“Never mind.”
The back door burst open to announce Dirk’s entrance.
“Well well well, if it isn’t my favorite ex-professor.” His wine glass was empty and his teeth were purple. “Academic outcast and private-sector employee-to-be. What’s shaking in your world, Austin?”
“I was just kissing your wife.”
“She’s not my wife. And she wouldn’t kiss the likes of you, but that was a good comeback.” He crossed the kitchen in a few easy strides and reached between them to open the fridge. “Step aside you two, the man of the hour has to tenderize the steaks before they go on the fire.”
Dirk slid the plate of steaks from the fridge and set them on the counter. “Open one of those beers for me, will you?” He removed a heavy wood cutting block from a cabinet near the sink and slammed it dramatically on the counter, as if he were performing on stage and he wanted to be sure the people in the balcony could hear what he was doing.
Wanda pursed her lips as she removed a beer from the fridge, giving Austin a pointed look that said OK, he is a jerk. A point for you. Take it with grace.
He did.
Wanda opened the beer as Dirk rummaged through a drawer of odd utensils in search of the aluminum mallet with the spikey surface for tenderizing meat.
“Where’s the…” He rummaged more violently, trying to think of the name of the thing he was looking for. “Where’s the thing I use to pound my meat?”
“Left hand,” Wanda said.
He looked and there it was.
“Oh yeah.”
Wanda turned to Austin. “Hey, come in my office for a second. I want to ask you something.”
18
Hannah stood at the window of the old Victorian farmhouse, watching the churning fog.
“What do you hear?” she asked.
“Well, they’re talking,” said Trevor.
“How’s it going? What’s your sense?”
“I can’t tell.”
“I can’t either.”
“She was about to kick him out, but she didn’t.”
“Well that’s something,” Hannah said. “What are they saying now?”
“Nothing. They’re going to her office. Oh, and his name is Austin, not Dallas.”
“She’s walking close to him. Closer than usual.”
“You can see that?” Trevor asked.
“No. I can feel it.”
19
“What is this?” Wanda held the two halves of the drawing out to Austin.
“You took that? You took that from my desk?”
“Who is she?”
Austin took the two halves and tried to fit them together.
“Huh?” Wanda demanded. “Who is she?”
Austin shook his head. He didn’t want to answer.
“An old girlfriend?”
His lips clamped shut to say he wasn’t going to talk.
“Why won’t you tell me? Are you in love with her? Is this someone you stalk?”
He shook his head silently.
“Why won’t you tell me?”
“What do you care?”
“I’m curious who she is,” Wanda said.
Austin shook his head again, looking sheepish this time.
“What?” asked Wanda.
“I’d be embarrassed.”
“You’d be embarrassed to tell me about a woman in a drawing? After you just tried to kiss me in the kitchen? After you kissed me with NO WARNING, with your cold beer lips while Dirk was right outside? NOW you’re embarrassed?”
Austin took a deep breath and let it out. “Do you remember the first time we spoke?”
“You asked me that the other night,” Wanda said impatiently.
“We spoke for over an hour—”
“Get to the point.”
“—but I had never seen you.”
“And?”
“And I drew that. That was what you looked like in my mind.”
Wanda stared at him in wonder, and he felt foolish.
“That’s… That’s the person I saw after listening to you speak.”
He dropped the papers on the desk, the image of her as she understood herself, torn in two by the struggle between her and Dirk.
“Wandaaaa!”
“What the fuck do you want, Dirk?”
“What kind of vegetables go with steak?”
20
Hannah, standing at her window, felt a sharp pang in her heart. Trevor saw the effect of it so clearly he instinctively stood to help her. She held her stomach as he guided her to the couch.
“You going to puke?” Trevor asked.
She sat.
“What did he say to her?” Hannah asked.
“I don’t know,” Trevor replied. “He was talking quietly. I couldn’t hear him.”
“Whatever it was, it really got to her. Oh, I feel sick.” She bent forward as if her stomach was cramping.
“Is there anything I can get you?”
She shook her head. The fog outside darkened and billowed against the rattling windows. Trevor waited for the noise to stop, but it didn’t.
“Are there earthquakes here?”
“If there are,” Hannah said, “there will be one tonight. She’s cracking because she’s finally admitting to herself that the guy who really gets her isn’t the one she’s with. That her great project with Dirk, for all its passion, is a failure. That hurts. It hurts more deeply than she can say. She sees it in the contrast between Dirk and Austin. One of them touches her where she wants to be touched. Emotionally, I mean. The other bullies his way into her feelings, and she lets him.”
Hannah rocked in pain as the dishes in the kitchen rattled on the shelves.
“But she’s holding on, Trevor. Holding on to the life she knows isn’t working. She’s stubborn as hell and she doesn’t want to give in. She’ll kill me before she’ll do what she knows is right.”
“What should I say? Tell her to kiss him?”
“She hasn’t got the courage for that. Just tell her to stay near him.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“So we leave it up to him to make the move?”
Hannah doubled over as a violent tremor shook the house. “No. She already made the call. She just doesn’t know it.”
She winced as a pain went through her gut, then looked up at him with difficulty.
“She has tremendous intuition,” Hannah said. “She doesn’t listen to it, but I feel it. I understand every bit of what it tells me. Austin is far more subtle and determined than you know. Than even he knows. But she gets it. She knows him as deeply as he knows her. She’s just not consciously aware of it. She made up her mind when she chose not to throw him out after that clumsy kiss.”
“You look awful,” Trevor said. “Are you sure there’s nothing I can do?”
