Loves Me, Loves Me Not

by Libby Malin

  “I wasn’t sure you’d find it,” he says when I come to the table. He stands and pulls out my chair for me.

  You read that right—he pulled out my chair. No wonder he’s able to seduce women by the multitudes. He’s loaded up with Old World charm.

  After we order some brewskies, he asks me if I’m hungry, which I am, so we order a pizza, both agreeing on mushrooms and peppers, even though Henry is willing to go with pepperoni if I really want it.

  The business of ordering out of the way, I look into his chocolate-brown eyes and could swear they are twinkling.

  “You were pretty mad at me,” I say as I look away. I’m afraid if I look into his eyes too long, he’ll cast a spell on me. Maybe he and Tess have some sort of coven thing going on.

  “Well, you messed up,” he says matter-of-factly, the ire completely removed from his voice now. “And it cost me.”

  “Cost you what?”

  “Time.”

  I wonder how much time he’s allotted to me. I change the subject.

  “Do you often get hassled like that—by the police?”

  Our beers arrive and he remains silent while the miniskirted waitress plops down paper napkins and bottles and glasses. Henry smiles at her appreciatively.

  “Sometimes.” He sips at his beer. “It’s only happened in the car, though. Driving around town.”

  “Racial profiling?”

  He shrugs. “Who knows? It’s annoying. And it got me riled up. I probably shouldn’t have cursed at that cop, but…” He takes a long swig of beer this time and licks some foam off his upper lip with a slow movement that is both erotic and sweet. Now that I can take the time to study him, I notice his well-muscled arms, his expensive Rolex watch, his strong jaw. Henry’s a good-looking man, not in the Ken-doll sense, but in the sleek-leopard sense.

  “You own the flower shop long?” he asks.

  “Nope. Don’t own it at all.” And I proceed to tell him how I used to be in communications work but moved out of the fast lane after a car in the fast lane moved into me. I don’t talk about Rick. Rule Number One of the new dating scene, embroidered on my heart by both my sister and Wendy, is: do not talk of dead fiancés. It’s a real date-dampener. So instead, I just casually mention the accident without mentioning Rick, although I do show him the five-inch scar on my leg from the screws that had held the bone in place. He is suitably impressed.

  “You’re lucky,” he says when the pizza arrives. “I represented a man last year who’s a paraplegic now because of an accident.”

  When he sees my pained face, he immediately rephrases. “Not that I think anyone in an accident is lucky.”

  I mumble in agreement with a mouth full of pizza. So far, we’ve managed to talk about racial profiling and my accident. Terrific.

  After an awkward pause, I move on to safer subjects. I mention a movie I just saw, and he saw it, too, so we’re good for a half hour on that topic alone. And it breaks the ice. By the end of thirty minutes I feel like he’s an old friend. Turns out, we agree on the movie—that it was a stinker—and the lead actress—that she’s a mannequin who talks—and we manage to share some genuine laughs. Henry’s eyes do twinkle when he laughs. He touches my arm when he makes a point, just gently, just enough to make the peach-fuzz hairs there stand up from the static electricity. Or some kind of electricity.

  I swallow hard and try to think of something unsexy, but instead, the only thoughts that go through my mind are of the NC-17 variety. And then—I am not making this up—someone puts Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” on the jukebox and I’m beginning to think that perhaps this is how heavenly signs manifest themselves in modern times. Forget burning bushes. Think Muzak.

  A half hour after this, the pizza is gone, our beer glasses are empty, and we’re still sitting there chatting away. We’ve moved from favorite movies, to favorite restaurants, all the way through to favorite books. We’ve talked about our pasts—up to a point. I still don’t discuss Rick and I don’t ask about the flower recipients and Henry doesn’t volunteer info on them. He seems genuinely interested in my work in communications, though, and asks me a lot of insightful questions. I do most of the talking and it feels good. Except for an occasional conversation with Gina, or a quick gabfest with Wendy, my only contact of the verbal kind is with customers. Oh, yes, and with Trixie. But Henry is a better listener than Trixie.

  Eventually, Henry asks for the check and insists on paying, even though I pull out my wallet faster than you can say “overdrawn checking account.”

