by Jill Barnett
The waiter said something that made her laugh again, in that husky kind of sound nature created to propagate the species of man. Jud leaned back in his chair and relaxed. When the waiter left he said, “You gave him the order without ever looking at the menu. Impressive.”
“I know food. I just don’t know why I’m here.” Something dark crossed over her features, the kind of bleak pain that was difficult for anyone to hide.
“When you look like that I can’t believe life has hurt you so badly, Laurel.”
She closed her eyes as if she could hide that way. He imagined her hands were knotted tightly in her lap. Her breaths were long and measured, then she asked, “Why did you come? Why the flowers?”
He thought about it for a moment, then admitted, “I’m a bad loser.”
“You would have lost more had I stayed and continued to come between you and Cale.”
“You know what I don’t understand?”
“What?”
“The damage was done by then.”
She looked down at her hands, then drank her wine. She poured another glass. “How long did it last?”
“For Cale?”
“Yes, for Cale.”
Jud shrugged. “He was angry for about six months, then he met someone else.” Although Cale and he were close, the most painful events couldn’t be taken back, and the betrayed seldom gave second chances. There were jagged edges both he and his brother felt; the remnants of lost trust stood between them, never going away completely even as the years passed. Some lessons learned in life stayed buried underneath the flesh, scars so sharply and permanently damaging that even the bond of blood couldn’t heal what had happened.
He recognized how guarded she was from the way she spoke, in fits and starts, as if she needed to fill the awkward void of silence they fell into when his gritty questions asked for answers that mined too deeply. So he plied her with expensive wine he didn’t really drink and watched and listened until the salads came, then time and the courses flew by.
The wine loosened her up. Soon she talked freely about restaurants and cooking, about places they both knew well and the menus, about each dish, the piquant sauces, the smoky or pungent flavor of fresh herbs, and the difference between food here and food in France. He wondered why she’d had to run to another continent.
“After living abroad for so long, you come back and things here are so different. I don’t understand it,” she said. “We have so much wealth and science in this country, yet we drive-through for hamburgers made from beef injected with hormones. The fruit in the market can have the right color, especially if you put enough wax on it and grow it under lamps in hothouses, but never the succulent, ambrosial taste of fruit grown on green vines rooted inside the earth and ripened in honest sunshine, strawberries you can eat from the vine without washing, cream separated from that morning’s milk, butter churned an hour ago, a yeasty baguette still warm from the oven, and eggs so fresh and bright you see nature’s true colors are never diluted.” She stopped abruptly. “Why are you smiling?”
“A meal with you is always original.” He poured her the last glass of wine from a second bottle. On the wineglass was the clear red imprint of her lips. Listening to her took him back in time, to another meal, and for an infinitesimal moment he was thirty years younger, infused with the warmth of something lost to him. She talked about food to a man who hungered for something else. “Time doesn’t change everything.” He raised his glass to her, because she looked suddenly uncomfortable. “To old friends.”
She drank but grew quiet, stared at the empty glass with her lips still caught in relief on its rim, and he remembered that years ago he could look at her and feel crazy things. Pleasure was all he could name, and he understood because the years had made comprehension clear as looking through fine crystal—his lifetime was entwined with hers. She was his first true love and he had never mourned the death of that singular love because it had never died.
Her nervousness, the need to avoid him, the look that crossed her face made him believe she might be fighting the same feelings. But he could be a fool. Could be she felt nothing. Could be he was running down the road straight into a cement wall. With nothing to lose, he said, “I never would have thought to look for you in France.”
“It was a spur-of-the-moment decision.”
“What brought you back?”
“Beric’s ambition, Annalisa,” she answered quickly, then after a moment added, “and eventually my mother begged me to come back. She had strong reasons. Our lives had changed, so we came back.” She set her napkin on the table and nervously glanced around. “The place is empty. My God . . . the sun’s setting. What time is it?”
“After five.”
“We have to go.” She stood up quickly, then sat down and put her hand to her head. “How much wine have I had?”
“Almost two bottles, but I’m driving.” He took her arm and they left.
As he started the car, she looked at him and said blankly, “I can’t drive.”
“You don’t have to. This is my car.”
“I know that. You don’t understand. My car is at the office.”
“I’ll take you home, Laurel. Just tell me where I’m going.”
To his surprise she lived maybe ten miles from his condo in Balboa. He wondered what kind of fate made their lives cross now How many times had they passed on the streets, been standing nearby, at a gas station, the market, the theater? Today he discovered he had eaten almost exclusively at the same restaurants she frequented. He’d met her husband before. Barely a foot away from him sat the woman who taught him life was benign and monopolistic. She was the person who had created in him his decades of blinding ambition, which kept time for the softer things in life safely out of his reach. That, and an affinity for poets from centuries before who wrote verse about love and the women who left them.
