Interior Designs

by Pamela Browning

  He found himself sending Cathryn a reassuring look so that she wouldn't worry that Amanda was probing painful territory. Cathryn responded with a smile that told him he had communicated his reassurance. It was always like that. They didn't need words.

  Amanda finished the last of her potato salad-baked bean-pickle mixture. "What does your daughter like to do?"

  Drew gave this careful consideration, and Cathryn knew that he was thinking that, after so long, Selby might have changed and liked to do things other than what she did when he had seen her last. But Drew said, "We go to the beach a lot. She likes me to read to her, too."

  "Oh, she likes to be read to? I love to read out loud. I could read to her if she comes to see you."

  "She'd like that, and I would, too."

  "Is she coming to see you soon?"

  Drew was reluctant to answer that one, but he said, "I hope she'll be here this summer."

  "Oh, good." Amanda stood up. "I have to go see how long it will be before my turn to ski. I'll bet it's hours." She skipped off toward the water's edge.

  "She's a darling girl," Drew said, his eyes following her.

  Amanda rushed back again for moment. "When Selby comes, will you take me to the beach with you sometime?"

  "You bet I will," said Drew unhesitatingly, warmly, before she ran away again.

  "You were wonderful with her," said Cathryn when they were alone again. The sun was sinking in the west, and people were beginning to quiet down, finding places on blankets in the grass or in lawn chairs.

  "For a moment, it was like being with Selby," he said.

  They sat quietly for a while, watching the swimmers in the pool inside the big screened porch. Someone had brought out a guitar and was singing plaintive folk songs. The music sounded wistful and sad. Suddenly and urgently, Cathryn knew that she didn't want to hang around.

  "I have an idea," she said softly. "Let's go."

  "Go? Where?" Drew looked down at her, surprised.

  "Anywhere we can be alone."

  Understanding, Drew's smile widened in pleasure and appreciation. He was pleased to know that she wanted to be with him and that their relationship took precedence over this gathering of friends. Cathryn was sensitive to his every thought, his every feeling, satisfying him as he knew he satisfied her. His heart swelled with love for her.

  "You know what I love about you?" he whispered so that no one else could hear. "I think I mentioned it earlier today. You have the best ideas in the world."

  Chapter 7

  The next morning Drew awakened Cathryn gently by trailing soft breathy kisses from her shoulder to her throat. Sunlight filtered through the draperies of her bedroom, enveloping them in a rosy glow. She stirred and sighed, leaning into him, liking the way his body formed a warm nest for her. His toes wiggled against hers, a silent good-morning.

  It began slowly, with none of the breathtaking passion that had marked their lovemaking of the night before. Now their love blossomed into a wonderful, slow eagerness, flowering quietly but surely, the way they knew to let it happen. His hand caressed the curve of her abdomen, his fingers brushing lightly over her stomach and tantalizing her breasts into rounded peaks.

  She pressed her back into his downy torso, conscious of every part of him. They moved together, coupling, racing headlong together, until it all shattered in a ferocious joining, subsiding at last into sweet nothingness. They stayed linked together until their breathing returned to normal.

  Afterward, he murmured to her, "If you offer to cook breakfast, I'll kill you. I hate breakfast."

  "I know, but why?"

  "Just the very thought of sending slimy eggs down to say good morning to my stomach—"

  "Please. Since you put it that way, it doesn't sound too appetizing to me, either. How about leftover veal stew?"

  "Would you go for a frozen chicken-and-noodle casserole, like we had the first night we ate dinner together?"

  She laughed, remembering. She rolled over in his arms, settling her head on his shoulder. It just fit, as though it were molded to the exact shape of his bones. Her hair, loose, unfurled across his arm, gleaming in the ribbon of light that escaped the draperies.

  "I think," she said, tracing ovals around his navel, "that we should get out and jog."

  It was a continuing argument: the benefits of jogging versus swimming. So far, neither had given in. Drew still swam every morning, and she still jogged. Afterward, they met at the water's edge and sat and held hands until the sun appeared fully above them. They went their separate ways soon afterward, Cathryn to her studio, Drew to his office at Sedgwick's, sometimes taking time out from their busy days to meet for lunch, surreptitiously holding hands under the table and thinking they were fooling everyone even though the shining expressions on their faces gave them away. They saw each other almost every night for dinner.

