Then Janet asked how my scallops were. “Best in the world,” I answered. “Caught right out here in the bay, probably early this morning. And well prepared, I might add.”
“My sole is good, too.”
“Probably caught in Miami, frozen for six months and flown in,” I teased. “I never could understand sole Veronique. It is cast in stone that French-fries go with fish. Who eats grapes with fish?”
“Well, it’s delicious,” she defended. “And it’s quite a historical dish. While your ancestors were still painting themselves blue, the Romans were dining on sole Veronique! Perhaps in some former life I reclined on a couch beside the emperor and peeled him a grape. Then I dipped it in poisoned wine and fed it to him and became the all-powerful empress.”
“Gee, you’d have been perfect as Mrs. Nero.”
“Such a nasty, overrated little boy. I’d have had him for breakfast and then spit out the seeds.”
“You are ferocious! Listen, Empress Veronique, if we should go into a time warp and find ourselves in ancient Rome, remind me to head for the provinces on the first ox cart express.”
“I’d find you. And make you bring me here again for lunch. It’s really perfect.”
And she was really charming, I thought. I couldn’t remember when I’d so enjoyed a luncheon. She may have been only twenty-five, but there was a worldliness about her that belied her youth.
She cut herself another small slice of bread and buttered it. “This herb bread is superb. I recognize the marjoram and rosemary, but I can’t place the seeds. And that’s unusual, I’m customarily pretty good at identifying tastes.”
“I’m almost sure it’s borage.”
“Really? I’m not sure I’ve ever had it. You’re very clever.”
“It was a popular kitchen herb in England back in the fourteenth century, just as my ancestors were over in the creek scrubbing off the woad and putting on the shining armor. That’s quite a while after we threw you Romans out. They used it in salads, as well as breads. And medicinally for something, too, but I can’t remember what it was.”
“Good grief! I’ve an expert on my hands! You must be a fabulous cook!”
“Oh, yes,” I agreed. “I make an omelet that is simply beautiful until you try to get it out of the skillet. And I make a very tasty grilled cheese and tomato sandwich. The bread gets this really interesting dark brown, but somehow the cheese doesn’t melt and the tomato falls out.”
“Oh, come on!”
“About my cooking, it’s the absolute truth. I do know a bit about herbs because of my Aunt Mae. When her husband died, she started fooling with herbs as kind of a hobby to take up her time. Now she’s made quite a little cottage industry out of it.” Janet gave me a curious look over the top of her wine glass. “She grows them in the backyard and sells them dried in bottles, or growing in those tiny clay pots. She has a bunch of tourists who come back to her place year after year. In fact she’s written two little books about them, and they actually sell well enough to stay in print. You know, in nature food shops or gift shops, and a few little specialty book stores around New England.”
Janet was obviously impressed. “That’s fascinating! I love to cook, and I love herbs, properly used. I’ve always wanted my own restaurant, a small one with my own unique touch.” Her eyes lit up just thinking about it. “Maybe I’ll call it The Veronique. One where I could meet the diners and yet do some cooking, too. Intimate, I guess that’s the word I’m looking for. But not kitschy.”
“Oh, never kitschy,” I smiled. “But you are going to be one busy lady—a book here, a restaurant there . . .”
She looked down, embarrassed, and I was immediately sorry I had teased her about it. She reddened but she answered stoutly, “Well, I guess I’ll just have to be an overachiever!”
We went on to finish our meal and coffee, chatting about nothing in particular. Teachers we had liked or disliked. Food we like or dislike. Movies, books. Places we had been. She told me about her time out in Washington State where she had been stationed while in the Coast Guard. She had loved it. Especially out on the Olympic Peninsula just west of Seattle. She rhapsodized over the mountains, the lakes, America’s only tropical rain forest, and the silent beauty of the Pacific with the stone monoliths rising eerily from its quiet surface on a foggy day. She showed me a snapshot of her, standing in front of a shining glacier, in sun so warm she wore short sleeves, and with three lovely, tiny mountain deer browsing at ease, not twenty feet from her. Her face had a lovely glow to it, and I wondered if the gleam was for Seattle or maybe just a little for me.
