Was there a possibility Suzanna and Eric might get together after all these years? Or, was Carla lying and secretly having fabulous make-out sessions with Eric behind her back? Were Andy and Fernando going to stage a coup? And what about Eric? He definitely noticed Suzanna’s brain had been otherwise occupied these last few weeks. Should she confess?

She put everything out of her mind. She was determined to have a good time tonight.

As she walked up the promenade toward the club, she passed several street performers, all of whom seemed to be confident in their abilities as entertainers. Some of them were really good: a youngish guitar player channeling Nat King Cole’s singing style and a little girl about eight years old who did an unnerving Michael Jackson impression. There was a woman who banged on an old plastic Sparkletts bottle and created really interesting percussion effects. There were also some odd acts to skirt: a very large man in an Elvis suit and white mime makeup who pretended he was a mannequin never failed to spook Suzanna.