Arm Candy (29 page)

Relief had new meaning as Penelope’s entire tightly wound-up body grew limp with the word “nieces.”

“Mom?” Wes’s muted voice called through the closed car door as he knocked on the window.

Penelope ran to the car and opened the door, unbuckling Wes. She helped him step out of the car. She picked him up, holding him on her hip in his little red T-shirt and blue shorts as her heart sprinted like hoofbeats in a derby dash.

“Wesley,” she said in a voice so shaky it was studded with nervous breaths. “This is Wes.” She put him down and held his hand.

Wesley bent down on one knee, facing him.

“Hey, buddy,” he said, charmingly. But then, his expression changed, his eyes widening. As he looked into Wes’s eyes, he knew. He instantly looked up at Penelope. “Is this . . . ?”

Penelope’s mouth quivered, and she simply nodded.

To her complete shock, Wesley grabbed Wes and hugged him so tightly she thought the boy’s lungs would squeeze out his last gasp of CO
₂
.

“Wes. Wes, I am your dad!” he said to her son. “I’m your dad.”

Streams of tears flowed down Penelope’s cheeks. Wes looked confused, but Wesley’s warmth and enthusiasm were infectious and softened any apprehensions.

“You’re my daddy?” Wes said, looking at Wesley’s welling eyes.

“Yes, I have a son!” He engulfed his child in a bear hug, and Wes’s little arms moved from his sides up and around his father’s neck, encircling him so tightly that his little hands touched his elbows.

The vision transcended Penelope’s wildest hopes. It had been only a few days, so long ago; drugs, music, a blur of rolling in grass, of keeping each other warm, a rainbowy collage of dancing and good-byes. And here they were.

“I was so worried you had a family,” she said. “And I didn’t want to just show up but I’ve been trying to find you for so long and I have just thought of this—dreamed of it—for so long.”

“Penelope,” he said, kissing her cheek and squeezing her hand. “I’m so happy you’re here.”

Without talking about plans or the future or even the past, the little family cooked dinner. The next night they did the same. And the night after that. For two weeks, as Wesley lay awake in a spare room off the kitchen while Penelope slept upstairs in his bed, he replayed the memories of Woodstock, fresher and more colorful than ever.

One night after Wes went to sleep, Wesley asked Penelope about her life in San Francisco. She spoke of her friends, the familiarity of the rolling hills and winding streets, the place she bought her paper, the café where she sipped her espresso.

He reached over and took her hand.

“I was so terrified we’d come here and ruin your life,” Penelope confessed, feeling the spark between them as he ran his fingers over hers.

“
Ruin
it?” Wes laughed, kissing her hand. “Are you kidding, my life is made.”

As Penelope’s eyes watered, Wesley got up, moved her chair with her in it, bent down and swept her up in his arms. He carried her to his bed and kissed her like he had in the grass, but no magic pills, no dewy damp air, no music. This time, the guitar chords were all in their heads, shared memories they now relived together. Their spines both tingled even without acid, and now to be completely naked together, warm skin on skin, legs intertwined, Wesley and Penelope transcended their former ecstasy by finding it once more, as adults.

“Penelope,” Wesley said, holding her trembling soft body. “Can you and Wes stay? I don’t have that much, but whatever I have, it’s yours.”

—Golda Meir

 

 

 

 

 

“S
o the sex is like mind-blowingly sensational, right?” probed Allison.

“I guess, yes,” said Eden, stirring four Sugars in the Raw into her cappuccino.

“What do you mean, you
guess
?” asked Allison.

“It is,” replied Eden, warming her hands on the scalding mug. “I’m crazy about him. He’s such a great guy and I just am so grateful to him, you know? I feel like he picked me up and dusted me off after Otto basically chucked me out with yesterday’s news. He made me feel beautiful and special again.”

“Uh-oh,” said Allison, leaning back in her chair, knowingly. “He’s toast.”

“What? Wait, why do you say that?” Eden asked.

“I know you. That tone.”

“No, no, it’s just . . . ,” Eden trailed off. “I feel like Chase is so wonderful, he’s such a great guy but . . . I have this strange kind of . . .
ache
lately.”

