The Merchant of Venice Beach (7 page)

“I’m taking dance lessons.”

“Dance lessons. That sounds fun. We’ve had some dangerous frost up here . . . how’s the weather in L. A. ?”

“The weather is fine . . . like it always is . . . .” Suzanna said. “Aren’t you amazed that I’m going to take dance lessons?”

“Well, I’m sure Fernando is pretty coordinated . . . but I’m surprised Eric would agree to dance lessons,” Carla laughed. “I mean, he can barely put one foot in front of the other sometimes.”

“It’s not for the three of us. It’s only me.”

Dead silence.

Suzanna rejoiced—inwardly. Now she had Carla’s attention.

“Really?” Carla asked.

Suzanna could tell Carla was measuring her words. “You’re going to do something without Fernando and Eric? Is everything OK there? Do you need me to fly down?”

“No . . . Everything is great. I just want a little breathing room.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, ‘why’? You’re always telling me I should be a little more independent and now you’re criticizing me.”

“I am not criticizing you. This just isn’t like you, that’s all.”

“Well, it’s like me now.”

“Okay, whatever,” Carla said.

“Fine.”

“Isn’t Fernando jealous? I think he would love dance lessons.”

“I . . . I . . .”

“Oh my God, Suzanna, you haven’t told them!”

“I just told you—I need a little breathing room. I don’t need their permission to breathe and I don’t need their permission to take dance lessons.”

“I’m not arguing with you.”

“Did Eric ask my permission to go to business school?”

“How should I know?” Carla replied.

“Well, he didn’t. Did Fernando ask my permission to invest in a run-down gymnasium?”

“I’m going with no—just a wild guess.”

“You’re damn right he didn’t.”

“Look, don’t get all defensive about the dance lessons. I think it’s great.”

“You do?”

“I do. Suzanna, you’re almost thirty-three and this is probably the first decision you’ve made on your own. This is very mature of you—except for the lying part.”

“I’m not lying. I’m just evading.”

“OK, this is very mature of you—except for the evading part. Better?”

“Well . . . thanks,” Suzanna said. “Look, I gotta run. Smooch.”

“Smooch.”

Suzanna heard Carla’s phone click off and she stared at her iPhone as if it were going to impart some sort of techno-wisdom. She had almost told Carla why she was taking dance lessons, but decided against it. Carla was a little on the practical side, if truth be told, and Suzanna was pretty sure she would fail to see the charm in the car– bicycle encounter. Carla thought dance lessons were a mature thing to do.

Why muddy the waters?

CHAPTER 5

After getting off the phone with Carla, Suzanna spent a half hour tidying up the office before dinner. She stared in irritation at a pile of receipts sitting on her desk. Now that he was within sight of his business degree, Eric was constantly revolutionizing Suzanna’s bill-paying system. He had started her out slowly, with a software program called Quicken. But as soon as she’d gotten the hang of that, he’d fallen in love with another program that caught his eye, which he then threw over for something even more financially glamorous.

I should have known. He has the same fickle attitude with operating systems as he does with women.

Currently, everything related to expenses and bill-paying was meticulously entered in a computer program called QuickBooks. Eric was very patiently teaching Suzanna how to handle each program, but it always came down to her having to spend an awful lot of time entering numbers into the computer. Suzanna grabbed a handful of receipts and started typing.

The bills could be paid in the time I spend doing this!

As she entered the last bill into the Mac, she glanced at the clock. It was after seven. She’d better start thinking about dinner. Suzanna looked around the office, trying to think of something else to do. She had a habit of keeping an eagle eye on her business, so when she wanted to stall for time, “catching up” was never much of an option. She shut down the computer, locked the office, and headed home.

She walked out into the small yard behind the bookstore and tearoom and headed up the backstairs to the second story. A great feature that she took advantage of more and more frequently was that there were two sets of stairs leading up to their living space. One set of rickety wooden steps snaked up the back of the building, while another ran right through the center hall that divided the tearoom. Eric, Fernando, and she lived together in what they referred to as the Huge Apartment. The door at the top of the stairs opened directly into the kitchen. Suzanna stepped inside and smiled. She loved this room, and every time she walked into it, her spirits immediately lifted.

The room was oddly shaped, something it had in common with all the rooms in the tea shop/bookstore/apartment compound. The kitchen was a perfect square, which made it look massive, but a large percentage of the square footage had been wasted floor space until Eric had built a large workstation, now center stage on the black-and-white-tiled floor.

Fernando was at the stove, and Suzanna braced herself for a complaint. Fernando had redesigned the kitchen at the Bun about two years ago, and had been campaigning ever since to redo the upstairs kitchen as well. But Suzanna loved the kitchen just the way it was. If the vintage stove was finicky, so be it. If Fernando was cooking something that needed precise heat, he could always work in the Bun kitchen.

“I’m starving,” Suzanna said, relieved to find it wasn’t her turn to make dinner. “What are we having?”

“Salad, peanut soup, and fresh bread.”

Suzanna felt her throat constrict. She and Eric tended toward the shepherd’s pies and angel-hair-with-tomatoes-and-garlic-variety dinners. Suzanna had often wondered why Fernando refused to cook normal dinners like everybody else.

“Oh?” Suzanna said. “That sounds. . . peanuts, huh?”

“I know! I found the recipe online. It’s an African dish. Slaves apparently brought it to the American South. They still serve it all over Virginia, according to the article I read. Try it,” Fernando said, nodding toward the pot.

