Madame Mirabou's School of Love

by Barbara Samuel

  “Mark?”

  “We used to try to find horny toads by the creek.”

  He chuckled. “I don’t think I know what that is.”

  “It’s an ugly little frog.”

  So it went. We fell silent, then spoke again in small washes of words. Our feet crunched over rocks. A light sweat had formed on my skin. I liked the look of his knees, lifting so sturdily, the cording in his thighs. The sun was hot on my head. I liked the feeling of fresh air in my lungs. The sense of healthy movement.

  And Niraj—I liked the way his name rolled around in my mouth—he smelled of sun-heated hair and faintly of ginger. A wind blew the flavor of pine needles over us, and I liked that, too.

  It wasn’t a long walk, only an hour. As we headed up the side-walks toward the parking, with the Kissing Camels towering over the landscape from the left, I wondered how we would end it.

  “I think they look like kissing squirrels,” he said, pointing.

  “Like clouds—open to interpretation.” I pointed at another rock formation. “A gargoyle.”

  “So it is.” He smiled, met my eyes, and I felt a quick, hot flash of something over the darkness, the twinkle in his irises, what seemed to be a frankness of admiration—though how would I know, it had been so long? The backs of our hands brushed and we swayed closer, then farther apart, focused on the ground, the red concrete beneath our feet.

  “I really needed a walk today,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “My pleasure. We shall have to do it again soon.”

  “Yes.”

  We reached the parking lot and stopped, facing each other. A breath of breeze ruffled his hair, teased mine into my eyes, and I caught it back. I cocked a thumb over my shoulder. “I’m parked over there.”

  “I’ll walk you.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  He gave me a very small smile. “I know.”

  It took all of thirty seconds to get there, even weaving through the knots of walkers and rappellers crowding the lot on such a beautiful day. “Here’s my car,” I said brightly, and opened the trunk to get my purse. A waft of restaurant odors, embedded in my clothes, sailed out.

  “I am leaving for San Francisco in the morning, so I won’t be seeing you at Annie’s.”

  “Forever?” I said, surprised at how disappointed I felt.

  He laughed. “No, no. Only a week. I will be back next weekend. Perhaps we can think of some walk to do then, hmm?”

  “Okay.” I slammed the trunk, held my keys in my hand. He stood there in front of me, not really doing anything, either, and I wondered if I should offer my hand or something. “Um . . . I guess I’ll see you then. Have a good trip.”

  He took a slight step back, as if he’d been waiting for some sign, and raised his hand, palm out, in a wave. “All right, Nikki. You have a good time working. Take care.”

  I climbed in my car, buzzing. I watched him walk away in the rearview mirror, strong calves and a loping grace. I should have given him a sign, shouldn’t I? But what?

  Or maybe I was imagining things. Zara’s words came back to me: You’re not exactly his type.

  I sat there with my hands on the wheel for a full minute, filled with an agonized insecurity I hadn’t experienced in twenty-five years. I thought of my best friend from junior high, Holli Bradish, and how we would sit in my bedroom listening to 45s and eating M&M’s, examining every detail of a boy’s behavior—Do you think he likes me?

  With a groan, I threw the car into gear and backed out. You would have thought at least something would have become easier over the years. Apparently not.

  On the seat beside me, my cell phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number, but picked up anyway. “Hello?”

  “Hi, Nikki,” said a husky woman’s voice I didn’t immediately recognize. “This is Roxanne, your neighbor? I just found out my kids are going to see their dad tomorrow night. You want to go to Happy Hour somewhere, maybe?”

  The car idled beneath me, and in a Land Rover, Niraj drove by, his hair blowing. Hmm. “I have to work Saturday morning, so I can’t stay out too late.”

  “That’s all right. It’s only Happy Hour. Over at seven-thirty.”

  Happy Hour. “All right.”

  9

  Nikki’s Perfume Journal

  SCENT OF HOURS

  Time: 1:30 A.M.

