Sweetheart Deal

by Claire Matturro

  I was embarrassed. I was starving. And the mini–tape recorder was cold and sharp inside my bra. And I’d had to remove the push-up padding in one cup to make room for it, and now worried that I had lopsided cleavage.

  Not that I was planning on having a second date, so what did it matter?

  Upon closer observation, despite his blatant oddities, Simon seemed to be a pretty nice man. His manners were perfect. His concern for Willette and my family and me seemed sincere. His suggestion we go to Annier’s Courtyard, where he insisted they served organic and vegetarian fare, boded well. In fact, he so resisted my countersuggestion of going to the Deer Den that I wondered if he knew and was disgusted by the turtle-egg rumors. But gentleman that he was, finally he let me convince him to take me there.

  On the long ride through the evening and the countryside, I fully intended to learn one key thing from this man. But “Why did Willette call you the day she shot a man?” seemed way too obvious. So I went at it sideways and asked, in my most friendly, i.e., not lawyer, voice: “Did you know my mother at all? I mean, you’re so sweet to her in the hospital, had you met her before?”

  Simon took his eyes off the road for a moment to cut them over to me. I smiled my girl-on-a-first-date smile, the one that promises a lot, plus shows off my good dental hygiene.

  “No. I heard she didn’t get out much,” he said, and turned back to the dark country road in front of us.

  “True, she didn’t. But I’m just learning that she liked to chat with folks on the phone. Why, Eleanor and Dan both said she’d call them up, just to talk. Did she ever call you?”

  “Why would she do that?” Simon asked.

  Well, yes, that was the twenty-dollar question, wasn’t it? And wasn’t it interesting that he hadn’t actually answered my question yet.

  An old lawyer trick is to ask the same question with slightly different wording until you get a better answer. I was usually very good at this. So, I gave it a whirl. “Hm, I think she must have gotten lonely. Maybe she wanted to welcome you to your new home, seeing as how it was the house she grew up in. So, I don’t know. She was a strange lady.” I paused, hoping Simon would jump in with a suddenly remembered phone conversation with my mother. He kept driving.

  “So. Did you ever talk with her? Over the phone, I mean?”

  “I don’t think she had any reason to call me,” Simon said, and then he reached over and put his big hand on my knee. “You know, we have a lot in common. My mother didn’t like me either.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, I hear things, but don’t worry, that’s why we understand each other. My mother thought I was a freak.”

  “What?” Had my mother thought I was a freak? Had somebody told him that?

  “Because of my Marfan syndrome, only a mild case, really, I’m quite healthy; I work out all the time. But she was ashamed of me. Because of the Marfan’s.”

  Ah, Marfan’s syndrome, an inherited condition, like some experts thought President Lincoln had. The most obvious symptom being elongated limbs. And being tall, very tall. That would explain Simon’s long, long arms. And legs. And his long, thin face.

  “It’s a genetic mutation, hardly my fault, more like her fault for passing on the DNA. But my own mother blamed me, and despised me for having it. But it gave me something to transcend. Like you. We’ve both risen above having mothers who didn’t care for us. We’ve both done very well. Very, very well.”

  I didn’t want to pursue either the topic or his hand on my knee. For a moment I just sat still. It was actually pretty hard to transcend having a mother like that. I mean, if the one person in the whole world who is supposed to unqualifiedly adore you despises you instead, then yeah, a hard row of emotional adjustment to hoe lies in front of you—forever. While I still hadn’t made up my mind if I liked this man, I was suddenly very sympathetic to him. I didn’t reach to take his hand off my knee.

  “Did you ever resolve things with her?” I asked, my voice soft.

  “No. But I will. I’m going to impress that woman if it’s the last thing I do. Right now, I’m the administrator of a little hospital, a good hospital, a very good hospital. But that’s not enough for her. She thinks I’m this big failure, this big…all because I inherited Marfan’s. But see, with all the development and population boom that’s coming to this area, that hospital will grow, and I’ll be right there, taking it to the top. It’ll be the best damn hospital in the whole region, and the biggest. Boom times coming for the community and the hospital. You wait and see.”

