“My dear girl, are you all right?” He seemed amused.
“I …” Coughing, I nodded my head. “I’m fine.”
“Now tell me the truth, Ariel. Have you ever even smoked a cigarette?”
“Ummm … Actually, no. Well, not since I was sixteen,” I said, grinding it out in the ashtray.
We talked for a long time after that, about Margaret, the parties, and the people in attendance. He wanted to know everything about me, but I remained elusive, aware in the back of my thoughts that I was from a different era and could return there at any second.
“I’m a writer. From New York,” I said. “I’m working on a book.”
“You’re prettier than most writers. You do know that, I hope.” He leaned back in the chair, took a long drag, and studied me with smoldering eyes.
“You know, it’s not really something I think about. But thank you.”
“You should send me that book when you finish it. I’d love to read it.”
Was he bullshitting me? It was certainly possible. And so what if he was? So what? I was tired, sure, but this was a night to always remember, and I did not want it to end.
Apparently, Clark was in no hurry to see it end, either. He showed no signs of leaving anytime soon, or of phoning the front desk for access to his own room. Did I mind? Not one bit.
Although I try to avoid alcohol late at night, I issued no complaints when he offered to fix me a drink. I took a few sips, and my vision began to blur.
“Say, do you have a boyfriend? You must have a boyfriend.”
“No.” I shook my head. “Not at the moment.”
“Good. A woman like you should be selective.”
Selective? If he only knew the poor dating selection these days in New York City.
“Vivian is learning to be the same,” he said. “All these men throwing themselves at her … it could be her downfall, if she’s not equally selective.”
“She’s unbelievably beautiful.”
“She’s a star, that’s for sure.”
“I loved her canary diamond ring,” I exclaimed. “And did you see that necklace she was wearing?”
“Yes, they were very beautiful,” he said. “But you have something far more important. You have …”
“What, Clark?”
“Oh, how can you expect me to remember what I’m saying when I’m looking into these gorgeous eyes of yours?”
I fell madly in love with him, then. Who would not?
Through my curtains, I could see the sky blushing with dawn’s first hints of pink. I could not believe Clark was still sitting near me in that towel. When at last he rose from his chair, I watched in undisguised awe.
“I think I’ve kept you awake long enough,” he said. “You must be tired.”
“No, I’m … Really, I’m not. I feel wide awake.”
“Stand up,” he whispered gently, moving toward me.
I stood. He took me into his arms. He tilted my face up to his, and pressed a soft kiss to my lips. I was still in my taffeta gown, and I felt his fingers touching the clasps at the back. He kissed me again, deeply this time, slowly undressing me. I thought of his wife, of his relational troubles, and then shoved aside those concerns. He was a man, capable of making his own choices. And if experience was any indication, I could be escaping the scene of this crime at any second anyway.
Abruptly, he stopped.
“What is it, Clark?”
He looked me in the eyes. “No, I … I don’t think I am going to do this. I’ve gotten around a lot in this life of mine. I’ve had any woman I wanted. And I’ve done a lot of damage. I need to have one beautiful, unsoiled moment to look back on, one time when I rose to a higher place inside of myself and did the right thing.”
Could I be the one to give him that moment? Just my luck. He was having a pang of guilt. But I understood that he did not want to follow his lust at the expense of his existing relationship.
“Ariel,” he said, releasing me. “I cannot make love to you tonight.”
One lone tear spilled down my cheek, but I nodded.
“I’m sorry,” he added.
“Me, too.”
We stood like that, only inches apart, our eyes never leaving each other.
A sudden pounding at the door broke through our thoughts and repressed desire. “Open up, you bastard,” a woman shouted. “I know you’re in there!”
“It’s Carol.” Clark’s face turned ashen. “How did she know?”
“Someone in the hallway must’ve seen you coming in.”
“Quick,” he said. “Open the window. I’ll go out on the ledge, and you can just tell her you haven’t seen me.”
