Right Place, Wrong Time

by Judith Arnold

  “Who is it?” Alicia shouted in the distance. “Can I talk to them?”

  Gina’s sister relented. “Okay, so she mentioned something about that,” she said, her inflection uncannily similar to Gina’s.

  What was the sister’s name? Mona, perhaps, or Rona…Her sister’s name was quite possibly the only thing about Gina that Ethan didn’t remember. Everything else about her was etched into his memory, from her coal-black hair to her elegant toes, from her sarcastic wit to her rousing laugh, from her tears to her kisses. Since returning home from St. Thomas, he hadn’t lived a day without thinking about her, wondering about her, remembering those few crazed minutes on the terrace their last night, when he’d believed he would have done anything, anything to have her.

  Maybe they’d both succumbed to vacation madness that night, some sort of tropical fever. Maybe he’d been suffering a bizarre reaction to his breakup with Kim. Or maybe, as the song went, it was just one of those things. He’d never know—unless he saw Gina again.

  “I’m trying to reach Gina,” he said. “I couldn’t find her phone number anywhere—”

  “Don’t you think she’d have given it to you if she wanted to hear from you?”

  “I…” He faltered. Why hadn’t he asked for her number before she’d disappeared from his life? “I don’t think it occurred to either of us,” he said, then considered that answer and decided it was reasonably true. “Things were hectic at the end.” More than reasonably true. Those deep, hungry kisses, that desperate groping, the tears, the touches…Hectic summed it up. “I don’t intend to bother her,” he assured the sister. “We were all thrown together for a week, and a friendship developed. I just want to say hi, that’s all.”

  Another pause. The sister took her time mulling things over. Finally she sighed. “You said your name was Ethan?”

  “Ethan!” Alicia shrieked, her voice blasting through the phone line. “Is it Ethan, Mommy? I wanna talk to him!”

  Bless you, Alicia, he mouthed. He recalled her solemnly informing him, that day at Trunk Bay Beach, that Gina didn’t have a boyfriend, and a smile tugged at his mouth. She’d been in his corner right from the start. “Can I say a quick hello to Alicia?” he asked in his gentlest, least threatening voice.

  “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy! Can I talk to Ethan?” Alicia bellowed from her end.

  Two against one; Alicia’s mother didn’t stand a chance. “All right,” she said reluctantly. “Just for a minute.”

  Alicia let out a whoop, and then he heard the rattle of the phone changing hands. “Ethan? It’s me!”

  “Hey, Alley Cat,” he greeted her, loving her even more because she was so damn enthusiastic. “How are you?”

  “I’m great. I’m in second grade now,” Alicia bragged. “My teacher let me tell the class about snorkeling. I drew a picture of a snorkel on the blackboard, and I talked about the fish and the coral and those water flowers—an-enemies?”

  “Anemones,” he corrected her.

  “Uh-huh. And my best friend, Caitlin, is in my class.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “And I see my daddy twice a week. He buys me ice cream. My mom thinks that’s not healthy, but Aunt Gina let me eat ice cream in St. Thomas. With butterscotch sauce.”

  He inhaled slowly, hoping to drain any unruly emotion out of his voice before asking, “How’s Aunt Gina?”

  “She’s great! She’s got shoes in Fashion Week!”

  Ethan had no idea what that meant, but Alicia made it sound like the best possible news. “Wow! That’s terrific!”

  “Now she’s working on something new. She said the new shoes she’s making are going to look like fish. I bet they’re weird.”

  “No kidding.” She’d hide those beautiful feet of hers in shoes that looked like fish?

  “Finish up now, Alicia,” her mother said. Monica, perhaps? Ethan remembered her name having three syllables. “It’s time to say goodbye.”

  “Will you call me again?” Alicia asked into the phone.

  “If your mother lets me.”

  “Can I see you?”

  “I’d like that. I’d like to see your aunt, too. Do you think she’d like to see me?” He cringed as the words rushed out. Did he sound too eager? Would Alicia think he was only using her to get to Gina?