  Date: June 30, 1982

  Bottle: something that calls up the excess of the eighties

  Elements: Aramis cologne, sour beer, martini with too much ver-mouth, cigarette smoke, onion rings, glass sterilizer, Doublemint gum

  Notes: the apartment over on Academy, with all the mismatched glassware

  My mother’s first husband was my father, a Fort Carson sergeant she fell in love with when she was sixteen. They married when she was eighteen, and he sowed three daughters before heading out to his second tour in Vietnam, which was just before the Tet Offensive. He was a good soldier, they say. Not that he died there, not physically anyway.

  Her second husband was a mechanic at the shop next to the real estate office where she worked as a secretary. He only lasted a little more than a year, which is when my mother decided he was a bum, like every other man she met in those days, and she kicked him out. We three girls secretly cheered. I thought he looked like a caveman with his hairy back, and my sister Gina hated the way he chewed with his mouth open.

  After that, my mother did without male companionship for quite a while. Or if she had lovers, she kept them offscreen. Her daughters didn’t see them. She worked her butt off, bought a smallish house in the suburbs so we could go to good schools. She kept herself up, and the other mothers were often jealous of her figure.

  She met her third husband at a Parents Without Partners meeting, and moved to LA with him and my younger sister—the beautiful one—the summer after my high school graduation. My sister Gina had already met the soldier who would be her husband, and she’d gone to live with him in Germany.

  I was left to my own devices. In my working-class world, nobody went to college, so it didn’t even occur to me at that point to even explore the possibility—not then. It took a couple of years.

  Right out of high school, I took a job as a waitress at Coco’s Hamburgers—waitresses made more than secretaries or receptionists—and found a place with a girlfriend from school. We lived in an anonymous strip of apartments on the north end of town and went to Happy Hour at a dozen spots along Academy Boulevard.

  In those days, Colorado still had a 3.2 beer drinking law for ages eighteen through twenty-one. We’d put on our eyeliner, our Dan-skins and jeans, and head out for the Odyssey or D.J.’s or Giuseppe’s to drink watery beer and dance with soldiers and cadets from the Air Force Academy, and others who were just as young and bored as we were. The Odyssey had floors with squares of flashing lights. I had a crush on a drummer who played at D.J.’s in a band called the Wumblies that earnestly seemed as if it might make it someday. He had long dark hair and full lips and I couldn’t think how to talk to him. I don’t remember why we went to Giuseppe’s, other than the fact it was close and we could walk if gas money was an issue.

  My roommate, J.J., was a little fast, and sometimes she’d spend the night with a guy she’d met, or bring him back to our apartment, which was hung with posters of Peter Frampton—hers—and the Rolling Stones—mine. There were plants crowded into every available space, coleus and purple velvets and Swedish ivy, and a hanging macramé table J.J. had woven that attracted much admiring comment. We lived on boiled eggs, coffee, pot pies, and copious amounts of 3.2 beer.

  Twenty-five years later, as I checked my lipstick in the rearview mirror, nervously eyeing all the cars in the parking lot at Ruby’s, I thought of J.J. and my old apartment with a sense of exhaustion. Was this the answer, going the Happy Hour route? It seemed idiotic and impossible to do it without the freshness of young skin or a spectacular waistline or even a sense of optimism. How could I stand it?

  What did women do when they foun
d themselves widowed or divorced at middle-age? What had my mother’s friends done? They’d gone to bars, I knew. I’d babysat for them sometimes.

  Now it seemed that women in the magazines had women friends, book circles, cooking classes, travel. They went on walking tours of Tuscany, or trained for marathons. They had careers, most of them. Good lives.

  I patted my hair and got out. That was my problem. I should have had a career, and then I wouldn’t need a man. I wouldn’t have to be headed across the parking lot in a pair of jeans that were a bit too tight, trying to remember to keep my stomach pulled in, to meet a girlfriend for Happy Hour when I was well past the traditional age.

  At the door, seeing all the people crowded around the bar, I nearly turned around and headed right back to my car. Only the sight of Roxanne, smoking a cigarette as she kept an arm protectively around an empty stool she was presumably saving for me, made me take a deep breath and pull open the door.