“For what? My analyst would say for your youth, maybe,” said Allison. “That’s not surprising. I was running around with a hundred guys in my twenties! You were bound to Otto and had Cole! Maybe you just miss that era in your life; you weren’t shagging a million people like the rest of us.”

“It’s not about the million people,” Eden said, trailing off as she stirred her coffee. She finally got the courage to meet Allison’s inquisitive gaze across the table. “It’s about one.”

“Who?”

This was too embarrassing. Eden could barely admit it to herself, let alone say it aloud, even to her best friend.

“Never mind,” said Eden, shaking her head quickly as if to scatter the memories away. “I mean, it’s literally Paleozoic. Forget I said anything.”

“Eden. Come on, it’s totally normal to think about past relationships, about people who were in your life . . .”

“Seriously, not this long ago,” Eden said, looking out the window at the busy street. “It’s the past. It’s foolish to even wonder. It’s just that I bumped into Wes’s mother, Penelope.”

“WHAT? When?”

“A few weeks ago. I can’t stop thinking about him now. He never got married. And his mom, God, she was so . . . amazing, Alli. We spent this whole afternoon together—until the museum closed—and I just have had all these memories flooding back. She told me this whole saga of how she got together with Wes’s dad, and I’m obsessed with it. I realized that I think I’ve been, I don’t know, haunted by that relationship in a way.”

“I can see that. I mean, he was such a great guy. And you totally decimated him.”

“Thanks.”

“What? You did!”

“Don’t remind me. I’ve been thinking about that, you know, the path not taken or whatever. I can’t stop! It’s so unproductive and stupid to waste time thinking about it but knowing what I know now . . .”

“You regret it?”

“No, I mean . . . I don’t have regrets. I have Cole, I have a life here. It’s just Wes was such an amazing person; he never would have treated me like Otto did. He was the type to love each wrinkle and fat roll, you know?”

“I don’t see any of either, annoyingly.”

“I’m just saying I may not have been starting over at this age, you know?”

“Or you might have. There is no way of knowing.”

“Right, as I said, it’s foolish to even think about,” Eden huffed, clearly wanting to change the subject. Sort of.

Allison caught her drift. “So he never married?”

“No, never.”

“Really? Where is he?”

“Moving back here,” Eden said, looking cautiously up at Allison.

“Oh, boy.”

“But it’s irrelevant, anyway. He probably hates me. And there’s Chase. I think in this strange way his sweetness reminded me of Wes. I guess in the whole blur of falling for Otto, having Cole running around, I kind of forgot about the purity of that relationship. I don’t know, in a weird way I think he’s the only man who ever truly loved me.”

“Oh, bullshit! Don’t make me puke. You had countless guys wrapped around your finger!” Allison shot back, calling Eden’s bluff.

“But they didn’t love
me
. I was so lonely for years with Otto, and I think I was lonely in the beginning, too, but I just didn’t notice because we had so much going on when Cole was a baby, and traveling so much, and I was blinded by all the stuff that I now know is just crap. Wes was my best friend. He was totally devoted and I shat all over him. I didn’t break his heart, I trampled it. I obliterated it. I smashed it with a mace.”

“Mace? Like that spray you use on rapists?”

“No, the club with a metal orb with spikes on it. He thought we would be together forever. I didn’t deserve him.”

“Where the fuck is this coming from? Seeing his mom?” wondered Allison, who had never seen her friend pine away over
any
guy.

“I don’t know, I’m unglued,” Eden marveled, not recognizing herself. “Maybe being with Penelope was the catalyst, but I think because of my big birthday coming up I’ve been doing all this bizarre emotional reckoning. I also think . . . maybe in a way being with Chase reminded me of my younger self. What I used to be like. Anyway, it’s a silly time-suck because you can’t go back.”

“I remember now that you said Wes’s mom was really cool. Didn’t she used to visit and take you guys out? You loved her—”

“Yes! She’s amazing. She’s so self-assured and happy and still in love with her husband. In a way she’s what I would love to be like at that age.”

“Geez, I never knew this haunted you like this.”

“It didn’t . . . until now. Somehow Chase reminds me of what Wes wanted to be; the same strength and ideals, but with money. All the money Wes wished he had so he could shower it on me. I was such a greedy piece of shit.”

