The Astral

by V. J. Banis

  Having drained the wine glass and much of her emotion, she picked up the phone, found Jack’s card and violently punched in his number.

  He was surprised, certainly, to hear her voice. “Am I interrupting?” she asked a shade too sweetly. “You do have company, I take it?”

  “In a manner of speaking.” Was that amusement in his voice? Damn him, she was in no mood to be mocked.

  “Then she will just have to listen. There are some things I want to say.”

  “That’s not a problem. And it’s a he, by the way.”

  “He?” She knew that there were drag queens who were very effective, but surely the redhead outside The Beverly Hills had been the real thing.

  “Graham Greene,” Jack said.

  “Oh. But I thought...I saw....” Some of the wind went out of her sails.

  “She was just a colleague,” he said patiently. “We left the station bash—attendance obligatory or I wouldn’t have been there at all—walked out together, and we parted company just about the time you escaped down the drive.”

  Her sails went utterly limp. She stared bleakly out the window for a moment, feeling like an utter fool, and blurted out the first thing that came into her mind.

  “Have you had dinner?”

  “I was just eyeing a can of tuna. Without much enthusiasm, I might add. Why don’t I pick you up? I know a place I think you’ll love.”

  “I’m in jeans.”

  “Perfect. So am I.”

  She had a fleeting memory of how he looked in jeans, and smiled into the telephone.

  “And you can say all those things you wanted to say over dinner,” he added.

  * * * *

  She saved him the difficult chore of finding a parking place by saying she would wait for him at the curb. If he was surprised to hear that she was living at a new address, he saved his questions for later as well.

  He was there in less than half an hour, a honk of his horn alerting her as the silver gray Porsche glided to a stop. She jumped in with a quick, nervous grin and fidgeted with her seat belt to give herself a moment’s grace.

  “I should explain,” she began, but he interrupted her.

  “Dinner, first. Explanations after. It makes for a much nicer evening. And I think we can treat ourselves to one of those, can’t we?”

  She breathed a sigh of relief. Why had she thought this would be so difficult? Nothing in the intervening years had felt more natural than that she should be sitting beside him in his car as they wound their way up Laurel Canyon, into the Valley, engine purring, Maxine Sullivan’s honeyed voice insinuating itself into the comfortable silence. It had rained earlier, briefly and lightly, but the moon was splendid now. In her showy radiance and the gleam of headlights, the damp street was the silver of mackerel.

  She was surprised to realize what a lovely evening it was.

  * * * *

  It was the sort of Italian restaurant that had years ago already been a cliché: red and white checked tablecloths topped with half burned candles in fiascos, a fisherman’s net on the wall, replete with glass markers, and on the facing wall a mural straight out of Cavalleria Rusticana.

  Only two of the dozen or so tables were occupied. At one, a couple who might have stepped out of the mural shared a huge bowl of what looked to be fish stew, and a family noisily squabbled over an enormous platter of spaghetti at the other. In the corner an artificial Christmas tree twinkled rhythmically and near it a fire burned invitingly on a hearth.

  “Trust an Italian restaurant where you see Italians eating,” Jack said. “They’d rather eat at home, and if they eat out, it should be just like home.”

  An immense bosomed woman in a white apron came from behind a curtained doorway at the sound of their entrance. Her face lighted up when she saw who had come in. “Jack,” she cried with obvious delight, and hurried around randomly placed tables to embrace him. “Come sta?”

  “Bene, bene. E tu, Celestina?”

  He introduced Catherine to Celestina, who gave her a quick once over even as she welcomed her to the restaurant. “But come, it is a cold night, you must sit over here by the fire.” She led them to what was obviously the best table. “And a bottle of Barone, on the house. Sergio, where are you?”

  A handsome young man in a red jacket appeared with glasses of water and a basket of bread still warm from the oven. “My grandson, Sergio,” Celestina said proudly. “And the worry of my existence.”

  Sergio, all of seventeen at a guess, gave a little laugh at his grandmother’s good-natured criticism and looked Catherine over in that instinctively flirtatious manner that Italian men apparently learned in the cradle.

  The menus, large sheets of parchment, were already on the tables. Catherine picked hers up to read it, and Jack leaned across to take it gently out of her hand and put it back in its holder.

  “I always let Celestina choose for me,” he said. A thought occurred to him suddenly. “Lord, I hope you aren’t on some kind of diet.”

  She crossed her fingers under the table and brightly laughed off that suggestion. “Not at all,” she assured him.

  “Because if you were, Celestina is the last person you’d want feeding you.”

  Celestina was back in a moment with three glasses and an opened bottle of wine, from which she filled theirs and poured just a splash of red into the third glass for herself. She raised her glass in a toast.

  “To an old friend. And, I hope, a new one,” she added with a shy but friendly look at Catherine. “Now, I shall fix a special dinner for you, yes?”

  “Yes, indeed,” Jack said. “Unless you want to pick...?” He looked innocently across at Catherine, who shook her head. She’d been given her cue already.

