Overseas (15 page)

“Please,” I said, into his silence. “If you knew how far I’ve come, how hard I’ve fought to find you.”

“But why?” he said. “Why? I’m a stranger to you.”

“Would it be deeply unfair of me to promise to tell you later?” We were standing so close, there in the failing light; I could hardly breathe, for fear his scent would be the end of me. “When you’ve come back tonight? Because it’s hard to explain on its own.”

His right hand rose, grasping, and then fell back. “Kate,” he said, “I’ll send a message to Warwick and Hamilton, make my excuses. The rain’s stopped. We can have dinner. Is that all right?”

“They’ll be suspicious. My reputation will be ruined.”

“I’ll tell them I’m unwell. Exhausted. That I’m keeping to my room.”

“I don’t have anything suitable to wear,” I said.

“That doesn’t matter. You look lovely.”

“I might be sick again, at some point.”

“I’ll find you a basin.
Please
, Kate.” He lifted his hand again, more confidently, and brushed my elbow. I could hear the coals now, new lumps catching fire at last, hissing with renewed strength to warm the air around us.

I said: “You’re impossible to resist, did you know that?”

He grinned, broad and iridescent.

“All right, then, Captain Ashford,” I sighed. “It’s a date.”

9.

Julian stood waiting for me in a shaft of sunlight at the back of the ballet studio, arms folded, with a peculiar smile on his face.

“They’re not supposed to let members of the general public inside,” I complained, to disguise the way my heart skidded at the unexpected sight of him. I’d been thinking about him constantly over the past two days, and still I wasn’t quite prepared for the reality. He stood so tall and broad-shouldered and vital, so radiant with good looks. His extravagant eyes glowed at me.

“I managed to persuade the receptionist to make an exception,” he said, stepping forward to drop a kiss on my lips. The other dancers streamed past us, glancing back curiously. Enviously.

“I’ll just bet.” I sighed. “So how much did you see?”

“Just the last ten minutes.” His mouth turned up in that intimate way of his. “Enough to become enchanted with you all over again.”

“Oh, please. I’m about the least competent woman in the room. They’ve all been doing it nonstop since about age three; I only picked it up again last year. I’d forgotten pretty much everything.”

He made the smallest shake of his head, still smiling. “You had me mesmerized.”

My eyes slipped downward, fastening on the trim white shirt collar showing above the V of his sweater, last button ajar. “Well,” I said, “I think I’d better get dressed. Can you wait in the lobby this time, like everyone else?”

“I’ll try.”

“And no chatting up the receptionist, okay?”

“I wasn’t chatting up anybody,” he protested.

I thought about this while I was pulling on my yoga pants and hoodie in the changing room. “I think I’ve found your fatal flaw,” I said, as we walked to the elevator a few minutes later.

“Which one?”

“You’re smug. You know exactly what kind of effect you have on women, and you don’t have any problem using it.”

“Is that what you think?”

“Oh, I’m
so
right. Come on. You used it on me. You knew I was a sure thing.”

“Not for the reason you think. Anyway, it’s hardly a
fatal
flaw.” He glanced impatiently at his watch. “Let’s just take the stairs. It’s only three floors.”

We found the stairwell doors and tripped down to street level. “So what reason, then?” I demanded, annoyed he’d admitted it. “Why did you know I was a sure thing?”

He pushed open the door to the building lobby and motioned me through before him. “It’s hard to explain. Let me put it this way: when I saw you, in that conference room, I felt as though I already knew you. And it seemed to me that you felt it, too.”

“Did it?” I frowned, trying to remember the details of our meeting. I’d been so addle-brained, so distracted by attraction, it was hard to pin down my emotions.

“Well, perhaps I was wrong about that.” He shrugged, following me through the revolving doors onto the bustling pitted sidewalk of Eighty-sixth Street. “It only felt natural to me, that you would feel the same attraction I did. It was like something falling into place.”

“Oh, is that how it works for guys like you? You just feel this attraction, and the girl follows?”

“You’re deliberately misunderstanding me. Where do you want to go, by the way?” We stood on the corner of Eighty-sixth and Lexington, facing west toward the park.

“Well, I guess I should go home and change, right?”