  Before I could figure out how to respond, Simon turned to me and leaned over like he was going to kiss me. But as his face neared my lips, he kept steering straight where the road began a sharp curve.

  “Watch the road,” I shouted, and he spun the wheel, and after only a little jerk and bump, we were back off the shoulder and on the hardtop again. Maybe, I thought, it’d be in our own interest to wait till he wasn’t driving a small car too fast on a dark, curvy road before we made out or delved deeper into our wounded souls.

  “Tricky road,” he said.

  “Well, not if you would actually watch it,” I said, our moment of connection gone in a snit. Rather than risk getting back to where we’d left off, that being Simon leaning into a kiss rather than the curve, I asked if I could play his CD, and before you’d know it, we had some jazzman I’d never heard of playing music I didn’t much like. But at least Simon kept his eyes on the road.

  While I blocked out the music, I thought: Well now, this is interesting. Willette’s notebook showed she had called him, and he more or less—indirectly, at least—led me to believe he had never spoken with my mother. However, in a lawyerlike way, he had managed not to actually deny talking with her.

  As I was pondering what this might mean, I leaned back in the car and took in the night around us. The stars were bright. No one else was on the road. The car was smooth. The man driving it had opened his soul to me, and had at least some potential if he’d let me renovate his wardrobe and vocabulary. In spite of the dreadful music, this could have been a really good drive on a decent first date—I mean, if Simon had really been my date (at least in my mind), and we weren’t going to a horrid place where we wouldn’t really eat, and I didn’t have a miniature tape recorder poking at me in my bra.

  Finally, we arrived at the Deer Den, which was nothing more than a big old farmhouse. Simon explained to me that this place had been a local favorite for a long time. However, just a few months ago, new management had taken it over when the original owner had sold it. Apparently, the verdict was still out as to whether the new people—outsiders, Simon noted without a trace of irony—would run as good a place as the former owners.

  I smiled and nodded as if Demetrious hadn’t already told me that and more.

  As Simon escorted me inside, the tape recorder tried to work its way up from my bra cup, and I turned away from Simon to push it back down. “Lovely view,” I said, to explain my sudden turn to the left as I looked out over a big, dark field of denuded cotton stalks. Once the tape recorder was back in place, I thought, all systems go, as Simon led me inside and the hostess took us to a table with a candle by a window. In short order, a young man dropped off a basket of bread and poured water in our glasses.

  “You’re quite the mystery,” I said, and sniffed the water. Chlorinated tap water. Never drink water that smells of chlorine, I thought, and pushed the glass away. “Please, tell me about yourself.”

  “I really like jazz.”

  Okay, technically a proper response, but not what I had in mind. Besides, I don’t know a thing about jazz.

  “Classical,” I said, not because it was true but because it sounded impressive. “Now what led you to come down South?”

  “I’m passionate about Mendelssohn.”

  Okay, I had to assume this was a side step about music and not a Southerner he was crazy about. “Uh-huh. Me too.” So, was Mendelssohn jazz or classical? Before this hole got dug deeper, I needed t
o introduce a new, nonmusical topic. “No one seems to want to wait on us. And I’m really hungry.”

  Simon rose gracefully from the table—gracefully, that is, for a man dressed in bright blue everything and with all those long appendages—and he said, “Permit me to find someone to take our order.”

  In his absence, I peeked at the rolls—ordinary white-bread things, definitely off the chart on the glycemic index. I pushed the bread basket away and once more poked down the tape recorder.

  Simon returned alone. “Someone will be right with us.”

  Chat chat chat, and the man would not answer a single helpful question, but at least we were no longer discussing jazz versus classical music.

  Finally, a blond waitress stood by our table. Sheila, her name tag said, and she was quickly all business. After she rattled off the nightly specials—all some kind of poor dead cow or pig and nothing exotic or illegal—I started hinting about unadvertised specials. Sheila stared at me, not at all taking the bait, no matter how wink-wink I was in my inquiry about something “really different, you know, exotic.” Suddenly I realized that even if she started rattling off monkey meat and panda filets, I couldn’t just turn the tape recorder on while everyone was looking at me—I mean, I couldn’t be grabbing my own bra and pushing the on button. So, I said “Excuse me” and crawled under the table, hit the on button, in case the waitress said something incriminating in the next few minutes, and I popped up again. “Slippery napkin,” I said.