  “I don’t know. She’s very busy with Fashion Week.”

  “I’m sure she is. And you’re busy with school, and I’m busy with work. But it would still be fun for us all to see each other, don’t you think?”

  “Say goodbye, Alicia,” Gina’s sister commanded.

  “I gotta go. I’ve got spelling,” she groaned, as if it were some sort of disease.

  “Great talking to you, Ali. Please put your mother back on, okay?”

  “Okay. Goodbye!”

  He heard more rattling as the phone changed hands again, and then Alicia’s mother’s voice: “So. You’re happy now?”

  “No, I’m not happy. I mean, yes, I’m happy, but I’d be happier if you gave me Gina’s phone number.”

  “Forget it. I’m not giving it to you.”

  “How about her work number?” She worked for a public company, didn’t she? A place where Fashion Week people could get shoes that looked like fish. If only he knew the name of her shoe company, he’d have phoned her there and not wasted hours telephoning all the Barrys and Baris in White Plains.

  Yet another long silence ensued while the sister weighed her options. “All right, look,” she finally said. “If I hear anything about you pestering her, or stalking her—”

  “I’m not going to—”

  “Or anything that makes me regret giving you her number at work, I’m going to have the cops on you so fast you’ll get whiplash just from their locking you into handcuffs. I can do that, you know. My brother is a cop.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean it. I don’t want you bothering her.”

  “I know you mean it, and I won’t bother her.” Was she this shrewish all the time? Not that he condoned her husband’s infidelity, but there were two sides to every story. Maybe the guy had had his reasons for seeking another woman.

  “Because if you do bother her—”

  “Right. Your brother.”

  She fell silent again. Had she heard the impatience in his tone? Was she going to punish him for it? He waited anxiously. “Okay,” she said. “Here’s her work number.”

  He jotted the digits down and disavowed the nasty thoughts he’d had about her. She wasn’t a shrew. She was a saint. He adored Mona-Rona-Monica, whatever her name was. He worshiped her.

  He thanked her three times, then decided he was coming across as too obsequious and ended the call. Staring at the phone number he’d scrawled onto his memo pad, he smiled. Alicia’s mother might have been right when she’d said that if Gina had wanted to hear from him, she would have given him her number herself. Possessing her work number offered no guarantees that she’d talk to him, let alone agree to see him. But it was a start.

  FORTUNATELY, chaos didn’t faze Gina. The main design room of Bruno Castiglio Shoes—a cavernous, brightly lit space in a Seventh Avenue postwar, cluttered with drafting tables, rolls of paper, mock-ups and prototypes of shoes, cartons of samples and boxes of swatches—existed in a permanent state of chaos. Bruno stood near his worktable at the far end of the room, yammering into his telephone. When he was under pressure, his voice rose and became more staccato. As preparations for New York City’s Fashion Week raced toward their final stages, he’d come to sound as shrill and rapid as a jackhammer chewing up concrete at a construction site.

  In the past, Gina wouldn’t have minded. After her trip to St. Thomas, however, she’d lost some of her tolerance for noise. Her week there had given her a taste for tranquillity. Sometimes, when she was walking to work, the din of traffic—blaring horns, wheezing buses, pedestrians babbling into cell phones and the ubiquitous clamor of jackhammers at some construction site or other—actually annoyed her. It never had be
fore.

  Not that she’d be able to survive on a full diet of island life. One week hadn’t been long enough for her to grow weary of the balmy winds, the soothing surge and ebb of the sea, the brilliance of the stars in a night sky devoid of smog and light pollution. Two weeks in paradise, though, and she would have been tearing at her hair. She was an island girl, as long as the island was Manhattan.

  But she missed St. Thomas. She missed the salty ocean fragrance, the lush heat, the freedom to do nothing but play in the sand and the high-quality time she’d had with Alicia. St. Thomas haunted her. Over the past few weeks, she’d been working on designs for shoes constructed of iridescent fabrics, some silver, some bluish, some white, like the fish she’d seen while snorkeling.

