The Way Life Should Be (19 page)

“Sure was nice of her to offer her kitchen. Lance is sweet.”

“Lance is sweet,” he agrees.

“You belong together.”

“I’m more into the bad-boy type, you know.”

“Take it from me,” I say. “You’re making a mistake.” With effort, I hoist myself off the couch and start collecting glasses.

“Whoa, Nelly,” he says. “Do we have to do that yet?”

I sink back onto the couch.

“So was anybody here tonight who didn’t come from somewhere else?” Flynn muses. “Rebecca’s from New York, Lance from Virginia. Tom’s from the West Coast somewhere. You’re from Jersey.”

“Flynn—”

“You know what? This whole night was about your being an Italian girl from Nutley. Claim it.” He takes a swig of wine. “So what do we think about Tom? Gay? Not gay?”

“Don’t ask me,” I say. “As you well know, I’m no judge of character.”

“Aw, don’t be so hard on yourself,” Flynn says. “That Saunders guy is a professional manipulator. It’s to your credit that you weren’t hard-boiled enough to see it.”

I glance at Flynn, with his freckled nose, teasing eyes, and two-day orange stubble. “Excuse me, perhaps I’m mistaken—was that empathy?”

“Nah, couldn’t be,” he says.

“Well, anyway,” I say, “I’ve sworn off men for the time being. I need to, as they say, ‘find myself’ before I start looking for someone else.”

“Find yourself?” He gives me a skeptical look, then nudges me with his shoulder. “Perhaps
I’m
mistaken—but it seems to me that you’re right here.”

CHAPTER 19

“There’s something I can’t figure out,” Tom says, craning his neck
over the coffee shop counter early on the morning after the cooking class. “What are you doing here?”

I peer up at his smiling face. “Hi, Tom. I’m restocking the deli case.”

“I see that,” he says. “Italy to New Jersey, I understand. New Jersey to Mount Desert Island? Can’t make sense of it.”

“I know,” I say, straightening a row of fruit cups. “I’m not so sure myself.”

“Don’t lie,” says Flynn, pouring Tom a small coffee.

“I’m not lying,” I snap, irritated by his intrusion.

“Love pays geography no heed,” Flynn stage-whispers to Tom.

“It was love?” Tom asks.

I pinch Flynn’s calf. “Well, in her case, lust,” he replies blithely, shaking his leg and handing Tom the coffee.

“Don’t you have anything better to do?” I ask.

“Excuse me.” Flynn motions toward Tom with a flourish. “I’m serving a customer.”

“Lust, huh?” Tom says.

“No.” I slam the door to the deli case shut and haul myself up
off the floor. “I mean, yes, I was briefly involved with someone. But that’s not the reason I came. Not the
only
reason.”

“She just lo-o-oves the bracing winter air,” Flynn says.

Ignoring him, I turn to Tom. “What about you? How did you end up here?”

He takes a sip of coffee. “I came here one summer to visit a college friend whose family owns a house in Seal Harbor. Then I moved to California, and when—well, it’s a long story. But after a while I didn’t need to be there anymore. I didn’t need to be anywhere in particular. And I remembered this place.”

“So you came here randomly?”

“Sort of. I like working with my hands, and I thought I could do that here.”

“You’re a woodworker.”

He nods. “Yeah. Furniture maker.”

“He makes these exquisite chairs and tables out of cherry and maple,” Flynn says. “They’re like—art.”

“Can I see your work? I—I used to work in a museum.” As soon as I say this, I cringe. First of all, working in a museum has nothing to do with Tom’s furniture, and second, it has nothing to do with what I actually did. I might as well have been planning events for a pharmaceutical company. I expect Flynn to expose me—he’s usually quick to root out phony posturing—but he’s uncharacteristically quiet.

“A museum? That’s interesting.” Still, Flynn says nothing. “Drop by my studio in Deep Spring Harbor anytime. It’s open most days.”

“I will.”

“By the way, last night was fun. I learned a lot.” He laughs. “I have a lot to learn.”

“Good,” I say awkwardly.

“I didn’t mention this, but I’m half Italian, too,” Tom says.

“Martinelli. Of course,” I say. “What’s the other half?”

“Jewish. My mom’s Jewish, so I’m Jewish. But you can’t beat Italian food. Speaking of which, I’m going to get the ingredients for last night’s menu and surprise my girlfriend this weekend. She’s going to be impressed.”

I nod and smile, hiding a prickle of disappointment.

