by Joy Fielding
“I’m glad you called,” he was saying. Lynn lifted her fresh strawberry daiquiri into the air in a silent toast. “I wasn’t sure you would. Why did you? Not that I’m objecting, mind you. Just curious.”
“A writer’s curiosity?” Lynn asked, and Marc Cameron smiled. “It’s my wedding anniversary.”
“Curiouser and curiouser.”
“I thought you’d appreciate the irony.”
His smile grew wider. “So I’m a convenient substitute?”
“I’m not sure what you are, to be honest.” She paused, looking around the small, empty Italian restaurant in Lake Worth where she had suggested they meet. “I was angry and depressed. I just needed to get out of the house for a while. My neighbor said she’d stay with the kids. I probably should apologize in advance. I don’t think I’ll be very good company.”
“You’re doing fine so far. Are you ready to order yet?”
She shook her head. “I’m not very hungry.” She finished the last of her daiquiri in two quick gulps. “I wouldn’t mind another one of these, however.”
Marc Cameron immediately signaled the waiter to bring them each another drink.
“So, tell me about your writing,” Lynn asked, careful to avoid his watchful blue eyes. “Are you working on anything now?”
“I have an idea for a novel I’m tossing around in my head.”
She laughed. “I’ll bet you do. It wouldn’t by any chance be about a recently separated man who gets involved with the wife of the man his own wife left him for, would it?”
“That depends.”
Lynn looked directly into Marc Cameron’s eyes. “On what?”
“Are we involved?”
“Figure of speech,” Lynn said, and cleared her throat. She was relieved when the waiter returned with her second drink. “I don’t much relish the idea of finding myself in the pages of your next book.”
“Most people are thrilled to find themselves immortalized in print.”
“Even the unflattering portraits?”
“Even those. Of course, you have to remember that the bad guys rarely recognize themselves. Besides, what makes you think you’d come off badly?”
Lynn lifted her glass to her mouth and was surprised to see that when she put it down it was half empty. “Women who are dumped tend to be whiners at best, pitiful creatures at worst. I’m not crazy about either of those prospects.”
“Suggest an alternative.”
Lynn pondered the question. In truth, she already knew what her answer would be. “Oh, I guess I’d like to be … oh, what the hell … heroic.” Marc Cameron laughed at her choice of words and she lifted her glass in another silent toast, though she didn’t take a drink. “Shouldn’t heroines be heroic?”
“What makes you think you’d be the heroine?” He smiled, his mouth a crooked grin, his eyes teasing hers, as if he knew all about her, as if he understood all her secrets, which buttons to push to get the desired results.
“I read Small Potatoes,” she said after a slight pause, referring to his last book, and was pleased when she saw the tease in his eyes change to surprise.
“You did? When?”
“I went to the library after our walk on the beach and took it out. I tried to find it in the bookstores, but nobody had it.”
He laughed sadly. “Figures. So?”
“So … I liked it. You’re a man of complicated thoughts.”
This time he laughed out loud, throwing his head back, obviously enjoying her appraisal. “It’s never been put quite that way before. I think I’m flattered.”
“I got the impression that it was very autobiographical, though in a very different way from your first book, Awkward Pauses.”
“Now I really am flattered. Do you realize that you may be the only person in the state—hell, forget that, in the country—who has read both my novels? I don’t think even Suzette got through Awkward Pauses.”
“It wasn’t as well thought out as your second book,” Lynn said, and watched him frown. “I thought Small Potatoes was the better of the two. You don’t agree?” The waiter hovered nearby, but Lynn shook her head at the prospect of another drink, and he retreated.
“I agree, but I still don’t like to hear it. No matter what you may hear about writers appreciating constructive criticism, it’s all a pile of baloney. We don’t like criticism of any kind, constructive or otherwise. We want only good reviews, especially from our friends and lovers.” He stared forcefully into Lynn’s eyes. Lynn immediately pictured the two of them rolling across the top of her queen-size bed. Instantly, she brought her glass to her mouth and took a long swallow, finishing what was left. For a minute, she debated calling the waiter back, having another drink, hell, maybe another two or three, then she thought better of it.
