Bitter Sweet (6 page)
What the hell?
He hung up, returned the phone to the cabinet and stood staring at it.
at night after twenty-three years Maggie calls. Why’? He slipped his hands inside the elastic waistband of his shorts and scratched his belly, wondering. He opened the refrigerator and stood a while with the chill air fanning his bare legs, registering little but the repetitive thought:
Just to say hi, she’d said, but that sounded fishy.
He took out a container of orange juice, uncapped it and swilled half of it straight from the bottle. Backhanding his mouth, he continued standing in the wedge of light from the open door, baffled. He’d probably never know the real reason. Loneliness, maybe. Nothing more.
He put the juice away, snapped out the kitchen light and returned to his bedroom.
Nancy
was sitting up cross-legged with the light on, dressed in a peach satin teddy and tap pants, her shapel limbs gleaming in the lamplight.
‘Well, that took a while,’ she remarked dryly. ‘Surprised the hell out of me.’ “Maggie Pearson?’ ‘Yup.’
‘The one you took to the prom?’
‘Yup.’
‘What did she want?’
He dropped onto the bed, braced his hands beside her hip and kissed her left breast above an inviting edge of peach coloured lace. ‘My body, what else?’
‘Eric!’ Grabbing a fistful of his hair, she lifted his head ‘What did she want?’
He shrugged noncommittally. ‘Damned if I know. She said she talked to Brookie and Brookie gave her my phone number and told her to call me. I still haven’t figured it out’.
‘Brookie?’
‘Glenda Kerschner. Her maiden name was Holbrook.’ ‘Oh. The cherry picker’s wife.’
‘Yeah. She and Maggie were best friends in high school. We were all friends, a whole gang of us who ran along together.’
‘That still doesn’t answer my question. What is your old girlfriend doing calling you in the middle of the night?’
With his inner wrists brushing her jutting knees he smiled smugly into her face. ‘Jealous?’
‘Curious. ‘
‘Well, I don’t know.’ He kissed
Nancy
’s mouth. “Her husband died.’ He kissed her throat. ‘She’s lonely, that’s all I can figure out.’ He kissed her breast. ‘She said to tell you she’s sorry she woke you up.’ He bit her nipple, silk and all, ‘Where does she live?’
‘
Seattle
.’ The word was muffled against
Nancy
’s lingerie.
“Oh... in that case. . .’
Nancy
uncrossed her legs, slid onto her back and pulled him down on top of her, linking her arms and ankles behind him. They kissed, long and lazily, rocking against each other.
When he lifted his head she looked into his eyes and said, ‘I miss you when I’m gone, Eric.’
‘Then stop going.’
‘And do what?’
‘Keep the books for me, open a boutique and sell all your fancy cosmetics to the tourists here in Fish Creek...’ He paused before adding, ‘... be a hausfrau and raise a pack of brats.’
Or even one brat would do. But he knew better than to push the subject.
‘Hey,’ she scolded, ‘we’re starting something interesting here. Let’s not spoil it with that old epistle.’
She drew his head down, invited his tongue inside her mouth and became the aggressor, stripping him of his briefs, rolling him onto his back, and slithering from her own skimpy lingerie. She was adept, very adept, and infallibly desirable. She saw to her desirability the way some wives see to their daily housework, expending much time and energy upon it, allotting it a fixed time in her schedule.
Lord, she was a beautiful creature. While she reversed their roles and seduced him, he admired her at close range, her skin with the exquisite texture of an eggshell, incredibly unaged for a woman of thirty-eight, cared for twice a day with the expensive French cosmetics she sold; her nails, professionally groomed and artificially lengthened, painted a gleaming raspberry; her hair, which was presently a deep mahogany colour, shining with highlights added by some costly beautician in some far-off city where she’d been this past week. Orlane paid their sales reps a hair and nail allowance and gave them unlimited gratis merchandise with the understanding that they present themselves as walking testimonials for their products. The company got its money’s worth with Nancy Macaffee. She was the most beautiful woman he knew.