  "Did you know that jogging causes wrinkles?" said Drew, teasing her. "You should give up jogging. Swimmers never have wrinkles."

  "Let's see." She slid on top of him, minutely inspecting his face. Not that she needed to, since she had memorized every plane and contour. "Here's a wrinkle!" she exclaimed triumphantly, tweaking the skin beside his eye.

  "Ouch," he said, trying to push her away. She clung to him with both arms and both legs. "You're awfully tenacious," he said when his efforts had failed. "Anyway, what I said about jogging was true. A wrinkle here—" and he nibbled at her neck where there was no wrinkle "—and here." He nibbled farther down, and the touch of his warm, wet tongue drew a gasp from Cathryn.

  "You're tickling me," she said, laughing, pulling away. He wouldn't let her go.

  "I'm going to do more than tickle you," he vowed, his hands sliding downward.

  She curled herself into a tight ball and rolled away across the fine Belgian linen sheets. She landed on her knees and, hands on hips, laughed at him. "Last one ready to go is a—"

  "If you so much as mention the word 'egg' in the morning, I'll—"

  "Go ahead!"

  And growling in mock anger, he was upon her. Then he was kissing her more and more passionately, and he was holding her as though he would never let her go.

  "Cathryn, my love," he said, and she was dazzled, then humbled at the awesomeness of his love for her shining from his eyes.

  An hour later, Cathryn assembled tuna salad sandwiches and they ate on her balcony overlooking the ocean, the salt breeze playing with their hair and riffling their clothes. The sky was a sun-washed expanse of blue above, and even so high above the beach, the rush of waves on the sand played rhythmic music in the background. They were at ease with each other, their happiness heightened by their intimacy.

  "You know," said Drew reflectively after a time, "I enjoyed being with Amanda so much yesterday." He chewed his sandwich thoughtfully.

  "Maybe you could come with Amanda and me when I take her to the movies sometime. She'd enjoy that."

  "She mentioned going to the beach. Do you think she'd like to go with us? At the Hobe Sound house?"

  "Why that would be lovely, Drew." Secretly Cathryn was surprised that Drew would offer this, as full of memories as the house was for him. Did he think that Amanda's presence might help to banish the ghost of Selby?

  He must have read her thoughts, because he said, "Just hearing a little girl's laughter in that house again would be wonderful."

  Cathryn reached over and covered his hand with hers, looking deep into his troubled eyes.

  "You really do miss her, don't you?" she asked carefully.

  "I'll always miss Selby when she's not with me," he said, a simple statement of truth.

  "Have you heard anything more about her visiting this summer, or were you just being optimistic with Amanda yesterday?"

  "Actually, things are pretty bad. You see, I've talked with Talma recently," he said, watching her carefully to see what her reaction would be.

  Cathryn covered up a quick stab of surprise. He had not mentioned this before. She removed her hand
from his and went back to eating her sandwich, sorting her emotions into a facial expression that she hoped came across as studiously casual.

  "Talma's opposed to Selby's visiting. She says she won't have Selby upset by seeing me, and she claims that Selby is perfectly happy in New York. I asked to speak with Selby, but Talma wouldn't allow it. I threatened her with a court battle over custody, and we ended with Talma's screaming at me over the phone before she finally hung up." He disliked speaking of this because the dissension with Talma worried and depressed him.

  Cathryn's heart wrenched with sadness at Drew's obvious pain before she was overtaken by a pang of jealousy of Talma. She chided herself about the jealousy. After all, Drew was here, with her, and she knew he loved her. Talma was of the past and far away. Why in the world should Cathryn feel jealous? She'd allow herself only the sadness, for Drew's sake. She hated to see him hurting.

  "What will you do now?" she asked.