“And which one am I?” Lynn asked, then wished she hadn’t, seeing the two of them locked together at the hip, disappearing underneath black satin sheets. What was she doing here? What was she doing, period?
“I leave that up to you.”
Lynn lowered her glass far enough away from her lips to be able to speak. “Which would be more interesting in the pages of your next novel? Which would make me the heroine?”
“The lover, unquestionably,” he answered without hesitation.
Lynn lowered her empty glass to the table, without releasing it. What was she getting herself into? “I thought your ambivalence about your father was very well observed in your second book,” Lynn sidestepped, hearing her words echo somewhere in her head, feeling Marc’s invisible hands on her breasts, moving down her body. She cleared her throat. “You seemed less angry than in your first book. You seemed to accept him more.” She tried focusing on his mouth as he spoke.
“My father left my mother when I was very young. Younger than my boys are now. He moved to Florida from Buffalo, which is where I grew up, and I really didn’t see him again until I was in my teens. Suddenly, he was writing letters, showing up at my high school and college graduations, stuff like that.” Lynn nodded, trying to concentrate on what he was saying, remembering these details from the pages of his books. “I was still so angry, I didn’t want much to do with him. But after my mother got married again, I didn’t feel quite the need to hate him as much as I had before, although God knows, the child in me still hasn’t forgiven him for abandoning me when I was four years old, and probably never will entirely. But about a dozen years ago, he invited me down to Palm Beach to visit him, and I accepted, and I decided I liked the idea of not having to shovel a mountain of snow off my car every morning six months of the year, and so I decided to look around, see if I could get any work free-lancing. I mean, hell, a writer can work anywhere. So I went back home and packed a few bathing suits and my Selectrix typewriter, and set up shop. I sold a few pieces pretty fast, and soon I was asked to do a story on the plethora of little ballet studios which seemed to be springing up everywhere in Palm Beach at the time, a pretty unusual thing when you consider that the average age of the Palm Beach citizen is ninety-seven.”
Lynn laughed. The waiter appeared again, this time impatiently standing beside their table with his pad prominently displayed, ready to take their order whether or not they were ready to give it.
“The special?” Marc asked, looking at Lynn.
Lynn checked the menu, noted that the special was blackened snapper, and nodded, listening as Marc gave their order to the waiter, who looked vaguely put out by their choice.
“And that’s when you met Suzette?” she asked, suddenly aware of the source of Megan’s aversion to ballet.
“Her parents had financed this little studio for her. She’d studied to be a ballerina, but it hadn’t worked out. Believe it or not, she’d been kicked out of school for having an affair with her very married head instructor when she was all of sixteen. Anyway, she eventually ran off with some would-be actor and spent a few drug-filled years in Hollywood before coming home to Mommy and Daddy and letting them set her up in a little ballet studio
. I went out to interview her as part of the story I was doing, and I guess I liked what I saw. She has one of those interesting, almost Egyptian-like faces, all sharp angles and prominent features. Anyway, we moved in together not long after, over her parents’ vociferous objections, I might add. I mean, their poor baby had already been defiled by two no-good artists and they hardly welcomed a third, if I can include myself in the category of artist. They decided to ignore me and my relationship with their daughter. But then Suzette got pregnant, and when you’re pregnant with twins, you’re kind of hard to ignore, so they casually suggested it might be time for us to get married, which, of course, we did, and the rest, as they say, should be good for a few more novels. What are you looking at?”