She ran one long nail across his lips and inside them. He bit it lightly, then, still lying beneath her, reached up to stroke her hair.
‘I like the new colour’ he murmured, threading his fingers back along her skull, combing her hair towards the ceiling, then letting it fall. She had hair as coarse as a mare’s tail, thick and healthy. Daytime, she wore it drawn back to the nape in a classic, smooth, tucked tail, held by a sixty-dollar gold barrette. Tonight it bunched around her high cheekbones, making her look like Cleopatra in an up-draught.
She sat on his abdomen, svelte, nude, shaking her head until the hair slapped the corners of her eyes, flexing her fingers in the hair on his chest like a dozing cat.
‘Maurice did it... in
Chicago
.’
‘Maurice, hm?’
She gave her head a final shake and let an insinuating smile tease her lips as she studied him with hooded eyes.
‘Mm-hmm . . .’
On her hips his hands flexed repeatedly. ‘You know, you’re incredible.’
‘Why?’ She scratched a dim white line from his throat down to his pelvic arch and watched it return to its natural colour.
‘You wake up in the middle of the night looking as if you just got up from Maurice’s chair.’
Her eyebrows were brushed upward, her eyelashes thick and black around deep brown eyes. Long ago, when she’d been in training to learn her trade, she’d told him a fact she’d learned: that most people are born with a single row of lashes, but some are blessed with a double.
Nancy
had a double and then some. She had incredible eyes. Lips, too. ‘Come here,’ he ordered gruffly, catching her by the armpits and tipping her down.
‘We’ve got five days to make up for.’ He flipped her over neatly and slipped a hand between her legs, touched her inside, found her wet and swollen with desire equalling his own. He felt her cool hand surround him at last and shuddered with her first stroke. They knew each other’s sexual temperaments intrinsically, knew what the other needed, wanted, liked best.
But at the moment when he reached to place himself inside her, she pressed him away, whispering, ‘Wait, sweetheart, I’ll be right back.’
He stayed where he was, pinning her down. ‘Why don’t you forget it tonight?’
‘I can’t. It’s too risky.’
‘So what?’ He continued enticing her, stroking her shallowly, strewing kisses across her face. ‘Take a chance,’ he murmured against her lips. ‘Would it be the end of the world if you got pregnant?’
She chuckled, bit the end of his chin and repeated, Il be right back,’ then escaped and padded across the carpet to the bathroom down the hall.
He sighed, flopped to his back and closed his eyes. When? But he knew the answer. Never.
She pampered her body not only for the benefit of Orlane cosmetics, not only for him, but for herself. She was afraid of jeopardizing that perfection. He had taken a chance, introducing the subject tonight. Most times when he mentioned having a baby, she grew indignant and found something in the room to occupy her attention. Afterward, for the remainder of their weekend together, the atmosphere would be strained. So he’d learned not to badger her about it. But the years were on a downhill run. In October he’d be forty-one; another two years or so and he’d be too old to want to start a family. A kid deserved an old man with a little zip and zest, one he could scrimmage and wrestle with, reel in the big ones with.
Eric recalled his earliest memory, of riding above his father’s head, seated on the old man’s wide, cupped palm while the gulls wheeled overhead. ‘See them birds, son? Follow them and they’ll tell you where there’s fish.’ In sharp contrast came the memory of himself and his brothers and sister standing around the bed when his father died, all with tears streaming down their faces as one by one they kissed the old man’s lifeless cheek, then their ma’s, before leaving her alone with him. More than anything in the world, he wanted a family.
The mattress shifted and Eric opened his eyes.
Nancy
knelt above him. ‘Hi, I’m back.’
They made love, quite expertly if the book s were any criteria. They were inventive and agile. They sampled three different positions. They verbalized their wishes. Eric experienced one orgasm;
Nancy
, two. But when it was over and the room dark, he lay studying the shadowed ceiling, cradling his head on his arms and pondering how empty the act could be when not used for its intended purpose.