“Listen, give yourself a break,” Allison said. “If he was so great, you wouldn’t have ended up with Otto.”

But in the darkest recesses of Eden’s mind, she knew the truth was too embarrassing to admit to even her best friend. She had ended up with Otto because he could make her famous. He would make sure she would never have a return bus ticket home to Shickshinny. Otto made her safe, and then he made her a star.

The older she grew, the less her ego mattered to her, and the more she felt the emptiness in her chest. The first four decades had been scripted, mapped out with a cartographer’s precision. She got to the destination she thought she had punched into the satellites of fate above, only to find that X sadly did not mark the spot. Unlike the first forty years, the next forty years were hazy and uncharted. And this time, she wanted to go off road, drop from the grid, not care about where she was going or what she would find. The only thing she wanted to seek was happiness—something, she feared, was more difficult to locate than even the most deeply buried treasure.

—Anonymous

 

 

 

A
fter Wesley and Penelope tucked young Wes into bed, they sat on the front porch with two glasses of wine, side by side.

“I feel strangely spiritual all of a sudden, and I’m not a religious guy,” Wesley said, smiling.

“You are amazing,” said Penelope, taking his hand. “Here you are, living your life, and we show up like a tornado, and you take it all in stride. I’m so sorry. I—tried to call, I just didn’t have the guts. I had to just be extreme, I guess that’s what I do. That’s how I got to Woodstock in the first place, it was total impulse!”

Wesley squeezed her hand. “Thank God you did. See? There I go again. I’ve never believed in God. And in these parts, that is top secret—you’re in the Bible Belt, my dear. But I just never connected with the church or even the whole concept of a higher, invisible being. I’m a builder. My work’s based on things working, fitting together, making sense. I run my hand over the beams, I can touch the wood, bend the metals. God never has made sense to me.”

Penelope nodded, understanding his point.

“And then—I was sitting right here, two, three days ago and I thought to myself, no, I guess it was a prayer, really, that I could fall in love and have a family. Your arrival,” he said, looking in her eyes. “It’s almost like I was heard.”

Penelope leaned in and kissed Wesley, and the kissing, as it turned out, never ended. Six months later, once again in his young life, Wes would serve as ring bearer: but this time to his own parents.

With Wes carrying their thin bands, handmade by a goldsmith friend of Wesley’s, Penelope and Wesley got married. The years were good to this one-time fractured family, and they more than made up for lost time. And soon, Wes became a brother.

His parents had three more children, Lila, Hugh, and Eloise. Friends from his old neighborhood in San Francisco would come to visit, reminders of a life Wes could barely recall—a life with his mom that was now eclipsed by the picture-perfect family. It seeded in him a desire to wander; after all, his own parents wouldn’t have met had they ignored their insatiable urges to travel, to experiment, to take risks.

So it wasn’t a complete shock to his mom and dad when Wes announced, at eighteen, that he wanted to move far away for college. In a quasi-continuation of his father’s line of expertise, Wes decided he wanted to study architecture and went to Columbia in New York City.

Naturally the family was crushed, but something inside his mother made her proud—Wes was certainly wired like his parents, following his gut, going for what he wanted, and maybe, she hoped, his path would lead him to a love who deserved him and cherished his enormous heart and those big blue eyes like his father’s. She suspected, even when Wes was four, that he would have a loving gaze so powerful that a woman who felt that connection to him could never get over him, just as Penelope could never get over Wesley. Until she found him once again. And she was so happy, so at peace, finally, that she knew if she had never gone after him, he would have haunted her forever.

—Anonymous

 

 

 

E
den got a nervous chill as she clicked through Wes’s company Web site. It was crazy to think they were together before the Internet was even a glimmer in Al Gore’s eye. So much time had passed. Each aspect of the site was pure Wes. Clean and restrained, cool and laid-back. It was unpretentious, with modest copy and clean lines. As she looked at the images of what he had built abroad, she smiled. How amazing, what he had done. As much as she loved being with an artist all those years, she saw in Wes’s portfolio true art fused with science, a brilliant combination that had her staring in awe at her Mac.