She wasn’t just hot. She was transcendent.
It went beyond her extremely pleasing body, her serene face, and her thick, silky hair. A presence emanated from her that seemed to burn beneath her skin, a strength that said she was in charge of every situation, impervious to the insecurities and self doubts and neuroses that lived in most people to varying degrees. She held his gaze without looking away, not staring, not challenging him, not trying to get his attention. Just looking. Like a cat looks at you, unthinking, unperturbed, simply observing. He would gladly yield his soul to those eyes.
Without thinking, as if it had a mind of his own, his eyelid moved in an exaggerated wink.
From the corner of his eye, he saw Noreen scowl. Alexandra’s expression didn’t change.
3
On the Saturday that Jared moved into the bungalow with us, he stacked his four boxes in the corner of his room, and informed us he was going out for the evening. He didn’t share the details and was vague about what time he’d be back. The implication was that he might not be sleeping in his newly occupied room that night.
The minute the front door closed behind him, Noreen clicked her playlist of 90s tunes and pulled a bottle of Smirnoff out of the refrigerator. She filled a shaker with ice, poured vodka into a shot glass, and then over the ice. With the second pour, vodka spilled on the counter. She didn’t seem to notice it was there. She splashed in vermouth. “I’m crushing so bad,” she said. “Isn’t he cute?”
“Be careful,” I said.
“Why?” She blinked rapidly, then turned and began shaking ice and alcohol. The racket of ice against metal prevented her from hearing when I pointed out the obvious. The rattling stopped. “Why should I be careful?”
“You’re his landlord,” I repeated.
“So?”
“It’s not a good idea to mix business transactions with romance.”
“I’m not.”
“You absolutely are.”
“I like him so much. He’s gorgeous. And such a gentleman.”
I flopped on the couch and put my feet on the coffee table. I sat up again and unzipped my boots. I tugged them off and nudged them under the table before putting my feet on top again. “I’m not blind, but I would be careful.”
She shook the metal container more vigorously. Ice slamming against metal made me feel as if my brain was slamming against my skull. I put my hands over my ears to muffle the sound. The racket didn’t faze Noreen. She stopped shaking, poured the drinks into glasses, and added two enormous olives to each one. She picked up the glasses and walked by sliding her stocking feet across the tile, cross-eyed as she watched the liquid waver close to the edge. She carefully lowered the drinks to the table and pushed one in my direction. I leaned forward and took a delicate slurp from the stationary glass. Then I picked it up. “Very nice.”
She smiled. “Cheers.”
We didn’t touch our glasses in a toast. The liquid was still too close to the rim. The olives bobbed like decapitated heads, the red tongues pushing to escape the round, surprised mouths. I took another sip.
She settled beside me, cradling her martini in both hands. “Maybe we should have eaten first.”
“Plenty of time for that.”
“Leftover pizza?” she said.
I nodded. After that brief look of rage when she’d caught Jared winking at me, she’d reclaimed her chummy self, but the look nagged at me.
Still, it was nice having someone to chat with. I liked living in a house again. In an apartment or condo complex, you’re smashed up against each other all the time. When you approach the building from a distance, walking home from the train every evening, you see that there are far too many people contained in a rectangular box. It wouldn’t take much to set them against each other. A hundred people with a hundred different religious beliefs, political viewpoints, food preferences, music preferences, and varying tolerance for noise. It’s amazing there isn’t more violence in apartment complexes. The sheer number of people per square foot is enough to stretch nerves until they feel more like strips of wire than human flesh.
Noreen pulled her knees up to her collarbone and hugged her lower legs. She laced her fingers between the toes of her left foot and mumbled into her kneecaps. “How am I mixing money and romance?”
It wasn’t clear whether she wasn’t very bright, or so in the grip of Jared’s beauty she was willfully not understanding the problem. I put my glass on the table and flicked down the volume on her phone.
“I like that song.” She reached across me and turned it up.