Nancy
rolled close, threw an arm and a leg over him and tried to finesse him into cuddling. She commandeered his arm and drew it around her waist. But he had no desire to hold her as they drifted off to sleep.
In the morning
Nancy
rose at
and Eric at
, the moment the shower was free. He thought she must be the last woman in
America
who still used a vanity table. The house, prairie-styled, circa 1919, had never pleased
Nancy
. She had moved into it under duress, complaining that the kitchen was unsatisfactory, the plug-ins inadequate and the bathroom a joke. Thus the vanity table in the bedroom.
It sat against a narrow stretch of wall between two windows, accompanied by a large round makeup mirror circled by lights.
While Eric showered and dressed,
Nancy
went through her morning beauty rite: pots and tubes and bottles and wands; jellies and lotions, sprays and creams; hair blowers and curlers and teasers and lifters. Though he’d never been able to understand how it could take her an hour and fifteen minutes, he’d watched her often enough to know it did. The cosmetic ritual was as deeply ingrained in
Nancy
’s life as dieting. She did both as a matter of rote, finding it unthinkable to appear even at her own breakfast table without looking as flawless as she would if she were flying into New York to meet the Orlane hierarchy.
While
Nancy
sat at the makeup mirror, Eric moved about the bedroom, listening to the weather on the radio, dressing in white jeans, white Reeboks and a sky-blue knit pullover with the company logo, a ship’s wheel, and his name stitched on the breast pocket.
Tying his sneakers, he asked, ‘Want anything from the bakery?’
She was drawing fine auburn eyelashes onto her lower lids. ‘You eat too much of that stuff.
You should have some wholegrain instead.’ ‘My only vice. Be right back.’
She watched him leave the room, proud of his continued leanness, his eye-catching good looks. He had been displeased last night, she knew, and it worried her. She wanted their relationship -just the two of them - to be enough for him, as it was for her. She’d never been able to understand why he thought he needed more.
In the kitchen he put coffee on to perk before stepping outside and pausing on the front stoop, studying the town and the water below. Main Street, a mere block away, contoured the shoreline of Fish Creek Harbor, which lay this morning beneath a patchy pink-tinged mist, obscuring the view of Peninsula State Park, due north across the water. At the town docks sailboats sat motionlessly, their masts piercing the fog, visible above the treetops and the roofs of the businesses along
Main
. He knew that street and the establishments on it as well as he knew the waters of the bay, from the stately old White Gull Inn on the west end to the sassy new Top of the Hill Shops at the east. He knew the people down there, too, hometown folks who waved when they saw his pickup go by and knew what time the mail came into the post office each day (between 11 :00 and 12:00) and how many churches the town had, and who belonged to which congregation.
These first few minutes outside were some of the best of his day, casting a weather eye at the water and the eastern sky above the woods which crowded the town, listening to a mourning dove mimic itself from a highwire nearby, inhaling the scent of the giant cedars behind the house and the aroma of fresh bread, lifting from the bakery at the bottom of the hill.
Why did Maggie Pearson call me after twenty-three years? Out of nowhere the thought intruded. Startled by it, Eric set his feet in motion and jogged down the hill, hollering hello to Pete Nelson through the back screen door of the bakery as he passed it and headed around the building. It was a pretty little place, set back from the street with a grassy front lawn, surrounded by a white-railed porch and beds of bright flowers that gave it a homey look.
Inside, he nodded to two early tourists buying bismarcks, exchanged good mornings with the pretty, young Hawkins girl behind the counter and asked after her mother, who’d had a gallbladder operation, then exchanged pleasantries with Pete, who stuck his head out of the back room, and with Sam Ellerby, who was out collecting his usual tray of assorted rolls and breads to serve at the Summertime Restaurant on Spruce Street, two blocks away.