Curious Wine (19 page)

A hand at her throat, she studied him.

He continued, “So I’ve been seeing him three weeks now, four times a week. He showed me what a prick I’ve been. I learned a lot about myself I didn’t like learning, but it was all true. It’s about time I grew up, Diana. He asked me questions about you I couldn’t answer. What you think about things. What kind of books you read. Jesus, I didn’t know. After five years of living with you, loving you. I’m not proud of how I was with you. I was a jerk.”

Nonplussed, she stared at him.

“I’ve been a lot more serious since you… since we broke up. I guess they were looking for some clue I was settling down. Richardson recommended me for sales manager.”

She said excitedly, delighted for him, “Jack, that’s wonderful. You’ll be so good, you have such skill with people-”

His smile was warm and eager. “Thanks, honey. But there’s one hitch. I’ll be transferred, the Florida office. Fort Lauderdale. I’ll be leaving in another week.”

“I see.” She felt pummeled by tiny shocks.

“I’ve thought about it, I talked to Doctor Phipps. I’ve decided I want to go. If we don’t get back together I think it’s better for me to get away. If we do, it would be good to start again in a new place. So I can show you I’ve really grown up.” He looked at her beseechingly. “Florida isn’t a bad place. And if I do a good job I won’t be there more than a year. Two at the most. And we could come back right away if we hated it.”

“I’m sure Florida isn’t a bad place,” she murmured.

“I want you to come with me, start all over again. I’d really like us to get married, but if you don’t want to, that’s okay.

I want you to come with me. Diana—give me one more chance.”

Diana said without pain and with utter certainty, “No, Jack.”

Jack sighed, looked down at his drink, rattled the ice cubes. “Think it over. Take a couple of days.”

“I don’t need to.”

“I love you, Diana. I need you.” His eyes, his voice were pleading.

She said resignedly, hating this, knowing it was inevitable, “You need someone. Not necessarily me. You can love a lot of women. Maybe you should.”

“You’re the only woman I want. Nobody else ever meant anything. You loved me once. You know you did.”

“It isn’t enough.”

“There were so many good things. Remember? The good things? Breakfast in bed? Reading the paper to each other? Remember Bourbon Street? The way we discovered it together? Remember how good it all was? Our trips to Vegas? Christmas at Yosemite? Jesus it was so pretty. Our friends want us back together. Bud and Rita miss us at Friday night poker.”

“It isn’t enough.”

“It was so good in bed, you know it was. We’re terrific for each other. Doctor Phipps says not many people have sex as good as we did, as often. After five years, to still want it that much, it was a very good thing we had together.”

“It isn’t enough.”

“You’ve got somebody already. Is that it, Diana?”

She touched the cross at her throat, hidden in the folds of her dress. “I feel no need to answer that question.”

“There
is
somebody.”

She shrugged. “I’ve already answered that question.”

He picked up his drink. A drop fell from the frosted glass onto the table. She thought of slender fingers stroking frost from a glass. He rubbed the drop carefully with his fingers, removing it from the table, and put the drink down.

“It’s really over, then?”

Diana nodded. “Yes,” she said.

He said, “The doctor said sometimes when love ends it just ends. There’s nothing left, the spark goes out, it’s just over.”

Diana did not reply.

He said, “I don’t know if that’s true but I guess there’s no point in hashing things over. I’m a good salesman, but you know the product I’m trying to sell you, you had it for five years. I’m just telling you again it’s a new improved product. I’ll be around another week if you change your mind.”

He rose. His strides toward the door slowed, stopped. “Can we stay friends?”

“Yes. But I think our lives will be quite separate.” She opened the door, wanting him to be quickly gone. She was close to tears.

“Let me kiss you?”

“No, Jack. Don’t try,” she ordered sharply as he moved toward her.

“Am I that repulsive now?” His face was twisted with hurt, anger.

“No,” she said, in pain. “There’s just no reason to.”

“Good luck,” he said abruptly. “You know where I am.”

“Good luck to you.”