  Simon was staring at me strangely. And this from a guy in a midlifecrisis car and wardrobe-coordinated eyewear.

  I ignored his look and went for two more rounds of coy games with the waitress, trying to get her to tell me the “real house specialties” till finally she snapped out something about other customers and stomped off.

  Okay, so I hadn’t accomplished anything so far beyond irritating the waitress, but the evening was still young. I popped under the table to turn off the tape recorder, as I didn’t want to run out of tape. “Really slippery napkin,” I said as Simon continued to give me that what-have-I-gotten-into look.

  “Do you want to go someplace else?” he asked, his voice the very voice of concern. Or of a man who wanted to get out of the public view before his date did something really strange.

  I wiggled around until I was sitting up straight and the recorder in my bra was only poking me a little bit, and I grinned like everything was fine and said, “Why, no. Let’s order.” As if that wasn’t what we’d already tried to do.

  Just then, an official-looking manager-type man came to the table. “Sheila tells me you wanted something…exotic.” He looked me up and down, and then glanced at Simon, who quickly assured him the house specialty—fried chicken—would be just fine for him.

  “Oops,” I said, and bobbed down under the table again, and pushed the on button on again, and popped back up.

  “You guys just have the slipperiest napkins, just won’t stay in my lap.” Grin, grin.

  “Here, try mine, it stays put,” Simon said, ever the gentleman, as he handed me his napkin.

  Okay, enough with the napkins, I thought, and launched my most mischievous smile at the manager man. “I’ve heard that for special people, you have some off-the-menu items that are just out of this world. Or out of this country anyway.”

  “We have some shrimp that’s imported from China. Everything else is quite local, I assure you, and quite fresh. Perhaps some of our quail?”

  “Quail, eh, why no. I had something…exotic…in mind.” Come on, how many times did I have to say “exotic”?

  As if Manager Man had been quite well coached in the nuances of entrapment, he said, “Please tell me what you have in mind. Specifically. Then we will see what there is.”

  I’d watched enough TV over the years to have the gist of entrapment too, and so, instead of saying, look, I want some illegal stuff, I took a different tack. “Hey, Lonnie Ledbetter, who is an old friend of mine dating back to grade school, told me to ask for the off-the-menu specialties and you’d have a real treat for me. Ray Glenn and I were close, real close, up till his unfortunate accident, and he used to brag about your exotic meats.”

  Okay, okay, spank me for being a name-dropper, but Lonnie struck me as the sort that would impress this man, and Ray Glenn sounded exactly like the type of man who would actually eat endangered snow leopard filets. So what if Simon knew I was lying? The man was much too polite to interrupt my quest for recorded evidence to point out to a stranger that I, his date, was, technically speaking, not telling the truth about Ray Glenn.

  Still, if our manager guy had had half a brain, he’d have checked my references by calling Lonnie. Instead, he bowed slightly and ran through a couple of nightly specials that included beluga caviar and a rare delicacy—Caribbean sea-turtle eggs.

  Hiding my disgust and anger, I swallowed a few times and finally ordered the beluga caviar for an appetizer, and asked Manager Man to check back with us in a few minutes on the main course.

  Simon shook his head at the manager, who pranced off totally unaware that I’d just recorded him offering to sell me something in violation of federal and international law.

  “I can’t believe you would order that,” Simon said, and gave me a look that radiated disapproval.

  Well, okay, as I’d already admitted, I was not looking for a second date—provided I could learn what I needed on this one.

  My first plan had been to order something illegal on tape, then photograph it. Surreptitiously, of course. Maybe even ask for a doggie bag to take it to Demetrious for lab work, or something. But Simon’s glare got to me, I had to admit. “I don’t want to eat them,” I said. “In fact, I don’t want to stay here at all.”

