Crystal Clear

by Jane Heller

  “What if it did work out between us? Have you considered that possibility? Or is happiness too mind-boggling for you to deal with? Yeah, maybe that’s the problem. You came to Sedona looking for Happiness with a capital ‘H,’ you found it, and now you can’t handle it. Maybe your idea of a good time is running back to a company that’s about to dump you, to a boyfriend who bores you, to a father who ignores you. Maybe you like to suffer, Crystal. Maybe, when you get right down to it, you’re more comfortable being miserable, and all this Happiness stuff isn’t what you’re searching for after all.”

  “Maybe.” My eyes flooded with tears, my breathing became labored. I felt stung, didn’t know how to respond to Terry’s harsh assessment, didn’t know whether his words were triggered by hurt or truth. I only knew I had to get away, had to be by myself. I turned to leave the kitchen.

  “Where are you going?” he asked, his voice soft now, concerned.

  “Got to pack,” I managed and rushed out of the room.

  I didn’t have much packing to do, given that I’d been living out of my suitcase ever since I’d moved into Terry’s guest room. So I sat on the bed and sobbed, wishing my trip to Sedona didn’t have to end on such a sour note, wishing Terry and I could enjoy our last day together, wishing things could be different between us.

  An hour went by and then there was a hesitant knock on my door.

  “Come in,” I said, dabbing at my eyes with a Kleenex.

  Terry opened the door. “This is dumb,” he said. “You’ve gotta be out of here by 8:30 tomorrow morning if you’re making the 12:25 out of Phoenix. That only gives us a few more hours. Personally, I don’t feel like spending them with you up here crying and me down there sulking.”

  I smiled through my tears. “I was thinking the same thing. Any ideas?”

  He walked toward the bed and sat down next to me. “I’m not going into the office,” he said, putting his arm around my shoulders. “And Annie will be at Laura’s house after school. We’re on our own. We could take a drive, have lunch, come back here for an afternoon nap. Does any of that appeal to you?”

  “It all appeals to me,” I said. “Thanks.” I leaned over and kissed him.

  “You taste salty,” he said, then stroked my cheek. “I’m sorry about the tears, babe. I never wanted us to—”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry, too. So very sorry.”

  We made the best of the day. Terry drove me to Tlaquepaque, a charming, Spanish-style village with courtyards and gardens and, most notably, dozens of art galleries specializing in Southwest and Native American crafts. He drove me to an area known as “Uptown,” where there are more galleries and shops, these set along Oak Creek. And he drove me to Garland’s, a legendary store that carries authentic kachina dolls—hundreds of them.

  “I’d like to buy you one,” Terry offered as we browsed through the shop, coming upon display after display of the carved wooden images. “Sort of as a souvenir, you know?”

  I knew, but I didn’t need a souvenir—some token to spark memories of the trip. My heart was flooded with memories, and I hadn’t even left town.

  “I’d love to own a kachina,” I said. “But how could I ever choose one over the others? They’re all beautiful works of art.”

  “How about him?” he said, lifting a doll up off a table. “The Sun God. He’s a cheerful-looking guy, isn’t he?”

  “He is,” interjected a saleswoman. “He’s also the work of one of the Hopi tribe’s most accomplished artists.”

  She went on to describe how real kachina dolls are crafted by the Hopis from the root of a cottonwood tree after it has eroded and dried, and she explained the process by which each doll is coated and painted.

  “Set the Sun God on a table in your bedroom, where you can see him first thing every morning, and he’ll surely brighten your day,” she added.

  “We’ll take it,” said Terry, winking at me.

  Seeming pleased, the saleswoman jotted down my name and address and promised that the kachina would be carefully wrapped and boxed and shipped to me.

  I thanked her and later, when Terry and I were walking toward the car, I thanked him.

  “I’m crazy about Mr. Sun God,” I said. “I’ll have to find a very special place to put him.”