Lynn had tried focusing her eyes on Marc Cameron’s mouth during his long speech, but his beard kept getting in the way. Normally, Lynn watched people’s eyes when they spoke, but Marc Cameron had the disconcerting habit of watching right back, sending her signals she was unprepared to deal with, so she had tried to concentrate on his mouth instead. She wasn’t used to men with beards, she thought, immediately recalling the feel of his beard on her face, feeling her skin start to tingle. She always thought she preferred her men clean-shaven. Lynn almost laughed. Her men! What men? Gary had been the only man in her life for the last fifteen years. They had discovered this stupid little restaurant, with its surly, impatient help, together. Why had she come here? What was she doing with this bearded man who was not her husband on the night of her fifteenth anniversary?
“Is everything all right?” Marc Cameron was asking.
Lynn shook her head, unable to speak.
He reached across the table and lifted her chin so that her eyes were forced to confront his. Immediately, they filled with tears. Marc Cameron became an unfocused blur.
“Do you want to leave?” he asked.
“What about the food?”
“We’ll come back for it another time.” Marc Cameron quickly deposited a couple of twenty-dollar bills on the table and then was at her side, helping Lynn out of the low-backed wooden chair. “Come on. Let’s get some fresh air.”
Lynn allowed herself to be led gingerly from the restaurant, soon finding herself on the sidewalk outside. Moving from the cool air conditioning of the restaurant into the outside heat, she felt like she had stepped into a sauna. The tears refused to dry despite the dark intensity of the night heat. If anything, they increased. She could barely see past them to walk. Marc Cameron led her down the street and stopped her in front of his small red Toyota. “Where are we going?”
“Just get in the car,” he said gently, and she did as she was told.
She could barely make out where he was driving her, and realized that they were near the beach only when she heard the familiar, comforting roar of the ocean. She walked haltingly beside Marc, his hand on her elbow, guiding her across the concrete of the large parking lot until they came to the Lake Worth pier, still crowded with young people coming out of John G’s, a popular night spot in the area. Still holding on to her arm, Marc Cameron led Lynn down onto the darkened beach and sat her gently by the water’s edge. In the next instant, Lynn was aware of a handkerchief against her cheek, and she pressed it under her eyes, feeling it soak up her tears like a blotter. “I always knew these things would come in handy for something,” Marc was saying. “Feel any better?”
“I feel like an idiot,” Lynn said, blowing her nose noisily into the wet handkerchief, aware that he was tugging at her shoes, rolling up her pant legs. “Should I ask what you’re doing?”
“I thought you might feel better if you got your feet wet. Don’t ask me why.”
“Are you going to take advantage of my depressed and vulnerable state?” She realized that the question was only partly facetious.
“Call me old-fashioned, but the idea of making love to a woman drowning in tears doesn’t exactly turn me on.”
“My God,” she wailed, hating the sound, “I can’t stop! What’s the matter with me? Where are all these tears coming from? They’re getting on my nerves.” He laughed softly as she buried her head in her knees. She heard him moving away. Was he going to just leave her here, crying in the sand? Not that she could blame him. This wasn’t exactly the fun evening he might have been expecting. Where was he going?
She felt his hands at the back of her neck, kneading the tense muscles at the top of her spine. “That feels so good,” she whispered after a few minutes, hoping he wouldn’t stop.
He didn’t. His hands pressed firmly into the muscles of her shoulders, his fingers disappearing into her hair to massage her head, then moving slowly down the length of her back. She thought she should probably tell him that was enough, but the truth was it wasn’t enough, not nearly enough. As his hands moved back up toward her shoulders, Lynn suddenly spun around and pushed herself into his arms with such force she knocked him over, pressing her mouth against his as they fell. His arms immediately wrapped around her waist, and once again the soft bristles of his beard tickled her face as they rolled over in the sand. Not quite the black satin sheets she had envisioned earlier, but infinitely more satisfying in the flesh than in her fantasies. She felt his tongue inside her mouth, his hands moving down to grip her backside. What on earth was she doing? As suddenly and forcefully as she had pushed him over, Lynn now pushed herself out of Marc’s arms and sat up, looking at the ocean as if searching for a satisfactory explanation for her behavior.
“I thought you said that the idea of making love to a woman drowning in tears didn’t exactly turn you on,” Lynn said when none was forthcoming.