I pried it open, as instructed, and he climbed outside. Was he out of his mind? The ledge was six inches wide, at best. As for the temperature, it was thirty-five degrees—tops. And he was only wearing a towel. This was not good. What if the wind blew off his last bit of covering? What if he fell?
Talk about gone with the wind.
Even as I turned back inside, I imagined the scandal of Clark Gable being discovered naked on the ledge outside my window, in the ever-brightening dawn.
“Let me in there!” Carol demanded.
I never unlocked that door. I told her she had woken me up, and I had no idea what she was talking about. When she finally left, I peered out the window to see how Clark was doing. Directly below, an old woman was taking in the view from the street, her mouth hanging open. Clark smiled, then tipped an invisible hat to her—just as his towel fell to the ground.
I started to say something, but then the room bucked underneath my feet. With the fluttering of that runaway towel, my thoughts and surroundings twirled down, down, down, fading, fading from view …
***
My limbs were numb. I sat up, finding myself back in present day New York City, in my apartment, on my bed, with my thirteen-pound cat Baby meowing plaintively from her position on my stomach.
Funny. I did not remember even getting into bed, and I was still fully clothed.
Oh, man. It had happened again.
After feeding Baby, I turned on the TV. The A&E Channel was chronicling, of all people, Clark Gable. The voice-over explained that Gone with the Wind had premiered seventy years earlier, on this very same date
I was all ears.
The narrator continued, “There were strange goings-on the night of the Atlanta extravaganza. Allegedly, Gable disappeared with a young woman he had just met, which created a major row with his new wife, Carole Lombard. Lombard reportedly ran out of the hotel, screaming and cursing—only to find a group of hotel staff gathered outside, pointing up to a sixth-story window where her husband balanced naked on a window ledge. Although he never revealed the identity of the mystery woman, and claims he never saw her again, he spoke fondly of her in the years that followed. During a rare interview from his own deathbed, soon after Lombard’s tragic death in a plane crash, he gave us this final insight into that mysterious evening in the winter of ’39:
“‘I’ve always been kind of a heel with women. Everybody knows that. But that night in Atlanta, for once I did the right thing—probably the only time in my life, where a woman was concerned. Nobody, especially Carole, believed me when I said nothing happened. But it’s true. It was all incredibly innocent. This girl was something special, and I realized that. And you know what? After all these years, I still wonder if she wasn’t the one that got away.”
He was talking about me? I sat in disbelief.
Of course, none of it made sense, not here in the present, but that was nothing new to me since I had grown accustomed to the havoc of my time-traveling escapades.
As I changed from my clothes into a robe, I discovered a wad of paper in the pocket of my jeans. An old grocery list, perhaps? When I removed it, I saw it was a cocktail napkin still damp with red wine. In barely legible script, it read:
Forget the canary diamond, or any of that other fancy jewelry.
Frankly, my
dear, you have something far more important:
You have jewels inside.”
C. G.
December, 1939
THE THERAPY CHRONICLES:
Part Two
This morning I dressed in my Sunday best, not because it was Sunday but because it was Friday: Therapy Day. Mr. Perfect looked so cute—especially the way he kept brushing his hair back from his face. Could he have been nervous? We had a series of discussions about why I’m not meeting the right kind of man. And now I know that this curse isn’t only related to the present, but also to the past. But do I have any control over that?
Although I’ve enjoyed the time travel and the interesting men I’ve met in the past, I find myself beginning to long for something in the here and now. But how will I find anyone who can compare to Hemingway, Van Gogh, or Clark Gable? Good luck, Ariel. You have about as much chance of that as losing a race to a one-legged man.
The only person I feel any spark for present day, is Mr. Perfect. And that flame is not reciprocal.
In his dark, wood-paneled office sitting on one of his leather sofas, he said, “I’m glad you told me that you are no longer interested in married men. That’s a big step forward, right? The goal is to meet available men who are relationship material.”
