Going Back

by Judith Arnold

  He wanted to make it better. He wanted to make it go away.

  All he needed was a time machine.

  Chapter Seven

  THE ELEVATOR DOOR slid open, and Brad found himself face to face with his father.

  The two of them sprang back from each other in shock. But when the elevator door started to slide shut, Robert Torrance regained his bearings quickly enough to press the “Door Open” button and escape into the sumptuously decorated lobby of the Upper East Side apartment before the elevator whisked him away again. He smiled tensely, evened his Brooks Brothers blazer across his shoulders with a slight shrug, and said, “Dining with your mother, I take it?”

  Brad had arrived at his mother’s apartment from the office, where he’d wasted the better part of the afternoon pretending he cared one way or the other regarding the selection of the new IT person and trying not to be too obvious about the fact that he was waiting for word from Daphne. She was supposed to have contacted the owner of the expanded cape that morning to make an offer on Brad’s behalf—an offer that seemed insultingly low to him—and she’d promised she would call Brad with the seller’s counter-offer, assuming the guy wasn’t so offended by Brad’s bid that he refused to make one. But Brad’s cell phone had never rung. Now he was stuck fulfilling a dinner obligation to his mother, during which he would continue to be distracted by thoughts about whether or not he was going to be able to buy the damned house and make use of his return ticket to Seattle on the following Monday.

  He was scarcely prepared for the ordeal of being charming with his mother all evening. To see his father emerging from the elevator left Brad at a complete loss. When he didn’t speak, his father filled the silence by mumbling, “I stopped by the apartment to pick up a few items, that’s all.”

  Given his father’s empty-handedness, Brad felt safe in assuming that Robert was lying. Judging by the tousled state of the older man’s thick, silver hair and the lingering gleam in his eyes, Brad had a pretty clear idea of what his father and mother had been doing together that afternoon—and it wasn’t picking up items.

  He was pleased. If his parents were willing to acknowledge their compatibility in bed, they ought to be willing to acknowledge the even more obvious truth that they belonged together. “Dad,” he said, trying to sound calm and impartial, “you don’t have to pretend you and Mom aren’t still in love. You are, and I think it’s great.”

  “Did your mother tell you we’re in love?” Robert asked indignantly. “If she did, I can assure you that she was speaking for herself and not for me.”

  What a pair of stubborn asses, Brad thought with wry amusement. His mother would never admit that she still loved his father, either. If only they would stand side by side in front of a mirror, they’d see the love emanating from their own eyes—and from each other’s. “Why can’t you two just sit down and work it out?” Brad asked with what he considered supreme sensibility. “Why can’t you air your differences and admit that they aren’t serious enough to destroy your marriage? Why do you feel you’re better off apart?”

  Brad’s father exhaled. He moved to the gold-veined mirror adorning one entire wall of the lobby, but what he saw in his reflection apparently wasn’t love—it was a crooked necktie. He adjusted the knot, then turned back to Brad. “I wish I could say it’s none of your business. But since you’re our only child, I don’t suppose I can. However, you’ll just have to take your mother’s and my word for it that we’re pursuing the course that’s best for us.”

  “Even though you’re still...?” Unable to think of a tactful way to mention his parents’ ongoing physical relationship, Brad tapered off and glanced toward the elevator.

  “Sex isn’t everything,” his father retorted dryly.

  “It’s a hell of a lot,” Brad pointed out.

  Robert thought for a moment. “Your mother and I aren’t divorced, and we happen to be ethical people. We aren’t about to engage in extramarital affairs. Once our situation is finalized, I’m sure we’ll both find other...outlets for our particular needs.”

  “Outlets? Needs?” Now it was Brad’s turn to be indignant. “Come on, Dad. After you and Mom spend one of these afternoons together, don’t you feel close to each other? Don’t you feel anything at all for each other besides animosity?”