  “Let me,” he says, suavely placing his platinum Visa on the bill. “I’m sorry I scared you earlier.”

  Earlier? What’s that? The entire episode is erased from my memory bank as I stare into those eyes. Henry insists on escorting me to my car like the flower-sending gentleman that he is. “Not a good neighborhood for a young woman to be walking alone in,” he says, placing his hand on my elbow. I shiver.

  When we stroll to my car, it’s twilight—when the jewel-blue sky laughs at you, saying, “Hah, you thought you wouldn’t make it through another twenty-four and yet, here you are.” I’m feeling good. I’d come into town just to get away from the country and I’d landed myself with a date of sorts, a date with a real ladies’ man to boot, which has to mean that I am, well, a lady. It’s an affirmation.

  Once at my car, he stands close.

  “You have my numbers. Give me a call some time.” Then he smoothly puts his left hand behind my neck and presses a kiss on my lips that makes it clear that any “incomparable nights” his litany of flower-recipients experienced were probably due in large part to his skill with his tongue.

  We read the stories, like warning posts, about gigolos, yet we do not heed. I am in bed with a Don Juan.

  Oh, yes, I go to bed with him! After that kiss, he asks me if I’d like a nightcap at his place, and I’m there and we’ve done it before you can say “Stupid is as stupid does.”

  Well, maybe not too stupid. I mean, after all, we’d actually had a good time, right? And Wendy would be proud, right? She thinks if you want a man, you should go after him—hey, as long as you’re careful and safe about it.

  But speaking of the sex part, maybe Marvin Gaye was right about sexual healing. Maybe Wendy was right, too, about needing sex to feel better, because I feel damn good after Henry Castle makes love to me. Sure, Henry might think of it as sex, but he does it as if it’s love. I feel new and strangely clean, I feel rescued and deprogrammed. Henry is the kind of lover who makes a woman feel organic, he’s the kind of lover the gamekeeper in Lady Chatterley’s Lover must have been with all his talk of bodily functions as if they were sacred events. Henry is a natural lover. Henry is sex.

  And he didn’t need to ask to get me into bed. In fact, once at his place, after just a sip of cognac, he was asking me if I wanted to take it slower. I was the fast one. I wanted it bad. Or I wanted something and Henry would do.

  The next morning, I am at Henry’s condominium. His new two-story home on the harbor in Canton, one of those gentrified areas that fill the have-nots with envy and the haves with self-congratulation for reclaiming part of a decaying city.

  Henry is out at a French bakery getting croissants and baguettes. But I’m giddy as a schoolgirl, so I phone Wendy, waking her up. It is, after all, only nine o’clock on a Sunday morning. I think I hear a man groaning in the background and I hope it’s Sam.

  “What is the meaning of tuberoses?” I ask her.

  “Amy? What time is it?”

  Holding the sheet to my chest I sit up in Henry’s bed, which is a black-satin-sheeted platform thing in a room with teakwood furniture.

  “Tuberoses. Don’t you remember? Tuberoses was the code word. Tuberoses mean ‘dangerous pleasures,’” I say triumphantly.

  “Huh?”

  “Henry Castle and me. I’m at his place.”

  She screams and asks all the right questions, and screams some more when I give her the right answers.

  With
promises to give her all the details later, I hang up and wander into Henry’s shower. Here my newfound joy is dampened and not just by the warm water from the spigot. Some previous visitor has left her shampoo and soap, herbal and floral things that no man would buy, a reminder of Henry’s past, or more accurately, a prophecy heralding his future.

  Never Get Involved With a Philandering Man is my motto. I learned it early, at my mother’s knee. My dad was a womanizer, who chased after everything in skirts until his organ gave out. He doesn’t hear well now and doesn’t read newspapers. We’ve all hid from him the news about the discovery of Viagra. Whenever he sees the ads on television, we tell him it’s a hemorrhoid treatment.

  So how did I end up in the bed of a bed-hopping Latino? I mean, can you get more stereotypical than this? What was I thinking—that if I met Don Juan he’d be Polish?

