“Come on in!” I shouted back.
He used his key. We were always losing ours. Macbeth was our backup in so many ways. And being Macbeth, he flipped on the overhead light as soon as he entered. Tom would have stumbled around in the gloom, no more aware that dusk had settled than I was, but Macbeth always knew where he was, what he was doing, and how it related to the rest of the world.
“What’s with sitting in the dark, babe?”
“I’m not reading, mother, so it’s okay, I won’t strain my eyes.”
Grabbing another cushion as he crossed the room, he settled himself on the floor beside me. “Cyd phoned. She’ll be working late. She sent me over because she’s worried about you. Something about a bummer day.”
Ceiling lights suited Macbeth, have to admit, accenting the neat haircut, clean profile, tailored sports coat, dark slacks. I leaned my head back against the windowsill and treated him like eye candy, not that I would ever tell him so. He was Cyd’s guy.
“I’m okay.”
“Not coming down with anything?” He pressed the back of his hand against my forehead.
“A hangnail, maybe.”
“Cyd said you skipped an interview this afternoon.”
“How could I go with a hangnail?”
“You’re probably the last female on earth who can spend two hours pushing back her cuticles.”
I said, “Nobody loves a smartass.”
He smiled a quick smile that showed the gap between his front teeth and softened his face. “Babe, you’ve skipped three appointments this week.”
“Got my ass kicked twice today. Twice is enough.”
“So you’re quitting?”
“Typical, Macbeth. Nag, nag. You got that Midas touch, you know, everything works for you. Don’t expect the rest of us to meet your standards.” I said it like a joke but it was true. He could multitask and keep it all aimed at one ambition. Which is probably how he got the nickname Macbeth, short for Macklin Braithe, when he was a child. It stuck. “Bet you were the kid who picked up his games and went home if the other kids forgot the rules.”
He kept the smile but it looked forced. “You should go back to school and get your degree.”
“I wasn’t learning anything.”
“You’ll never get a decent job without a degree.”
“Or with one. Look at Cyd and Tom.”
They had their degrees from the U and they were both in jobs they hated, stuck in cubicles squinting into computers all day.
“So what did they expect with history majors? Get into something practical.”
Yes, sure, we’d been through this a dozen times. Reminding him I was a trust fund baby and could squeak by if I stuck with a shared apartment and pizza wouldn’t shut him up.
So I said the thing that always worked. “I love you, Macbeth.”
He said, “Sure, April, I love you, too,” but he didn’t look at me. Instead he stood up and walked out, pausing at the door to say, “I need to pick up Cyd. We’re going out to some new Italian place she’s heard about. Want to come with us?”
“No. I’m okay. Honest. Tom will be along soon.”
Macbeth nodded and left, pushing in the lock button on the door before he closed it. The knob rattled from the other side when he turned it to make sure he had locked me in safely. After his car pulled away from the curb, I got up and switched off the overhead light, then returned to the window to stare out at the darkening sky above the moving shadows of the vine leaves.
Could have told him to turn out the light when he left. Cyd would have done that. Not me. I’d spent my life avoiding confrontations, doing things my own way when no one was watching.
Once in a while I’d tried to defend myself, explain why I wanted something, and I either stumbled over crappy explanations, or screamed things I couldn’t take back, or dissolved into tears. So I quit bothering and kept my thoughts to myself.
While I played with my thoughts, weaving them mentally through the vine maple like threads, I saw Tom hurrying along the sidewalk, his tall frame bent against the nonexistent wind. His head was lowered as though he could only move forward by butting his way through the mist. A forelock of dark wavy hair fell across his eyes. His trench coat flapped around his long legs.
I banged on the window glass and waved but being Tom and lost in his own thoughts, he didn’t hear me.
After I let him in he trailed me to the kitchen, his hands on my shoulders, and we stared together at the interior of the fridge.
“We could do eggs,” I said.
“How about eggs benedict?”
“We don’t have ham. Or muffins.”