  “Fine. I don’t wish to stay here either.”

  “Good.”

  Simon stood up to flag down Manager Man, while I crawled under the table to turn off the tape recorder. When we were both eye-to-eye again at the table, he gave me a long, steady look.

  “Are you all right? You keep ducking under the table.”

  “Fine. Good. So.” Next time somebody wants me to spy with a tape recorder, I’m putting it in my purse, not my bra.

  Manager Man appeared at the table. But before Simon could say whatever he was going to say to him, I said, genteelly, “Oh, please, sir, I was wondering if I might see your kitchen? I’ve got a kind of cleanliness thing, and I just can’t eat at restaurants until I’ve inspected their kitchen.” I didn’t want the man becoming suspicious that I was spying for Demetrious, and thought demanding to scrutinize the kitchen an ideal exit strategy. It had certainly resulted in my exit from other restaurants.

  Typically so, Manager Man insisted his kitchen was clean, and was equally emphatic that I couldn’t see this for myself but would have to take his word for it.

  “Well, in that case, cancel my order. We’re leaving.”

  Manager Man cast his eyes at Simon, as if he had the final say. Simon gave me a what-are-you-doing look, and I smiled my sweetest smile at him.

  “Isn’t that right, Simon?” I asked, in a tone that suggested I wouldn’t care for any disagreement.

  “Fine,” he said, his puzzlement sounding even in that one word.

  So, we canceled our orders, Simon left a five on the table for the water and bread, and we huffed and puffed out the front door and back to his spiffy sports car.

  “Lilly, what are you up to?” he asked as he held the door open for me.

  I slid into the passenger side, and debated bringing him in on the secret mission, but decided not to. Let him just think I’m a bit nutty. After all, he knew my mother’s condition and would surely believe I could be weird too.

  “Oh, nothing,” I said. But once we were both in the car, I had a sudden sense of unfinished business, that being the lack of photographic evidence, and I expressed a need to visit the ladies’ room, and got out of the car. Leaving Simon before he could question me further, I trotted back to the restaurant, darted past our for
mer waitress, and barreled my way straight ahead under the EMPLOYEES ONLY sign. In a matter of uninterrupted seconds, I was standing just inside the kitchen, and the salad maker caught my eye. I saw no evidence he had washed that head of iceberg, and he was not wearing gloves.

  “You know, you should use romaine, much more nutritional, plus you should wash it, really wash it well, and you should be wearing sterile gloves.” I like to be helpful.

  Salad Guy stopped chopping iceberg and looked me up and down. “You with the Health Department?”

  The words “why, yes” started to form on my lips as I figured that would open some doors here. But a woman who had the look of head chef stepped up to me and said, “I’d like to see your ID.”

  “Oh, me, I’m sorry, I was just looking for the ladies room.” I gave them all what I hoped was a sheepish but friendly look. “The waitress, the blond one, told me it was back here.”

  “That Sheila,” the salad guy said, “doesn’t know her head from her—”

  “It’s back the way you came, first door on the right,” the head chef woman said, and crossed her arms in front of her chest in classic defensive mode.

  Okay, so this chef knew something in this kitchen didn’t bear inspection. Even if it was just dirt.

  But now that everyone had stopped chopping and boiling and frying to stare at me, there was nothing to do but turn and head back down the hall.

  Only when I got to the first door on the left, where I had spotted a walk-in freezer, I peeked back. Head Chef was watching me, so I continued down the hallway to the bathroom, and ducked in.

  After counting to one hundred, I stepped out, and seeing no one staring toward me, I dashed silently back up the hallway, once more boldly ignoring the EMPLOYEES ONLY sign, and turned left into the room with the walk-in freezer. The cosmic gods of sneaks smiled benevolently on me. No one was in this room, and those wide, stainless-steel doors screamed to me to open them.

  Within seconds, I was doing just that. Peering behind me toward the kitchen, I couldn’t see anyone, and figured that meant no one could see me. In short order, I plopped a bag of frozen peas inside the door to make sure it didn’t fully close and lock me in, and I stepped inside, pulling the door mostly shut behind me.