  After I finish, I trundle out to the kitchen with his silk bathrobe around me, my head a mop of wet hair. This is a test I’ve devised for prospective relationships. Like me after a shower and there’s hope. Henry, who has just returned from the bakery, does not flinch.

  “Hey, you didn’t put the coffee on!” he complains, then sets about doing it with some fancy-schmancy black machine that hisses and spits as soon as he flips the switch. I sit at the round table by a bay window overlooking the parking lot, and shyly take a croissant from the bag.

  “You never told me how you got the job at Squires,” I say. We’ve talked about his work—he mostly handles divorce cases—and we’ve talked about his loves, at least the material kind. He wants to buy a sailboat when he gets the money, and he hopes to trade his Beamer for a Porsche next year. But I’ve managed to stay away from asking him too much about his firm, which, after all, was Rick’s firm.

  “Something opened up there about a year or two ago, that’s all.”

  I nearly gag. He took Rick’s job.

  “Yeah, but Squires. That’s a very exclusive club. Did you know somebody?” I manage to squeak out.

  “Nope. Not a soul.” He pulls out a chair and sits next to me, grabs the bag and starts munching lustily on a piece of bread. He eats the way he makes love, with no inhibitions and his hungers on full display. There’s something erotic about the way he paws at the bread, chomps on it, licks his lips. After downing nearly half a baguette, he turns and snatches a black mug from a mug tree on the corner of the counter. Thinking he’s going to offer it to me, I pipe up.

  “I take it with cream.”

  But instead, he pulls out the carafe, halfway through its brew cycle, and pours himself a cup.

  “There’s some in the fridge,” he says, gesturing.

  I get up to fetch my own coffee and cream.

  “I think Squires was angling for some diversity,” he says. “And they’d rather have a Latino than a black, sí?” He says it with a cynical laugh. Eager to show off my multiculturalism I throw a few high-school Spanish phrases at him, but he stares at me blankly.

  “My father was Colombian,” he says dryly, “but my mother is American. They divorced when I was two and I was raised in New Jersey. I took French in high school and avoided languages in college.”

  “Castle? That’s no Spanish name.”

  “Castellano,” he ripples off his tongue. “Enrico Castellano. My mother anglicized it when she moved back here.”

  Henry is on the second half of the baguette. If I want any, I better say something soon. I decide to stick with the croissants. They’re more fattening anyway, and we can always use more fat in our diets, right?

  “Whitest law firm on the Atlantic seaboard,” he continues, laughing again. “Big story in the Law Journal.”

  Ah, so that was it. Henry had traded on his heritage.

  “You let them think you were some ghetto kid making good?”

  “I let them think whatever they wanted to think. I’m a damned good lawyer and I deserve a break just as much as the next guy.”

  Maybe Henry Castle deserves a break, but the idea that he snookered Rick’s law firm into hiring him burns me. My mouth puckers into irritation.

  “Well, if you’re so smart, buster, then you must know that giving yellow roses to a woman signifies jealousy, not ardor.” There, take that.

  “What?” His face changes from confusion to amusement. “Oh. The flowers.”

  “Yeah. The flowers. If you plan on sending any to me, you might want to be more creative.”

  “Like what?” He stares outside where a bank of red tulips planted by some unseen landscaper blooms along the water’s edge. “Maybe I should just go out and pick a bunch of those.”

  “Red tulips? Declaration of love,” I recite. I notice Henry does not jump out of his chair to go pick a few.

  He sips slowly at his coffee. It’s good stuff. He makes mean coffee and sweet love.

  “Why do you send flowers anyway?” I twirl a piece of flaky croissant in my fingers. “Nobody expects flowers nowadays. Maybe a call the next day. But not flowers.”

  He leans back in his chair, the master sharing his secrets. “Ah, but that’s the trick. The unexpected leaves no room for the expected.”

  “So the flowers take the place of the day-after-sex phone call? You send the flowers, they forget about wanting you to call. Or better yet—” I snap my fingers, getting it now “—they call you!”

  “You are assuming facts not in evidence,” he states. “Perhaps the flowers do not all go to women with whom I have had sex.”