  She was probably fixated on the place because it had been a vacation—a long overdue one, arriving at a time when she’d needed a break from the daily hustle-bustle of her life. Her dreams were filled with St. Thomas because Alicia had been such a sweetie and the beach had been so clean and soft and warm. There was nothing more to it than that.

  The abrupt ring of the phone occupying the corner of her drafting table jolted her. The company had three phone lines, and in the days leading up to Fashion Week, Bruno usually tied up all three single-handedly. Right now, apparently, he’d left one line open. She lifted the receiver. “Yes?”

  Meg, the administrative assistant who worked in the relative peace of a tiny office adjacent to the design room, said, “Gina? It’s for you. Personal, I think, but he wouldn’t give his name.”

  “Wonderful,” she groaned. A legitimate personal call would have reached her via her cell phone. This must be some weirdo who’d tracked her down through her job. Whom had she met recently? She hadn’t been doing much partying or club hopping in the past few weeks. She’d been too tired, what with all the demands of Fashion Week. At least, that was the best excuse she’d come up with for why she’d been lately spending most of her evenings by herself, quietly.

  She did have a plan for tonight, at least. She was taking Carole out for a belated thank-you dinner. She’d wanted to do something special to repay her friend for the use of the time-share at Palm Point, but Carole’s recent schedule had been as crazy as her own.

  Or maybe that was just another excuse. Gina suspected she’d been putting off the thank-you dinner because she was still assimilating the week she’d spent at Palm Point, still trying to decide how grateful she was for Carole’s having crossed wires with some bozo named Paul, forcing Gina and Alicia to share the condo with—

  “Hello?” a man’s voice broke through her cluttered thoughts.

  Not just a man’s voice. Ethan’s voice.

  She pulled the receiver away from her head and stared at it. Why was she hearing Ethan’s voice through this piece of molded plastic?

  “Gina? Are you there?”

  She pressed the receiver back to her ear, clamped her free hand over her other ear to shut out Bruno’s abrasive chatter about why some top-name designer wanted to have his runway models shod in Manolo Blahnik instead of Bruno Castiglio, and said, “Ethan?”

  “I found you! I can’t believe it. I’ve been trying to track you down for weeks.”

  “You have?”

  “I got this number from your sister.”

  When had he spoken to Ramona? Did they know each other? Why hadn’t Ramona told Gina that Ethan had contacted her? Why did Gina suddenly feel as if she were swimming underwater, lost in that alien universe, sensing no gravity and unsure which way was up?

  “I had to twist her arm to give me your work number. She wouldn’t give me your home number, and you’re not listed in the directory.”

  “I don’t have a land line,” she told him. “It’s a cell phone. It’s not in the directory.” Why were they talking about her phone number? She had spent the past two months trying not to think about whatever the hell had flared between them their final night on St. Thomas—whatever the hell had flared between them the entire week they’d been together. She’d berated herself for wasting her mental energy on him. He was a privileged, polished Connecticut fellow, sort-of not-quite engaged to a woman—or at the very least sleeping with her, whatever the hell that was all about. Gina and Ethan had become friends the way soldiers sharing a foxhole might; odd circumstances had thrown them together, and there had been a certain amount of chemistry, and that last night those kisses had been a complete and utter mistake. Gina had been sad about leaving St. Thomas, far sadder about her sister’s wrecked marriage and its impact on Alicia, and she’d let her emotions carry her away. She was usually not that stupid.

  So why was Ethan on the phone? Why had he tracked her down at work? How had he managed to call her at a rare moment when Bruno wasn’t tying up all three lines?

  “I’d like to see you,” he said.

  She still felt as if she were underwater, blowing bubbles and kicking against the current. But now, at least she could make out some signposts—a bit of coral reef, the rippled sand below, the sun broken into glints of light across the surface of the water above. He’d like to see you, she thought.

  Would she like to see him?

  She sucked in a deep breath—and coughed, as if some water had come through the snorkel tube along with the air.