Suzanna often relied on bread to cut the weirdness of many of Fernando’s creations, but when she eyed the bread maker, it was still ticking away. She clearly was going to have to go cold turkey on this one. She grabbed a spoon and tentatively tried the soup. She often chided herself for not being more adventurous—after all, she owned a restaurant—but she usually gave herself a pass on this particular flaw. She had other things to worry about.

“Wow!” she said. “This is good.”

“I know! I’m thinking about putting it on the menu.”

Suzanna’s whole mood shifted. She thought the tea shop customers would really enjoy this new treat and it would get him off her back about the swing. Win–win!

“I’ll call it ‘Slave Soup,’” he said.

Suzanna’s good humor tanked.

“You can’t put ‘Slave Soup’ on the menu.”

“Sure I can . . . I’m part Cherokee.”

“Sure he can,” Eric echoed, coming in to join the conversation. “It could be a post-racial-era statement.”

Fernando snorted.

Suzanna stared at the boys. Were they joking?

It was obvious that none of them harbored any prejudices. After all, they were two men (one gay) and a woman, living together with not a hint of sexual tension—unless you counted Suzanna’s tamped-down feelings for Eric, which she didn’t. And Eric, who was firmly heterosexual, didn’t even have a type. He dated casually, as far as Suzanna could tell, and the women he went out with were all over the map—tall, short, curvy, thin, and of every race and religion. He could have been the poster boy for Benetton. Even so, the boys made politically incorrect jokes that she never would have dared to utter.

Eric took a quick look at the stove and countertop. Determining that they would need soup bowls, bread plates, and flatware, he started to set the table, which was tucked into a corner of the room. The table was built into one of the walls and sat three, not the conventional four. When they had first seen the apartment, they had all happily taken that to be a sign that they were meant to be together. Nowadays, to Suzanna, it seemed more like a commandment carved in stone.

The three of them sat down to eat dinner. Suzanna poured wine and Fernando passed around a wire basket with a checkered napkin placed over the sweet-smelling warm bread. Suzanna took the basket and inhaled the fragrance of the bread—one of her all-time favorites—before she opened the napkin. Only when her nostrils had had their fill did she reach in and pull out a slice of warm bread.

It was lavender.

“Isn’t it gorgeous?” asked Fernando.

“What is this?” Suzanna asked.

“Bread,” he replied.

Suzanna looked at Eric.

“It is bread,” he said.

“Did you know about this?” Suzanna asked Eric.

“Was I in charge of dinner?”

“It came to me while I was making tea sandwiches for the billionth time,” Fernando said. “I thought, ‘What if I dyed some of the bread a nice mountain laurel?’”

“Oh!” Eric said. “Mountain laurel bread . . . like the walls! Very cool.”

Suzanna could feel her eyes welling up with tears. As far as she was concerned, the boys were being totally passive-aggressive. They always said that the walls were lavender but only referred to the color as mountain laurel because Suzanna insisted on it.

“This is about the swing, isn’t it?” Suzanna asked.

“No, Suzanna, it’s about my spirit being drained of any creativity.”

Suzanna turned to Eric.

“Are you going to help me out here?”

Eric swallowed his soup, put down his spoon, and looked at Fernando.

“I know what you mean. I felt my spirit dying, too. That’s why I decided on business school. Just the creative outlet my soul was looking for.”

The boys howled and high-fived. Suzanna stood up and threw down her napkin.

“I have had it with you two!”

The boys looked startled.

“Hey, Suzanna, chill out,” Eric said. “It was just a joke.”

Suzanna picked up a slice of purple bread and thrust it under Eric’s nose.

“Oh?” she said. “Does this look like a joke to you?”

“No,” he replied. “It looks like a science experiment.”

“Hey!” Fernando looked at Eric. “I thought you were on my side.”

“I’m not on anybody’s side! What the hell, you guys. Come on. Calm down.”

“I will not calm down,” Suzanna said, still holding the bread. “Forget it—I’m not hungry.”

She threw the bread on the table.

“And for your information, the walls are mountain laurel and this bread is lavender.”

Suzanna stalked out of the room and headed down the hall toward her room. She stopped, turned around, and stalked back to the kitchen. When she got to the doorway, she waited until the boys noticed she was standing there. They looked at her and waited.

“And I don’t want to hear that I’m probably just having my period,” she said, and turned on her heel.

As she walked down the hall again, she heard the boys speaking in low voices.

“God, heterosexual women can be so Gothic sometimes.”

“Well, you got to admit, this bread looks pretty gross,” Eric said.

Suzanna’s anger subsided a tiny bit as she walked into her room. Eric had at least defended her.

The next morning Suzanna, feeling a little sheepish at her outburst, decided she should give Fernando a hand in the Bun’s kitchen. She slipped in quietly. Fernando was already hard at work mixing shredded chicken, homemade mayonnaise, and curry powder. He looked at her sullenly and pulled several mountain laurel loaves out of the oven. They stared at each other. Suzanna didn’t have the energy to fight.

“You’re in charge of the kitchen, Fernando.”

“Thank you. Well, if I can’t have a swing . . .”

“Let’s just leave it, OK?”

“OK.”

Fernando seemed to be satisfied and the rest of the morning went smoothly.

Suzanna looked around the kitchen. Her practiced eye told her that today they were doing cucumber, curried chicken, and egg salad. They started making the finger sandwiches in what she hoped was companionable silence but was in fact abject terror that her clientele was going to think they were being served some penicillin-laced delight.