But we by a love, so much refined,
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less eyes, lips, and hands to miss.
“Turn here . . . Jud?”
He came back into reality, but found himself looking at her eyes, lips, hands. “What?”
“You missed the turn.”
“Sorry.” He turned the car around and from her taut directions eventually pulled into a parking place in the alley behind the houses on the strand. “I’ll walk you to the door.” She didn’t argue but carried her shoes as they walked, his palm resting on the small of her back. While she looked for her keys, he stood on her porch with his hands in his pockets, surrounded by pots of bright flowers and looking across the sand to the soft heartbeat of waves on the shore. “I’d bet it gets pretty crowded in the summer and weekends.”
“It does. Beric complained of the crowds. Said it was like living in a bowl of fish. But I love it here. I like activity around me. Some professional volleyball players are locals and they’ll practice here. For the most part, people are friendly or keep to themselves. When you live alone, sometimes it feels good to have people around. Noise means life. I can sit here and tune it out when I want to. Nights are always quiet.” She shrugged. “It works for me.”
He leaned against the railing, watching her.
The front door was open and she stood in front of it, a bit defensively. “Thank you for lunch . . . and dinner.” She laughed.
“You okay, Jailbait?”
“I’m okay. Home safe and sound.” She stepped inside and looked back.
He didn’t move. “Good night.”
“Good night.” She closed the door.
He walked down the steps, around a patch of pickle-weed with yellow flowers, and onto the brindled sand. The wind came in smelling of the sea and blowing his hair and collar back. A few miles away his condo faced a boat-filled marina, mirror calm and placid from the breakwater. Here he could feel the rush of the waves, taste the salt in the air. A group of surfers coated in seal-like wetsuits and sand carried their s
hort boards down the strand, and soft jazz trumpet came from a nearby patio where a couple sipped drinks and talked. A small blond woman walked a pair of retrievers on the sand while gulls floated noisily overhead, their heads turning pink from the setting sun.
He looked back at her house from a distance, maybe fifty feet away, the wind at his back, the moon overhead, and the sky losing color. A warm light came on upstairs and the strangest sense of peace inexplicably came over him.
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold into airy thinness beat.
He stood there ignoring time until it was dark, and he walked to his car and left. Later that night, he lay in bed and asked himself the singular, elusive question: why this woman? Even more elusive was the answer, but then no man could ever understand his own obsession.
28
At the job site, Annalisa avoided Matt Banning for most of the week. So when both he and her father walked into her meeting with the contractor, she said the first thing that came into her head. “What are you doing here?” Matt seemed startled and she wanted to take the words back.
“Is that any way for a daughter to talk to her father?” Beric said, annoyed. “Can you believe how she speaks to me? You get this from your mother.” With three sentences he had just reduced her to his little girl in front of the men she had to work with, and whose respect she was fighting so hard to win. He turned to Matthew, “Did you hear that?”
“I sure did,” Matt said, half laughing, because he knew she’d been talking to him.
She sat on the corner of the worktable and took a second to set down her pen and notepad. “You caught me unexpectedly,” she said without apologizing. “Why are you here?”
“I need to talk to you immediately about the plans for the Cliff restaurant.”
Matt stepped forward. “Beric tells me he needs more footage in the kitchen.”
That was weird. They hadn’t done the kitchen configurations yet. She faced her dad. “Why? There’s plenty of room.”
“No. No.” Beric shook his head, walked around the table, and collapsed in a leather executive chair. “It is much too small.”
“But we haven’t decided on the actual kitchen configurations. The trade show is only a week away from now. You cannot possibly have a problem when all you’ve seen are the initial blueprints.”
He swung around in the chair and leaned over the table, where the plans lay spread from end to end. “There is a huge problem already. I know. Look at these.” He poked his finger at the blueprints. “I just know. I have a feeling for these things.”
The moment he spoke about feelings she understood he was doing this on purpose and couldn’t believe he would try to undermine her this blatantly. She glanced from the contractor and job sup, to Matt and back to her father, who was frowning at the blueprints.
“Show us where you feel there’s a problem. Here.” She faced down her father, looking into his eyes for something other than what she was seeing: that they were both running neck and neck toward a finish line in a race he had started. “We can’t fix it if we don’t know what’s wrong.”
The seconds ticked by without him saying anything. He looked back at the plans in silence.
“If you can feel something is wrong, study it and tell us where you feel it.”
The moment she said it he slowly lifted his gaze to hers. “I don’t think I can put it into words.”
“You don’t have to. Just point.”
The job sup coughed but she kept her father pinned with a glare.
“Let me finish . . . please,” her dad said with an annoying tone of patience mixed with condescension. “Words that you will understand, ma petite jeune.”
She was so brittle at that exact moment, if someone had touched her, she would have shattered into pieces.
