Promises, Promises

by Shelley Cooper

  “Maybe I should run the vacuum cleaner,” he said.

  Gretchen shook her head. “Too loud.”

  “That’s what I thought.” Plus, it wouldn’t take anywhere near three hours to vacuum rugs that had already been tended to—in this case, quite thoroughly—by his cleaning service. And, when he was through, he’d still have to think of something to fill the remaining time.

  They could always sit around and talk, he supposed, then had to suppress a grimace when he remembered their last conversation. Had he really blabbed all that personal information to her? Why had he told her so much about himself?

  She was a good listener, and she’d seemed truly interested. Funny, now that he thought about it, how most of his recent girlfriends had been more interested in their clothing, their figures and their careers than in the formative events of his life. Funny, too, how he hadn’t thought about those events for such a long time now.

  He hadn’t thought about them, he told himself, because they were from a time he didn’t care to remember. Losing his mother was one of the most painful episodes of his life. He didn’t see any point in dredging it up all over again. Resurrecting those memories only served to stir emotions that were better left unstirred. What was past was past. It couldn’t be changed. No useful purpose could be served by reliving it.

  At least now he understood the real reason why he was having so much trouble looking Gretchen in the eye. Like some women he’d known—marriage-minded women—she’d challenged his reasons for remaining single. Unlike those very same women, he was afraid he would find himself listening to her. If he let her, he was terrified she’d have him second-guessing—and maybe even revising—a decision that had served him quite well so far, thank you.

  But had it? Had it really?

  Yes, he told himself firmly, it had. So what if he felt lonely now and then? Didn’t everyone, at some point or another in their lives? Why couldn’t Gretchen just accept that after carefully weighing the alternatives he’d made a choice, that he was confident it was the right one for him and his lifestyle and that he was perfectly happy with it and had no intention of changing it?

  Because to women like Gretchen, a man who professed no interest in marriage and fatherhood was an abomination to be obliterated in any way possible. Well, he had news for her. He was one abomination who would not be obliterated.

  Without question, she unnerved him in a way no other woman had. First she’d made him physically uncomfortable. Then she’d made him emotionally uncomfortable. From the moment of that unexpected proposition, she’d knocked him off balance and kept him there. It was an unaccustomed and most uncomfortable place for him to be. He didn’t like it at all. He felt like a tightrope walker getting ready to span a wire stretched across the Grand Canyon. And he was afraid of heights.

  No, talking with her was definitely out. For the time being, anyway. Because he never seemed able to have a conversation with her that didn’t end up with the tables being turned on him.

  “We could always watch TV,” he offered.

  She looked relieved. “Couldn’t hurt to check and see what’s on.”

  When he turned on the television, he wasn’t surprised to discover that the baseball game had been rained out. In its place the station was airing an infomercial on rotisseries. The offerings on the other two major networks were equally unpalatable: another infomercial, this one about flattening your abs, and a fifties sci-fi thriller that he might have been tempted to watch, had they not missed the first half. As a last-ditch attempt, Marco switched to PBS. What he got was an incredibly graphic eyeful of the mating habits of the African black rhinoceros. Quickly he turned the television off.

  “Let me guess,” Gretchen said. “You don’t have cable.”

  He shook his head. “Seemed like a waste of money, when I’m hardly ever home.”

  “Sure would come in handy right about now,” she murmured.

  He agreed with her.

  “Do you have a VCR?” she asked.

  He nodded. “But I only have one tape. I use it to record sporting events. You into baseball?”

  “Not really.”

  “What about you?” he asked. “You have any tapes?”

  “Nothing I haven’t seen a dozen times already. Like you, I guess I don’t watch much TV.”

  He really was pathetic, Marco decided. Surely he wasn’t that unnerved by being alone with her. After all, what did he think she was going to do? Tie him to a chair, call a priest and somehow have them married before nightfall? In a state that not only required blood tests but also a three-day waiting period? How ridiculous could he get?

  He could always ask her to go home—at least until Kristen’s bedtime tonight. But a part of him wanted her to stay. And another part of him felt hopeful that, with continued exposure to her, he’d finally grow immune to the unease she made him feel and put it to bed, so to speak. Then, once that was nicely tucked in, maybe he could seriously reconsider putting Gretchen to bed, too.

  “We could read,” he said.

  “Okay,” she agreed. “Let me run home and get a book.”

  Five minutes later she was curled up on his sofa, and he was stretched out in his armchair with his legs propped up on the ottoman. Yes, he thought with satisfaction, this was a great idea. Opening the latest offering in the adventures of Spenser, his favorite detective, Marco drew an anticipatory breath and began reading.

  When thirty minutes had elapsed and he couldn’t begin to recall the content of the ten pages he’d managed to read, Marco closed the book. It wasn’t because the story wasn’t riveting. It was because his gaze kept straying across the room. To her.

  He knew one thing. When the antics of Spenser couldn’t keep him pleasurably occupied for a good hour or two, he was definitely in trouble.