  “Maybe on your dresser?” he suggested. “If you have one, that is. I’ve never seen your apartment, so I’m just guessing here.” He smiled, trying to act chipper. We both were. But underneath everything we did and said that day, behind every word and gesture, there was a terrible sense of inevitability. I was leaving. We wouldn’t see each other anymore. Our brief encounter was coming to an end. And all the kachina dolls in the world weren’t going to change that.

  “Lunch?” Terry asked as we pulled out of the store’s parking lot.

  I looked at him and shrugged. “I’m not all that hungry. You?”

  “Nope.”

  “What should we do then?”

  “What about the nap? We could go back to the house and conk out. I don’t know about you, but after all the excitement yesterday, I’m pretty beat.”

  “Oh. Well, yes. I’m tired, too. Sometimes there’s a real letdown after a big event.” Bullshit, I thought. If we go to sleep, we won’t have to pretend everything’s peachy between us.

  We drove back to Terry’s. I assumed we’d be “napping” in separate rooms, but he invited me into his bedroom.

  I hesitated.

  “I know you’ve had a thing about us sleeping together in my room,” he said, “but it’s your last day, Crystal. What difference could it make now?”

  “None,” I agreed and followed him into his bedroom.

  It was a well-proportioned room, twice the square feet of the guest room. Terry kicked off his shoes and stretched out on the queen-size bed, his head propped up by a couple of pillows.

  “Coming?” he asked.

  “In a second.” I unlaced my sneakers, walked over to the bed, and lay down next to him. We didn’t touch, didn’t talk, didn’t move—until Terry suddenly rolled over and kissed me.

  “I’m gonna miss doing that,” he said, after he released me.

  “Then you’d better do it again,” I said.

  He kissed me again, but this time he didn’t release me. This time he held me close and kissed me over and over.

  At some point it became clear to both of us that napping was no longer on the agenda.

  “Just one for the road?” he murmured.

  “One for the road,” I whispered.

  Our lovemaking was fiery and passionate, yet purposeful. We not only craved each other, we meant to leave an indelible impression on each other—as if, with each caress, we were saying: I dare you to forget me; I dare you to find someone who can make you feel this good.

  Later, we showered together, each wanting to linger over the other’s body, each wanting the moments of intimacy to last, each painfully aware that they would not.

  “How will this work now?” Terry asked as he was toweling me dry. “Will we be pen pals? E-mail each other? Have phone sex once in a while?”

  I smiled.

  “I’m serious, Crystal. Are we going to keep in touch?”

  “I’ve thought about that. We could stay in contact, of course. I know where to reach you now, and I’ll give you my number at—”

  “Or we could leave it right here,” he cut me off, “with this afternoon. I’m not wild about calling you at your place some night and hearing another guy in the background. I’d rather remember the way you are when you’re with me. That sound okay with you?”

  I nodded. I understood.

  Annie came home from Laura’s and asked why my luggage was sitting in the foyer. Terry explained that he was about to load it into the trunk of my rental car, because I was flying back to New York first thing in the morning.

  She looked at me with surprise. “You’re leaving tomorrow?”

  “Yes, Annie, I am,” I said. “There’s an important meeting at the c
ompany where I work. It’s on Wednesday and I’ve got to be there.”

  “Are you coming back here after the meeting?” she said. “We could do stuff together over the weekend.”

  God, this is brutal, I thought. Worse than I expected.

  “I live in New York, honey,” I said. “I was only visiting Sedona. Now my vacation’s over.”

  “Oh. Got it,” she smirked. “You and Dad had a fight, right?”

  “No fight, sport,” said Terry. “Crystal’s going home. That’s all.”

  Her smirk faded. “So you didn’t like it here with us?” she said to me, the little girl in her reemerging.

  “Of course I did,” I said. “But all good things come to an end eventually.”

  “They do? Why?” she said.

  I had no answer for that one, except that it had been my experience that happiness is elusive, that nothing lasts forever.

  “Let’s get dinner ready, huh?” said Terry, trying to distract his daughter. “It’s spaghetti tonight. I’m cooking the sauce. Crystal’s making the pasta.”