“I’ve never been there, of course,” I said. “But you’re making that sound like something I should remedy. And probably sooner rather than later. It sounds magnificent. But I tend to get lost easily. I’d definitely need a guide. Any idea where I could find a good one?”
“I was a Girl Scout. We never get lost. We make very reliable guides. In fact we double as two-legged St. Bernards.” She smiled at me and our eyes met in one of those glances that seems marvelously promising as it occurs, and may or may not have been caused by the wine, and may or may not mean a damned thing an hour from now.
We were getting to know each other, I realized, and it felt rather nice. Janet might be seven or eight years younger than I was, but it didn’t seem to affect the pleasure we were taking in each other’s company. Screw Sonny.
Then the haughty waiter was clearing his throat and looking sauterne-y again and it dawned on me that we had been there quite a long while. I got the check. We argued over it but I finally won, and we left.
On the way back to the car we stopped in a small bookshop that was new to me and, of course, to Janet. We separated to browse. I soon picked up the latest Rita Mae Brown mystery and took it up to the register. After I paid for it, I leaned against the counter to read the first few pages while I waited for Janet. It looked like she might be a while, but then she hurried over to me, eyes shining, holding up two little brightly colored paperbacks.
“Look here!” she cried. “Two herb books by a Mae Cartwright! They must be your Aunt Mae’s books, aren’t they? Isn’t that great? I’m going to get them. Could you possibly get her to sign them for me?”
“Sure. They’re hers, and I know she’d be delighted. Of the few authors I’ve met, I’ve yet to see one who wouldn’t walk a mile in a driving snowstorm to autograph a book.”
“How right you are!” The store owner came to life. “Once in awhile we have a book signing here, and the authors will write special little messages and sign their names on the flyleaf until their fingers are frozen to the pen—with nary a groan. They don’t even take a bathroom break, for fear they might miss someone.”
Janet managed to catch one of the books in the strap of her purse. Both books and purse fell to the floor. Typical stuff flew all over the place: tissues, comb, compact, pens, scraps of paper, lipstick, wallet . . . you name it. I scooped several papers, pens and the wallet together and picked them up. A driver’s license fell out of the wallet as I lifted it and dropped back to the floor. As it landed, I noticed it was a Connecticut license, not Massachusetts, as I would have expected. She plucked it from the floor and the wallet from my hands and jammed them all quickly back into the purse, her face red with embarrassment.
“Isn’t that silly of me, keeping that old expired Connecticut license all these years?” I was amused at her discomfiture. It made her seem very young again after the sophisticated woman I had seen at lunch.
“I have no idea why it is still in my wallet. Why, it must have been in there since I was stationed at New London! Lord knows it’s worthless. Typical woman, huh? Maybe this will inspire me to clean out this bag and wallet.” She smiled up at the owner. “I’m mortified at all this junk, although I suppose some of it might find a market as antique.” She managed to come up with two $10 bills and hand them to the woman.
“Don’t be mortified, my dear.” The woman smiled as she put Janet’s books into a bag an
d handed back her change. “I’ve only owned this store a few months, but you wouldn’t believe some of the weird things I’ve seen come flying out of handbags and pockets in here! You wouldn’t believe it, for the plain and simple reason I’d be too embarrassed to tell you!”
We all laughed. Janet finally had everything back in her purse and the books in hand, and we left. Driving back to Provincetown we chatted about Aunt Mae’s books and the mystery I had bought. Janet didn’t know Rita Mae Brown, and when I told her that two of the main characters were a Welsh Corgi named Tucker and a cat named Sneaky Pie, who talked to each other and to other animals, she laughed. “I’m not surprised. If you ever wrote a book I’m sure Fargo would be in it. Does he talk, like the ones in the book you bought?”
“I’m sure he talks to other animals in some manner. I’ve noticed that various barks and growls and whines seem to have a lot of different meanings. And even though he may not speak English, he very definitely manages to communicate most of what he wants to say to me, one way or another.”