“It’s the hollandaise that counts. We can use toast.” He turned me to face him and wound his arms around me. He was tall and thin and average looking until you looked up into his eyes. Tom had thick black eyelashes out to there and his eyes were this lovely shade of dark brown, sparkling and teasing and full of promises he never remembered he’d made. Oh yes, I knew the boy well.
“Your coat’s wet.”
“Not inside,” he said, and opened it to wrap me up, pressing me against the rough wool of his sweater. Right off I knew he’d split up with his latest girlfriend. He nuzzled my neck until I giggled.
“We’ll never get supper done this way.” I pushed away from him because I wasn’t about to be a consolation prize.
Despite the lack of ingredients, Tom, who was a fair cook, put together a hot meal while I, who wasn’t, turned off the TV and turned on the stereo and poured the wine.
We sat on the floor in the front room, stretched out among the pillows and bolsters we had dragged off the couch. Light from the kitchen doorway threw a patterned strip up one wall and across the ceiling of the entry hall, giving us all the light we needed. I could feel Tom watching me more than I could see him, his dark eyes shadows in his narrow face.
“What’s the problem, April?”
“A couple of job interviews, no job.”
“Sorry, lovey. Wish I could help.”
“What about you?” I asked, because I knew he hated his job. “Thought of something else to do?”
“Been thinking about going back to the U. God, I still owe on my student loan. But I need a master’s.”
That was Macbeth’s chant, that Cyd and Tom needed to get degrees in business or computer science. “What can you do with a master’s? Besides teach high school that is.”
“Teenagers? Right. Forget that plan.”
“I’d rather panhandle than go back to school,” I said.
“We could get married,” Tom said. He said that regularly between girlfriends.
“What’s-her-name left you, huh?”
He laughed. “Yeah. Something about me living with my folks. A turnoff, I guess.”
Tom lived with his parents and I lived on a very small trust fund set up by a grandmother. Real shortage of Macbeth ambition in there somewhere. Also, maybe you have to love something in order to be committed to it and I didn’t have a definition of love. Nothing and no one had ever happened to me that I could separate from the rest of my life and identify as love.
Having the sort of prettiness that attracts males, I’ve had guys following me since grade school, had sex for the first time when I was in high school and since then had several lovers except that they weren’t. I enjoyed sex but even at seventeen and not very worldly, I knew I didn’t love the guy.
“How can you do that, have affairs with guys you know you don’t love?” Cyd once asked me.
“I love the guy I’m with,” I had told her, “when I’m with him, and isn’t that a song? Thing is, even then, I know in my head I could have as much fun with any of a half dozen other guys I know.”
To Tom I said, “So, lover, how would marriage solve our financial problems?”
“It wouldn’t,” he said and managed to knock over his glass of wine while reaching for me. “But it would make poverty more fun.”
“Uh huh. You could cook for me,” I sa
id over my shoulder as I headed for the bathroom to grab a large towel. “And I could clean up after you,” I added as I knelt and mopped up the wine from the carpet. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings but I’m going to have to pass on your offer.”
“Okay. I’ll ask again next week.”
He would, too, he would still be around next week caring about me and so would Cyd and Macbeth. I could count on them which was why I adored them.
“Tom, do you believe in premonitions?”
“The first time I saw you I knew you were the woman I would marry.”
“Not that kind of premonition. Listen, be serious.” Kneeling beside him, where he had stretched out on the carpet, I put my face close to his so I could see his expression in the dim light. He didn’t try to grab me, just lifted his face enough to kiss me. I socked his arm.
“Stop, be serious.”
“I’m always serious when I kiss.”
“I’ve got to tell you something. Cyd thinks I imagined it. I didn’t.”
The scene was sharp, the palm trees, the brilliant sky, the shimmering heat, the wheel beneath my sweating hands, the oncoming car. I described it to Tom, quickly at first, afraid that like Cyd, he would think it was a memory of something I’d once seen.
He surpassed me by saying, “Describe the car we were in.”
