“I’ll keep it contained.”
“—and the wires. They pose a hazard.”
“I’ve taped the wires down good.” He popped his head down for a moment, scanned the room, and then—shockingly—blatantly—her bare legs. “And I don’t think any ten-year-olds will be wearing shoes like that.”
Wendy’s arches prickled. She’d worn strappy red sandals, a bit higher in the heel than usual, but she’d been in that kind of mood this morning. The I’ve-been-worn-down-by-my-fiancé-and-my-mother-so-I’m-going-to-wear-red-heels-and-pretend-I’ve-got-it-all-under-control kind of mood. It clearly wasn’t working. Because when Gabriel’s gaze slipped back up her body, his leisurely perusal felt like a feather tickling her inner thigh.
She took a swift sip of her skinny latte. She really should eat a healthier breakfast, even if it meant not losing the last six pounds before the wedding.
Honestly, she knew exactly what was going on here. She’d known since the first day she’d laid eyes on this broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped hunk of man. She was all too clear about the fundamentals of sexual engagement. She’d been an anthropology major, after all. She’d written her thesis on the courting rituals of the Wodaabe tribe of Cameroon.
Here’s the thing with Gabriel Teixeira: Gabriel was a handsome man waltzing into her life in the vulnerable months before she married. It was no surprise that she would simply and strongly respond. Her thoroughly physiological reaction to Gabriel’s knee-melting gaze was an evolutionary impulse. It was her body urging her to take in a variety of genetic material before settling down with one mate.
You know, like a bonobo.
And there it was, categorized and labeled. Now she could put it firmly behind glass.
“I have no choice,” she said, swiveling on one of her slim red heels. “I’ll call downstairs and see about closing the gallery.”
“Wendy, hold on.” He climbed down the ladder, bracing the enormous coil of wire against his shoulder. “I almost forgot. I found something this morning that I want to show you.”
He let the coil slide off his shoulder to fall in a cracking heap on the floor, raising a puff of dust. Then he pinched something off the pile of flotsam near the bottom of the ladder and straightened to hold it out toward her.
She approached, drawn by the sight of a pair of grime-encrusted spectacles. She noted the small circular lenses and the delicate, blue-steel wires. “They look very old,” she murmured. “Turn of the twentieth century, maybe.”
“I found them sitting inside the ceiling on a beam. Probably been there for a hundred years.”
He turned them over in his hands, examining them with the kind of respect she was used to seeing in white-gloved experts of primitive art.
“Can you see some poor worker,” he said, “finishing the ceiling and then, when it’s all closed up, patting his pockets for his glasses?”
“He must have been frantic.” She reached out to wipe some grime from the lenses. “They were expensive in those days.”
She’d leaned in too close. Gabriel was a good head taller than her, so different from Parker, who topped her by only a few inches. More than that, she felt the warmth of him, and his scent of dust and burned wire and an honest man’s labor, and, strangely, the faintest aroma of resin, a perfume that teased the corners of her memory.
She noticed his paint-flecked knuckles and abruptly understood.
She blurted, “You paint.”
She saw the surprise flicker in his eyes. Saw, too, the darkness of emerging stubble on his cheek, a prickly little line of it following his jaw.
“I do paint.” His voice was a rumble. “Not houses. Canvases.”
“Of course.”
She took a step back and felt herself blushing. Not a swift pink tinge to her cheeks, but a full-blown flush rising up from the collar of her silk blouse, the kind of embarrassed glow that would make the skin of her chest, exposed beneath a few open buttons, a complete patchwork of blotches.
“I’m working on a large canvas now.” He returned the dusty eyeglasses to the top of a pile of flotsam by the foot of the ladder and then reached for a rag in his toolbox to wipe the grime from his hands. “In a month, I’m going to have a booth at the Hudson Valley Art Fair.”
Thoroughly unnerved, Wendy thought of the Brazilian artists she knew. She thought of the brilliant colors and the textured street scenes of Sérgio Telles and the Picasso-like nudes of Ismael Nery and the way Antônio Garcia Bento painted water. She thought of the lovely woodscape by Batista da Costa acquired by her Soho art gallery, the one she’d repeatedly failed to sell and so had finally, guiltily, bought for herself.
