The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman

by Louise Plummer

  I watched another horror movie, about a man who ate his victims after murdering them, biting their faces off in some cases. “I’m having an old friend for dinner” was the last line of the movie. Finally I watched a vampire movie in which young, nubile things with white boobs bursting from lacy lingerie had the blood sucked from their necks by a really evil-looking vampire. The young nubile things all reminded me of Ashley. I enjoyed it when they died, when their eyes rolled back into their heads and they sighed their last breaths. “Die, slut, die!” I said aloud just as my mother passed by.

  Her eyebrows arched.

  “Not you,” I said. “Her,” and pointed to the brunette victim in the throes of a death rattle.

  Without comment my mother passed into the study.

  We watched the news again at ten. It was now twelve below zero but would get lower. After the news Bjorn and Trish called from Nebraska. I said hi to them from the extension. They wanted to know about Richard. Dad told them he was in the snow cave out in back. “The temperature is supposed to stay just above thirty-two degrees in those things, isn’t it?” he asked.

  Bjorn’s voice sounded annoyed. “That’s the theory. I don’t personally know anyone who’s tested one, do you?”

  “Actually”—Dad cleared his throat—“no.”

  I clicked the extension down and wished I had another horror movie to watch.

  In bed, I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking of this story called “The Dead,” by James Joyce, that Midgely had us read. In it the wife tells her husband of a young lover of hers, who years earlier had stood in front of her house, looking up at her window while it snowed. Had he died of exposure? Had he frozen to death? I couldn’t remember. I only remembered that the falling snow was a heavy-duty symbol in that story. Well, I thought, pulling the quilt over my head, dramatic things like that only happen in fiction. I didn’t know anyone who had frozen to death ever.

  Except the Hutchinses. Wendy Hutchins had been a girl in my class in fifth grade and had let me borrow her colored pencils once when we were coloring the different countries of South America and I had left my pencils at home. She and her family had pulled to the side of the highway in a blizzard and they had all frozen to death. Her mother, her father, her baby brother, and her grandmother. It had been all over the TV.

  But I didn’t know anyone else. Yet.

  After tossing and turning for who knows how long, I got up and went into Bjorn’s room across the hall and gazed out the window. The lantern was out. The snow cave, a deep purple mound, was barely visible with the trees of the common behind it. I curled up in a fetal position on Bjorn’s bed, under the quilt that lay at the foot, and tried to concentrate on cannibal killers.

  When I awoke, late, I knew I could not stay in my house as long as Richard lived in a snow cave out in my backyard, and I decided to spend the rest of the Christmas holiday at Aunt Eve’s. Without looking out the window, I went to the bathroom and then hurried downstairs in my flannel nightgown. I’d announce my plans to my parents and leave.

  They both stood by the sink, their backs to me, their faces leaning toward the window. I thought I heard Dad chuckle. I moved across the room next to Mother and looked out to the snow cave. Richard, alive, stood in full winter gear, holding a large sign with red printing on it. I squinted to focus my eyes on the words: WILL WORK FOR FOOD.

  Something hard and tight in my chest dissolved. “Richard,” I whispered aloud. “He’s an idiot.” A warm feeling rose in me for the first time in two days, making my chin quiver.

  Mother handed me my parka. “Talk,” she said.

  I pulled on my fruit boots in the back hall and opened the door. The shock of the cold air pressed the tears from my eyes. I damped my teeth shut to keep them from chattering.

  When Richard saw me, he let the sign fall to the ground. We stood facing each other, he with his hands in his pockets, me with arms folded tightly across my chest. I was shuddering.

  “You’re crazy,” I said, my chin wobbling, my nose running.

  “I was a fool,” he said, his eyes riveted on mine.

  I nodded. “You hurt me,” I said. Saying it aloud made my nose run more.

  “I know, and I’m sorry—very sorry.” He looked down at his feet and up again. “I don’t have an excuse. I did it, because at that moment, I wanted to. I wish I hadn’t.”

  “I trusted you.” I couldn’t control my stupid chin.

  “I’ve never been so sorry about anything in my life.” His voice was strained. “If I could take it back, if I could erase the whole thing, I would.” He took a half-step forward. “Kate?”

  I wiped my nose on my mitten.

  “Are you ever going to forgive me, Kate?”

  I think I nodded. I meant to. I wanted to. I think I nodded and said, “I want to.”

  In any case, The Romance Writer’s Phrase Book is filled with emotion-laden descriptions of what happened next: I mean there really. was “an undeniable magnetism building” between us. A magnetism neither of us could resist any longer, and we were “swept,” yes, “swept” into each other’s arms. I don’t think that’s overstating it—two dinging steel-belted radial tires in that Minnesota landscape. Richard kissed my face and said he loved me more than anybody in the whole world, which was exactly what I wanted to hear. He even “swung me in the circle of his arms,” all six feet of me, and get this, “his mouth covered mine hungrily.”

  Yes, hungrily. And I, dear romance readers, “drank in the sweetness of his kiss.”

  Revision Notes

  Should I just let this romance novel be as I’ve written it? Richard charms me out of my anger and we melt into each other? The end? Should I not tell about lying in bed that same night and realizing that making a snow cave and a sign, WILL WORK FOR FOOD, was the same as stepping into a bathtub fully clothed, which in turn was the same as sending a dozen roses? Bribery, Fleur called it. Richard himself had called it that. Grand gestures of apology, all of them—but without discussion, nothing was solved.