“I’m not good at cars. Gray, I think, or maybe light blue, and lots of chrome, the fenders were chrome and it had wide strips around the front of the hood, and oh, there wasn’t any roof.”
“A convertible?”
“I guess so.”
“Do you know anyone who owns a gray convertible?”
“No, and I’ve never seen a car like it except, wait, I know, on PBS. That’s it, those Masterpiece Theater shows. Only those are in England and they don’t have palm trees.”
“You’ve lost me,” Tom said.
Leaning against him, I closed my eyes and tried to visualize the car. “You know those shows on TV that are set at some English country estate and the women wear thin little dresses, the kind Cyd looks for at vintage clothing stores, and everyone talks fast and drinks nonstop?”
“Mysteries? Dramas? Which series?”
“I can’t remember names, oh, they take place between the World Wars and everybody is very rich.”
“The twenties or thirties?”
“You’re the history major. Yes, I guess so.”
“All right. Now describe Cyd and Macbeth to me.” He ran a fingertip down my nose and then across my lower lip.
I swatted his hand away.
“I can’t think when you do that.” But as I concentrated on the scene, I saw them all again, not a vision but a memory. “Cyd. She was sitting in the middle and staring right at me. You were all in a row, all three in front.”
“A bench seat that went all the way across the car. Was Cyd wearing the same style glasses?”
“No. No! She wasn’t wearing glasses. And her hair, it was cut short and pressed tight to her head. In some ways she didn’t look like Cyd at all, her face was rounder, but I knew she was Cyd.”
“And me and Macbeth?”
“I couldn’t see you too well. You had one hand in front of your face, like you were trying to keep the sun out of your eyes. You were both wearing white shirts. And ties.”
“Macbeth, yes. Me, no,” Tom said.
“It was you and both of you had very short hair.”
“Like an army cut, straight across?”
“No, but your hair was either cut or combed close to your head, slicked back, I think maybe.”
“And the car you were driving? Describe the dashboard. What about the hood? Was it a convertible, too?”
“I can’t remember and it doesn’t matter, Tommy! What matters is that I killed us all, all of us, you, me, Macbeth, Cyd! It was so real. What if I saw something that is going to happen?”
“You’re describing the past, lovey. So whatever it is, it’s over.”
“Or we’re all on our way to a costume party. People renovate those old cars and make them look like new.”
I felt the tears rising and I hated that, hated going out of control. He touched my cheek, must have felt tears, because he pulled me down into his arms and stroked my hair and kissed me.
Then he piled pillows around me, building a wall of velvet and corduroy, saying, “That’s your barricade against the world.”
“Make the wall crenelated,” I laughed, gulping back tears.
He made a few attempts at stacking cushions. They slid off and he restacked, finally arranging them around us until we sank down, giggling, in the center of the circle.
His hands and mouth were as familiar to me as my own because sometimes, between other others, we did that, forgot we weren’t lovers, remembered we did adore each other in our weird way. And I did not want to think about anything else.
“Am I the consolation prize?” I whispered.
He stopped kissing me and lifted his head. “Why would you think that?”
“You just broke up, didn’t you?”
“Oh.” He thought a moment, then said, “Lovey, I want you because I want you, that’s all. Should I quit?”
“You should, but then I’d have to go stand on a street corner and find somebody else.”
He laughed and between kisses he said other things, probably that he loved me, probably that I ought to marry him. I didn’t pay any attention because I knew him too well and he didn’t mean a word of it.
I did tell him, “I don’t believe a word you say.”
And he mumbled, “That’s good, because I don’t remember what I said.”
“Then just shut up and concentrate, Tommy boy.”
He was warm and familiar and safe and kind and gentle and loving and passionate and finally mind-blowing good.
Our barricade fell in on us unnoticed.
CHAPTER 3
We were dressed and watching TV by the time Macbeth brought Cyd home. Tom was stretched out on the couch half asleep, one arm draped around me. I sat on the carpet next to him, leaning back with my head resting against him.
