Time After Time (34 page)

"Oh. Well. In that case.
Of course I will," Liz said. She followed him out of the room,
still shaking her head over him. "But! I don't get it. This shelter
has been here for years. Why you? Why now?"

"I've never been here
before," he said simply. "Come on. We've got work to
do."

****

They settled on an
impromptu working supper at Liz's house. The proper place for such
discussions obviously was her office. But Jack was going to be tied
up in meetings with a couple of investors the next day, and Liz had
no free time the day after that. Since Jack was determined to stage
the event before the annual flight of Newport's summer colonists to
Palm Beach, speed was critical.

They called ahead from the
shelter for Chinese takeout, and Jack went to pick it up before
continuing on to meet Liz. In the meantime, Liz drove like a
madwoman, short-cutting through Newport's maze of one-way streets
so that she could beat him to the mess she'd left
behind.

Letters! Clothes! Dishes!
Everything on the damned floor again ... I haven't
showered—oh, God, candles all
over
the bedroom ...
did I ever turn off that mindless New Age
tape?

Why on earth hadn't they
gone to
his
place? Plenty of room, plenty of food ....

And plenty of people.
Neither one of them had alluded to the fact that at Liz's place
they'd be alone, but it was on both their minds as Liz murmured
something about a little peace and quiet and Jack said how nice it
would be to be able to hear themselves think.

Liars!
thought Liz with brutal honesty. They could brainstorm
anywhere — under a tree, in a coffee shop, at Netta's kitchen table
— but they couldn't take off all their clothes and make wild
abandoned love in any of those places. The carriage house apartment
might do, but after the other night — well, the carriage house had
sexual connotations that her own innocent house did not.
Yet.

"So we're backing into
this affair accidentally on purpose," Liz murmured, suddenly weary
from the agony of thinking about it.

It was no use resisting;
making love with Jack Eastman was absolutely inevitable. If there
was a lesson to be learned from Ophelia's example, Liz hadn't
learned it. Even after last night — maybe
because
of last night — Liz wanted
desperately to be in Jack's arms. Victoria was right: Liz had gone
way, way too long without making love.

Jack arrived close on her
heels. Liz had barely had time to sweep a jumble of clothes and
candles under her bed and dash down to the living room when she
heard him knock and then try the handle of the front door. She ran
to open it.

"Glad to see you're
locking up at last," he said with a protective smile that made her
heart wobble like a top.

She thought of the night
she was burglarized, the night he climbed over the barbed
wire.
It's true,
she realized.
We really have
been through a lot together. It's not as though
I've just picked the man up in a bar.

"You bet I'm locking up,"
she admitted. "Grant Dade's going to have to break the door down
next time."

Jack shot her an amused
look and said, "Still haven't given up on that graduate student?"
Without waiting for her answer, he added, "In the kitchen, or out
here?"

Liz had no idea why, but
she assumed he was asking her where they were going to make love.
"Oh — well ... I hadn't considered .... On the floor?"

"Hey, whatever turns you
on," he said amiably. He plopped the heavy bag of food on the
seaman's trunk in front of the chintz sofa and then sat down on the
rug and began taking out the paper cartons. "Hope you like
Szechuan."

He meant where to
eat.

Clearly, Liz had sex on
the brain. Embarrassed to be so gung-ho when he was not, she said,
"Why don't we just sit at the kitchen table?"

He looked up with a
relieved grin and said, "Thank God. My knees are killing me down
here."

The phone rang as they
were relocating to the kitchen. Susy was calling, with her
grandparents' help, from the motel where the three of them had set
up camp. Susy, thrilled and exhausted from the first day of her
adventure, was too tired to sleep, too tired to talk. It was an
unsatisfying conversation, made worse by the fact that the two of
them weren't used to talking about Important Matters without laps
and hugs. Still, Susy was happy and secure in her grandparents'
care and just homesick enough to satisfy Liz.

"Is she getting plenty of
boat rides?" asked Jack when Liz hung up.

"You bet. She's been
through the Pirates of the Caribbean; on the jungle cruise; on the
ferry to Tom Sawyer's Island. Tomorrow comes something called Mike
Fink's Keelboats," Liz said, smiling.

"Sounds promising," Jack
said. "Come and sit."

Jack had arranged the
half-dozen white cartons on the table like a small village of food
and had set out plates and silverware. He took a pencil and pad
from her desk and tossed them on the table, then popped the tabs on
the two cans of Budweiser he'd hunted down in the back of the
fridge.

"Okay," he announced
cheerfully. "First, food. Then work."

Then sex?
she wondered. Was she the only one wondering it?
How could he be this way — so casual, when nothing about their
relationship was casual? Could he honestly have forgotten about
their fight?

"Before we go any further,
I want to apologize for the way I stalked out of your house," she
said briskly. "I overreacted."

He was midsip in his beer.
Putting the can down carefully, he said, "No, Liz, you didn't
overreact. You behaved with a lot more dignity than I would have
done. I'm the one who owes the apology," he said, coloring, "which
is why I came looking for you. To say how sorry I am. I was — truly
— an ass."

"Apology accepted," Liz
said simply. His words sounded sweet in her ear; it occurred to her
that neither her father nor her ex-husband had ever said them. She
smiled to herself, thinking,
It's nice
when a man can admit he's an ass.

He misunderstood her
smile. Laying his hand on her wrist for emphasis, he said softly,
"I mean it. I had no right to trivialize what you do for a living.
In the first place, it's not trivial: look at today, in the
shelter. And in the second place, who am I to criticize?" he said
ironically. "I launch rich men's toys for a living."