  Annie shook her head, her expression hardening. “Crystal’s bailing out,” she said and scooted up the stairs.

  We ate dinner. Then Annie did her homework while Terry and I cleaned up the kitchen. When we came upstairs to say good night to her, she was fast asleep in her bed—or appeared to be.

  Terry and I spent the night in the guest room. We did not make love; we simply held each other until the sun came up.

  In the morning, I stuffed the last of my things into my carry-on bag, threw back some coffee, and prepared to hit the road.

  “Say goodbye to Crystal, Annie,” Terry urged her. All three of us were standing in the foyer. The front door was open, beckoning.

  “I’m really late for school,” said Annie as she permitted me to hug her briefly.

  “Thanks for being such a wonderful hostess,” I told her, in spite of her coolness. “And for teaching me how to jump on the trampoline. It was fun.”

  “But fun things come to an end. Right, Crystal?” she said.

  “Yes, but I want you to know that I’ll never forget you, Annie. You’ll always be very special to me.”

  “Yeah. Whatever,” she said, sounding more like a typical monosyllabic kid than her usual articulate self. “Hey, gotta run. Have a nice trip.”

  And off she went, out the door, a knapsack slung over her shoulders, a tear running down her cheek.

  I turned to Terry. “She’ll be okay, won’t she? You’ll make sure she’s okay, right?”

  “I’ll take care of it,” he assured me, then glanced at his watch. “You really should get a move on. You don’t want to miss the flight.”

  I flung my arms around him. “Terry, I—”

  He kissed me. One last time.

  “I love you, Crystal,” he said.

  “I love you, too,” I said.

  “Better go, huh?”

  I nodded, trying desperately to hold myself together, trying as hard as I could to save the sobs for the long ride to Phoenix.

  I removed my arms from around Terry’s neck and released him. He walked me out to the burgundy rental number and helped me into the car.

  “Peace to your journey,” he said, his voice choked with emotion.

  “And to yours,” I said.

  I placed the key in the ignition, strapped myself in, and drove away.

  Epilogue

  The Christmas season in New York is very festive—unless you have to get somewhere, in which case it’s a nightmare. The traffic in midtown Manhattan is such gridlock that you can literally sit in a taxi for twenty minutes and not advance a single block.

  Fortunately, I had done my Christmas shopping the day after Thanksgiving, along with millions of similarly compulsive Americans, and had no need to get anywhere this particular holiday season. I wasn’t dating, wasn’t taking in the theatre or the ballet, wasn’t rushing to cocktail parties, not counting the office party Duboff Spector threw for its employees at Tavern on the Green.

  Yes, I was still a partner at Duboff Spector, still sorting out my clients’ tax problems, still working side by side with my pal Rona. It turned out that the meeting I’d rushed back from Sedona to attend had not been convened in order to squeeze me out of the firm; the partner who ended up getting the heave-ho was a rather surly man in his late fifties named Clyde Hicks whose unpopularity had more to do with his attitude than his age. But he wasn’t the only one forced out that Wednesday morning. His long-time secretary was canned, too, along with two people in the bookkeeping department, two in clerical, and the receptionist, who rarely showed up anyway and was, therefore, not missed.

  “I guess you and I are in the clear,” Rona declared when I’d returned to my office after the meeting.

  “For the time being,” I responded with a shrug. I’d felt oddly let down when I found out I wasn’t the focus of the meeting, the focus of Duboff Spector’s “key personnel changes.” It was as if I wasn’t even important enough to fire, as if I had worked so hard to serve my clients, had logged in so many long hours to keep everybody happy, that, as far as the other partners were concerned, my little corner of the company practically ran itself. Which meant that I had, effectively, rendered myself invisible.

  “Oh, you know how it is in business today,” Rona attempted to console me. “They only pay attention to you when you screw up. Nobody takes the time to say, ‘Good job.’ It just doesn’t happen. Companies aren’t very spiritual.”

  “No, they aren’t,” I agreed.