  Robert contemplated the question, then offered a grudging smile. “I suppose we wouldn’t bother at all with these occasional…afternoons,” he said euphemistically, “if we didn’t feel something bordering on pleasant. I imagine that such pleasant memories help to make our separation less acrimonious. Your mother and I don’t hate each other, Brad. And she’s a damned attractive woman.” He checked his tie in the mirror one last time, fidgeting with the knot even though it looked fine to Brad. “Beyond that,” Robert concluded, “I have nothing to say on the subject.” He smoothed his collar, then headed briskly toward the door, giving the doorman a perfunctory nod on his way outside.

  Brad chased his father as far as the doorway and watched through the glass until Robert turned the corner and was absorbed by a throng of pedestrians on Park Avenue. Sighing, Brad turned away, walked back to the elevator, and wondered all over again why his parents insisted on being so obstinate about their relationship.

  In less than two minutes, he was upstairs, ringing the doorbell of the twentieth-floor apartment where his mother lived, and where he himself had spent the first eighteen years of his life. When his mother answered, her appearance revealed no hint of what she’d recently been up to with her Brad’s father. Her white-streaked black hair was impeccably coiffed, her face carefully made up, her apparel staid and her tasteful jewelry in place. Penelope Torrance’s usually expressive gray eyes, unlike her husband’s, were totally emotionless, lacking any residual glow of passion.

  “Hello, Brad,” she greeted him, brushing a maternal kiss across his cheek and ushering him into the apartment. Her bland welcome informed him that, even though she had to be able to guess that Brad had run into his father downstairs, she had no intention of mentioning his father’s visit, let alone discussing what it did or didn’t mean.

  Brad dutifully followed her lead. If he was going to convince her to get back together with his father, he’d have to do it without mentioning the romantic interlude they’d just indulged in.

  Almost as soon as Brad and his mother entered the living room, his mother’s housekeeper appeared, carrying a crystal pitcher of martinis and two matching glasses. Brad didn’t care much for martinis, but he accepted the cocktail Grace poured for him, offered his mother a silent toast…and thought about Daphne.

  What shook him was not simply that she’d barged in on his thoughts when he hadn’t expected it, but that he was thinking of her in the context of drinking. He wondered what would happen if he ever brought her to his mother’s house for dinner. Penelope always insisted on serving martinis before dinner. It was a ritual about which she brooked no argument. Would Daphne accept a drink she didn’t want for the sake of good manners, or would she politely refuse the drink, claiming that she never touched alcohol? How did teetotalers cope with social gatherings?

  He probably shouldn’t feel guilty about having driven Daphne to abstinence. For all he knew, he might have done her a big favor. But still…he would have preferred not to have been the one to teach her, through wretched experience, what sort of mess a woman could get into when she drank too much.

  He realized that his mother was speaking, and he forced his attention to her. At the age of fifty-seven, Penelope Torrance was, as Brad’s father had said, a damned attractive woman. Her face was unlined, her throat sleek, her figure as slender as a teenager’s. Brad doubted that his mother had ever gained the “freshman twenty” during her years at Mt. Holyoke.

  “Brad, where are you? I’m talking to you,” she chided before sipping from her glass.

  “Sorry.”

  “I was saying,” she went on, “that this house you’re planning to purchase sounds dreadful. I understand the time p
ressures you’re facing, and your desire to return to Seattle next week—but that doesn’t mean you’ve got to rush into such a major commitment. You’re more than welcome to stay here with me until you find the house of your dreams.”

  “I’ve already found the house of my dreams,” Brad said, surprising himself. He’d never viewed the expanded cape in Verona as the stuff of dreams—but now that his mother had mentioned it, he believed that maybe it was something of a dream house for him.

  The apartment he was in right now was no dream, even though he’d grown up there. Few of the furnishings had changed since his childhood. Several knickknacks had been rearranged, the torch lamps on either side of the sofa were a recent touch, but for the most part the decor had a nostalgic, almost cloying familiarity to it. He remembered spending hours constructing cabins with his Lincoln Logs on the patterned Oriental carpet; he remembered devouring chocolate-chip cookies and Mark Twain novels on the couch—until Grace would order him off, scolding that he was getting crumbs all over the upholstery. He remembered gazing down through the window at the island of grass and flowers separating the northbound and southbound lanes of Park Avenue, and wishing he lived in a house with a yard.