  An instant slam of laughter, voices, smoke enveloped me. Roxanne waved, and I made my way through the room.

  Ruby’s was a restaurant I’d passed a zillion times, just down the hill from the apartment complex. Once it had been an upscale steak house, and it had that slightly outmoded sense of the seventies about it, a giant flagstone fireplace with a copper hood, and heavy wooden tables. The bar section had been redone, the windows opened up to the view of the mountains, the chairs upholstered in a purple-and-blue fabric, which made it cheerful enough.

  I felt people looking at me as I settled on the chair Roxanne had saved for me. “Hi!” she said. “What do you want to drink? It’s all two-for-one.”

  “Um. Chardonnay?”

  The bartender, a good-looking young man with red hair in a brush cut, said, “House white?”

  “Sure.”

  Roxanne leaned over. She was wearing black slacks with a red shirt that showed off her shoulders. Her eyes were smokily lined, her hair freshly washed and swingy. I’d done my hair and face and ironed a fresh blouse I usually liked, but next to her, I felt like a worn-out old mama wolf, coat molting, tummy swinging with my walk.

  “It’s not usually this crazy in here,” she said in my ear. It wasn’t like screaming over the music, but we had to tuck our heads together. “But it’s a pretty good crowd, huh?”

  I looked around. There were a few tables of mixed guys and girls in their mid-to-late twenties, dressed as if they’d just got off work. Some couples shared appetizers. The surprise was in the numbers of people my age, forty- and fifty-somethings in little knots. I had had no idea middle-aged people went to Happy Hour. In my old neighborhood, we were too busy with dinner or soccer or phone calls to think about taking time to go have a cocktail with friends.

  I leaned over. “Where do they all come from?”

  Roxanne shrugged, lit a cigarette. Her smoke joined the low cloud hanging over the room. It was weird to see so many people smoking. Before this, before going to work at Annie’s, I hadn’t known anyone who smoked anymore. At all. Ever.

  “All over,” she said. “There are a bunch of computer companies around here, and some manufacturing, that kind of thing.” She eyed a man who came in the front door. “There’s Alan. What do you think?”

  “Is he your date or something?” I asked, prepared to be miffed.

  “Not at all. He’s a regular. He used to be dating one of the bar-tenders here, but she quit and went back to Detroit, or wherever it is she was from.”

  The man was in his late thirties or a little more, with the artfully messy look of a country-western singer—sun-streaked hair raggedly cut and a little too long around a good-looking face he hadn’t shaved. “He looks like he’d be a headache,” I said without thinking. “Too much trouble.”

  The bartender delivered my wine. Two of them. He slapped the ticket down on the bar in front of me and rushed away. “Two?”

  “Yeah.” She gestured, and I noticed lots of stacked-up drinks around me. “They mean literally two-for-one.”

  Maybe, I thought, I wouldn’t be driving home, after all. “Is it hard to get a cab from here?”

  “You can always get a ride. Nearly everyone lives right along here somewhere. A lot of them live in the same apartments we do.”

  “I still can’t stay out late.” I looked at my watch and made a mental note to be out the door in two hours—at eight, sharp. “I have to work at six.”

  “Ugh!” She sucked on her cigarette, wiggled her fingers at the guy across the bar. “Too much trouble, huh? Probably is. But I bet he’s good in bed.”

  “Maybe.” He did have a good mouth, lush and sullen.

  “What’s your type, then?” she asked.

  “I don’t know, really. It’s been so long that I’m just now realizing I can even look at them.” I sipped the wine, and it was crisp, cold, refreshing. “I went on a walk yesterday with a guy from the restaurant.”

  She lifted her eyebrows. “Yeah? Was it a date?”

  “Good question. I don’t know.” With a sheepish smile, I shook my head. “It’s all so new and weird and I don’t have my signals straight yet.”

  “Yeah? What’s he like?” Her gaze was direct, interested.

