Uh, what? My eyes narrow in on his silver-tipped temples. “Just how old are you?”
“Forty-eight…next November.”
He’s got some nerve to sit there grinning at me. “You’re a younger man.”
“Not that much. Forty-seven, forty nine—”
“Fifty, next week.”
“The French say an older woman makes the best lover.”
I wish he wouldn’t keep making it so easy to like him. “So then, you are here because you think you’re going to get lucky again?” I should get so lucky again!
“Don’t get the wrong idea, Lu. I just came to spend a little time with you. And, I admit, to ask your advice.”
“About senior citizen benefits?”
“No.” He sighs. “I’m a lousy mother.” That sounds like my line. “Jolie needs someone to listen to her. She thinks I should be better at it. I try. But I only seem to get her back up. I don’t understand. Patients love my bedside manner.”
“They are mostly widows, and mostly senile.”
He laughs as though it’s forced out of him. “I wish that were the answer.”
“You want to talk about it?”
I can see the change take place in his expression. “It’s serious. Do you mind?”
I shake my head and settle back. I think I can handle daughter stuff—at least, someone else’s daughter’s stuff.
Spina bifida.
I hear William talking but it’s taking my mind a few seconds to catch up. Oh, God. Poor Jolie!
He reaches for a paper napkin and pulls a pen out of his jacket pocket, and begins to draw a fetus’s physiology. I try to adjust my layman’s eyes to his deft strokes. He’s good at explanations. But I have to admit the Latin terms mean nothing to me other than as signals that an unborn child’s life could be in serious jeopardy.
Finally he sits back and rubs a palm across his mouth. “She should have been tested months ago. She and Jon don’t have insurance so Jon vetoed any optional testing as an unnecessary expense. She was too proud to tell me until she left him. I was angry, of course. Didn’t she know that I would have gladly paid? I convinced her that testing was still a good idea, although I was certain she had nothing to worry about.” I can tell by the way that his voice has emptied of emotion that there’s more.
His head dips a little. “She got back positive results the day we saw you in the Paradise.”
I remember Jolie’s red eyes and pinched expression when she saw my baby’s sonogram picture, and I wished her well with her pregnancy. My heart feels tight as I think about it. My test results have been fine.
“Not that AFPs are definitive. There is a high potential for false positives. I told Jolie more than ninety-five percent turn out to be wrong.” He doesn’t make eye contact. “I should have said positive results indicate only one thing, the need for more testing. She had a level-two sonogram last week. It, too, was inconclusive.”
“So now what?”
“The next step is an amniocentesis. I told her Jon should be included in the decision. The procedure poses some risk to both mother and fetus.”
I look for the bright spot. “Isn’t it a good sign that she agreed to talk it over with Jon?”
William looks at me. “I called him. He sounded so relieved to hear from me that I wanted to throttle him. Why the hell hadn’t he come to see her?”
“Maybe because he thought you’d kill him.” I smile, but William is having none of it. “And guilt. Guilt stuns the young.”
“He’s her husband, dammit!” He stands up. “Not that she’s going to listen to him, after what he’s done.”
“Unless he’s a complete idiot, Jon knows he made a huge mistake and is focused on his wife and baby. He’s there to convince Jolie to have the tests, isn’t he?”
William shrugs. “If the tests come back indicting severe defects, Jolie will have to make more choices. If it is spina bifida, she could be a candidate for an in utero surgery on the fetus. If not, she’ll need a Caesarian delivery. There’ll be specialists ready to start special care and reconstruction immediately after.”
I can’t help it. I shiver and wrap my arms protectively across Sweet Tum.
“There’s another possibility. If she and Jon should decide on divorce, she’d be a single mother, with a child with terrible health problems….” The words seem to be moving out of him without the effort of his breath. “There are several private facilities where she can go where they ask no questions and assign no blame.”
I get up and put my arms about him, but I can’t tell him it’s going to be okay. About halfway through this speech he turned to look at me, and I suspect he wasn’t only talking just about Jolie.
“I don’t need a choice, William. This is how life is sometimes. There’s what you want and what you need. And then, occasionally, there’s just what you have to do. A high risk pregnancy isn’t what Jolie or I wanted. But we’re both grown women. It’s what we’ve got to deal with.” I put my hand across my middle. “Her choice may be understandably different. I’m having my baby.”
He nods and even smiles a little. “I knew you’d say that. I just wanted you to know, if you thought…I would disapprove of you ending the pregnancy, that I wouldn’t.” He lifts a hand as if flicking a thought away. “But I’m glad you want to have the child.”
“So then, while you’re being the absent parent, Jon will help Jolie understand the importance of the test. She’s just scared. You hear stories about things that can go wrong with amnios. She needs to see it as a resolution to her fears. Or a way to take action to rectify the problem her child may have.”
William looks at me. “You see why she needs a mother? You word things better than I can.”
“I think Dad’s doing pretty well. He hasn’t murdered the wayward father, or even stayed to referee their first meeting.”
For a moment, he looks grim. “You know what that cost me?”
“Tickets on Long Island Railroad and the New Jersey Transit?”