  Now, finally—if Daphne didn’t blow it—that wish might come true. He might get his house and his yard, his flower beds and his tree-framed views of the sky. It was possible to make amends for the past, after all. It was possible, if one was willing to put forth the necessary effort, to compensate for the shortcomings of one’s past, to overcome one’s mistakes and disappointments, and put things the way they ought to be.

  If only he could convince his parents of that, perhaps they’d work harder to repair their relationship, not just for sex but for love, for the sake of their marriage. Perhaps they could journey backward to the point where everything had started to go wrong for them and do it over again, properly this time. If an afternoon of lovemaking could erase the the resentment, why couldn’t it rekindle the love? Why couldn’t it at least nourish the friendship?

  ***

  THE SHRILL RING of the telephone jolted Daphne awake. As she cursed and groped blindly for it, her brain staggered toward consciousness. Once her hand landed on the phone, she opened her eyes. Through a blur of sleepiness and myopia, she read the digits on the alarm clock next to the phone: one-two-two-eight. She cursed again, then lifted the receiver to her ear. “What?” she growled.

  “Daphne, it’s Brad,” Brad whispered. “I just got back to Eric’s apartment, and Andrea left me a note on the kitchen table, saying that you called. I’m sorry for getting back to you so late, but—”

  “Oh.” Daphne struggled into a sitting position and shoved a heavy tangle of blond curls back from her face. “Oh. Yeah.” She knew she was communicating less than coherently, but there wasn’t much she could do about it except wait until her brain clarified itself. After a minute, feeling semi-lucid, she managed to say, “Hello, Brad.”

  “I had dinner at my mother’s this evening,” he went on, his gabbiness giving her an opportunity to wake up completely. “I wanted to get back here earlier, but my mother was on a tear. All I did was say something about what a fine couple she and my father make, and she was off and running. For three hours I had to sit there, listening to a blow-by-blow description of every argument they’d ever had, every disagreement, starting with whether to hold their wedding reception at the Pierre or the Plaza, on through whether they should have named me Brad Michael or Brad Stephen, whether I should have gone to Collegiate as a day student or Exeter as a boarder, whether they should have bought a vacation house in the Hamptons or the North Fork… To go by what my mother said, there was not a single moment in their entire wedded life when they weren’t at each other’s throats.”

  At first, Daphne was nonplussed. When she’d left a message with Andrea to have Brad call her, she’d assumed that he would be anxious to hear about her negotiations with the seller of the house he wanted to buy. Instead, all he wanted to do, apparently, was vent about his mother.

  That was all right with Daphne. If it made Brad feel better to talk to her about his parents, she had no objections. “Maybe her memory is more accurate than yours,” Daphne suggested. “Or maybe she and your father tried to shield you from their fighting when you were younger, so you were never really aware of it.”

  “I was always aware that they had their ups and downs,” Brad insisted. “They never hid their arguments from me. But so what? People can disagree with each other and still make a perfect couple. My parents belong together. They need each other; they’re good for each other. They’ve been arguing for thirty-five years. I can’t imagine why they want to stop at this point.”

  “Brad.” Daphne sighed, then allowed herself a weary smile. Despite her drowsiness, she was touched that Brad had chosen her, of all his friends, to unburden himself to, even if he was doing it at an ungodly hour. Besides being touched, she was still amazed to think of Brad as someone who would have to unburden himself at all. She’d never had any basis for thinking he was as neat and well put together emotionally as he was physically, but given the externals of his life—the wealth, the career the success, the bedroom eyes and sexy buns and all the rest of it—Daphne was having trouble accepting that he suffered from actual human anguish on occasion.