And that’s what I mean about too many people living too close together. If infringement on your space and psyche happens enough times, or at the wrong time, perpetrated by the wrong person, some would be driven to murder. Killing a human being shuts a person out of the mainstream for good. It can never be undone. It shocks and horrifies most normal people. Although the shock and horror depend on the circumstances. Far fewer people are shocked by murder under the guise of war, and many are actually pleased when the perpetrator of a heinous crime is executed by the state.
Passion over musical tastes and political views, sex and love and religion, make for murderous feelings. If it happens enough — having the music you love turned down, or any other slight that is normally insignificant — so-called moral rules are drowned quickly. Little things have a way of turning into something huge, given the right set of circumstances.
I took a large swallow of my drink. “He’s paying you to live here.” I set my glass on the table. “Let’s say you start up a relationship. Then, let’s say he’s late with the rent. You don’t want to hassle him and introduce a thorn into the romantic bliss. A week later, you mention the late rent. He laughs it off. Seven or eight days later, you remind him again that he owes you. He says you’re acting like you care more about money than him. You see where it could end up, don’t you?”
She sipped her drink. Her eyes were watery. She took another sip.
“It’s not worth crying about.”
She batted her eyes. “I’m not crying.”
I picked up my glass, took a sip, and touched the edge of my glass to hers. “Cheers. If the attraction is mutual, you should do what you want.”
She sighed. “I just…he seems so nice. I can’t see him being that way. About money.”
“You don’t even know him. Except for his paperwork.”
She took a long swallow of her drink. “I feel like I do know him. It’s one of those instant connections. It seems like I’ve known him forever. And the way he looks at me, I think there’s something there. He was so eager to pay the rent even though he wasn’t moving in yet. So I really don’t think he’d take advantage of me like that.”
“A gentleman.”
“Exactly.” She gave me a watery smile.
I’d been wrong to assume a woman who liked martinis was a certain kind of person. It seems to me, a woman who likes martinis is tough at the core. She’s less sentimental than most, knows what she wants, doesn’t get all gooey over the idea that she can let go of protecting her interests and trust a man to be nice, just because.
I took a deep breath and a long sip of my drink. It was important to be friendly, to be nice…sweet, even. “Should we watch a movie?” I said.
She shook her head and scooted closer to me. “Let’s just talk and get to know each other.”
I poked my tongue at the bobbing olives. Why hadn’t she put them on a stick?
“We’re almost total strangers,” Noreen said.
“You don’t feel like you’ve known me forever?”
“That’s mean.”
“Why?”
She stood up and walked across the room. She turned out the overhead light. She picked up a butane lighter and lit two fat, gardenia-scented candles that were sitting on a table next to the armchair. “There, that’s better.” She smiled.
“It was a joke,” I said. I suppose it was a joke, but with an old style, double-edged ra
zor blade hidden inside.
“Jared is a guy,” she said.
“Well, yes.”
“It’s completely different, connecting with a man, than it is with a woman.”
I picked out one of my olives, sucked out the pimento, ate the olive, and licked the vodka off my fingertips.
“Why does everyone do that?” Noreen said.
“Do what?”
“Suck out the pimento?”
I shrugged.
“It’s weird.”
“Not really. Like you said, everyone does it.”
“I don’t.” She returned to the couch, sitting farther away again. “Tell me about your last boyfriend.”
“What’s the point of that? It’s not a happy story.”
“I guess no former boyfriend is a happy story,” she said.
I ate my other olive and finished my drink.
“Do you want another?”
“Let’s eat first.”
We heated four slices of tomato and onion pizza. Noreen took a pitcher of iced water out of the fridge and filled two glasses. We put down cushions on the tile and sat side-by-side on the living room floor, setting our plates and water on the coffee table. We ate and watched a comedy news show. “Hey, I was thinking.” I smiled warmly. “I don’t have a streaming account. Do you mind if I tap into yours? I’ll pay half, of course.”
She giggled. “Don’t be silly. I’m already paying, it doesn’t matter.”