We turned left to walk down Lexington. The pleasant weather had returned after a rainy interlude yesterday, and now the sidewalks were cluttered with people and baby strollers and sudden blinding shafts of sunlight between the cotton-ball clouds.

“You seem to have this idea,” he said, picking up the thread of our conversation, “that I’m some sort of… of
playboy
, I believe, is the term.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You accused me of consorting with models and actresses…”

“I never accused you! I just thought they were, you know, kind of in your line. As a successful, attractive man, I mean.”

“What I’ll never understand about the modern era,” he said, “is this
fascination
with—what’s the word—celebrities, I suppose. Every age has its fixations, of course, but it’s as though vanity has suddenly been transformed from a sin to a virtue.”

“But we’re all vain,” I pointed out. “I mean, we all buy into it, don’t we?”

He walked along silently for a block or two, eyes fixed somewhere on the sidewalk, a few feet ahead. “Kate,” he said finally, “I daresay it’s rather a cliché, and in some ways a sort of left-handed compliment, to prattle on about inner beauty. And I don’t mean in any way to diminish your own looks, which frankly take my breath away. But I can’t imagine feeling this way about a mere pretty face. It’s everything else, the… the
Kateness
of you.”

I tried to speak, but my throat had closed like a vise. We both stopped, and he pulled me into the little recess next to a bodega fruit display. “You always have some fresh surprise for me, Kate. Some new aspect I never suspected. This dancing of yours.”

“Oh, come on. I’m honestly not that good.”

He shrugged. “You’re talking about technical skill,” he said, “about which I’m no judge at all. I only saw the way you held yourself, so naturally graceful; or perhaps
poised
is a better word. You possess a certain innate dignity, darling, which expresses itself in ways that fascinate me.”

Up until that point, I’d been trying to keep a lid on this infatuation with Julian Laurence. I knew my own weaknesses, my susceptibilities; any romantic illusions had been long ago crushed under the brutally efficient heel of college life. I’d met the first one in the library, as late bloomers do, right after Thanksgiving break: the charming and confident senior of my dreams, handsome, sleepy-eyed. We’d flirted for a week or two before he asked me to the movies with a group of friends—all his, of course—and followed that up with an invitation to watch the Packers game at his house off-campus. Later, I’d realized this was pretty generous wooing, as standards went.

I’d sat on a couch in the living room, surrounded by his roommates, eating stale Tostitos and salsa, sipping from a bottle of Bud Light. When halftime came up, he’d stood and walked down the hall, and his voice had floated out a minute later:
Hey Kate, come to my room, I want to show you something
. I’d heaved upward from the sagging sofa, felt the eyes of his friends shift away, walked down the narrow hallway with its bachelor smells of old beer and old laundry overlaid by the stickiness of a Glade PlugIn. I’d thought, so this is it. Not what you’d dreamed of, maybe, but this is how it’s done in the real world, don’t be a prude, don’t be a coward, get with the program.

Once our clothes were off, I’d blurted—embarrassed, really—that I was a virgin, and he’d said
Oh that’s okay, we don’t need to go all the way,
and we hadn’t, technically. But as I’d cycled through the frozen starry night to my dorm an hour later, my hands still stunned and burning, my flesh strangely raw against the pressure of the bike seat, I knew I was no longer innocent.

He’d asked me over a few more times—I’d never heard the term
booty call
, at that point—until Christmas break arrived and he forgot all about me. Sometime that spring, he’d called up again, out of the blue, because some friend of his had claimed that I was bragging all over the dorm about having had sex with him. I’d stammered my innocence, reeling to recall the melancholy Friday evening I’d confided some part of the story to a trusted friend, and hung up the phone and cried. Not because he’d scolded
me unjustly, or because I still cared about him, but because he’d once touched my body so intimately and yet had never known the smallest thing about me: had never understood that, to me, having sex wasn’t something to brag about.

And now I stood here with
this
man, with Julian Laurence, in the shadow of a grubby storefront, surrounded by fruit crates and flattened cardboard boxes, powerless again, my eyes cast down to the crumbling gum-blotched pavement. I felt his hand slide into mine, firm and certain, turning me, urging me forward.

“Tell me something,” he said. “Why ballet?”