  “You want me to shut up,” he guessed, sounding appropriately contrite. “I know, it’s late.”

  “I wouldn’t mind the time,” she assured him, “except that I’ve got to go to a closing at nine o’clock tomorrow.”

  “No explanation necessary. I’ll let you get back to sleep.”

  “Brad,” she said swiftly, before he could hang up. “Don’t you want to know about the house?”

  “Oh—right! The house. What did the seller say?”

  Daphne’s smile widened and she drew her knees up under the covers, forming a tent with her sheet. “He said five-thirty-five, take it or leave it.”

  “Five-thirty-five?” Brad repeated, perplexed.

  “Five hundred thirty five thousand.”

  “But...but that’s lower than you and I discussed. That’s much lower than I was willing to go.”

  “Take it or leave it,” she said, smothering a laugh. “He doesn’t want to haggle, he just wants to get the house sold. I swore you’d be a sure thing—no problems as far as your qualifying for a mortgage or anything like that. And he said he wanted to cut through the crap and settle on a price.”

  Brad let out a restrained hoot. “No kidding? Daffy, that’s fantastic! You’re a genius.”

  “I’m a businesswoman,” she asserted. “I want to see the sale go through, too. Shall I tell him you’ll accept his price?”

  “You mean you haven’t already? Of course I’ll accept his price.”

  “I’ll telephone him tomorrow. And I’ll get a contract written up right away. You may have to do your mortgage application long-distance, but I can help you with that if you and the bank need a go-between.”

  “Thanks, Daphne,” Brad said earnestly, his tone low and intense. “I mean it. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. Now go to bed and dream about your soon-to-be new home.”

  She heard a strange sound through the phone, something that might have been a cross between a gasp and a laugh. Then Brad said, “You’re clairvoyant, Daff. Go back to sleep—and thanks again.”

  Before she could ask him to explain his cryptic remark, the line went dead.

  She wasn’t clairvoyant. She wasn’t even that good a listener when it came to other people’s problems. Whenever Phyllis embarked on one of her self-pitying monologues about Jim, Daphne invariably wound up cracking snide jokes. On those rare occasions when her sister Helen telephoned and griped about her marriage to Dennis, Daphne seized whatever excuse was handy to end the call. She had little patience for people who had so much more going for them than she did, yet who constantly demanded sympathy from her.

  But she didn’t mind listening to Brad talk about his parents. For one thing
, he wasn’t asking her for sympathy; his focus was totally on his parents’ well-being, not on his own disappointment. For another, she liked knowing that his life wasn’t as flawless as it seemed on the surface, that he cared deeply for his loved ones and ached for them. And for another, she was honored that he considered her trustworthy enough to confide in.

  But clairvoyant? What was that all about?

  A hectic day lay ahead for her, and she was too tired to puzzle out his strange comment. Besides the closing she was supposed to attend the following morning, she had arranged to meet Bob Battinger for lunch and discuss the possibility of Horizon Realty’s extending her a loan to finance her share of the partnership. Now that reality had set in, she was beginning to wonder whether she could afford to become a partner. What with her mortgage, her car payments, and two more years of a college loan to pay off, she was teetering on the edge of financial panic.

  But she was too tired right now to worry about that, too. So she plumped the pillow beneath her head, closed her eyes and drifted off almost immediately. One thing Daphne never had to worry about was her ability to fall asleep, regardless of the challenges that might be lying in wait for her when she rose.

  ***

  IT WASN’T CLAIRVOYANCE that compelled her to drive past the expanded cape on her way back to the office from what had turned into a marathon luncheon with Bob Battinger the following afternoon. They’d met at one o’clock, tossed around various financial strategies during the course of their two-hour meal, and then stopped in at a bank branch where Daphne did a great deal of mortgage business to discuss loans with one of the loan officers there. Bob seemed much more optimistic than Daphne about her ability to carry an additional loan—but, then, it was easy to be optimistic when someone else’s money was at stake.