  And was more than glad later that she had followed instructions. They started with little plates of antipasti: black olives in oil and garlic and a sprinkling of herbs—“from our own yard,” Celestina informed them proudly—a dish of white beans flecked with anchovy, and paper-thin slices of salami, rolled into little cornets that exploded in the mouth with peppery flavor.

  After that came a kind of curly edged pasta, obviously freshly made and dressed with nothing more than the most delicate olive oil, bits of tomato, and fresh basil, with a last minute squeeze of lemon.

  By the time Catherine had used the crusty bread to clean her plate she was already thinking of adding an extra mile to her next run; and when she tasted the veal cutlet that appeared next, for which “ambrosial” would have been inadequate, she decided it would have to be two miles.

  There was a bit of Gorgonzola and some figs to have with the last of the wine, and finally some tiny, not too sweet cookies to accompany the espresso.

  “I don’t know when I’ve eaten so well,” Catherine said, sipping the espresso, and meant it. “Or so much,” she added with an exaggerated groan.

  “Celestina’s a wonder.” And when the proprietress appeared then to refill their cups, he said in a stage whisper, “I’ve asked her to run off and live in sin with me, but she says her husband would beat her.”

  Celestina giggled girlishly and left them alone. By now, the other diners were gone and Sergio was just cleaning the last table across the room where the family had made a happy mess of their spaghetti.

  They had kept the conversation throughout dinner on a casual and safe level: anecdotes about his work and hers, the occasional asking after mutual acquaintances, and of course, the delicious food.

  Now, Sergio having finished his chores and vanished discreetly behind the curtained doorway, they found themselves in sole possession of the dining room. The Christmas tree twinkled garishly. The candle sputtered in its straw-covered bottle. A cool breeze billowed the curtains and fanned the flames in the fireplace as a door was opened briefly in the kitchen, and closed again. There was a muted clatter of dishes being stacked.

  Their conversation slowed and faltered. Catherine leaned across the table, her eyes on his, and took his hand.

  “Jack,” she beg
an, and at the same moment, he said, “Catherine.”

  They laughed, dispelling that brief moment of tension, the first since she had climbed into his car. “You first,” he said.

  “I’ve left Walter,” she blurted out, not at all the pretty speech she had rehearsed earlier.

  He lifted an eyebrow and waited for her to go on, deciding that this probably wasn’t the best time to start spouting his opinions.

  “For good,” she added. She fidgeted with her napkin and managed to drop it on the floor. Jack was up before she could reach it and handed it back to her.

  “I’m such a nuisance,” she said.

  “The most beautiful nuisance I’ve ever seen.”

  She gave him a grateful smile and went silent again. If her mother could only see her now: self-possessed was she? She felt like a tongue-tied schoolgirl and there was Jack waiting so patiently, watching her so intently. And how was she supposed to have any clue what was going on right now in his mind. He probably thought she was bonkers.

  She took a deep breath and began to talk, haltingly at first, trying each word out as she spoke it, and then in a rush that came spilling out faster than she could think.

  “When I lost...when Becky died, the way she did, so horribly, it was like, I don’t know exactly how to say this, I think, no, I know that for a time I lost my mind, in the most literal sense.

  “In a way, though, when I began to recover, I realized that it had opened me up, to myself, to life, like I had never been before. All I could think about was all the time I hadn’t spent with her, all the things that we hadn’t done together, those things that you are always going to get around to, but never do. The words that never get said. And I saw how important these things might have been, and how unimportant were so many of the things I had done instead. How much of our time had been wasted, and how precious every moment can be.

  “It was like I had been held to a scorching fire, as if everything extraneous in me, in my life, had been burned away, and all that was left were the things that really mattered, the truly important things: Love, and people and connecting with them. That’s hard, I’m having to learn, but I know that I must learn.”

  Her eyes were down as she said this, not so much watching the little fly that had discovered their cookie crumbs but more to avoid what she feared she might see in his expression, but now she looked up again into his face.

  “You are one of the things that matter. I don’t know after all these years how you feel. In a sense, that doesn’t matter. I had to tell you anyway. I owed you, I owed myself, to tell you. I had to tell you that I love you. I’ve always loved you. I never stopped.”

  He needed a few seconds to collect his wits. He didn’t know what he had expected to hear from her, but despite the hopes that never left him, this wasn’t it.

  “Lord, you do choose your moments, don’t you?” he said.

  Watching him, watching the expressions flitting across his face, she had a heart-sinking thought that she had goofed again, had scared him away. She knew that many men did not like for a woman to take the initiative, but she really had believed that he was different.

  “I think this time the moment chose me,” she said.

  He took her hand again. “Catherine, you must know, surely you realize, that I’ve never stopped loving you either? How could I? You’re so entwined in my heart it would kill me to tear you out. I know. I tried for years.”

  Tears glinted in her eyes. She tried to say something in reply and found the words simply wouldn’t come. She shook her head, half laughing, half crying.

  “The miracle,” he said, “is discovering that you still love me.”

  The tears began to stream down her face. “Oh, my darling, till the day I die.”

  Celestina came in from the kitchen, and with one quick glance, backed through the curtained doorway out of sight. Neither of them had even noticed her.