As we crested the last hill in Truro we looked down on Provincetown, curled up for a late afternoon nap by the harbor. The roofs of the buildings made a haphazard colorful quilt, bordered by the sand dunes turning a pale peach in the lowering rays of the sun. It was lovely and, unthinking, our hands reached out to each other.
We drove a few moments that way. I suddenly realized the day was nearly over, and I didn’t want it to end. Or rather, I knew exactly how I wanted it to end. I just wasn’t sure how to make that happen. So I decided to try something very original.
“Uh . . . ah, would you like to stop back by my place for a drink?”
She looked at me and grinned. “I thought you’d never ask.”
I was awfully glad I had changed the bed.
Chapter 6
I’m only speaking for myself, of course. But whenever a companion and I have decided to have sex together for the very first time, the moments between entering the bedroom and actually finding ourselves in bed are worse than any root canal on record. It’s all a matter of logistics. That first time, how the hell do you go about getting undressed and into bed?
Do you A) Run around the room shedding clothes wherever they may fall and calling out, “I want you! I need you! I must have you now!”? B) Suddenly become teddibly British, saying, “With you in half a tick, Luv,” and undress neatly, folding your clothing onto a nearby chair? or C) Sit on the edge of the bed and try to slither out of all your clothes in one movement, leaving them to implode into a messy heap on the floor while you whip beneath the sheet?
Or do you ignore your clothing all together and turn to your companion, beginning to undress her/him in the middle of the room, a passionate kiss here, a delicate caress there . . . all the time praying she/he understands that this is a two-way endeavor. Otherwise in a few moments you stand facing a nude partner while you are still in full armor, as it were, and are once again faced with A, B or C.
Of course it all works out in the end. Clothes are somehow shed, lights are turned off or remain on, covers are left on or kicked aside and pillows accept heads. Noses stop bumping and teeth stop clicking. What at first seemed like at least a dozen arms and shoulders sort themselves out and revert to the original number. Legs entwine or loosen at agreeable times, and concave accommodates convex as if architecturally designed.
Then it becomes wondrous indeed to contemplate how two bodies can at the same time be so pleasured and so pleasuring. At least, that’s how it worked for Janet and me.
Now we sat at my kitchen table, enjoying that après-sex kind of lazy high. She had on my terry cloth robe. I had thrown on a sweatshirt and pair of khakis. We were drinking coffee and munching on two rather stale doughnuts, which were all my larder seemed to offer except for a can of chili, some frozen dinners, a head of wilted lettuce, a saucer of finely aged lasagna, a little carton of what might once have been Chinese take-out and some saltines of uncertain vintage.
“I’m sorry about the doughnuts,” I smiled. “Don’t break a tooth.”
“They’re fine,” she smiled back. “And I’m not really hungry anyway. Lunch—and everything—was so wonderful.” She smiled again, but it looked sad to me.
“Are you okay? You seem . . . forlorn.”
“I’m fine!” She straightened in the chair and assumed a cheerful aspect. “I’m just crazy, I guess, but sometimes when everything is just about perfect, and I know I should be happy, I feel sad because I’m afraid things will all go wrong and it will end badly. Do you ever feel that way?”
“I don’t think so. If you start feeling that way, then no matter how great the moment is, you’ll be remembering that someday you’ll get old, or sick or fall off a cliff and die! Of course, logically, I know this will happen to me at some point, but I’d just as soon not put a damper on the moment, if you don’t mind.”
She laughed. “No wonder I like you, you’re so openly pragmatic! Oh, I’m very practical about things, but I have a ridiculously hard time with feelings. You seem to have some sort of balance between being sensitive and sensible. I seem to set myself up for disappointment and then fall apart when it happens. I wonder why I’m like that? I always have been.”