After she finished her second slice of pizza, she turned toward me. “Why won’t you tell me about your boyfriend?”
“He’s not my boyfriend any more, why would I want to talk about him?”
“Do you still love him?”
“Do you love your ex?” I stuffed the last of my pizza into my mouth. I stood up and carried the plates to the kitchen and put them in the dishwasher.
Noreen washed the martini glasses and started mixing a second round. Two is usually my limit but they’re so damn good, I break that rule more than I should. It was only seven-thirty. I vowed to take this one more slowly. Much more slowly. It’s easy to get tempted for a third, and once I have a third, my tongue takes off on its own. I didn’t want to go blabbing all kinds of things about my life to Noreen.
“Of course I don’t love my ex,” she said. “I wouldn’t be thinking about Jared if I did.”
I returned to the couch. I wanted a cigarette. That’s the other thing martinis do to me. To distract myself, I picked up my discarded boots and carried them to my bedroom. I changed into leggings and when I returned to the living room, I sat on the large, soft pillow again and arranged my legs in a lotus position to further suppress the smoking impulse.
When Noreen was finished mixing the martinis, she proceeded to tell me about her ex-boyfriend. She’d met him when she was fifteen and they were together forever. I asked how long, exactly, and she repeated — for-ever.
They’d bought the house together. For her share, Noreen had used a very generous inheritance from her grandmother. They were so, so happy, and then he left. He practically disappeared, walking away from his share. He was that eager to get out.
It wasn’t hard to see how that would hurt. A lot. A guy is so anxious to get away from you, he walks away from half a million dollars? Probably more? Not to mention the years invested in his share of the mortgage payments? What was to keep him from coming back and demanding they sell it, telling us we had no right to live there? Surely he’d wake up one day and realize how stupid he’d been.
Asking her why he was so eager to get away from her would have implied there was something terribly wrong with her. So I didn’t, to be nice. To be thoughtful and sweet.
And then she volunteered the information. A horror story of misguided love.
4
When Noreen and Brian got together, she was fifteen and Brian was nineteen, so right from the get-go, there was a problem — her parents forbade her to see him. It was practically pedophilia, they said. This enraged Noreen who, despite her sweetness, said she has quite a temper.
Keeping her temper in check, she proceeded to climb out of her bedroom window at night and meet up with Brian. When they discovered their daughter’s empty bed, her parents nailed the window shut. Who does that in the twenty-first century? After labeling your daughter’s crush a pedophile? They might have taken a wait-and-see approach, but many parents lose their sanity when their daughters start having sex. The woman they see remains a baby girl in their imaginations. All they can think of is their daughter’s naked body ravished by a man, her heart tugging away from theirs, filling up with experiences and feelings they know nothing about. Devotion to mommy and daddy are replaced by another — a complete stranger.
In Noreen’s eyes, Brian was charming and good and kind. He was funny and attentive. He made her feel important and cherished. He was the love of her life. His smile melted her heart. That same smile froze the hearts of Mr. and Mrs. Palmer.
With the window nailed shut, Noreen found ways to meet up with Brian during the day. She cut class, forging notes from her mother. Her approach was quite clever. She wrote that she was in therapy with twice weekly sessions. Of course twice a week for two hours wasn’t enough to fill her aching need for Brian. She added more free hours by informing her parents she was trying out for the track team. Instead of running with other kids around the sports field or along nearby open space trails, she did the obvious with Brian.
This went on until several months after her sixteenth birthday when someone at the school became concerned that bi-weekly therapy wasn’t resulting in better classroom behavior. Her parents were called. Noreen was immediately enrolled in a Catholic school where kids didn’t leave campus unless mom or dad showed up at the school office and escorted their teenager out to her appointment.
Noreen ran away.
Brian’s mother welcomed Noreen into her house, perfectly comfortable with Noreen sharing Brian’s bed. Noreen returned to the public school and Brian dropped out of Junior College. He found a position with a landscaper who had a lucrative contract looking after Silicon Valley companies who needed gorgeous, drought-friendly landscaping to enhance the altruistic side of their public image.
