The Numbers Game (48 page)

            “I need to
see you, Markie. When do you have some time?”

For a
second or two a heavy silence hung in the earpiece.

Then came:
“For you anytime is an okay time, but maybe it’s best we make it later tonight.
Say seven, maybe at Luigi’s on Crown?” Markie could barely contain his joy.

            “No.” Serena
shook her head in hopes he got her disapproval telepathically. She had a day
off the set and the last thing she wanted was to do was venture off where
there’d be people.  “I’d prefer that you come here, come home for this meeting.
If that’s okay with you….”

            “Really?”
She listened to his joy fizzle into disbelief. Then hesitation.

            “If that’s
what you want then I’ll come but are you sure it’s what you want?”

            “I think
so,” Serena replied. And Markie understood it was as close to certainty as
she’d ever get.

Oh my God, oh my God,
oh my God, oh my God.

            The moment
of truth had almost arrived. Serena and Markie were reuniting as if they were
Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant in An Affair to Remember, just not at top of the
Empire State Building at 5pm. No, it was much more similar to the later scene
when Cary visited Deborah at home and he of course didn’t know she was
incapacitated, that Deb had been struck by a car running to meet him six months
before at the “closest thing to Heaven we have in New York City”.

            Just like
Cary, Markie also didn’t know anything. That like Deborah, Serena too had gone
through trials and tribulations of the ninety-ninth degree. Not that she had lost
a limb unless her heart counted as one.

            The
doorbell rang and Serena wished she could freeze time, in order to change her
clothes one more time. Suddenly the pink suede skirt worn with a new sheer
white blouse all seemed wrong, too dressy, too contrived. If she could snap her
fingers, ala Samantha from Bewitched, it’d be her baby blue tracksuit she’d be
slipping into with a pair of well worn trainers.

            “But we
know the likelihood of that happening,” Serena muttered under her breath.
Tearing off her earrings and ruffling some of the flatness out of her hair, she
figured this was as casual as it was going to get.

            Serena
walked to the door, with what felt like a thousand-man marching band stomping
through her stomach. By gosh, they were stomping hard. Markie, not
surprisingly, was right on time, not a minute early, not a minute too late.
Maybe he’d planned that, sat in his car for a while until the countdown began.
Who knows? Who cared, it wasn’t important now…

            With what
seemed to be a absence of breathing, Serena opened the front door to see
Markie, dressed also a bit overboard, in his grey Armani shirt, black pants and
pale silver tie. Oh but he had a valid excuse, he probably came straight from
work. At least Serena assumed so. She couldn’t really be sure; his hair looked
freshly washed, his skin still tingling from the slap of Gucci Envy aftershave.
Maybe he stopped by the gym on the way home and enjoyed their showering
facilities. Either way, a gentle stirring tickled Serena’s insides.

            “Gosh you
look beautiful,” Markie murmured. He said it like he meant it, like he could
not help but speak it.

            “Thank
you, so do you.”

            And he
did. Markie looked cuter, sweeter, much more edible than the flimsy images
Serena had dredged up over the past three months. Oh gosh had he always being
this tall and strong and manly in a boyish way? Have she been sitting on a Brad
Pitt this entire time and never even known it was so? It was as if over the
years Serena had developed immunity to his good looks and it’d finally worn
off; pre-this moment she’d always thought Markie was nice and never
embarrassing to have on her arm but definitely not an instigator of awestruck
tendencies.

            Serena was
awestruck now however.

            She didn’t
know what to do. Reach over and give him a hug, kiss him hello or squeeze his
arm? All these options seemed terribly dangerous now, as if with touch all her
poise, all her deceptive strength would disintegrate to specks of dust.

            To think
that weedy, pathetic, runaway Jasper could ever compare to this.

            “Are you
going to let me come in?” Markie grinned, when two minutes later he was still
stuck on the doorstep.

            Serena
wasn’t even aware she’d fallen into a trance.

            “Of
course,” she nodded, slightly shy. “I mean it’s your home as much as it’s
mine.”

            Now how
was that for an understatement? The house was really more like 90% his versus10%
hers, if a financial militant looked at it in terms of contribution. All the
sudden Serena felt a surge of guilt rush through her.
You selfish, selfish
bitch, you should be ashamed of yourself! What made you think you deserved half
of three months in a house that someone else was paying all the mortgage
repayments for? What made you think you could screw another guy on a couch
Markie bought as your housewarming present? If he knew even these little tincy
wincy details….

            “He’d
leave me,” Serena answered in her head.

            And there
she was thinking she was the special one, that she could take Markie or leave
him, depending on how she felt. What a crock of baloney! She should be kissing
Markie’s feet. She should be thanking the heavens she ended up with him and not
some loser like Jasper who couldn’t even rent, let alone buy, his own studio
apartment. 

            Was this
the real definition of taking things for granted? Serena looked at Markie, and
for the first time she was seeing him not just with open eyes but with an open
heart and head.

Not that Serena would
ever guess it but Markie was struggling with his own guilt at the same time.

            He was
thinking “what a feckwit, what a complete and utter feckwit I am.”