Matt put his hand on her dad’s shoulder. “You know, Beric, Annalisa is one of the smartest young women I have had the pleasure of working with. Jim and Peter—the architect—and I were just talking about it in a meeting a few days ago. We trust her to be able to address any issue or problem you will have with the project.”
She didn’t know if she wanted to smack Matt or hug him. What she did know was that she wanted the men in that room to understand that she could stand on her own. “Jim?” She faced the contractor. “How difficult would it be at this stage to change the size of the kitchen?”
“Well, there are two possibilities.” Jim studied the blueprints. “We can move the freezer unit here and expand out eight feet. Here. That would give us almost another hundred square feet. Or we can expand the wall out and eliminate this patio area between the west corner and the trash container area. This will give us another hundred and fifty.”
“Which is the most expensive?” she asked.
“Eliminating the patio, because we’re dealing with the outside lines of the building.”
“Then we’ll move the freezer units. I’ll check with the manufacturers and do several CADS. I can see what’s new at the trade show.” She didn’t ask anyone his opinion, especially her father, who leaned back in his chair and watched her, his expression unreadable.
He stood abruptly. “I believe my daughter has found the perfect solution.”
His daughter. It was all she could do not to rest her head in her hands and groan. It was always about him.
“I will leave you to your work.” He waved at Matt. “Stay. Stay. I can find my way out.” But he came over and kissed her on the cheek, because Beric King was the kind of man who marked what was his—names on awnings, branding on cookware and appliances, packages in the frozen food sections, and daughters who tried to stand on their own. “I shall call you later, ma petite jeune.” Then he left the room.
For a few heartbeats no one spoke. “My dad could rival Garbo for an exit.” She braced her hand on the table and added, “My mother is a saint.”
Jim burst out laughing and stood. “My heart goes out to you, kid. We’re going to get a coffee. You two want to come?”
“No,” she and Matt said at the same time.
When the others left, she crossed her arms and looked up at Matt. “You don’t have to defend me to my father.”
“Everything I said was true.”
“I’m glad the men on this project trust me. As you pointed out before, I’m young.”
“I heard grousing about it when they first met you,” he said with the frankness she liked in him. “Some thought I hired you for other reasons.”
She laughed facetiously. “Three of them saw you asking me out after the cocktail party.”
“I don’t usually behave that badly. The point is, in a short time you’ve won over everyone who had doubts.”
“Thank you for telling me.” She relaxed. “You should be aware that my dad has another agenda here. He wants me to be a chef—a little female clone of himself. And I refused and work with my mom. I think that was what today was all about.”
“If it was, you handled it well.” Matthew Banning stood two feet from her, close enough so she could smell his cologne. There were moments when she wanted to reach out and touch him. Glancing down at her feet was safer. She brushed imaginary lint from her skirt, then crossed her arms. Self-preservation.
“I was impressed with the way you handled your father.”
“I’ve had a lot of practice, and I watched my mother for years. What my father doesn’t know is that the cost of his changes is going to come out of one of his other budgets. I won’t go over the bid, especially not for his precious ego.” She hadn’t realized how hurt and angry she was until she said those words out loud. “I will find a way to offset the cost once I’ve been to the trade show.”
“I’m not worried, Annalisa.” His cell phone rang. For just a moment he looked sorry, then he excused himself and walked away to answer it.
She put some distance between them, too, made a few notes in her Da
y-Timer. He was talking quietly across the room and said, “Me too.”
She felt a sharp pang of disappointment. “Me too” was the universal answer to I love you, I want you, or I miss you.
The others came back in with their coffee, and Matt pocketed his phone, then gave her a quick glance. “I need to get back to the office. We’ll talk later.”
She stared at the door long after it closed, heard his truck start, his tires spit on the gravel outside the work trailer, and the distant sound of John Mellencamp singing “I Need a Lover.” In her car CD, she had the Pat Benatar version. She wanted to laugh, or maybe run. Jim asked her a question about the plan changes and she went back to work, but every so often, she would glance out through the metal blinds at the dissected landscape and wonder if Matthew Banning was playing a game.
Cale saw Rick Sachs a few more times, each session answering questions that needed stronger answers. Human ego was endemic to the art of medicine. But no statistic was more important to him than a patient’s life. He made that bluntly clear to Sachs.
All that they spoke of he knew, but it was no longer clear-cut and he had trouble making sense of everything on his own. He couldn’t think in terms of the practical—something that made a surgeon able to work around his innate empathy and compassion and to make all those incisions and never allow himself to bleed.
“You open them up and find the unexpected,” Cale said. “There was never a clue. Later you can go over it, reexamine all the tests and your notes, replay every motion in your mind, and still feel confounded.”
Rick set his glasses down. “Patients die of complications.”
“Exactly.”