When Noreen graduated from high school, her parents showed up at the ceremony and everything got smoothed over. They were no longer willing to let the pedophile cut their daughter out of their lives. Besides, Noreen was eighteen. It was time to bury that ugly word in the drawer where family secrets are kept and never looked at again. Noreen’s grandmother had some influence in the reconciliation. She loved Noreen to death — Noreen’s words, not mine — and she’d kept in close contact with Noreen during the years she and her parents were estranged. Grandma was very tech-savvy, with an email account and a Facebook profile that gave her complete access to Noreen’s life.
Noreen’s grandmother died suddenly from a stroke when Noreen was only nineteen. Grandma left everything to Noreen. The substantial inheritance severed Noreen’s already fragile relationship with her brother because Noreen felt no obligation to include her brother in her good fortune — he’d sided with her parents’ opinion of Brian. So she cashed the check from her grandma’s estate and went house shopping with Brian near the ocean. Brian was a motorcycle aficionado who liked the twisting, turning highway through the Santa Cruz mountains and didn’t consider the commute from the ocean to Silicon Valley a burden. Noreen stayed home taking care of their funky new home. She grew vegetables in the side yard and made jam with fruit from local orchards, transforming herself into an earth mother type.
I closed my eyes and tried to imagine an earth mother who was a hard-core runner and martini drinker. It didn’t quite fit, but I guess we all have our inconsistencies. “It sounds very cozy,” I said. “Why didn’t you get married?”
“It didn’t come up.”
“Did you want to?”
She shrugged. “I guess if we decided to have kids.”
“Did you think about kids?”
She
shook her head. “We had Terry.”
“Terry?”
“Our beagle.”
“Aw. Beagles are cute. I love beagles.”
“Me too. So does Brian.”
Her words sent a light shiver down my arms. Usually, when you’re talking about someone you were in a relationship with, you say he was like this or that, he used to do this or that, not in the present tense, as if he’s still part of your thought process. “Do you still see him?”
“No.”
“When was the last time?”
She shrugged.
Fully embracing the earth mother role, Noreen took up knitting. She got into it big time. She signed up for knitting classes and formed a knitting group. The group took trips to Marin County and down to Santa Barbara, pursuing unusual yarns in quaint shops. It seems like it would be easy to find unique yarn all over the world with the internet, and she did a bit of that too, but she and her knitting companions liked the road trips. “Besides,” she said, “sometimes you have to touch something, and see the color in real life.”
The knitting group met at Noreen’s house once a week. They talked and knitted and helped each other with complicated stitches and patterns. It was a small group — three women besides Noreen, because the other knitters Noreen knew couldn’t stomach sitting on that back deck where she insisted they meet on balmy, cloudless summer evenings. The sheer cliff beneath the deck made them shiver even with silky warm air on their arms. The deck sloped ever so gently toward the railing. Not enough that a knitting needle would roll off, but enough to make you feel uncertain about your balance. Just beyond the left corner of the deck was a large pine tree. That portion of the cliff was so badly eroded, half the tree roots were exposed, sticking out into space like the tree wanted to change its location and was sending out feelers.
Naturally, Noreen knitted scarves and hats and blankets for every family member, friend, and casual acquaintance. After a while, Brian suggested that ten scarves and eight hats were more than he’d need in a lifetime, so along with sweaters and scarves for herself, she began knitting jackets for the beagle. Brian said the fluffy pastel sweaters humiliated the dog, which led Noreen to the conclusion that Brian found the scarves and hats she’d knitted for him humiliating. He insisted it wasn’t the case, but that dogs weren’t meant to wear clothing, especially such un-masculine clothing. There was something feminine about a hand-knitted sweater, even if it was a studly navy blue.
The Woman In the Mirror: (A Psychological Suspense Novel) (Alexandra Mallory Book 1) Page 2