  Should I tell about those discussions with Richard that still continue? How I now know that he has had two serious girlfriends (Karen Holden and Abby Creer) while I, foolishly, lived in a fantasy world of Richard. One-and-Only. What has hurt me is knowing that I too wanted to be a One-and-Only, and it’s already too late. I’m a nineties kind of girl—only the wrong century.

  And should I say anything about listening to his voice, so low and smooth, and thinking Is this Mr. Radio speaking? I’ve thought of asking Fleur again what exactly she meant by that nickname, but I’m not sure I really want to hear the answer. Not right now.

  I began writing this novel thinking it would be a kick, and it has been, really, but it’s also reminded me how easy romance is and how hard (this will sound corny as hell) building a real relationship is. And then too I’ve found that my biggest supporters aren’t entirely happy with me. For example, Shannon read the whole novel yesterday and called me on the phone to say that she really liked it, but I could tell she was holding something back, so I said, “But?”

  “I wish I were in your novel more.” It came out in a spurt of breath. “You do a lot more things with me than you’ve ever done with Ashley, and I’m hardly in it.”

  “But the whole story takes place at Christmas and you weren’t even here—”

  “I know, I know, but if I’d been here, you would have been calling me on the phone all the time and I would have been at your house hanging around like I do—”

  “I just wrote it like it happened,” I said.

  “I know,” she said, “but you’re calling it a novel and that’s fiction. Couldn’t you pretend I was home and write me into it? You know, use your imagination.” Sigh.

  My parents weren’t any better. Mother read the novel a few days ago in the living room and said, laying the manuscript in her lap, “Is this the way you think I sound? You make me sound old.”

  “I do?” I had only tried to copy the way she talked.

  “E
xcept for that section where you have me telling about the fight with your dad—I wish you’d take that out. I come off so foolish.”

  “But that’s the way you always tell it!”

  “Well,” she said, “I wouldn’t have if I’d known you were recording every word and gesture in your brain.” She had rolled the manuscript into a loaf and was squeezing it.

  “The point was to show you in a weak moment, because—”

  “If I wanted to be shown in a weak moment, I’d call a press conference and show them the scar from my hysterectomy! And don’t quote me!”

  My dad said, “All you have me do in this novel is sleep and lust after Fleur. I seem to be a cross between Rip Van Winkle and Woody Allen.”

  I’m sure Ashley wouldn’t like the way she’s portrayed either, but I’m not letting her read it. We haven’t spoken to each other since New Year’s Eve, and I like it that way.

  Anyway, being a writer is hard. Now I have to go through the book again and decide which of the revisions to integrate into the text and which to drop.

  I know even as I write this that I won’t include all this retching in the novel. Reality is not appropriate to the genre. I just read a couple of Harlequins, and I’ve got to edit out some of the reality in this novel as it is. I’ll have to cut Midgely and the cancer (he died three weeks ago). I won’t say anything about Richard receiving an early acceptance into the University of Minnesota’s American Studies Program with a full fellowship, while I have applied to Columbia and do not expect to be turned down. Even if Richard and I marry down the line and have 2.5 children—a real possibility—I need to find out first who Kate Bjorkman is.

  I’ll end the novel with a happy epilogue that romance readers will adore. I promised them a happy ending, after all. And it’s mostly true.

  Epilogue

  For the past several nights, I’ve been reading this romance novel I’ve written to Richard, on the phone. Mostly he laughs and says the book is a riot.

  “This is no laughing matter,” I say. “This is the story of our romance. This is serious business!”

  “Right,” he says. “In that case”—and he lowers his voice—“I just want to say how much I’d like to gather the soft curves of your body and mold them to the contours of my lean body.”

  “Now you’re talking,” I say. “And I want to bury my face against the corded muscles of your chest.”

  “You’re much too tall for that,” he says. “You’ll have to bury your face in my nose, Amazon woman.”

  “Well,” I say. “That sends the passion pounding through my heart, chest, and head.”

  “Seriously,” he says. And I wonder what delicious thing he might say to me that isn’t a cliché. “You ought to try having the book published.”

  Bingo!

  “It doesn’t have an ending,” I say. “Category romances need a committed ending.”

  He snorts. “The heroine is a bit of a flake, but I know the hero is committed to her. His greedy mouth wants to open her lips and plunder the warm moistness within.”

  We break up laughing.

  “See you in a few days, Kate.”

  “See you,” I say.

  I’m going to San Francisco over spring break. If this were one of those really sensual novels, Richard and I would hole up in a hotel room for a week, but I began the novel as a virgin and will end it as a virgin. I’m staying with his parents, Caroline and Roy. Richard and I will eat dim sum in Chinatown and I will try the duck feet, which Richard says are delicious once you get past the idea of duck feet. We will also eat Ghirardelli chocolates, take the boat to Alcatraz, explore the wharf, dance at the Top of the Mark, and ride the trolley to Golden Gate Park.

  Later, maybe we’ll marry and have a girl named Fleur and a boy named Chuck. Maybe not. One thing I know is that there will always be something to laugh about, and laughter, as it turns out, is the best aphrodisiac of all.