  Drew sighed, and it was a troubled sigh. "My lawyer will talk with Talma's lawyer. It seems clear to me that I can't try to gain custody right now without proving that Talma is an unfit mother, and that seems likely to upset Selby. And I don't want to upset Selby, much as I'd like custody."

  "Do you really feel that Talma is unfit?"

  "I don't believe there's any doubt about it. She goes off for days at a time with Alfredo, leaving Selby with babysitters, and you know how I feel about that. Talma seems hell bent on pursuing life in the New York City fast lane.

  "Doing what?"

  "Drinking, wild parties, the whole bit. I'm going to have to weigh which would upset my daughter more—living in that kind of atmosphere or being torn apart by custody proceedings, where she's likely to find out more than I'd like her to know about her mother." His lips tightened, and his blue eyes darkened to the color of steel.

  Cathryn paused for a moment, seeing the situation as a tangle of should and should-nots, coulds and could-nots.

  "Are you sure custody is what you want?"

  The hardness melted into an expression of emptiness. Drew looked as dejected as she'd ever seen him. His melancholy expression made her want to cry.

  "I miss my daughter. I miss her terribly. And if Talma won't let me see her, then gaining custody is my only way of having any influence on Selby's life. I want to be a good father more than anything." It was important to him to express this to Cathryn, the one person in the world whom he could count on to understand.

  They sat for a few minutes in silence, watching a jet climbing as it took off over the ocean. Drew sighed once more, the burden of his decision evident. Cathryn yearned to reassure him and to tell him that everything would be all right, but she felt so helpless in the face of his frustration. Everything might not be all right. They both knew that. It was the way of the world. But she couldn't help wanting life to be perfect for this man she loved. The knowledge that she couldn't make it so curled into a tight, painful knot inside her.

  She thought back to the day before, when Drew had so clearly and enthusiastically enjoyed being with Amanda. His positive feelings about fatherhood had been so obvious yesterday, almost as much as his present fierce longing to have Amanda with him.

  "Oh, Drew," she said wearily, her heart aching for him. They fell silent again, but their communication still felt complete.

  Drew roiled deep in his own thoughts, but it seemed somehow fitting to include Cathryn in them. There was so much involved with his longing to be with his daughter. His wish to be a good father harked back to Selby's birth, when his hope for his future was bright and untarnished by what happened later between him and Talma.

  "I remember," he told Cathryn with a hint of nostalgia, "when Talma told me that she was going to have a baby. It was one of the happiest days of my life. We had waited until we could afford a child. And the waiting was hard, because I longed to have a family that would be different from the one where I grew up."

  "You wanted a baby?" This was a side of Drew about which Cathryn knew so little.

  "I longed for a child. My child. A little piece of eternity, that's the way I thought of it. And seeing her born—well, it was beautiful. That's the only way I can describe it. Beautiful."

  Cathryn was surprised that Drew had chosen to be in the delivery room with his wife. "It's hard for me to picture you in the delivery room. I guess it simply doesn't jibe with the way I think of you," she said slowly, trying to imagine it.

  Drew shrugged. "I was Talma's coach during childbirth, helping her with her breathing and so forth."

  Another cold spasm of jealousy shook Cathryn over his sharing the birth of his daughter, their daughter—an important part of his life that Cathryn could never experience.

  "I can't imagine that moment of birth. There's nothing in my realm of experience to bring it into focus for me." Cathryn spoke tentatively, trying to get a grip on it. She thought about the utter helplessness of newborns, of the thrill of hearing that first lusty, piercing cry of a tiny baby. She tried to imagine the purposefulness and the vitality of a hospital delivery room and couldn't. Her throat ached, and a kind of tension vibrated behind her eyes. She looked off into the distance to relieve it.

  Drew's long look was filled with compassion. "I guess it would be hard for you to understand bearing a child. Just as hard as it is for me to comprehend how it would be never to have one. I'm sorry—have I brought up an uncomfortable topic?" He wished now that he'd never mentioned it because Cathryn had gone white around the mouth as though someone had slapped her.

  She shook her head too vigorously. "No, long ago I came to grips with the idea that I might never give birth to a child. I never had time for marriage or motherhood." If she spoke abruptly, she was sorry. Suddenly she felt sensitive about her child-free status, though she'd never felt defensive about it before.