Gabriel was an artist. A Brazilian artist. Showing up in her gallery like the ghost of Christmas Past.
“You should come by the fair,” he said. “I’d love to show you my work.”
Wendy stilled the reflex to say yes. She loved discovering new artists, loved the juxtaposition between who they seemed to be and what subjects they chose to draw. But she had to decline. This offer went beyond a friendly exchange between a contractor and his client. She’d heard this approach a dozen times while she’d worked for the art gallery, spoken from the mouths of so many bohemian artists, unshaven, unwashed, eyeing her three-hundred-dollar shoes and hoping for more than just a showing. It wasn’t quite “come up and see my etchings,” but often the sentiment was the same.
And in that moment, Parker materialized beside her. Not kind-but-stubborn Parker, holding firm against the idea of Birdie at the wedding, but possessive Parker. She imagined him slipping an arm around her shoulder and giving Gabe the eye before deftly changing the subject to sports.
“My weekends are pretty busy these days,” she said, granting Gabe a noncommittal smile, “but I’ll certainly try to drop by.”
And then, to save them both from any more awkwardness, she switched her coffee to her right hand. With her left hand, she tucked her hair behind her ear and let her fingers linger, wishing for the first time that she’d opted for a garish two-carat Harry Winston engagement ring, rather than the discreet topaz heirloom Parker had inherited from his great-grandmother.
Certainly Gabriel would understand this gesture, this international sign language for I’m already taken.
He greeted the exaggerated motion with a brief curiosity, and then, as his gaze fell upon the ring, the expression in his eyes shifted.
“I understand about busy weekends.” He tossed the rag with careless aim toward his toolbox. “So hard to fit everything in, especially if you have family.”
“Every Saturday with my mother,” Wendy said, “and every Sunday with my sister.”
“Me, I spend all my time with my son.”
My son.
The information sank in, like a flint skipping across water and then diving beneath the surface to drift, in a rocking motion, to the bottom.
“Just so we’re clear,” he said, thrusting out his hand. “You’ll be calling me Gabe from now on, yes?”
She hesitated. His expression was open, regretful. A teasing smile twitched at the corner of his lips. This situation could have been awkward, if Gabriel had had the usual contractor swagger or if she’d been forced to verbally turn him down. She shouldn’t worry about ceding him this one small request. She was not, after all, one of the American Woodland Indians, reluctant to reveal her own name lest she lose a piece of her soul.
“Of course.” She took his hand in hers. “Gabe.”
He had a working man’s hand, callused and thick-knuckled, still rough with the grit of the ceiling. Holding it, she understood three things in swift succession. In a few weeks, Gabriel would be finished updating the electricity in the museum. In three months, she would be wearing a sixteen-thousand-dollar designer wedding gown on the grounds of the Briarcliff Country Club, taking Parker Pryce-Weston as her lawfully wedded husband. And right now, there was absolutely no harm in gorging herself on the glorious sight of Gabriel Teixeira—and his strangely haunting, beautif
ul puzzle of face.
His lips curved as he read her mind. “My grandmother was Japanese. People always wonder.”
Caught again.
“I’m pardo. Mixed blood.” He shrugged. “In Brazil, it’s very common.”
“You have most unusual features.”
“And you,” he said, his gaze roaming, “have the most incredible skin. Almost translucent. I’d don’t think I could ever….”
Paint it.
In the trailing silence, she heard what he didn’t speak. Her heart did a little flutter. An image bloomed in her mind of Gabe behind an easel, and her reclining on a sun-drenched couch, naked.
Then she felt a tingling between their palms. A strange sort of prickly static, concentrated, like the electric charge she’d gathered as a child shuffling in her socks across the Aubusson rug in the parlor. It grew in intensity until it was pinpoint-painful, until she felt the heat crackle between their skins.