“I guess I’m kinkier than I thought.”
“This will make a wonderful chapter in your new book.”
“I’ll be kind.”
Lynn stumbled to her feet and started brushing the sand from her clothes. “I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not.”
“No, I’m not.” She stopped shaking the sand from her clothes and smiled. “But I should be.”
“Why?”
“I ruined your dinner, for one thing. You had to put out all that money for food you didn’t even get to see.”
“I wasn’t hungry.”
“And then I did nothing but cry.”
“You warned me you wouldn’t be very good company.”
“And then I attacked you.”
“Things were definitely starting to look up.”
“And then I stopped.”
“A woman of mercurial temperament.”
Lynn looked around helplessly. “I really should go home now …”
“But …?”
“But I’m starving,” she said, and suddenly they were both laughing. “I don’t believe it but I’m famished.” She looked toward the restaurant up by the road. “Do you want to give dinner another try? My treat this time.”
He said nothing, only nodded and guided her up the sand to the restaurant.
“You’re a nice man,” she said as they pushed through the door into the noisy, crowded restaurant. His lips moved in reply but Lynn couldn’t hear what he was saying.
It was only after they’d been seated at a small table by the wall and the waiter approached to take their order that she realized what he had said: “Not always.”
TEN
Renee sat watching her sister. Kathryn lay, stretched out like a cat in the sun, on the large balcony of Renee’s sixth-floor oceanfront condominium. The balcony, which was covered with squares of freshly washed white tile, curved around the side of the corner unit, so that it always faced directly toward the ocean. Kathryn had positioned her chaise longue on that part of the balcony which ran perpendicular to the ocean and parallel to the large pool, which was deserted despite the heat of the late afternoon. The building, known as the Delray Oasis, was more than half empty at this time of year, and those residents who lived here year-round rarely sat out in the sun. Those nasty liver spots might prove to be something nastier still, the dreaded brown markings of an incip
ient carcinoma. That is, if their pacemakers didn’t give out first. Two of the building’s more elderly residents had died over the winter, and another was in the hospital and not expected to return.
Renee watched as Kathryn flipped over onto her stomach, carefully avoiding putting any pressure on her wrists. She had removed the bandages, revealing a series of ugly-looking, if superficial, cuts, and now twisted the insides of her palms outward for the sun to get at them. Kathryn had always loved the sun. It was ironic, Renee thought, that Kathryn had been the one to leave Florida for New York, a city in which she herself had always wanted to live. She’d had several offers from important law firms up North, but had chosen to return to Florida to go into practice with a respectable, if not spectacular, firm. Why? Florida was a living tomb, she used to tell anyone who’d listen, an old-age home in the shape of a state, God’s little waiting room, as she was fond of quoting. Philip was always throwing statistics her way showing that Florida was America’s fastest-growing state, its population getting younger every year, people screaming to get in. They could have it, Renee thought but never said anymore, knowing that Philip loved Florida, that he would never consider leaving. Renee tried to get comfortable, feeling the buttons from the longue’s extended white cushion poking into the backs of her thighs. She should have changed when she got home from work—early, for a change—but the thought of putting on a bathing suit only depressed her, another reason to hate Florida.
People screaming to get in. Renee shook her head, recalling Philip’s words with amazement. From as early as she could remember, Renee had wanted nothing but to get out. She had never especially liked the ocean, never appreciated the unrelenting sunshine. She hated the humidity and the lack of seasonal change. Florida was for people who liked things as pretty and as flat as a postcard, with no shadows on the horizon. Florida was for people, like her parents, who were too self-centered to notice the population was as lifeless as the air, or for people, like Philip, who’d always been larger than their surroundings. Florida was merely a sunny backdrop for the force of Philip’s personality. But not her own. For some reason, Renee had never felt she belonged here. She’d managed to get out, briefly, when she attended Columbia Law School, but something had drawn her back. What? she wondered now. And why?