  Cathryn stood up quickly, her uneasiness erupting into restlessness. "I'll just clear away these things and—"

  "We'll both clear away the dishes," said Drew, his eyes burrowing into her, knowing her. He sensed that the conversation had touched a nerve. Whether he knew that it was a newly exposed feeling laid bare by hearing him speak of his memories, she wasn't sure.

  As she turned to go inside, her mind flew over the past weeks. During that happy and breathless time, with everything about their love so fresh and new, she and Drew had delighted in sharing everything. But now reality had intruded, as she'd known it would, although she couldn't have predicted that it would appear in quite this way.

  Because of Selby, Drew's past would always be a continuing factor in his life. It was a part of him, now and forever, and he couldn't and wouldn't be able to walk casually away from it.

  Sudden tears stung her eyes, but even the tears didn't wash away the ache in her heart. The deepest and most meaningful human experience of all, the birth of a first child, would never be hers to share with Drew. For him, the experience belonged to someone else, and it always would.

  In that instant she felt the first twinge of doubt. Her confidence in their ability to leap the inevitable hurdles that reality erected in the path of any relationship was severely shaken.

  She knew that she loved Drew. And he loved her. But was their love strong enough to survive the future—and the past?

  * * *

  The sun, glazing the Hobe Sound beach with gold, formed the perfect backdrop for the flowing series of movements known as the sunrise salutation. Cathryn's body stretched to the sky and molded to the earth in the classic hatha yoga postures, consciously relaxing in preparation for the new day.

  She had awakened at dawn and slid from her place beside Drew without waking him. She'd dressed quickly in her swimsuit and hurried to the beach. She had grown to love the Hobe Sound house and its beach during the past few weekends they had spent there. Today her fears about the progress of their relationship seemed to be unfounded. But then, she had to admit, since their discussion that day on her balcony, they hadn't confronted any more realities. They hadn't avoided them. It was simply
that nothing had come up.

  These weekends had been happy times. During them, she'd realized that the love she shared with Drew became a reservoir of energy when she was away from him. Being with him on weekends replenished that reservoir and enhanced her own creativity. Funny, she mused, how that worked. It was as though she took in more than she gained from their relationship. Cathryn had never worked more productively than since she'd grown to love Drew, even though she was putting in fewer actual hours at the studio and in her home office.

  Now concluding the sunrise salutation, Cathryn's body swept upright, and as her hands came to rest beneath her chin in the prayer position, she instinctively felt Drew's warm presence behind her.

  "You look like a lone flower on the beach, opening to the sun," said Drew in a tone of admiration. To him, every day with her, so special and so right, seemed like a miracle.

  Cathryn's heartbeat quickened when she heard his voice. She opened her eyes and turned, smiling. She went to him at once, standing in front of him in the damp sand and clasping her hands behind his neck. She tilted her face upward for his kiss.

  "If I am a flower, you are the sun," she said, nuzzling his freshly shaven cheek. "Haven't you noticed that I'm phototropic—leaning toward you as a plant leans toward the light?"

  "A romantic notion if ever I heard one," said Drew with an affectionate grin.

  "I get that way when I'm with you." She tipped her head to one side, admiring the way his dark eyebrows framed his eyes so expressively. He winked at her before tugging his shirt over his head before racing toward the ocean, where he disappeared with a quick dive beneath the surface. In a moment he was swimming parallel to the shore with strong, steady strokes.

  Cathryn laced her shoes on and began to run along the high tide line. Drew kept pace with her in the water. She watched him swim, admiring his style. The high school athlete he had been was evident in every stroke. She wished they'd known each other better in those long-ago days. Would they have liked each other? There was no way of knowing.

  She joined him for a swim after she ran. When at last they strode out of the water, droplets sparkled like diamonds as Drew shook them from his hair. She tossed him his towel and pulled on a short bathrobe over her swimsuit. They walked arm in arm up the beach gilded by sunlight, past the tree house with its memories, back to the house.