They had gone out to dinner at some Italian place in the Pioneer Square area that overflowed with atmosphere and fascinating people, Cyd said, waving her arms and doing one-line descriptions of customers and waiters.
Macbeth said, “The pasta was lumpy.”
Ignoring him, Cyd continued her chatter while she went into the kitchen, filled two tumblers with wine, then returned. She wore a straight, sleeveless dress that fit under a suit jacket for work, a style of dress that looks wonderful on really slim women like Cyd. Every shiny dark hair on her head hung neat and straight, not quite touching her shoulders. When she moved, her hair swung out. Very jealous, yes, I was. Good thing she’s also such a terrific friend.
“The clientele is very arty,” she explained.
“They dress in Salvation Army rejects,” Macbeth said.
“We ran into Lisa from our dorm, remember her? Always starting something, never finishing? She’s into reincarnation now. Goes to some hypnotist who took her back to a Gold Rush wagon train memory.”
“An earlier life?” Tom asked, half-opening his eyes.
“No, this life, she’s well-preserved. God, Tom. Of course an earlier life. He put her in a kind of trance and she was sitting on a buckboard. Lisa said she could see the other wagons and hear people calling to each other and she even smelled the dust and the horses. She says she knew there was this man sitting next to her and she knew he was her husband and they were excited about the journey, but when she tried to turn her head to see him, the trance ended.”
The pressure in my ribcage stopped my breathing. The muscles tightened in my neck and shoulders. It was as though I was paralyzed, a mind held captive in an immovable tower. I could feel the man beside me in the car and smell his cologne. I could see my hands on the steering wheel.
Macbeth leaned down and touched my arm. “April? Where are you?”
I shuddered
and began to breathe again. “That’s what it was like. I could see and smell and touch, but it was another place and time. Do you think I was remembering another life?”
“I wish you hadn’t mentioned Lisa and her stupid reincarnation story,” Macbeth said to Cyd. By the way his eyes narrowed, I knew Cyd had told him what had happened to me.
“Maybe it’s not a story,” Tom said. “Maybe it’s real. Maybe Lisa saw a former life.”
Macbeth said, “Which history prof taught you that, buddy? Reincarnation is a theory, one more superstition sometimes tied to a religion by people who need a crutch to get through life.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Listen, babe, even if it were true, even if they could prove it in a lab, it wouldn’t change anything. You can’t go back and change the past. So what’s the point? Done is done.”
He was usually right and that was okay because Macbeth kept the rest of us from flying off into self-destruct, well, he saved Tom and me. Cyd had her own built in system. If Mac was sure, then maybe he had a better explanation.
I said, “It makes a difference to me. If I knew for positive the crash I saw was something in a former life, over, done in a past life, couldn’t still be waiting to happen, I could forget it.”
Macbeth narrowed his eyes, ran his hand over his hair, glared at me, then tried to smile. “Okay, whatever you saw, it’s over. Probably a scene from a movie you’ve forgotten.”
“That won’t do. Let’s say I don’t believe in reincarnation and the past. That means the crash scene is a premonition. Something still going to happen.”
“No. April. Do you want to believe in reincarnation? Go ahead, because it puts your nightmare in the past.” Poor Macbeth. I was forcing him to argue against his own logic. “One thing I am sure of. No one can see the future.”
Okay, he was right, I decided. Forget the whole thing, credit it to a dizzy spell. Lay the blame on skipping breakfast.
That’s what I decided.
And then I ceased being me.
***
I was a girl standing on a concrete sidewalk in front of a stucco bungalow on a street of stucco bungalows, low one-story houses that would have been called summer cottages back home in Minnesota but here, in California, people lived in them year round. Painted in pastel shades, most of them beige or pink, the low bungalows had multi-paned windows below faded awnings. Red-tile trim edged the flat roofs. The front gardens were patches of brown grass with strips of foundation plantings, spiky oleander bushes behind sprawling geraniums, both with flowers in harsh shades of pink. The sky was so bright it made my eyes ache.
My Deja Vu Lover Page 2