  “He’s really nice. Great hair. Sort of formal—he’s British, and his manners are very good.”

  “Cool! An accent is always good. Very sexy.”

  “Right.”

  She took a deep drag off her cigarette, politely blew it away from me. “Do you think that’s partly why it’s hard to tell if you’re reading his signals right?”

  “Maybe.” A teeny sense of pressure drained away. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “You’ll figure it out.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “You will. At first, I didn’t even remember how to flirt, or what to do, or—oh, it’s just so weird at first, you know?”

  “It’s hard to imagine you feeling that way.”

  She lifted one finger and reached into her purse, which was sitting on the bar. It was a big leather bag, not at all what I would have imagined her to carry. “Check it out,” she said, and gave me a picture of a family—a mother, father, and two children in soccer outfits. “That’s me the year before he met his hoochy-kootchie girl.”

  The mother in the picture had long dark hair and straight-cut bangs. She was somewhat plump through the middle, but still very pretty in a denim jumper and T-shirt. She looked like a third grade teacher and suburban mom, and her husband had his arm around her and one of the children. His face said he was exploding with pride over them all.

  For a blistering second, I was transported to my own past, to a morning of gilded sunlight, my own husband happy beside me, everything in its place as children kicked a ball around a green park.

  I shoved the photo back to her. “You look so happy.”

  “Happy!” she barked, and looked at the picture. “Fat, you mean!”

  “Maybe a little, but not much. What were you carrying there, an extra fifteen pounds, maybe?”

  “About that,” she said, and peered hard at the photo. “I’ve lost around thirty-five.” She was painfully thin, but it gave her a chic look. “I mean, I’ve never worn more than a size ten my whole life. It’s not like I’ve ever been obese.”

  I wanted to cross my arms over my middle and resisted. My top was never smaller than a twelve, and that was on a good day. Dan’s new babe was much smaller than me—if I’d been thinner, would our marriage have lasted?

  I didn’t know. Maybe it didn’t matter, either. I’d loved him even though he’d started losing his hair, even though his ears sprouted hair and he snored. “He didn’t leave you over fifteen pounds, Roxanne,” I said.

  “I know.” She shoved the picture back in her purse and lit another cigarette, her foot swinging restlessly. She blinked hard, sucked the smoke, gave me a rueful smile. “Don’t mind me. I’m just PMSING. Let’s talk about something else.”

  I looked at her, seeing the vulnerability beneath her eyes, the fragile line of her coll
arbone, and felt suddenly protective. “I think you’re one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever met,” I said. “Don’t let him take that away from you.”

  She looked at me. “That was so nice. Thank you.”

  We ordered a mixed appetizer plate, made up of things I ordinarily never allowed myself to eat, like potato skins and fried cheese ( fried cheese!), and savored them. In the spirit of indulgence, I even put sour cream on the potato skins. Roxanne asked about my walking date, and I told her a little, just that we’d walked around the Garden of the Gods, that he was good-looking, that we hadn’t kissed or touched or anything.

  “He sounds nice,” she said, and it sounded like she meant boring, but that was all right. She liked something other than what I did.

  Witness her mark, Alan, who came over and took the chair next to her. I tried to see what she was excited about, but even the mouth really just looked surly to me. He looked like the kind of man who was used to getting his own way all the time. Like the petted, celebrated youngest brother in a family.

  A friend of his, a dark-haired construction worker who was called—of all things—Wolf, joined him. Roxanne gave me a sly look I tried to ignore, but I did like him quite a lot better than Alan. He was unapologetically a working man, a construction supervisor for a concrete firm, and it showed in his build. He smelled of clean laundry and sunshine, and his eyes were lively. The pair of them played off each other in an attempt to charm us.

  It wasn’t so bad. A lot better, actually, than sitting alone in my apartment thinking about my ex-husband and my daughter touring the city I’d most wanted to see my whole life. I drank the first wine too fast and made myself slow down for the second, and that was when I made Roxanne split the appetizer plate with me. Plenty of fat and carbs to soak up the alcohol.