  “All right, I’ll bite. Which women on the list at my shop have you had sex with?” When he doesn’t answer right away, I rephrase. “Maybe it would be easier for you to tell me which ones you didn’t have sex with.”

  “Maybe it’s better, my little conchita, if I don’t tell you anything of the sort.” He gets up and pats me on the head.

  What the hell is “my little conchita?” Another lightbulb goes off in my feeble brain. Spanish-challenged “Enrico” makes up Spanish-sounding words when making love to his many “conchitas.” He plays to the stereotype. I try to remember if anything south of the border slipped out during our tumultuous sessions, but I had been moaning so loudly I wouldn’t have heard it anyway.

  “So you used to work in an ad agency?” he asks, dredging up some info we’d gone over the night before.

  “Gelman Agency, University Parkway.”

  “They handle a lot of movie openings, don’t they?” His back is still toward me.

  “That’s the one. You know them well?”

  “Not really. I wonder who handles their legal stuff.”

  “Schwartz and Mendle,” I say, rattling off the name of another prominent law firm. In Baltimore, there are two kinds of law firms. Jewish firms. And old blue-blood firms.

  “Schwartz retired. Maybe Gelman will want someone new?”

  “What are you trying to be—a rainmaker for Squires?” I stand and walk behind him, putting my arms around his waist. He doesn’t respond, so I back away. I’m feeling kind of used right now. “Maybe I should get going.”

  “You can use my shower,” he says.

  He thinks my hair looks like this all the time? Why do I bother?

  “I already did.”

  By the time I gather my clothes together a few minutes later, Henry is on the phone with someone talking about “community property laws” and a headache nags at the outer edges of my brain. Maybe getting back to my country estate will cure that? Or maybe getting away from Henry will do the trick just as well?

  At the top of the stairs leading down to his front door, he gives me a kiss hot enough to make me want more but cool enough to say goodbye.

  “I’ll be seeing you,” I manage to croak out as I leave.

  chapter 4

  Flowering almond: Hope

  Rick and I officially met on a blind date, but we’d actually met weeks before at a St. Patrick’s Day party a coworker of mine had hosted at his new digs—a converted warehouse apartment with one of those huge, spacious layouts where no walls divide the r
ooms. Except for Wendy, I still hadn’t developed a post-college social circle after moving back home from the University of Richmond. So I had looked forward to the party. Even so, I had to leave early because the music had pounded a headache off the walls into my brain that was synchronized to the beat. Sickly sweet amaretto—which the host had in rich supply after a misguided delivery landed on the “warehouse’s” door—didn’t help. Rick arrived late and alone, just as I was leaving. He was lanky, with straight blond hair in a preppy cut, blue striped oxford shirt, khakis, deck shoes with no socks and a big open smile. He looked so bright and honest and neatly pressed that I almost stayed. He looked kind. When a mutual friend set us up the next week, I remember thinking “This could be the one.”

  How does a girl go from almost marrying Mr. “Perfect” Fiancé to screwing Don Juan? Huh? How does that happen? Not only had Rick been All-American and a little shy, he loved his parents and even went to church on Sundays.

  Rick’s parents don’t speak to me now. I can’t blame them. It’s so much easier to think I could have avoided the drunk instead of thinking that the drunk was some gun loaded and pointed in Rick’s direction from the dawn of time.

  At home, I feed poor Trixie and play back my messages. One’s from Wendy, wanting more details. One’s from my sister, wanting to know if I would like to come to dinner. One’s from my mother inviting me over for dinner at their place. And one’s a hang-up—probably a telemarketer.

  In the kitchen, I reach for the Motrin and swallow two. Sometimes catching the headache early is enough to keep it completely at bay.

  After letting the Motrin ease its way into my system, I lounge on the couch trying not to feel like Henry Castle’s chump. He probably bedded me just to get more info on a potential client—my old ad agency. The phone rings and when Trixie doesn’t answer it right away, I grab for the receiver.

  “Well?” It’s Wendy again, sounding more awake. Either she’s had a chance to have some coffee or she had some Sam.

  “Well what?” I walk into the kitchen and open my refrigerator, take out a carton of milk and smell it.