by Sally Mason
And the woman he’s thinking of isn’t Darcy Pringle, amazingly.
No, the person who occupies his thoughts is Brontë Baines.
He realizes that he misses her.
Misses her strange, aloof (but terribly efficient) presence.
Misses her oddball allusions to dusty old books that only he understands.
Misses the shy looks she sends him when she thinks he won’t notice.
And, if he glances at her, the way she colors.
Now he does think of Darcy Pringle.
Darcy Pringle saying that Brontë Baines is crazy about him.
Could it be true?
Billy, so deep in thought that he finds himself carrying a tray of cake and coffee out of the front door, only realizes where he is when a horn blares and cars whiz by him.
He returns to the coffee shop and delivers the order to the customer.
Weighing the evidence, Billy decides that there is a good chance that what Darcy told him was the truth.
He understands now that Carlotta had dark motives when she prompted him to pursue Darcy, but Darcy has no agenda, he is sure.
He is about to hang the CLOSED sign in the window and make his way upstairs to talk to Brontë Baines when the coffee shop is invaded by a klatch of women, hair freshly styled, smelling of hair spray and perfume.
Billy wanders across to them, trying to find some enthusiasm as he takes their long, complicated and ever-changing orders.
53
When Eric leaves, Darcy feels a creeping depression.
The house is oppressive, thick with memories of Porter.
The chunky leather furniture, the terrible paintings—her visit to the Getty has, at least, given her the assurance to hold this opinion—are all Porter’s legacy even the kitchen (which should by tradition have been her territory) had been designed and decorated the way her ex-husband demanded.
Wandering the house like a ghost, Darcy realizes how little of her soul is in the place she has lived for a decade.
The only room Porter let her take control of was the nursery, and as she stands in the doorway, seeing the mobiles and the gaily painted walls (carefully gender-neutral) it seems to symbolize her life.
A well-appointed, empty shell.
Darcy leaves the nursery, closing the door after her, and trying, too, to the close door on an image of Porter’s hand on Paige’s belly, she avoids her bedroom where the scent of her ex-husband still haunts the air, and goes down to the kitchen and does something right out of character: she pours herself a glass of white wine long before sunset.
Wandering out into her garden with the wine glass, she consoles herself among the plants and shrubs she’s nurtured over the years.
Porter, a man totally disinterested in nature, went out into the garden only a few times, ritualistically barbecuing on his Weber.
Standing in the garden, she catches the heady whiff of flowering bougainvillea, and is transported back to the night in the bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, feeling Forrest Forbes’s hands on her.
Feeling the wine in her belly.
Feeling the weight of her cell phone in her pocket.
She gets as far as removing the phone and thumbing Forrest’s number before she comes to her senses.
Eric was right.
Forrest is a mere footnote.
No more than a very, very pleasant footnote.
She is too fragile for a man like that right now.
And anyway, Darcy, an inner voice (that sounds unpleasantly like Carlotta McCourt’s) says, why would Forrest Forbes be interested in seeing a little mouse like you again?
She stows the phone and walks through to the kitchen where she fills her glass.
What the hell.
Who’s counting?
54
You’re doing it again, Forrest tells himself.
You’re staring at the wall.
He sits on the bed and watches the play of light from the pool dance across the plaster, feeling so empty and insubstantial that he’s surprised he doesn’t just float out the door and up into that menacingly hot sky.
One of Eric’s girl minions called him a while ago.
“Hi, Forrester?” she asked, chewing gum.
“It’s Forrest.”
“Yeah, okay, right, Forrest. Listen, Eric’s kinda bummed but the network have, like, passed on the whole SpyCam thing.”
Despite himself he felt a twinge of disappointment.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Yeah. Major bummer.”
“Well, if anything else comes up . . .”
“Hey, for sure Forrester, you’re on the top of the list.”
With a smack she popped her gum and ended the call, and Forrest let his phone slide from his hand onto the grimy carpet and has sat for a long time staring at the wall.
He shakes his head and lifts the phone, scrolling down for Darcy’s number.
Why? he asks himself.
Why Darcy Pringle?
He can’t answer, but he knows that he wants to hear her voice.
Not just hear her voice, he decides.
He wants to see her.
Before he can talk himself out of it he stands and leaves the apartment, hailing a cab in the street.
“Union Station,” he says.
55
For Brontë Baines, her departure from the Book & Bean and the loss of her beloved William Bigelow, is fully the equal of the privations and oppression suffered by Jane Eyre in Wuthering Heights when her love for Edward Rochester was thwarted.
Brontë dresses carefully in a long flowing black dress—the funereal hue contrasting dramatically with her pale skin.
So taken is she with her role of the tragic heroine that she pays little attention as she shoves her few belongings into her battered old suitcase, and doesn’t notice her journal—years’ worth of outpourings of her tormented soul trapped between its creased covers—slip from the case as she closes it, and skid halfway under the bed.