She pulled her hand away, like a little girl afraid of the spark.
chapter five
Marta called the pity party, and Kelly was the first to arrive. The pint-size redhead wandered into the hip East Village bar like a lost soul. Catching sight of Marta alone at the far table, Kelly launched herself across the room as fast as her gladiator sandals could take her and dragged Marta off her chair to envelop her in a hug.
Marta braced herself as her circulation was cut off at the waist. She was a good half foot taller than Kelly, but Kelly was squeezing for the kill. Marta tried very hard to blink back the tears that prickled behind her eyes. If she started crying now, it would be a hell of a watery night.
Kelly pulled away long enough to take Marta’s face in her hands. “I’m so, so sorry.”
Marta gave a casual shrug, the airy response she gave to anyone who asked her about the breakup with Carlos, because it was always easier to pretend it didn’t hurt so much than admit she was cut full through.
“Drinks are on me tonight,” Marta said, as the waitress approached. “Are you having your usual sticky poison?”
“Absolutely.”
“A rum and coke,” Marta said to the waitress, and then she tilted her own pomegranate Cosmo. “And another one of these for me.”
“This whole thing just doesn’t compute.” Kelly heaved her messenger bag over her head and slung it across the back of the chair. “The last time we talked, I thought you and Carlos were completely mind-melded.”
“I know.”
“When you called me with bad news, I thought you were going to tell me you were engaged.”
“I know. Your voice hit dolphin pitch. I had to tell you quick, before you woke up the neighborhood dogs.”
“Listen, I can be dense about these things.” Kelly gathered the swirl of her floral skirt and hiked herself on the chair. “But you were talking in the cab when we left Dhara’s engagement party like all that was left to do was finalize the design of the rings.”
Marta lifted the rim of the glass to her lips to hide an involuntary spasm. She knew Kelly meant well. Kelly was just being Kelly. The girl honestly didn’t understand that reiterating Marta’s own idiocy might not be the best way to soothe an already battered heart.
“Apparently,” Marta said, “I can throw together a twenty-million-dollar IPO, but I’m not so good at reading men.”
“I can’t believe he’s been living with you while he has a wife in Miami.”
“With three kids.” Marta tapped her glass back down on the table. A boy and two girls. Their school photos, tucked in his wallet. “The oldest is maybe five. She just lost a front tooth.”
“He’s one hell of a son of a bitch.”
“To both women involved.”
Then a purse landed with a clank on the tiny table, and Dhara came up behind it, looking disheveled and heavy-eyed. “Please solemnly swear that this is not some lame ploy to get me to another intervention.”
“Chica, I honestly wish it were.”
Dhara visibly deflated. She sank into her chair, covering her cheeks with both hands. She stared at Marta with widening eyes.
Marta swept her fresh Cosmo off the tray as the waitress approached. “You’d best get the doctor here a ginger ale,” Marta said to the waitress. “For her, that’s the hard stuff.”
“I’m going to need something stronger.”
“Whoa, we’re cutting loose. Make it an ice tea,” Marta corrected. “But not the Long Island type.”
“Yes, yes. Sweetened. With a lemon.” Dhara ran her hands down her face and then let them drop onto the table. “I’m an ass. I should have known you wouldn’t joke about this. How long?”
“I kicked him out the night of your engagement party. I haven’t seen him since.” She tightened her grip around the stem of her glass, remembering how she’d tossed the pictures of his children at him, ashamed at the tears on her face. “So, which one of you won the pool?”
Kelly’s brow furrowed. “What pool?”
“The betting pool.” Marta tried that casual shrug again. “Over how long this thing with Carlos would last.”
“Oh, Marta, you must really be hurting to suggest something like that.” Dhara shook her head. “You know that all of us were hoping that Carlos was the one.”
Marta’s throat constricted even more. She’d thought Carlos was the one too. She’d even brought him home to her family last January for El Dia de Reyes, the feast of the three kings. Must have been fifty people in her mother’s cape house, twenty-one of them children. He’d played dominos with her father. He’d dissected every dish, asking her mother how she made the meat and plantain pasteles, sniffing the sofrito that flavored the rice dish her aunt made with pigeon peas. He’d even chased around her three bratty nephews, the ones Marta referred to as Pedro Stop, Sanchez Put-That-Down, and Alejandro Don’t-Hit-Your-Brother.