I still wasn’t convinced that “available” and “relationship material” didn’t equal “boring.”
“Yeah, married men do come with a lot of baggage—wives, ex-wives and alimony, child support, custody issues, etc.,” I said. “It can be exhausting.”
A sudden lightning quick revelation came to me: Just like the living, dead men seemed to carry a lot of baggage—just of a different kind.
Were all interesting men unbalanced, unavailable, and untruthful? I know the old saying, “you can’t live in the past,” but sometimes I seemed to be doing just that. With my time-travel I knew the drill. With the crystal heart working its magic, I found great romances in the past, but so far they held no future.
I was starting to believe that I might never meet anyone, and was destined to becoming one of those weird cat ladies living with thirty felines.
Chapter Eight
THE SPIRIT OF ST. LOUIS
Flying the friendly skies sure ain’t what it used to be.
I found that out after this weekend in St. Louis, visiting a childhood friend. I returned home to New York City on the only flight I could find, a nonstop to LaGuardia leaving at 6:30 a.m. I confess, I would rather stick pins in my eyes than face the world any time before ten.
I will always remember Flight 1722. I made sure to note certain details of it on the vomit bag provided in the seat pocket in front of me, specifically, the name of the offensive Nazi stewardess—ahem, I mean, flight attendant. I intended to register a complaint.
The problem is that post-9/11 flight attendants have taken on a new kind of power. They have done away with pleasantries such as “please” and “thank you.” They act as if the airline—and they, as its representatives— are doing you a huge favor by allowing you to spend hundreds of dollars to pack yourself like a sardine into a seat on an overbooked flight. In coach, you’re lucky to get a bag of stale peanuts. If fortunate enough to fly first-class, you might be treated to a vile plastic meal. My compliments to the chemist!
I took one of the seats in the back, 40C. I figured I would be safer there, since they say that if a plane goes down you have the best chance to survive in the rear sections. What a reassuring thought. I struggled to place my roll-aboard suitcase into the overhead bin, noticing that not one man volunteered to help. And it is obviously beneath the flight attendant to help. Finally, after huffing and puffing my way into a probable future back brace, a man heading down the aisle to a seat next to mine asked if he could help. Not to be a smart-ass, but to make a point, I said in a very loud voice, “I am sure glad there is at least one gentleman on this flight.” I placed my writing satchel under the seat in front of me, and rested my purse in my lap. Already edgy after a mere four hours of sleep, and one too many cocktails with my friend the night before, I had only one nerve left—and Ms. Nazi-flight-attendant was standing on it.
“That purse needs to go all the way under the seat in front of you,” she spat. She had fried, bleach-blonde hair, and a mouth that bled with severe red lipstick.
I pulled my eyes from her nasty appearance to examine my purse, which was the size of a paperback book. “So when did they start this?” I inquired, holding it up. “Look how small it is. This shouldn’t be a problem, should it?”
“It doesn’t matter. Those are the rules. It needs to go all the way under, not on the seat next to you, nor on your lap.”
Wow. I looked down at my hardcover copy of War and Peace, almost the size of a telephone book. She hadn’t said anything about that. As I opened my mouth again, I wondered why I couldn’t leave well enough alone. It’s a question I’ve asked myself my entire life.
“Well,” I said, “since this book is twice the size of my purse, why doesn’t that need to go under the seat as well?”
“You know what we do with rude passengers?” she snarled. “We make them get off the plane. Do you want to stay on this flight?”
“Look, I’m not trying to be a smart-ass here. I’m just asking a simple question. It seems to me this book would be far more dangerous flying around the cabin than my purse. That’s all.”
“You can hold the book, but the purse has to go all the way under the seat.” She watched as I did as asked. She continued up the aisle, barking out similar orders to others, and with a twenty-minute delay she had to time to come around again. “It is not all the way under the seat.”
Jesus Christ. You could barely see the damn thing.
Then she snipped at the guy across the aisle. “Your seat-back needs to come all the way up.”