“Goodbye room,” she says as she leaves and quietly closes the door, making her way down the stairs.
She hesitates a moment on the sidewalk and darts a glance into the Book & Bean, hoping for a last glimpse of William Bigelow.
What she sees is like a sword to her heart.
Darcy Pringle, all blonde hair, white shirt and blue jeans—horribly Californian—strides into the coffee shop and William shows her to a table, bowing and fawning.
All he needs to do is tug his forelock . . .
Without a backward glance Brontë Baines sets off in the direction of the bus station and when a breeze tugs at her wild hair it is not the warm wind off the Pacific, but an icy blast charging across the desolate Yorkshire moors.
56
When Poor Billy takes a menu across to Darcy, he feels oddly light for the first time in years.
He considers what this may be.
Is it is his shoes?
No, these are the same brogues he has worn for far too long, as the rounded heels will attest.
Has he lost weight?
No, his belt still digs into the little paunch that swells his shirt.
Then he gets it: he’s no longer in love with Darcy Pringle!
Of course he can see how beautiful she is, and he can see the kindness that radiates from her wide blue eyes.
But he no longer wants her.
What a relief it is.
“Is anything the matter, Billy?” Darcy asks, narrowing those eyes in concern.
“No, Darcy, not at all. The reverse in fact.”
“I’m pleased to hear that.”
“Yes, and I have you to thank.”
A small vertical crease appears between her eyes.
“You do?”
“Yes, for what you told me last night about Brontë Baines,” he says, in what he thinks is a whisper, but carries across to Carlotta McCourt who sits sucking up a cup of black coffee.
“Have you spoken with Brontë?”
“Not at all, Billy, but keep your voice down, okay? There are unfriendly ears wagging.”
Darcy says this for Carlotta’s benefit and Billy almost laughs when the woman chokes on her coffee.
“It’s Brontë’s day off,” Billy says, “so I haven’t had a chance to see her yet.”
“Good. These things are better left for the evening.” She sees his blank look. “More romantic, Billy.”
“Oh, yes, of course. Quite true. I was thinking of asking her out to dinner.”
“That’s a great idea. Where are you going to take her?”
“I don’t know. I have no idea what she likes to eat.”
“Take her to Captain Ned’s out on the pier. It’s such a beautiful setting.”
He looks delighted.
“Yes. Fantastic idea.”
“And, Billy, an invite like that is made all the sweeter with a bunch of flowers.”
“Really?”
“Go across to the florist and ask her to put together a little arrangement of wild flowers. No girl can resist that.”
“I’ll do it,” Billy says. “Thank you.”
“It’s my pleasure, Billy. I know Brontë will be thrilled.”
“Okay, now I’ve wasted enough of your time. Can I get you the usual?”
Darcy shakes her head.
“No, I think I’ll have a glass of wine. White.”
Billy hides his surprise.
“Of course. I’ll get that for you right away.”
Opening a bottle of wine is always a nightmare for Billy and this afternoon is no different: he smacks his jaw with the corkscrew and has to fish bits of cork out of the glass with a teaspoon before he serves the wine to Darcy, but none of this can cloud his happy mood.
Good things are coming for William Bigelow.
He can feel it.
57
Sitting in the rear of the taxi, driving away from the train station en route to Darcy Pringle’s house, the strip-malls and kitsch pueblo style architecture on Santa Sofia’s main drag blurring past his unseeing eyes, Forrest remembers the one lie he told Darcy.
A lie he’s told himself for the last nineteen years.
When Darcy asked him if he’d ever been in love, he’d answered with an emphatic no.
But he had been in love.
Just once.
When he was sixteen he lost his heart to a siren named Emily Yates, she of the lissome limbs and honey blonde hair and lips (as some forgotten song would have it) like cherries.
It was summer vacation and his father swanned off to Europe with the latest wicked stepmother after dumping Forrest with relatives out on the Hamptons.
Forrest loathed his cousins, twin yahoos who drank beer and farted and chased waitresses, and he loathed this bland and anodyne world of privilege.
Walking along the beach one morning, smoking a joint and plotting his escape—he had the notion to make his way to Manhattan where he would find clubs and drugs and the knowing and slightly soiled girls he favored—he was presented with a vision of such loveliness that he was left breathless, coughing out a lungful of weed.
A girl emerged from the waves, golden in the sun, a sheer one-piece swimsuit hugging her body.
It wasn’t just the drug: she seemed to move in languid, slow-motion as she reached up to shake the water from her long, golden hair.
She walked straight toward Forrest, who—despite his coughing fit—found his most charming smile, the one that had all the females swooning.
“Hello,” he said, “and who are you?”
“I’m the girl whose towel you’re standing on,” she said, an expression of scorn marring those lovely features.
Forrest looked down and saw that his tennis shoes were, indeed, planted on a very large, very white towel.
Nimbly, he skipped onto the sand and reached down for the towel, holding it out to her.
“Allow me,” he said.