"You
know
that's not all you —" Liz
stopped herself. "You're right," she said with a good-natured
laugh. "Neither one of us is ever gonna be President of the United
States. Let's eat."

The air had cleared;
suddenly it seemed easier to breathe. Liz put aside her will-we,
won't-we agony and concentrated on the food and the fund-raiser.
They attacked the meal with gusto and began throwing ideas back and
forth with abandon.

"Okay," Jack started out
by saying. "First question: How much of your time will an event
take?"

"A biggish one? Half my
time for the next three months."

"Too much time. We'll
scale down. What are some minimum-manpower events?"

"Who do we want to
attract? An older crowd brings money; a younger crowd brings
enthusiasm for the cause."

"Anne's Place needs both.
What've you got? Talk to me, talk to me," he said comically,
stabbing his Lo Mein.

"A dinner dance is one way
to go. We'd need two bands for wide appeal, though: swing and
rock."

"Nah. What about a
walkathon? I see those all the time."

"Overdone.
Wow.
This Kung Bo
Chicken's great. We could do an auction. No — no time for
that."

"What if I produced a
celebrity? Schwarzenegger likes Newport."

She was impressed. "You
know
Arnold?"

Jack smiled. "I know he
likes Newport, is what I actually know. But say, someone like
him."

She thought about it, then
put the thought aside. "I don't have the experience to handle a
celebrity event," she admitted ruefully.

"Beach party? Amplified
music, big barbecue?" he suggested.

She cringed. "Just what
the locals need — someone stealing their beach and playing loud
music as they do it. You want to be run out of town on a
rail?"

She stole a spicy shrimp
from his plate, bit into it, started choking, and washed down the
fire with beer. "Ha-a-hht," she said, gasping, as the tears flowed
freely.

"Serves you right," he
said with satisfaction. "This sounds a little decadent, but I've
heard of something called Cow Pie Bingo. What you do is mark off a
field into squares, then 'sell' each square for, say, twenty bucks.
Then you let an overfed cow wander around, and where she drops
her—"

"Yeah, yeah, I read about
that," she said, laughing through her tears. "Did you know a
ministry in Canada refused to grant some charity a lottery license
to do it because they thought the cow could be influenced into
where to drop her — droppings? In any case, it's gambling. Besides,
we don't have a cow."

"There's always Snowball,"
he said helpfully.

The infamous Snowball
incident sent them into a round of comfortable laughter, and she
thought,
He'
s
so easy to get along with. I am
having such a good time here. I'd love to make it last.

"That's the trouble with
Newport," Liz said at last. "It's such a great place to stage a
charitable event. We've got mansions, historic homes, gardens,
galleries, restaurants, beaches, an ocean, a bay, superb
architecture, an international reputation." She sighed in
frustration and said, "We photograph well, dammit.
Everything's
been done
here."

"Garden tour?"

"Done."

"Cruise party?"

"Done."

"Food festival?
Dine-around? Cook-off'?"

"Done, done,
done."

"Jumble? White elephant
sale?"

"Not enough money. Look,
Jack, maybe we should just make this a friend-raiser instead of a
fund-raiser. We'll make sure everyone learns about Anne's Place,
what it does, how important it is to the community. Then next
year—"

"No," Jack said. "I want
the money for them this year. I know you think I'm a
Jack-come-lately to this. But something about the women there
touched me in a — well — a really profound way," he said, almost
embarrassed about it. "I want to do this. That's all."

"Sure," said Liz softly.
"It's just a question of finding the right fit. Let me
think."

She avoided the hot food
and picked at the Moo Shu veggies, mulling her options. Jack
respected her frown of concentration and busied himself with his
Peking ribs. The silence went on for a while; but it was a
comfortable, easy silence.

"Costume party," Liz said
at last. "We'll have a costume party. It cuts across all age groups
and income levels. It lets old people feel young and young people
feel old. If someone doesn't have the money to rent an expensive
costume, he can use imagination to design a clever one."

"Sounds good to me," Jack
said, his blue eyes alight with appreciation. "Will it have a
theme?"

She had an inspiration.
"How about 'From the Gilded Age to the New Age'?" she suggested,
stealing shamelessly from Grant Dade's doctoral thesis."

"Fine. We're talking about
a costume
ball,
right?"

Liz wrinkled her nose and
said, "Too expensive. I don't know what the entertainment will be.
But it'll be cheap. We want maximum bang for our buck."

The glitter in Jack's eyes
faded. "I don't want this to look like some Spartan affair," he
said diplomatically.

"I suppose you mean thrown
together," Liz said, trying to decide whether to be offended. With
a dangerous smile, she asked, "Have I failed to meet your high
standards so far?"

"Obviously not," he said,
retreating. "But we want real money to come to this thing. Are you
sure we don't want a ball?" he asked, almost plaintively. "At least
I know about balls."

"Mis-ter
Eastman. This will not be an extravaganza. This
will not be some private bash for you and your pals. This is going
to be a cost-effective
event.
You can stack the honorary committee with every
socialite you know. But I absolutely, positively have to have the
final say on everything. Are we agreed or not?"

"Agreed," Jack said,
disarming her with a smile. Then, resting on his forearms, he
leaned toward her and said, "Kiss me."

"Kiss you!" She laughed
uncertainly and looked away. "Why should I kiss you?"

"Because somehow I feel
like a frog," he said with a rueful smile in his voice. "If you
kiss me, I'm hoping I turn into your prince."