“Maybe you count too much on other people and not enough on yourself.” I thought for a minute. “I’m not sure how to put this. Nobody’s perfect. At some point your lover, your boss, your friend—hell—your mother is going to let you down. Maybe they’re ill or tired or busy or upset themselves about something. All of a sudden you need their help or their consolation or advice and they give you a blank look. You have to move quickly to Plan B, which is counting on yourself. Sure, it’s a disappointment. But it’s not the end of the world, nor even necessarily the end of the relationship with the other person. I try to be there for certain people—folks I care about, or people I’ve made a professional commitment to, but I know there are times I’ve failed. It doesn’t mean I don’t care or won’t be there next time. It’s life,” I finished grandly.
Janet’s mouth took on a stubborn line. “I cannot imagine letting down someone I care for. No matter what the personal cost to me. If you care for someone, you owe them your best, every time.”
“You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.” I kept it light, but I sensed that somewhere, sometime, someone had let Janet down . . . and badly.
“Not really. I have the feeling that you’re strong and reliable and one of those terribly honorable types.”
“Yeah, well, it’s a ‘thin red line of ’eroes when the drums begin to roll.’” She was embarrassing me and I was being silly to cover it.
“You’re the one who’s red,” she teased. “Don’t you like compliments?”
“Depends what you’re complimenting.” I gave her a grinning leer.
“Oh, okay, I could hand out a few on that subject, too.”
“A few! A few! Talk about letting people down!”
“Talk about conceit!”
We laughed and chatted on, and Janet remarked how relaxed she felt. Truth to tell, I was getting a little nervous. The clock seemed to be speeding, and soon I would need to do the same if I were to complete my assignment regarding Ray Miller. Then, to delay things further, Sonny arrived.
I could have wished he’d picked another time. I liked to keep my personal life personal, although I don’t suppose it really mattered. Sonny and I never commented on each other’s choice of partners or sexual activities. It was probably the one area in our lives that was off limits to the other, for the simple reason it would probably have led to bloodshed otherwise.
Janet was obviously embarrassed and excused herself to get dressed. Unfazed, Sonny helped himself to a beer from the fridge and took her place at the table, pushing away the stale doughnut scraps with a look of distaste. “Going to the store soon, Alex? These would poison a seagull and your refrigerator looks like a high school chemistry project.”
“I’m so glad you stopped by, Sonny. Want to borrow my white glo
ves and run your finger around the baseboard while you’re here?”
“No thanks. I’m allergic to dust and mold. I just came by to tell you what a truly superior detective your brother really is.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Jake Maxwell was flying his Cessna back from a trip to Boston. He spotted something bright yellow adrift in the water and radioed the Coast Guard. Guess what it turned out to be? An empty Zodiac!”
I saw Janet start across the living room and then hesitate, as if not certain she should join us. “Come on in,” I called. “I don’t think this is top secret.” I turned back to Sonny. “Well, doesn’t that pretty much bear out the Plymouth police theory that the robbers could-n’t handle it in the storm, went overboard from the big boat or fell out of the Zodiac and drowned?”
“Maybe. But once again there are those little discrepancies. The gas tank of the Zodiac was bone dry. Of course, they could have got the motor running and then fell out, so it just ran around until it ran out of gas. But, Mr. Watson, the tiller was lashed so the Zodiac would run straight.”
“I don’t get it,” Janet interjected. “What does that mean?”
“I’ll tell you what I think it means,” Sonny replied. “I think they got it going just fine. I think they came ashore in Provincetown. And unless there was some really far-out, unimaginably complex conspiracy and somebody was here to meet them with a car, I think they’re right here. They could have come ashore, lashed the tiller in place and sent the Zodiac back out into the bay empty, hoping it would get carried out to sea by the time it ran out of gas, and never be found.”
“Yes,” I added, “Or they may have hoped if someone did find it, they would know what those things cost and keep it for themselves, rather than reporting the find. But, Sonny, we’re forgetting . . .” I glanced at Janet. “You know, the foot. Whoever the man was, he was badly injured, and he’d been in freezing water and then in the cold air. He’d have had to get immediate medical attention or die! I mean, you couldn’t have just bandaged up the leg and somehow got him into a motel or something.”
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