In a desolation of loneliness, she stood by her living room window, wiping tears away, remembering tender lips kissing her eyes and moving down to warmly, sweetly wash tears from her face. She turned and stared at the telephone she would use three weeks and three nights from tonight, longing for the time to be past, tormented by the possibility her call might not even be answered.

She watched Jack’s car roar away, the headlights quickly vanishing in the night. There was a scent of burning wood in the spring air, someone’s fireplace. Diana drew the scent into her lungs, thinking it could be the smell of burning bridges.

Chapter 16

She went to bed early each night, slept late on weekends. In a twilight state of half-sleep she would lie in bed for hours, her mind gliding through a gallery of memories, lengthy episodes, brief scenes, still pictures, an unending flow of her time with Lane. She caught and held moments in timeless dreaming memory: the concentrated intelligence in Lane’s eyes as she articulated a thought; Lane smiling; Lane’s face in the shadows of their room; a scene of their lovemaking—Lane's face, her lips very full and parted as she breathed in deep gasps, her eyes tightly closed, masking emotion from Diana in unsharing privacy as orgasm drained from her.

Soon she had trouble concentrating on Lane's face; when she tried to hold it in sharp focus it became ambiguously featured. Bitterly, she reproached herself for not having a picture of Lane. Her clearest images now emerged from other people: an element of someone's features, the line of body, a stride, the curve of hair over a forehead—these would bring sudden breath-taking images that would begin to fade even as she focused on them.

She was acutely conscious of her own body, examining herself hypercritically—her figure, her skin and muscle tone. She groomed her hair and nails endlessly and began to exercise, performing for an hour each day a strenuous regimen that left her in limp exhaustion, muscles trembling. In the evenings she walked, long walks, her mind shrouded, lulled by the rhythmic cadence of her footsteps. Then the thought occurred that Lane might call—impulsively, perhaps. Rationally, she knew that Lane was too disciplined, too highly controlled; nevertheless, she stopped walking in the evenings.

For a week after she saw Jack, she paced and stalked her apartment, smoldering with anger. If Lane cared anything about her she would relent, break their agreement and call. Lane was putting her through this, making her wait and suffer, giving her this anguish, these doubts.

During the weekdays she occupied her mind with her job, striving for perfection in her paperwork, immersing herself during interviews. In the evenings, unable to concentrate on television or reading except for brief periods, unable to listen to music, which she had discovered tormented her, she cooked elaborate dishes requiring considerable effort and attention. She would eat her creations absently and without interest as she glanced over a newspaper or magazine. The importance of these meals was solely in their preparation.

Three weeks after their return from Lake Tahoe, Vivian took her to lunch and chided her with grumpy affection. “You won’t come over, you won’t even talk to me on the phone. I know I’m a big bore but you could at least be polite for the sake of the years we’ve been friends. God, Diana… I thought maybe it would be better once we got back from Tahoe.”

Diana said contritely, “I’ll be better soon. I just need to be by myself for now. Why don’t you just leave me be and stop worrying?”

“I can’t do that, honey. You’re alone there in that apartment.” Vivian took Diana’s hand, rubbed it between her two. “Dear,” she said worriedly, “people who won’t see or talk to other people often develop, problems. Diana honey, they can even have nervous breakdowns.”

“Oh Viv, please don’t worry,” Diana said, stricken with guilt. “It’s not anything remotely like that. I just need a little more time. Then things will be… will change, I promise.”

Vivian said doubtfully, “Well, okay. At least I see you every day at the office.”

As time dragged by, Diana was tortured by an increasing conviction that Lane’s feeling would not survive their separation, that too many factors were working against it. Five days and nights together was too little time. Their relationship was too tenuous and too perilous to last. Lane would become immersed in her work, all her emotion and energy again channeled into her career. Her father’s influence would reach out to her, reassert itself—even from the grave his disapproval would cause Lane to relinquish once more her strongest desires.

Thoughts of Carol haunted her. Jealousy was a new emotion, and it savaged her. Carol would be thirty-three now, undoubtedly very beautiful still—perhaps more so; some women became more beautiful with age. Did Lane still care for her even after the interval of years? Would she seek her, released from the inhibitions that had prevented a relationship she had desired so much? Diana thought of Carol incessantly as she exercised, as she shaped and polished her fingernails, as she creamed her skin and brushed her hair, thinking of her in a violent jealous hatred.