  “That’s why you can’t live your life strictly to please them, Crystal,” she lectured. “You have to satisfy yourself, find your own source of joy. Didn’t they teach you that in Sedona?”

  I nodded wistfully. “They gave it their best shot.”

  As the weeks after the partners’ meeting became months, as the season changed, as the air turned cold, my dissatisfaction with Duboff Spector grew, as did the pain of missing Terry. I thought about him constantly, replayed our week together, wondered if he was right when he’d suggested that I couldn’t handle happiness, that I enjoyed being miserable.

  And then came a blizzard-like afternoon in mid-December—the day I realized how right he was.

  The occasion for this realization was one of my regular Sunday visits with my father, who, despite my absence back in September, was as distant toward me as ever. His cable TV system had added six new channels, which gave him six more reasons to ignore me. As I was nearing the Larchmont exit en route to his house on this particular afternoon, my snow-tire-less BMW skidded off the Hutchinson River Parkway, into a guardrail. Thank God, there were no other cars involved in the accident, nor was my own car as badly damaged as it could have been. But I was a wreck, totally shaken up. After the police came and wrote a report of the incident, I proceeded cautiously on to my father’s, since I was almost there anyway. When I arrived—still trembling, an hour later than expected—he met me at the door with his typical remoteness, told me to deposit my snowy boots outside, and advised me that something terrible had just happened to him.

  “What was it?” I said.

  “The TV’s on the fritz,” he said bitterly. “The cable’s out. Must be the storm, dammit. Now I won’t have anything to do today.”

  “Anything to do?”

  I blinked at him. Had I heard him correctly? Had I not driven my car off an icy road so I could keep the old man company? Had I not plowed my way to his doorstep, wet, cold, seeking a little companionship myself? Had the bastard not told me his day was ruined because his television set didn’t work? I mean, really. Enough was enough.

  “Don’t make trouble, Crystal,” he sighed, trudging back inside the house after seeing the look on my face.

  I did not “make trouble.” I did not follow him inside the house, either. I remained outside, the big chill waking me up at last.

  My God! I thought, as the snow covered my eyes and cheeks and lips. I’m as pathetic as he is! I, too, have chosen
misery over happiness. I, too, have rejected someone who loves me. I, too, have isolated myself because of a past hurt. How could I not have seen the parallels between his life and my own? How could I have been so dense?

  There was still time to remedy the situation, to change things, I told myself. There had to be.

  “See ya, Dad!” I called out through his open front door and hurried back to my car.

  I drove carefully but excitedly back to the city, the car radio blasting with the sound of some opera I didn’t understand a word of. The minute I walked into my apartment, I rushed to the phone and called Cynthia Kavner, praying she hadn’t forgotten me. After two rings, she answered. I inhaled deeply, my heart thumping in my chest.

  “Cynthia,” I said. “It’s Crystal Goldstein.”

  “Hey! You were just on my mind, I swear it,” she said enthusiastically. “Annie was over here this morning and—”

  “And she mentioned me?” I said hopefully.

  “No. She mentioned that the magazine writer who was here when you were here—the one who took the Jeep Tour with you—is doing a book on the Amanda Reid case and wants to interview her. She thinks the whole thing’s a hoot.”

  So Michael Mandell’s writing a book, I thought wryly. It was Amanda who was desperate for media attention and yet it was Michael who ultimately got it.

  “How is Annie?” I asked, wondering if she’d grown, wondering if she was looking forward to Christmas, wondering if she liked Doug Freehan any better than she had in September.

  “Great,” said Cynthia. “Doing great.”

  “I’m glad,” I said. “And you?”

  “Busy. Laura had the chicken pox last month. Karen’s the lead in the school play.”

  Okay, Crystal. Ask her the next question, I dared myself. Go ahead. Ask her.

  “And Terry? How’s he doing?” I said, then braced myself for “He’s met someone” or an equally gruesome answer.

  “He’s good, too,” Cynthia said instead. “But he misses you, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Does he?”

  “Of course he does. He loves you, Crystal.”