  Jack got up from his chair and came around to where Catherine sat, dropping on one knee to take her in his arms. “My darling,” he said, and after that there were no words for long minutes.

  He got up finally, brushing a speck of lint off his knee and surreptitiously rearranging the front of his trousers. “Well,” he said, “Celestina is an old friend, but I do think maybe we had better take our leave before I put that friendship to the test.”

  They finished the last of the wine that Sergio poured into their glasses while Celestina wrote up their check.

  “The wine is good, yes?” Sergio asked, smiling from one to the other of them, and Jack assured him that it had been excellent—though, truth to tell, he was sure plain tap water would have tasted like champagne on this occasion.

  Celestina saw them to the door, her eyes shining with approval. “You must bring the beautiful signorina again,” she said. “Too many these young ladies today, all skinny like boards, they pick, pick, pick, half the food is wasted. I like to see a woman enjoy her food.”

  “Which,” Catherine said when they were back in the Porsche, “You have to admit, I did.”

  He started up the powerful engine and looked over at her in the dashboard’s glow. “Are we in any hurry?”

  “The night is ours,” she said, suddenly shy.

  “Good.” He started the CD player. Perfect choice: Chopin’s music surrounded them.

  She leaned back into the soft leather and surrendered herself to the music, to the night, and the sensual vibrations of the car’s movement. Again, there was little need for conversation. For the present they shared a magical place in which words mattered not at all.

  Instead of turning toward West Hollywood, he pulled onto the freeway headed north. She didn’t question him as the myriad lights of the Valley swept by. An endless stream of cars surrounded them on either side, but inside the Porsche there was only the glow of the moment and the glorious music that carried them along—and a hand that reached across the space between them to take hers.

  After a while, they left the freeway and began to climb the two-lane road that ran through Topanga Canyon. It twisted and turned, this way and then that. He was a good driver and the car seemed to sense exactly what he expected of it.

  They swooped over a ridge and down again, another hairpin curve and back up, gradually traveling higher and higher into the mountains, then making their way downhill, the car like a graceful bird in its descent. They came around a wide bend and the ocean spread out below them, a seemingly endless black slate in the pale moonlight, marbled with ribbons of glittering foam.

  He turned south on Pacific Coast Highway and she knew then where they were headed, and her heart began to beat a little faster with the knowledge.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  It was all too obviously a man’s apartment, everything dark and crowded, and had the look of one that had been lived in, comfortably, for years. A threadbare brown sofa and a much more comfortable looking leather recliner with a reading lamp beside it, and a pile of books on a nearby table. Piles of books everywhere, in fact, and crowded shelves of them as well. A reading man’s room. A workstation with a computer took up most of one wall and through an open doorway she could see a corner of a rumpled bed. She tried to ignore the suggestion that planted in her mind.

  “You couldn’t have just moved in here,” she said.

  “The last resident left pretty well most of it behind. A friend of Weitman’s. He got an assignment in Berlin and took not much more than his clothes and a laptop. I just had to carry in a suitcase or two.”

  Faded blue drapes covered a pair of windows. “The beach view?” she asked. She walked to them and pulled the drapes aside.

  “Want me to hold your feet while you look?” Despite the joking tone of his voice, she noticed that he kept a respectful distance, making no effort to approach her or initiate anything more than a sociable visit between friends. Cold feet? Or good manners?

  His description of the view had been a bit of an exaggeration, if not too great a one. Over the tops of low-slung buildings on
e could see a patch of moonlit ocean, without the need of dangling from the window.

  She turned, surveying the room again, and finally brought her eyes back to where he still stood just inside the door.

  “Well.” She left that word suspended between them.

  “Catherine.” He took a cautious step in her direction and halted again. “When you said you were divorcing Walter—is that a done deal?”

  “There’s no decree yet. I haven’t even filed. But yes, it’s over. I won’t be going back. I don’t think, frankly, he even wants me back.”

  The more fool he, Jack thought, and said aloud, “Because I’m not much of a one for poaching on another man’s territory.”

  She had removed her wedding ring earlier, dropping it into her jewel box with a sense of finality, and she held out her hand now for him to see the white band of skin on her finger.

  “In this case, I assure you, he has forfeited all title to it.”

  He hesitated for a moment longer. “I see,” he said, and then, still sounding unsure of himself, “The question, of course, is, what are we going to do now?”

  She, however, was done with waiting—and with being the lady. “This,” she said simply, and crossed in three quick strides to where he was standing, threw her arms about him and, stretching slightly on tiptoe, kissed him.

  She gave him full credit for losing whatever shyness had possessed him until now. He gave a little sigh that might have been a groan and kissed back, in earnest, crushing her to him.

  Like a dam bursting, it flooded over her all at once, making her knees so weak that she could hardly stand and could only cling to him. Tremors of desire raced through her.

  As if on cue, they moved toward the bedroom and, still locked together, fell across the unmade bed, trying to maintain their kiss and at the same time struggling with one another’s clothing. She stripped his shirt over his head—that did require breaking the kiss, if only briefly, but they took advantage of that break to get her pullover off as well, and then it was jeans tugged down, hers somehow kicked off, and naked flesh ground against naked flesh.