  The trouble was sitting less than five feet from him. He hadn’t realized, until she’d stretched them the length of his sofa, exactly how long and lean Gretchen’s legs truly were. How finely shaped her feet were. How beautifully crafted her toes—

  He brought his thoughts to an abrupt halt. He couldn’t believe that he was actually fixating on her toes. Again. He had to stop looking at her toes. He had to stop looking at her.

  But instead of looking away, he found his gaze running the length of her body. Big mistake. Her skin seemed creamy and soft, her eyelashes lush and thick, her lips full and kissable. For long moments he found himself staring at the soft rise and fall of her chest, until his awareness of her charged the air around him like the storm still raging outside.

  Surely she had to feel it. Surely she couldn’t be as oblivious to his presence as she seemed to be. But if she did, and if she wasn’t, he couldn’t tell. From where he sat, she seemed totally absorbed in the romance she was reading.

  Damn her.

  Marco shifted uncomfortably. Would Kristen never wake up?

  Activity was definitely the key. Unfortunately, because of the weather, his options were severely limited. What he needed was something mindless to occupy him, something not as challenging as a book, but consuming nonetheless.

  In an act of desperation, Marco lurched from his chair. After a brief search through the shelves of his hallway closet, he hauled out a jigsaw puzzle and placed it in the middle of his rarely used dining room table. A thousand-piecer. Surely that should keep him busy enough.

  “She isn’t going to sleep that long,” Gretchen drawled, her tone wry.

  He looked up and saw her framed in the doorway. “I know. But I’ve been meaning to put this together for months, and today seemed as good a day as any to start. My brother, Roberto, gave it to me for Christmas.”

  After a brief pause, he added needlessly, “It’s a picture of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.”

  “Very pretty.” She angled her neck to study the picture on the lid. “Mind if I join you?”

  “Is your book boring?”

  “I’m just not in the mood to read this afternoon.”

  Boy, could he rel
ate. “You like puzzles?”

  She moved to the table and took a seat across from him. “I used to.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, Marco decided not to ask her what she meant. “Do you prefer to put the border together first, or are you one of those people who just dumps the whole thing out on the table and sets to work?”

  “The border first,” she said.

  “Me, too.”

  This was much better, he decided as, ten minutes later, in companionable silence, they searched through the pieces for all the straight edges. So far he’d only been distracted by her presence a time or two, and then only because their fingers had accidentally brushed together.

  Yes, he thought in satisfaction, this he could do. There was only one thing that would make it better.

  “Do you think it would disturb Kristen if I put on some music?” he asked.

  “Not if you keep the volume low. What sort of music did you have in mind?”

  “I have mostly instrumentals. Bach, Beethoven, Gershwin, that sort of thing.”

  It was the music he’d listened to all through medical school because there were no vocals to intrude on his studies. He supposed, now that those years were behind him, it might be time to expand the range of his collection.

  “Do you have anything else?” Gretchen asked.

  When he’d entered college, he’d given the bulk of his rock and roll collection to his younger brother, Antonio. “Don’t you like classical music?”

  “I love it. I’ve just been listening to a lot of it lately. It would be nice to have a change of pace.”

  Marco glanced over at her, and his heart started thudding unevenly. It was probably a trick of the lighting, but her eyes seemed impossibly big and luminous. Maybe something a little intrusive would be a good idea. When he’d given his collection to Antonio, he had held back a few of his most treasured recordings.

  “I have several Van Morrison CDs.”

  Her eyes lit up. “I adore Van Morrison. You wouldn’t happen to have ‘Moondance,’ would you?”

  He pushed back his chair. “Coming right up.”

  He really should have given a second thought to the lyrics, Marco thought, when Van’s voice, singing about stars and romance and making love, softly filled the room. This much intrusion he hadn’t bargained for. Carefully avoiding Gretchen’s gaze, he sat back down and continued sorting through puzzle pieces.

  “Why did you become a doctor?” she asked.

  He looked at her blankly, thrown by the unexpectedness of the question.

  “Just making polite conversation,” she said with a smile. “Of course, if you prefer, we could always return to the awkward silence. Personally, I’d like to avoid it if at all possible.”

  He grinned. “It was uncomfortable, wasn’t it?”

  “Put it this way,” she told him. “If I had to choose which was more comfortable, a bed of nails or that silence, I’d take the bed of nails, hands down.”

  “Me, too.”

  She stared at him expectantly. “So, why did you become a doctor?”

  Marco had a stock answer whenever anyone asked him that particular question. He always replied that he found the workings of the human body fascinating and that he’d dedicated his life to studying those workings.

  So no one was more surprised than he when he opened his mouth and said, “When my mother was sick, I hated how helpless I felt. I wanted to be able to do something, anything, to make it better for her, but I couldn’t. It damn near killed me.”

  Dismay filled him, and he forgot all about awkward silences and the disturbing lyrics of “Moondance.” He bit down hard on his lower lip to keep from saying more. How did she do it? How did she manage to crawl under his defenses and make him open up to her the way she did?