When he leaves, the little bell in the door tinkling behind him, Flynn turns to me and says, “Girlfriend? What the
fuck
?”

I sigh. “Whatever.”

“Not whatever,” he says. “He was definitely flirting with you.”

“You know what? It doesn’t matter. I’ve sworn off men, remember?”

“Uh-huh,” Flynn says, nodding, “right.”

I am lying under a blanket
on the sofa with Sam, reading Wodehouse, a cozy fire in the stove and a cup of tea in my hand, when Rich appears at the front door of my shack with a six-pack and a pizza.

“I was in the neighborhood,” he says.

“With a pizza?”

“I remembered you like mushroom and sausage.” He holds it aloft. “Hungry?”

If the book were more my style (I’m still not loving Wodehouse), or the pizza didn’t smell so tempting, or Rich weren’t wearing those old, faded jeans with the hole in the knee that hang on his hips like boxers, I would never have let him in.

“So you got a dog,” he says, putting the pizza on the counter and the beer in the fridge. “Cute little fella. Kinda skinny though, huh? What’s his name?”

“Sam,” I say, a little smugly.

He grins, unfazed. “You found my dog.”

Here’s the thing: Sex with someone you don’t know very well is usually a brief flash of pleasure cloaked in a before-and-after of awkwardness. How do I look? What is he doing? Why is he doing that? It can be all elbows and knees, poking and prodding, rough hands, clammy skin, coffee or cigarette breath, or worse. With Rich, there’s none of that. His hands are a revelation—sensitive to nuance, attuned to ambiguity. Our bodies’ perfect fit makes me want to spend all my time with him entwined and naked.

The fact that I’ve already had sex with him means, in my own relativistic ethical scheme, that I’m no more morally compromised by sleeping with him again than I have been already.

“Despite yourself, you still like me,” Rich whispers, nibbling my ear.

I shift away, putting a pillow between us. “I’m not sure about that.”

“You can’t resist me.”

Sadly, this appears to be true. Something base in me is drawn to something base in him. Never have I experienced such disconnect between mind and body, which both craves and yields to him without consulting its better, higher half. Rich is shallow, self-involved, unscrupulous, and remarkably ignorant of the references that populate the brains of most intelligent people. Yet he can be witty. He knows the meter of a haiku. He sails complicated boats and reads the weather and sea with precision. He is all casual physical charm; sex is no big deal, yet it is everything.

But this can never work. I sit up and throw back the covers.

“I can’t believe I’m sleeping with you again,” I mutter, as much to myself as to him. “This is crazy. You have to leave.”

He pulls the covers up and pulls me closer. “I like you, Angela. There’s something about us that feels right. I know you feel it, too. Why can’t you admit it?”

Why, indeed…

A few days later, after another such encounter, we are sitting at a bar in Bar Harbor, eating hamburgers and drinking beer. “So what are we doing, Angela?” Rich says.

“Uh…Eating hamburgers and drinking beer?” I say with my mouth full.

“You know what I mean.”

“Not sure I do.”

He shifts on his stool. “Maybe it’s time to talk about where this is headed.”

“Where this is headed?”

“Where we’re headed.”

“We’re headed somewhere?”

“You’re not taking me seriously,” he says.

It’s true, I’m not. I take a sip of beer. “Last I knew, you wanted to keep your options open,” I say.

“So maybe I changed my mind.”

Nibbling a french fry, I ponder this revelation. Ideally, he would have liked to keep his options open, but it’s winter, and frankly, there are few options loitering around. Having my own place and interests takes off the pressure. As for me, I’m playing this game with his rules, and feeling just fine about it.

“Don’t you think it’s a little soon to be having this conversation?” I say.

“What do you mean?”

“Shouldn’t we take it slow?”

“You call sex in three different positions in one night ‘taking it slow’?” he says, his voice rising.

“Jesus, Rich,” I yelp, looking around. “Keep it down.”

“I’m just saying. It seems to me we’re pretty involved already.”

“Well, maybe. But last time we were ‘involved’ like this, you were still e-mailing five other women.”

“Not that many,” he objects.

“I should think that you, of all people, would be able to differentiate between sex and a relationship.”

He looks wounded. “That’s a low blow.”

“Why?”

“Look, Angela, I’m trying to turn over a new leaf here.” Reaching across the bloody remains of my burger, he grabs my hand. “I think we should give it a try.”

“But you—you’re the one who couldn’t commit,” I sputter.