He smiles now. “I can’t believe I’m here.”
“I know. We sort of had a one-night stand. Those are by definition one-time things.” I rise and head for the sink to put my glass in it.
He comes up to me. “Maybe it was something else.” He puts his hands on my shoulders. “I think maybe we needed each other.”
“And now? What are we doing?”
He pulls me in until we meet chest to chest. “We’re being together for another while.”
I lift my arms to his shoulders. “To keep from thinking about our real lives?”
“This is my real life.” He leans a little away to better see my face. “Do you have another, with Doc and Dopey, perhaps?”
“Perhaps.”
He kisses me softly. “You lead a busy life, for a woman your age.”
“You should know by now that men can get into serious trouble when they try to talk about a woman’s age.”
“I guess you’ll have to find a way to shut me up.”
Half an hour later, I’m lying in William’s arms, in my bed. I bought a new mattress the day the divorce became final. I steal a glance at the clock. He’s been back in my life less than six hours and we’ve been through more emotional changes than many couples cover in a year. We’re speed-reading through one another’s lives. No need to be coy at this stage.
“What are you thinking?”
“That younger men have their uses.”
His laughter jiggles my breasts under the sheet pulled over us.
“I’ve been little more than a doctor these last years.” He reaches up and pats my stomach. “I’m just beginning to realize what I’ve been missing as a man.”
“Enjoying rolling around in bed with women pregnant by other men makes you freaky, you do know that?”
He kisses the top of my head. “What if there’s just one pregnant woman I want to roll around with?”
“I suppose then you only qualify as odd.”
“Would it be
odd if I said I could use another couple of those lemon bars?”
“A man needs his strength.” I rise up to go get them, but he pulls me back against him and begins nibbling my ear. “I’ll get them…in a minute…or five.”
We are content just to touch and kiss and squeeze, learning the texture and feeling the limits of each other. I like his thighs. They are hard and nearly hairless, like the rest of him. Jacob had a lot of body hair. I didn’t mind that, either. If William finds me too much or too little or too anything, he doesn’t say, just seems to be enjoying sensation, as much as I am.
Yet I admit to a certain vanity. It’s small of me and I despise myself for it. I have living proof that he likes me. So why am I even doubting…? While he says looks don’t matter…what does? Maybe I can just do a little casual inquiry.
“I’m doing research for a piece for Five-O on what men find attractive in older women. The answers are sometimes refreshingly honest.”
He takes my hand and licks the palm. “So now you want to know what I think?” Got to give him points for seeing through me. “Yes. I care what a woman looks like. Generally. The details, no.”
And that’s all I should need to know. But… “I did some research when Tai was pushing my column toward an extreme makeover byline. There are procedures for things I would never in a million years have thought of. What sort of woman feels she needs hand rejuvenation, toe shortening or—this I couldn’t even believe!—a labia lift to attract a man’s attention?”
William laughs. “Any woman showing her labia already has the man’s attention.”
I slap my hand across his middle. “You know what I mean.”
He cups one of my breasts and kind of holds on, as if he really likes the feel of it. “A woman needs a good attitude, that’s all. Everything else is gravy.”
Must be the sexual energy, I can’t keep my mouth shut. “Don’t be disingenuous. Men judge women every day by how they look. I can practically give you the date men stopped looking at me.”
He rises up and cranes his neck around so he can catch my eye. “I’m looking at you. And touching you. What else do you need?”
What else, indeed! I kiss him hard because he makes my heart pound, and that scares me a bit.
It’s just that no one in her right mind would think this has any staying power. We’re comforting each other in our need. Oh, boy, do we do that! Yet, my emotions, raging with the need to nest and cuddle, can’t be trusted.
As for him, he admitted he’d been celibate since his wife died. Poor man! He’s probably just forgotten what a young woman looks like with her clothes off. In his line of work, a woman my age must look pretty good by comparison.
And then I want to slap myself for all the snide, unnecessary conditions I’m putting on what is in actual fact one of the best things in my life.
I put a hand on either side of his face to stop his kisses. He doesn’t give in easily. He licks the tip of my nose, and then each lip separately, before he lays his head back against my pillows.
“So what are you writing about in your column these days?”
He had to ask.
“Oh, midlife. Changes. Difficulties.”
“You could publish a journal about your pregnancy, if you weren’t too classy to peddle yourself in print.”
“You think so?” There are still some topics we need to steer clear of today. “Say, weren’t you hungry?”
A man’s stomach is always ready for food. He hops out of bed, pulls on his boxers and walks out of my bedroom.
I follow him, after snatching a filmy floral wrapper with lace trim out of my closet. I stop to fluff my hair a bit, and run a finger under each eye to wipe away the mascara smudge beneath.
By the time I reach the kitchen, his mouth is covered in powdered sugar and cookie crumbs, and he’s reaching for another lemon bar.
“Would you like some herbal tea?”
He nods, jaws locked in lemon-sugar delight.
I pick up the kettle from the stove and walk toward the sink. His eyes follow. I exaggerate my hip movements a bit to see what he’ll do. The rest of him follows me to the sink, that’s what.