  “So you became a doctor to help other people, the way you couldn’t help your mother?”

  “Yes,” he grudgingly agreed.

  Okay, she wanted to talk. Then talk they would. This time around, though, he would be in charge. This time he would dictate the direction their conversation would take. Besides, right now she knew more about him than he knew about her. It was time to even the scales. Not to mix metaphors, but maybe he could even turn the tables on her.

  “Why did you become an accountant?” he asked.

  She took another mound of pieces and started sorting through them. “Because of a promise I made to my mother.”

  Marco felt his eyebrows arch. “Your mother made you promise to become an accountant?”

  “Not in so many words. What she made me promise was to choose a solid, stable career. Accounting more than fit the bill.”

  Put that way, it sounded calculated and bloodless. Emotionless. He’d always, at least until she’d taken him for that car ride, thought of Gretchen as a highly practical woman. But not emotionless. Never emotionless. At least he’d based his choice of career on several criteria, one of which happened to be a deep-seated emotional need, the fulfillment of which gave him a great deal of satisfaction. But if he understood her correctly, Gretchen had made her choice based solely on one criterion: financial security.

  Was she satisfied to tote up numbers, day after day? Was she content to sit at a lonely desk for hours on end, while the rest of the world passed her by? He remembered the way she had looked, with the wind blowing through her hair and her face alight with the sheer joy of being alive, and he just couldn’t picture it.

  “Was there something else you were thinking of doing, before you made that promise to your mother?”

  All of a sudden, she seemed terribly interested in gathering up all the straight edges that would form the border of the sky. Marco finished sorting through the last of the mixed pieces and waited patiently.

  “Quite a few things, actually,” she finally said. “Like any adolescent, I imagined myself in a variety of careers. When I was ten, I wanted to be an astronaut. When I was twelve, I was certain I would be the first female president of the United States. Of course, maturity put things in their proper perspective.”

  “And you chose to be an accountant.”

  “Yes.”

  He wasn’t going to let her off that easily. “But was there one thing that stayed with you longer than a month or two, one dream that filled you with so much excitement you couldn’t sleep at night?”

  She kept her gaze fastened on the puzzle piece between her fingers. When she spoke, her voice was barely audible. “Yes.”

  “What was it?”

  Slowly, she lifted her gaze to his. Her eyes were bigger and more luminous than ever.

  “I wanted to be a concert pianist.”

  “You took piano lessons?”

  “From the time I was five years old until I was sixteen.”

  “That’s a long time,” he said. “You must have enjoyed it.”

  “I lived for it. I must have practiced two to three hours a day. Sometimes more on weekends. There were times my incessant playing drove my parents crazy.”

  The reflective light in her eyes and the dreamy quality in her voice told him she was in a place that was far, far away from his dining room table.

  “If you loved it so much,” he said, “why did you stop taking lessons? Why did you give up your dream?”

  She seemed to snap back to reality. Reaching for a few more puzzle pieces she said, “Because of the promise to my mother.”

  “Your promise to choose a solid, stable career.”

  “Yes.”

  “Couldn’t you have done both? Couldn’t you have had the career and continued to study the piano?”

  She wouldn’t look at him. “When you work sixty hours or more a week, it doesn’t leave time for much else.”

  No, it didn’t, he acknowledged. He sat back in his chair and stared at her.

  “So you gave up your dream because your mother asked you to.”

  Her back went ramrod straight, and a defensive note entered her voice. “You make her sound like an ogre, but she wasn’t. Far from it.
I was her only child, and she loved me very much. My welfare was her main concern. She had her reasons for asking me to make that promise. I understood and respected them. I probably wasn’t good enough to be a concert pianist, anyway. It was an impossible dream.”

  The last statement was said with a wistfulness that tore at his heart.

  “You don’t know that for sure.”

  “No,” she admitted before turning her attention back to the puzzle. “I suppose I don’t. Not 100 percent, anyway.”

  Marco gathered up the pieces that would form the puzzle’s lower border and began fitting them together. He tried to imagine what he would have done if someone had tried to talk him out of being a doctor. He didn’t have to imagine long. He would have laughed in that person’s face.

  But what if his father had been the one making the request? What would he have done in that case? He supposed it would have depended on the reasons put forth to him.

  “You said your mother had her reasons for asking you to make that promise. What were they?”

  “My father was a steel worker. When the steel industry all but died in Pittsburgh, he was one of the thousands of men who suddenly found themselves unemployed. I was eight years old when he lost his job. It took him almost three years to find another one. My mother had never worked outside the home, but she took whatever work she could find to help out. Of course, nothing paid all that much. The only reason we didn’t lose this house was because the rent our tenant paid helped my parents meet the mortgage.”

  No wonder she’d always seemed so serious. “That must have been a tough time for you.”

  “It was awful,” she replied. “I don’t like to think about it much.”

  He certainly understood that. He had his own painful memories. “I guess you had to give up piano for a while.”