It was the only time, she now realized, that he’d ever met her family.
“Tell me he’s out of the apartment.” Dhara dragged her purse off the table, dropping it with a clank to the floor by her feet. “Tell me you launched all his stuff out the fifth-floor window.”
Marta thought of the echoing spaces she’d confronted when she’d come home from work last night—the stretch of her closet, the two gaping drawers, and the pot-rack devoid of copper-bottomed saucepans. It had been days since she’d thrown him out, but she couldn’t seem to get the smell of his aftershave out of her towels. “His dry cleaning showed up on my door this morning. But from what I hear,” she said wryly, “the Salvation Army is always in need of Egyptian cotton shirts.”
“Sure you don’t want to take a scalpel to them? I have a supply.”
“Tempting.”
“And if you see him again, I could teach you how to make two small incisions on either side of his scrotum—”
“If I ever got that close, it wouldn’t be the scrotum I’d cut.”
“How could he keep a secret like that for so very long?” Kelly said, looking genuinely uncomfortable. “I mean, eventually, isn’t it going to come out anyway?”
“Kelly, here’s something I have to face.” Marta searched for courage in the rosy depths of her drink. “I’m no better than those well-meaning women who marry door-to-door salesmen only to discover—to their surprise—that those long trips the guy makes? Well, they are to one of his other four wives.”
Dhara made a muffled noise. “Marta, don’t do this to yourself.”
“Think about it. If I hadn’t made Carlos sign those loan papers, I’d be like some Florida granny who’d had her fortune siphoned off in marshland real-estate scams.”
“No,” Dhara insisted. “No.”
“Did you know that there’s a new reality show called Who the Hell Did I Marry? Can’t you just see me on it?” She morphed her voice into the drawling lilt of last night’s televised victim. “’Sixteen months I lived with him, and all that time I thought it was charming that he was so affectionate over the phone with his ‘nieces’ and ‘nephews.’”
“Clearly,” Dhara said, “he was very good at compartmentalizing.”
“Yeah, like the wives of those serial killers.” Kelly leaned over the table. “They never seem to notice the human remains in their freezers, you know? You’re lucky Carlos didn’t go all Sweeney Todd on you—”
“All right, that’s it.” Wendy waltzed into the conversation, holding a drink in each hand. “You are all hereby banned from late-night TV.”
Marta met Wendy’s wryly amused gaze, her heart swelling in gratitude that Wendy had made the long trip from Westchester to this East Village bar. After Marta had first absorbed the shock of Carlos’s betrayal, it was Wendy she’d called first. It was Wendy she’d kept abreast of all the developments in their sad detail.
Once a freshman roommate, always a freshman roommate.
Wendy scraped a highball glass across the table. “I asked the bartender for a good postbreakup drink,” she said, swinging into the chair next to Kelly. “He called it a Bastardo.”
“Perfect.” Marta shoved her Cosmo aside, raised the Bastardo, and tipped it to each of them. “Cheers, ladies. Here’s to saying good-bye to one no-good cheating Cuban.”
Dhara raised her ice tea. “Good riddance.”
Kelly heaved her rum and coke in the air. “Hasta la vista, baby.”
Marta took a sip of the Bastardo and felt the bite of the bitters all the way down her throat. The taste mixed really well with the ashes of failure and the gall of being duped.
She’d had her fill of both. Last Sunday at her mother’s house, after confessing a modified version of the bad news to her hovering gaggle of female relatives, she’d been smothered with clucking sympathy while cousins thrust their sticky babies into her lap, her aunt overfed her empanadas, and her mother casually discussed the nice young man who worked at the Home Depot. The growing miasma of unmet expectations threatened to suffocate her as she stared at the collage of pictures on her mother’s refrigerator.
One Good Friend Deserves Another Page 6