“Everything was happening too fast,” he says. “I needed to think. So—I thought. And what I thought was, What the hell? We should try to make a go of it.”

“C’mon, Rich. Let’s admit that this is a nice little diversion, and leave it at that.”

“Wow.” He sits back on his stool. “You really are cynical, Angela.”

“
You
told
me
to take a hike. For you to say, ‘What the hell, we should try to make a go of it’ a month and a half later seems, well, thoughtless.”

“Maybe it should be. Maybe you think too much,” he says.

His dimness irritates me. “‘Thoughtless’ is the opposite of ‘thoughtful.’ It is not the same as ‘thinking less.’”

“Whatever,” he says. “Sorry I’m not an English major.”

Leaving the bar, we bump into Tom and his girlfriend. Literally—trapped awkwardly in the doorway as they’re coming in and we’re going out.

“Oh, hello!” Tom says with evident surprise. Despite the few
people around, the island is so spread out geographically that it can be startling to run into someone from the other side.

“Hi!” I say. Tom is wearing a green-and-black-striped knit hat pulled low and an orange sweater, and looks pretty goofy. Actually, it occurs to me that he resembles Goofy, the Disney dog. “You look—” I start, and think better of it. “Never mind.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“No, what?” Tom says.

“Augh,” I say in exasperation. I don’t really want to admit to this silly observation, but I can’t think of anything else to say. Standing there in the unheated vestibule in our coats, we’re stamping our feet like ponies. His girlfriend is talking on a cell phone, and Rich’s attention has wandered to the football game on the TV above the bar. “I was just going to say that you—you look a little like Goofy. Your…sweater and hat. Sorry. It’s dumb.”

He looks down at himself. “You’re right. That’s pretty funny,” he says. “I wonder if it was subconscious. I always identified with Goofy as a kid. He was so—goofy. And so was I.”

We both laugh.

Girlfriend snaps her phone shut. She sports straight, blunt-cut blond hair and angular black-rimmed glasses designed for maximum hipness. “What?” she says.

“Ah, nothing,” Tom says. “Angela, this is Katrin. Katrin, Angela is—”

“The Italian chef,” she says in a throaty voice.

“Muy bueno,”
he says with a big smile. She’s a good girlfriend, this Katrin, to keep track of people he’s mentioned.

“Nice to meet you,” she says. We’ve migrated to the foyer, where we huddle in our coats, moving like bumper cars as people come and go around us.

“I’m not really a chef,” I tell her.

“She only plays one on Wednesdays,” Tom says.

“Uh, hey.” Rich breaks in belatedly, having followed an exciting long drive that ended in a fumble. He reaches out his hand to Tom. “Rich Saunders.”

“I’m Tom Martinelli. And this is Katrin Winters.” Tom raises his eyebrows at me:
Is this the guy?

I feign incomprehension. Beside me, Rich holds Katrin’s hand a second longer than necessary. She yanks it away. “Don’t think I’ve seen you around here,” he tells her. “I’m sure I’d have noticed.”

“I think I’ve seen you,” she says. “Do you hang out at the Thirsty Whale?”

“Ah, sometimes,” he says, clearly uncomfortable about where this is going.

She squints, steely-eyed. “Yeah, that’s it. Didn’t you go out with a friend of mine, Melanie?”

He has to think. “Melanie. You mean Melody?”

“No.
Melanie.
Melanie Guest.”

“Ohhh, yeah. Melanie. That was a while ago.”

She barks a laugh. “If you call two weeks ‘a while ago.’ I guess now we know why you haven’t called.”

Rich looks like he’s been caught with his hand in another kid’s piggy bank.

“Oh, no, no,” I say, laughing and shaking my head. “This isn’t a
date.
We’re just friends. It’s probably not my place to say this, and Rich never would, but he hasn’t felt well for the past few weeks.” I put my hand on Rich’s arm. “He even went to the emergency room. A weird virus, right, Rich? He’s just starting to feel better, aren’t you?”

I see the gears shifting as Rich catches on. “Ohhh, yeah. It
really sucked. Tell Melanie I’ll give her a call in the next day or two.”

Tom turns to me. “Well, I’ll see you on Wednesday. What kind of wine should I bring, red or white? Italian, don’t you think?”

“Sure. Either. I haven’t decided on the menu yet. It all depends on Super Shaw’s. The pickings are slim these days.”

“Hmm,” he says.

“What?”

“I’m just thinking. Did you know there’s an indoor farmers’ market in Blue Hill? Tuesdays and Fridays.”