If this plane went down, did she really think these things would make one iota of difference, since we were all gonna die anyway? I think about those things. Especially at 6:30 a.m.
Shortly after take-off, I flipped open my in-flight magazine. I should have been working on a piece I was writing for Cosmopolitan, but a particular article had caught my eye. It not only listed tourist attractions in the St. Louis area, but also mentioned a specific museum and showed a picture of a handsome man standing beside an airplane.
Charles Lindbergh. First man to fly across the Atlantic, in 1927.
I nodded off, with thoughts of airplanes and Nazi flight attendants filling my head. As the plane lifted, a steel-gray mist descended.
***
I awoke to find myself traveling by train. What was I doing here, and what time was it? I opened my purse, found a ticket dated Saturday, April 8, 1939, for an oceanic voyage aboard the Aquitania, from Cherbourg to New York. Interesting. I checked with a man walking down the corridor, and he told me in broken English that we were now en route from Paris to Cherbourg.
Okay. So I knew where and when I was going, but not why.
Used to this routine by now, I settled into my seat, thinking about what adventures might lie ahead. If the past was any indication, I knew there could be a new man on the horizon very soon.
The train ride to Cherbourg was insufferably long. I noticed I had my valise and writing satchel. I spent the time editing my Cosmopolitan piece. With no faxes or computers here to transmit my article, I hoped I would be back in New York in time to meet my deadline.
In the seats behind me, a family was traveling with a pack of noisy kids, and one boy kept kicking the back of my seat, then leaning over with snot running out of his nose staring at me like I was an alien from outer space. I wanted to say, “take a picture kid, it will last longer.” What sort of parents allowed their children to act this way? I wanted to knock the mother’s block off, but decided moving to the next car was probably a more suitable solution.
Hastily, I stuffed my papers into my satchel. The aisles were tight as I made my way into the forward car, and an unexpected lurch of the train threw me off balance. I cau
ght myself, preventing a nosedive, but the satchel flew from my hands and scattered its contents along the aisle. As I stooped to retrieve them, a man came to my aid.
“Here you are, miss,” he said, kneeling beside me.
My face flushed, and I was too embarrassed to look up.
“You missed a paper,” he added. “It’s under the seat.”
“Thank you so much.”
As he rose to his feet, I ventured a look and noticed he was tall and lean. My eyes moved up his body to his face, where I saw bright blue eyes and a sensual mouth. An amused smile tugged at the corner of his lips, and I wondered if this was the new man I was supposed to meet. I sure hoped so.
“Here you go.” He handed me the last pages. “I think that’s all of them.”
“Thanks again,” I said.
He returned to his seat, and I found an empty one next to a woman wearing a brown tweed coat and a paisley scarf.
“You know who that was, don’t you?” she whispered.
“No,” I said. “Who was he?”
“Why, he’s only the most famous man on earth. That was Charles Lindbergh. Can you believe it? First man to fly solo, nonstop, from New York to Paris. I hear he’s going back to the States.”
Inwardly I groaned that he had witnessed my clumsy moment. Would we be on the same ship together? I hoped I could show a little more grace should I encounter him again.
The train arrived in Cherbourg, and I flagged a taxi for the short ride to the harbor. The Aquitania hovered over the dock, gleaming with Old World charm.
I was ushered to my cabin. After unpacking, I removed my magazine piece, which I set out on the small desk. Feeling tired—my jumps through time seemed to have an effect on me like jetlag—I decided to go to dinner early. I needed to turn in at a decent hour so I could get an early start writing the next morning.
I dressed for dinner in a simple black dress, showing up in the dining parlor just before six. On the way, I passed the first-class drawing room. The walls were adorned with prints of English seaports, as well as portraits of royalty and prominent people of the day. The parlor itself rose through two decks and was beautifully decorated in Louis XIV-style. The maître d’ seated me at a quiet corner table by a window. While gazing at the menu, I was interrupted by a voice.
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