I shifted my throat. “Oh gosh. I don’t know. I guess I was looking for something else besides running. You know, cross-training. My friends were into yoga and Pilates and whatever. I was about to sign up. And then I was walking past this ABT poster one morning on the subway, this dancer just
hanging
there in midair, just unbelievably strong and graceful, both at once, and I thought, that’s it. That’s how I want to be.”

“It suits you.”

“Well, I danced as a child. Until I was thirteen or so, and it started cutting into the rest of my life. The whole teenager thing. Here’s my building.”

He waited in the lobby, chatting with Joey, while I raced upstairs and changed into date clothes—silk tank, cardigan, skinny black pants, kitten heels—and loosened my hair from its tidy ballet knot. It swung with an unfamiliar freedom about my shoulders as I came off the elevator; Julian, turning from Joey, seemed to start at the sight, though his voice was casual enough. “You look lovely. All set?”

“All set. Where to?”

“My car’s parked across from the house; I thought we’d drive.” He stood back politely, allowing me through the revolving door.

“You two have a nice time,” Joey called after us.

We started the short walk down Park Avenue just as the lowering sun began to wash the blue out of the sky. The sidewalks were shadowed now,
only the rare streak of light finding its way between the buildings, and the fragile spring air had already begun to cool. I felt Julian’s hand slip around mine and thought I should say something. “A beautiful evening,” I began, but my words were lost in the shriek of a taxi’s tires, as it flung around the center median and swerved to the curb next to us.

A man jumped out and started toward us. “Jeez!” I exclaimed, but Julian tugged urgently on my hand, pulling me along the sidewalk.

A voice called up from behind. “Ashford! Ashford, by God!”

“Come on,” Julian muttered, pulling me again.

“Ashford!”

I heard footsteps running up behind us. “Ashford! Stop!”

“Does he mean you?” I hissed. My right heel caught on the subway grate, sending me swooping downward. Julian’s arm snagged under me just in time.

The man caught up. “Ashford! I never thought…”

“Sorry, man,” Julian said, in a flawless American accent. “I think you have the wrong guy.”

My mouth dropped open.

The man was in his mid-thirties, round-faced, dark hair. He’d sounded British, though it was hard to tell; he was out of breath from running up the sidewalk after us.

“I’m sorry, mate.” His eyes swerved back and forth between the two of us, and then settled back on Julian. “You look just like a… a chap I used to know. Back in Blighty. I could have sworn…”

“Sorry, buddy,” Julian said again. “Wrong guy.”

“You’re sure, mate?” the man said. He peered one last time. “My name’s Paulson. Andrew Paulson.” He sounded as if he were pleading.

Julian shrugged and shook his head, looking regretful. “Doesn’t ring a bell. I must have one of those faces. Sorry.”

“Your pardon, then. Good… good evening.” The man walked away, so downcast I wanted to run after him, but Julian, who hadn’t let go of my hand, turned back and practically jerked me along with him.

“Um, wait a second,” I said. “That was really weird. Are you going to tell me what was going on?”

“Obviously it was just some idiot, thinking I was his long-lost friend.”

“But why did you use that accent?”

“He was British. I thought if I sounded American, he would give up sooner.”

“Oh,” I said. We were approaching the curb; I looked automatically down the street to check for traffic. We waited for the cars to pass by, and then dashed across against the light.

“Kind of funny, though,” I said, as we continued rapidly down the sidewalk. “I mean, he was British. Just like you.”

“New York is full of us,” he said.

We didn’t say anything more. The parking attendant at the garage retrieved the car, and Julian set me inside absently, almost as though he’d forgotten who I was and why I was there. As soon as we pulled out, he reached over with one hand to pull an iPod out of the center console. He plugged it deftly into the port on the dashboard and clicked through the menus until he reached some music. Mozart, from the sound of it.

“So,” I said, clearing my throat. “Where to?”

He rubbed his forehead. “I’ve spoilt the evening, haven’t I?”

“Not totally, but it’s only eight o’clock. You still have plenty of time to rip it to shreds.”

He tapped his finger on the steering wheel and turned right on Park. “Perhaps I should just take you home.” He sounded saddened, not angry; it gave me hope.