Intermittently and with pain, she thought of Jack. He had called her once, before he had left for Florida, pleading, finally breaking down, crying. He had never cried before with her. She had been calm; she had taken his new address in Fort Lauderdale as if it had been information given her by a stranger. Afterward she had lain on her sofa for hours, remembering him and crying, the memory of his sobs stabbing into her, and feeling utterly alone and more unhappy than she ever had in her life.

She could bear least of all the empty expanses of weekends, and she fled from her aloneness to her father. She spent three Sundays at his house, going over early in the day, staying into the evening, watching TV sports with him, cooking for him, playing games of cribbage, listening to stories of his teaching, reminiscing over their lives together.

The last Sunday before she would call Lane was a soft mild day in April. That afternoon she sat with her father at the picnic table in his backyard, playing cards. As she picked up the deck to shuffle for another game of cribbage, his large gentle hands covered hers.

“You know I never interfere,” he said.

“I don’t know if I’ve ever deserved your confidence,” she said, relaxed and warm under his affection, “but I’ve always appreciated it.”

“Non-interference has been difficult at times—especially when you were married. But you were an adult…” He took his hands away, reached into the pocket of his plaid shirt for his pipe. “I’ve been seeing a lot of you lately, not that I haven’t loved you being here—”

“I’m really fine, Dad,” she murmured, lowering her eyes. “There’s nothing wrong.”

He lit his pipe, tamping the tobacco down as he applied flame. She had never understood how he managed not to burn his index finger.

“Several coincidences concern me, my love. Jack, for one. I’ll confess to you now, I had many misgivings about him all the time you lived together. I do like a man who marries his woman, gives her all the protection he can. For a liberal democrat, I do have my old-fashioned quirks. But Jack showed me a new, mature side of him. He asked me to help him with you. Of course I couldn’t… wouldn’t. But I’ll always have more respect for him.”

She remained silent, watching her father stroke his gray goatee with a thumb and middle finger, a habitual gesture. As he sucked on his pipe, he studied her with light brown eyes the same shape as her own.

“Then Vivian called. For Vivian to call…” He sighed. “Well, she’s a good friend to both of us but it’s you she truly loves. Those two events, and you coming over so much. For a grown child to suddenly need to be with a parent…” He sighed again. “Whatever’s wrong, I know it isn’t Jack. I know how damaging your divorce was to your self-esteem… I don’t believe Jack can even compare to that. I want you to tell me what’s wrong.”

Diana riffled the cards, reflecting. She could not tell her father—but what could she say to him? “Dad,” she finally said, “I won’t lie to you and insist nothing’s wrong. But I’m all right, I really am.” She smiled—disarmingly, she hoped. “I respectfully request a return to your noninterference policy.”

He smiled, pushed a shock of brown-gray hair off his forehead. “There were things I didn’t tell my parents, either. Especially as a young man. But those were different times, and we’re two mature, intelligent people, more sophisticated than most. There isn’t much in this world that would even surprise me, let alone disturb me.”

She hesitated, still riffling the cards, studying her father anxiously, uncertainly. He put his pipe down on the picnic table, covered her hands again with his. “I know you. Nothing you can say would… disturb me.”

“Dad,” she said, seizing all her courage and looking into his eyes, “what if I told you I’ve fallen in love with a woman?”

He looked down, at their hands. He turned her hands over, and for some time rubbed his palms against hers. “When you turned sixteen,” he said, his eyes on hers, but distant, “I began to prepare myself. I thought about you bringing home a black man, a Chicano, a bearded orthodox Jew—”

She began to chuckle.

“ — I even imagined a young man with hair down to his waist and playing a sitar.” His smile was sudden, and self- mocking. “I don’t know why it never occurred to me to prepare myself for—”

He released her hands, picked up his pipe. “I need a little time… Do you know why this…” He looked at her helplessly.

“I’ve never known what it is that I needed, or even that I needed. Until I found this.”

“Is it… is it because after your mother…” He swallowed and said with difficulty, “Because I never gave you another—”