  “We could meet somewhere, or I could come downtown, if you’ll give me the address of your office.”

  She should have said no—because he was a privileged, polished Connecticut fellow, maybe engaged, and all that. Instead, she said, “When?”

  “How about today?”

  Today? Was he in New York now? Why did she still feel as though she were caught in a riptide? “What about Kim?” she asked.

  “Kim and I ended our relationship in St. Thomas, Gina. Remember? You were there.”

  “Well…maybe you were just telling me you weren’t going to marry her because you wanted to mess around with me.”

  “I didn’t want to ‘mess around’ with you,” he said, pronouncing the phrase as if it disgusted him. “There was something going on between you and me. You know that as well as I do. It wasn’t ‘messing around.’ It was something else.”

  “What was it?”

  “Damned if I know. But I’d like to find out. Can we get together?”

  She sighed. Closing her eyes, she tuned out Bruno’s hysterical blathering on the other two phone lines, the UPS guy in natty brown shorts who was dumping a carton of samples on the floor near the door, the off-key humming Geoffrey, the company’s chief engineer, indulged in when he was concentrating, the blinding fluorescent lights and the scents of leather and solvent and rubber that wafted around her desk. Damned if she knew what was going on between her and Ethan, either—assuming something was going on between them. Perhaps they’d only been acting out a tropical fantasy during that week on St. Thomas. If she hadn’t been with Alicia and he hadn’t been with Kim, maybe they would have continued their act until the final curtain.

  He wanted to see her. Today.

  “I can’t,” she said, both disappointed and relieved. “I’ve got plans.”

  He took a minute to digest this answer. “How about tomorrow?”

  “Why are you so eager to see me, all of a sudden?”

  “It’s not all of a sudden,” he told her. “I’ve wanted to see you since the moment you left Palm Point. But I had to get things properly squared away with Kim. And then it took me a while to track your sister down, after I tried unsuccessfully to track you down.” He paused, then asked, “Do you really not want to see me, Gina? Just say so, if that’s how you feel. Don’t make me come to New York only to make a fool of myself. I want to see you, but if you have no interest at all, no curiosity in seeing where this could take us—”

  “No,” she blurted out. “I mean, yes. I mean, no, I don’t have no interest or curiosity.” Great. She was blathering worse than Bruno. She wondered if she sounded like a jackhammer. More important, she wondered if Ethan had any idea what she meant. She wondered if she had any idea.


  He obviously chose to interpret her mangled words in a way that suited him. “Then we’ll get together tomorrow. Where do you live?”

  She wasn’t about to tell him. She was a savvy New Yorker, and even though she knew Ethan, even though she’d kissed him—a hell of a lot more than that, actually—she knew better than to give him her home address, at least not until she’d seen him again and assured herself that he was safe.

  He hadn’t been safe in St. Thomas. Oh, he’d been safe when it came to snorkeling…but even an innocent activity like sitting across the table from him at a fancy restaurant in Charlotte Amalie had proven risky. And talking to him, confiding in him, feeling so connected to him—

  Not safe. “There’s a coffee shop on Ninth Avenue,” she informed him, not adding that it was a five-minute walk from her apartment. She often went there for brunch on Saturday mornings. She’d be there tomorrow, if he wanted to meet her. One look at the place, with its pleasantly gloomy ambiance and its multicultural clientele, might scare the Connecticut fellow away.

  She provided the address and told him he’d find her there at 10:00 a.m. If he took one peek through the door and ran away—or if he decided between now and tomorrow morning that he really didn’t want to see her, after all—she would eat her omelette and get on with her life.

  “YOU COULD HAVE seen him tonight,” Carole said as she spread her napkin across her lap. She and Gina sat at a corner table at Gina’s favorite neighborhood Thai restaurant. Gina had ordered Pad Thai, Carole something with prawns and lemon grass and three little flames printed beside the menu listing, warning that the dish was extremely spicy. The waiter had already brought them bottles of Singha beer. Gina figured Carole would need a few bottles to put out the fire her dinner ignited on her tongue.