As I turn on the water he moves in behind me and kisses my neck, just where the robe gapes away at my nape. “Hmm,” he murmurs. And then one arm comes around the front, powdered-sugared fingers splayed so as not to soil my wrapper, and his wrist hooks in low on my belly to pull me back against him.
The kettle is filling.
“Lu?” he whispers against my ear.
“Hmm?”
“Do you mind if I have another taste?”
I don’t think he’s talking about lemon bars because he’s pulling loose my sash between the knuckles of his other hand.
The thing about sex is, if it’s been absent awhile, it comes back in waves of remembrance of need. The need is mutual.
William’s hands are something altogether different when they are being directed not by the physician’s mind but the man’s libido. Soon I’m remembering things I’ve only read about as those hands glide and slide and seek and slip into—oh my, I wonder if anyone ever used powdered sugar that way before?
Pretty soon, I feel him reach back and slide down his shorts and then he’s lifting the back of my robe with the other.
Feeling what he’s feeling, I wriggle back against him. “I’ve never done it standing up.”
“Good. We have some firsts together.”
A gasp at the right moment can be as distracting as glass shattering on marble. We are no longer alone.
One instant William is knocking on my door. The next, I feel the cool breeze of abandonment on my posterior. He’s amazingly quick, a flash of naked man through the nearest exit, which is the dining room. And he didn’t even trip on his boxers!
The blood draining from my head, my heart, my loins closes the world to a pinprick diameter as I turn to face our intruder.
Andrea. Standing in the doorway to the kitchen.
“I knocked. Nobody answered.”
26
I need to collect my house keys. Far too many people have access to my house.
“Girl, you need to be more careful.” Andrea has a hand on each hip. “I could have been anybody walking in here just now.”
“You are anybody, Andrea. Go home!”
I’ve adjusted my robe but the damage has been done. It could have been worse, I tell my galloping heart. It could have been Cy or Curran, or—Davin or Dallas! Much, much worse.
“Who was that guy?” Andrea cranes her head around but I step in her way as she’s about to follow the path William took as he sprinted off. “Tell me I didn’t walk in on some sexual predator you’re afraid to tell me about because he’s got a gun pointed on us from the shadows?”
I fold my arms. “Do I look frightened?”
Andrea grins. “You look freshly fu—”
“Andrea!”
“He’s cute. How come I don’t know about him?”
I’m trying for poise here. I really am. I have never been walked in on in the middle of sex before. It takes a bit of effort to speak coherently.
“What the hell are you doing here, Andrea?”
She shrugs and, to my horror, goes to sit down at my kitchen table. “I saw your car parked up the street a couple of hours ago. Just now I came back and saw it still there. I wondered if you’d had car trouble. Then I called and got no answer.”
“I turned off the ringer.”
Andrea grins. “I can see why.”
“What are you doing in my house?” I need the answer to make sense of an embarrassment so acute I feel a rash coming on.
“I rang the bell.”
It’s not that I don’t believe her, it’s just…I don’t believe her. “It worked yesterday.”
She crosses her legs as if I’ve asked her to tea. Tea! I turn to shut off the running water.
“Okay, so maybe I peeked through the window and it was so quiet and dark in here that I let myself in, thinkin
g maybe you were sick or something.”
“I was something.”
“Next time you should like, let a sister know, so she can run interference for you.”
“Andrea, I really don’t want to talk about this. But if we must, can it be another time, like in four or five years?”
“Oh, right, you’ve got company.” She stands up. Her head swivels toward the dining room again. “He looked pretty involved so I guess he’s pissed at me.”
“You could think that. I sure am.”
“Listen, you should be thanking me. This could have been something else altogether. You got someone looking out for you.” She prods her chest with a freshly manicured nail. “Don’t forget that.”
“At this point, I can recite a roster of people lined up to look out for me. Maybe you could form a political party and elect me mayor.” I point to the way out. “Home, Andrea.”
“Okay, okay.” She stands and takes long, cartoonish sneaky steps toward the door. “I’m proud of you. I told you, men are out there. Only answer this. Is he—good…?” She makes an obscene gesture with her hand.
I sling the first thing I can reach at her, a sponge.
At this point, it’s about even odds that William has shimmied down the drainpipe and disappeared over the eastern horizon.
I give him plenty of warning that I’m coming, mounting each step with a heavy, reluctant tread. I know it’s really me who’s delaying the moment in which I must explain myself, and my friends, again.
William is standing in Davin’s room, fully dressed. As in socks and shoes, and bag-in-hand dressed. “I’m sorry if it seems I ran out on you. I didn’t know what—I thought maybe it would be better if I… Who was that?”
“The FBI.”
“What?” Oh dear, at this point, he’s ready to believe anything of me.
“The Fábregas-Prem Bureau of Investigation. Better known as Andrea, my best friend. She thought I was sick, or maybe you were a pervert who broke in. We sorted it out.”
“Oh.” William puts down his bag and looks at me with exasperation. “I don’t want to tell you your business. But does it occur to you that you are managing a few too many parties in your life?”
A New Lu Page 19