            To think
he chose to take a break from this perfect beautiful specimen for a couple of
last minute flings. Fling being the operative word here because there was
nothing more that Markie wanted to do with those tramps than fling them out of the
house once their job was done. His mind wandered back to Sophie and Sammy, the
twins from the night before. They were the type of girls one was likely to find
naked and hugging each other in a Penthouse spread, with lots of big teeth, big
bosoms and matching Grand Canyons down below. Not surprisingly, it crossed
Markie’s head a few times while doing it whether his thing was the 237th or 433
^rd
to be inserted inside. It was definitely a possibility and to think he had
thought Serena’s twelve was bad once upon a time!

            But not
anymore, nuh uh. Markie snuck a peek at Serena, with her long soft caramel
curls and cherub nose, and observed all she needed was a halo to complete the
picture.
My little angel, my darling forever and forever
– as long as bad
karma from the past three months didn’t kick him up the ass. Behind his back,
Markie instinctively crossed his fingers and sent off a prayer to ward off any
bad omens. He had to take all the safety measures he could get.

            “So… it’s
been a while,” he said with a smile, easing himself onto the couch, “To some
extent much too long for my liking.”

            “Yes,”
Serena nodded. She was still standing up and over Markie like an impenetrable
tower. “It does feel like eons, doesn’t it?”

            At least
they got that observation out of the way. Evidently the next hurdle to jump
over was the strange feel of their current liaison. How much more unnatural
could they get? Here was a pair who’d had sex maybe a couple of thousand times,
who’d seen each other utterly bare and at their worst just as often and yet they
still resorted to stiff polite niceties in moments of ambivalence. That was what
they were experiencing right now, wasn’t it? Ambivalence? To call it anything
else would be worrying.

            All
someone needed to do was break the ice.

            “I missed
you, you know,” Markie started, because it was only natural that the mastermind
of all this trouble went first. “Not a day has gone by that I didn’t think of
you Serena.”

            Unfortunately
rather than growing wildly ecstatic Serena contorted into even more of a rigid
tower.

            “Really?”
she replied in the end. It didn’t even sound like she believed him. Or that she
wanted to believe him. “I was under the impression you were surviving quite
fine without me.”

            Oh he
could see what she was playing at now, Markie thought. It’s what he used to
call Serena’s defensive mode, the one she put on whenever she was feeling
vulnerable and scared. You know the drill, unsure of what other person was
thinking or feeling so she acted nonchalant as well. It meant like a dog
chasing its own tail around, they were getting nowhere but closer to hell.

            There was
only one remedy to this.

            “I mean it
one hundred per cent,” Markie said, taking Serena’s hand and easing her onto
the couch. Now that the first bodily contact had been made, he could see a
visible softening in her face. Her forehead lost its one deep-etched wrinkle
across the middle; her mouth slackened into half a smile. How instant the
transformation, how easy it was for Serena to increase her babe-o-meter reading
from ten to eleven, in less than half a second…

            “Not just
that but this time apart made me realize what an idiot I was. I should’ve never
let you go, not even for a second. You’re simply too precious, too valuable to
ever risk losing again. ”

            “You
didn’t force me to go,” Serena frowned, “I chose to go, remember? At the time
there wasn’t another alternative.”

            “Maybe we
could have found one.”

            “But we
didn’t,” she sighed. “What’s done is done. Just like your favorite Cher song, if we could turn back time we would but it ain’t possible.” She smirked as she
finished off with her legendary Dolly Parton twang.

            Markie
feigned horror.

            “I hope
you’ve kept that Cher tidbit to yourself, like you promised Serena. You don’t
know what a delicacy like that could do to my reputation.”

            “I think I
do,” she smiled, “it’d achieve absolutely nothing because everyone already
knows you are Bee Gee loving, teddy bear softie inside.’

            They gazed
at each other now, in a way that probably signaled very little to a bystander.
But then what did a bystander ever really see? They just discerned the basics:
boy/girl sitting beside each other at a respectable distance, a pair who seem
to like each other a bit. All the important details got skimmed over, mainly
due to ignorance rather than by design. At this very moment, they would without
a doubt be missing a million things…

            They’d
miss the sparks that were flying back and forth between Markie and Serena,
imperceptible to the naked eye. They’d miss the history that lied between them
and traveled as far back as the river Nile. In other words, they’d miss
everything.

Markie and Serena
spoke about the fundamental things first, as if they were a wife and husband
going over the details of their harmonious divorce.

            “So you’ve
decided to go to LA after all?” Serena asked.

Markie
nodded, without even bothering to come up with some elaborate excuse. No need
to when the truth would suffice in this situation.

            “I have
to,” he started. “At first I said yes to Sangster on the basis that you would
surely want to join me. Now it’s like I need to go either way. I’d regret it
forever if I didn’t.”

            “I
understand,” Serena replied grimly. And she did; it was easy to do when one
stepped out of the way and focused on the key person in the picture.  “I
wouldn’t have let me stop you either.”

            “Does that
mean you won’t be coming?” Markie quivered. He was treading carefully,
breathing softly.

            Serena
shrugged.

            “I don’t
know. I feel foolish saying yes. When it’s your dreams and your job offer. I
have no right to ride along on your coat tails.”

            “Are you
serious?” Markie said. “Tell me you’re not serious. That has to be the lamest
reason I have now heard for not embracing the opportunity. It’s almost as bad
as Shoshanna’s; you know our African American account director with the
perfectly straight waist-length hair. She won’t leave Frisco because she’s
afraid she won’t find a hairdresser as good as Evan in LA.”

            Serena
tried not to laugh.

            “But her
hair is fake. Surely Evan could express post the new locks once a month to some
affiliate hair-agent?”