The girl snatched the beach towel from him and walked away, the view of her rear equally breathtaking, disappearing into one of the mansions that littered the shore.
Forrest was smitten, all plans to decamp to Manhattan forgotten.
Suddenly he was best friends to his cousins Jed and Joe, and through them discovered the girl was Emily Yates, the daughter of some oil tycoon.
Using his cousins’ connections, Forrest wangled an invitation to a party at the Yates’s house, where he focused his charm—even at that age a normally irresistible force—on Emily.
She had remained unmoved.
Over the next weeks Forrest was obsessed.
He pursued her relentlessly and, finally, it seemed that he was winning her over.
One unforgettable night, with the moon dangling over the ocean as big as a dinner plate, Emily allowed him to kiss her on the beach right where he’d first seen her.
When his hands started to explore that astonishing body she gracefully disentangled herself.
“Slow down,” she said, “take it one step at a time.”
Then she disappeared into the garden of her house, leaving him boiling with love and lust.
But her words gave him hope.
Take it one step at a time.
He could do that.
A few nights later he glimpsed he through the crowd at a black tie ball at a beachfront mansion, those unmistakable curls moving down toward the ocean.
He followed and saw her slip into a boat house.
She had seen him, he was sure.
She was leading him toward the next step.
Forrest crept up to the boat house and heard Emily’s giggle.
He was about to announce himself when he heard an all-too-masculine chuckle, and, like some poor sap in a Hollywood comedy, he saw Emily in the arms of Ben Butler, a Princeton sophomore with a shock of blond hair, unnecessarily white teeth and muscles that threatened the seams of his tuxedo.
Emily and Ben stared at Forrest, then both of them laughed.
“Lost your way, sonny?” Ben asked.
“Leave him, Ben. He’s just as little out of his depth.”
Their mocking laughter followed him into the night.
The next morning Forrest had hopped a bus to Manhattan and spent a wonderfully debauched couple of weeks drowning his sorrows in booze and drugs and an endless succession of available flesh until his father’s security men had tracked him down and hauled him back to Boston to dry out in time for the next semester at Andover.
After that Forrest had declared himself done with love, and he’d never made that mistake again.
He kept his heart carefully guarded, and lived in a happily superficial world of luxury and pleasure.
Until the luxury ended, and the pleasure seemed to leak from his life.
And here he is, in a dull little Californian town, in pursuit of a little Californian blonde who has already dipped a toe into middle-age.
As the taxi turns into Darcy’s street, Forrest has to fight the urge to order the driver to turn the car and take him back to the train station.
But the memory of Darcy’s eyes looking up at him on the bed in Marilyn Monroe’s bungalow keeps him silent.
The car stops outside her house and Forrest pays the driver, squares his shoulders and walks up to the front door.
58
Eric Royce is a closet watercolorist.
Not even Darcy knows his dark little secret, and he keeps his messy daubs hidden in the upstairs room that he has come to think of—pretentiously he knows—as his studio.
He took to painting when he went sober, on the advice of a counselor who told him to get an interest, a hobby, something that would focus his mind.
Walking past an art supply store in the Beverly Center Eric saw watercolor paints and brushes in the window and impulsively went in and bought everything he needed to become a rotten painter.
He fav
ors seascapes and often snaps pictures during his walks on the beach to use as reference for his watercolors.
The process of making these clumsy paintings soothes him, takes his mind off work and the occasional tempests in his private life.
Today he is painting to forget what he has come to call The Darcy Situation.
He loves his friend dearly and has hated watching her pain and torment these last months.
Eric’s motives for engineering a collision between Darcy and Forrest were good, but—as he splashes cerulean blue into the sky of his painting—he fears that he has introduced a complication that her life doesn’t need.
And this business with Porter is worrisome.
Porter Pringle is a snake and it’s all Eric can do not to hurry off down to the coffee shop to watch Darcy’s back.
No, she is mistress of her own destiny, he decides.
She would be justly furious if he interfered.
So he carries on painting, making a hash of the waves frothing on the shore.
Taking a break, his brushes soaking in a jar of water, Eric hears the sound of a car in the street, and when he peers out the window he sees a taxi stop outside Darcy’s house.
Eric watches in astonishment as Forrest Forbes marches up the pathway and rings Darcy’s doorbell.
Ducking away from the window, Eric grabs his phone and dials Darcy’s number.
When he gets her voice mail he doesn’t leave a message and—usually the most decisive of men—he has no idea what to do next.
59
When Porter stands up out of his Mercedes, Darcy, observing him through the window of the coffee shop, can’t help feeling a surge of emotion.
Anger, yes, and hurt, but also—undeniably—a love that seems almost as old as she is.
And Darcy can’t suppress an unwanted flare of hope when she sees the care he has taken with his clothes.
He’s wearing the lightweight linen suit that was her gift to him on his last birthday.
His cotton shirt, buttoned to the collar, is one of her favorites.