“Just encourage her to sit by him, to look at him, to listen to him. Dirk’s spell doesn’t work on her if she’s not paying attention. Keep her focused on Austin.”
21
Wanda prepared asparagus and salad to go with the steak, having correctly interpreted Dirk’s question What kind of vegetable goes with steak? to mean Start making some vegetables to go with the steak.
She trimmed the bottoms of the stalks and tossed the asparagus in oil, then turned them over to Dirk for grilling. That was a process in which no one was permitted to interfere, not even with helpful suggestions, because Dirk felt that other peoples’ incorrect ideas contaminated his own correct ones and caused him to drop asparagus through the grill.
Wanda watched him through the screen door as she chopped the lettuce. Austin stood beside her, slicing carrots.
“You know he bought that apron just for today,” Wanda said.
“Really?” Austin glanced out at Dirk in his bright white apron and towering chef’s hat.
“He throws aprons away when they
get stained.”
“Isn’t that what aprons are for?” Austin pushed the carrots from the cutting board to a plate.
“Dirk has to dress for his role, and he won’t accept a second-rate costume. I told him no one wears a chef’s hat when they barbecue and he said, ‘Excuse me? I do.’ I think he likes that it makes him look taller.”
She dumped the lettuce in the bowl and picked up the plate of carrots. Austin, moving toward the fridge, put his hand on the small of her back to keep her from backing into him.
“You want a beer?” he asked.
“How about a glass of wine?”
“Wine it is.”
He went the other way toward the wine bottle, brushing her shoulder on the way past, again to remind her of where he was, so she wouldn’t back into him.
She read his touches differently. “Dirk’s right outside, you know.”
“Mmm hmm.” Austin poured wine into one of the glasses Wanda had left on the counter. “He’s busy too. Putting on a show.” Austin pointed through the side window to the women on the back deck of the neighboring house. Though none of them were looking at him, Dirk gyrated his hips suggestively as he salted the steaks, just so that when someone did look, he would make an impression.
“Crap,” said Wanda as she received the wine glass. “When he does that stupid salt dance he stops paying attention to the actual salt. Be sure to scrape both sides of your steak before you eat it, so you don’t get a sodium-induced coronary.”
Don’t look at him, whispered a voice. Don’t look at Dirk.
Wanda turned and looked at Austin. “Did you say something?”
“No. But hey, stop looking at Dirk for a minute. Get the cucumber and red onion. I’ll show you how to make a good dressing.”
The two of them stood side by side. She watched as he cut the onion into thin, even slices, quartered them, and put them in the bowl. His movements had a grace and precision that Dirk’s lacked.
“Now the cucumber,” he said. He peeled off most of the skin, leaving strips of dark green here and there. “Too much skin makes it tough. A little adds flavor and texture.”
This was the kind of nuance that Dirk, for all his nitpicking, was incapable of understanding. Dirk saw all the details and none of the meaning. When he read Shakespeare, all he saw was the punctuation.
Austin dropped the sliced cucumbers into the bowl.
“You see that,” he said. “The contrast between the bright orange carrots, the purple-red onions, and pastel green cucumber? I can name all the chemicals that produce those colors, but it’s a lot more satisfying just to look at them.”
She was standing close to him. Very close. She had been for some time, but why hadn’t she noticed until now?
Standing that close to Dirk made her uneasy. Dirk was a threatening figure. First, he made her tense, and then he manipulated her tension. He could turn it easily into another kind of agitation, a sexual agitation in which the discomfort grew and grew until they did something to annihilate it. But it was discomfort she felt around Dirk, and it was discomfort that he exploited. She had known this for a long time, but was just now putting it into words and examining it.
She closed her eyes and tried to imagine cooking side by side with Dirk, but she couldn’t. She and Dirk were like magnets. Whenever they were near each other, they were powerfully pulled together or just as powerfully pushed apart. There was no comfort around him, no comfort in her own home or in her own skin. She had let him take that away from her.
She leaned against Austin’s shoulder, her eyes still closed, and whispered, “Please don’t leave.”
The stretching of the spring on the screen door preceded the loud slap of the door against the side of the house.
“Wandaaaa!”
“What, Dirk? What the hell is wrong now?”
“Stupid bird shit on my apron! Where’s the other one?”
“Hanging on the hinge of the pantry door.”
He pulled the soiled apron over his head as he stomped by and flung it on the floor.
“You’re not going to leave that there,” she said.
He kicked it into the air and it settled on the back of a chair.
He really is a child, she thought. And when he gets like that, I try to soothe him, like it’s my problem. I would have helped him if Austin wasn’t here.
Dirk pulled on the new apron and went back outside. A little cheer went up from the women on the deck next door as the performer re-entered the stage with a fresh costume. He took a bow, only half in jest.
Now he was saying something to the women, twirling the spatula, making some joke. The kind his eighteen-year-old students would find witty. She didn’t have to look at him or hear his words to know this. She just knew.
“For the dressing,” Austin said, “olive oil, vinegar, pepper, and mustard. Stone ground mustard, not the yellow kind.”
She helped him gather the ingredients.
“Pour in the oil first,” he said.
“Me?”
“Yeah, you.”
“How much?”
“As much as three people would need.”
“Well how much is that?” she asked.
“Use your judgment.”
She poured in a couple of ounces, thinking about the precise instructions Dirk would have given. Everything measured out to the milliliter. All operations performed in the order of the written instructions while he hovered to correct her errors.
Two ounces didn’t look like enough. She poured in one more, knowing she didn’t need to look to Austin for approval.
There is no coloring outside the lines for Dirk Jaworski, she told herself as she tossed in another dash. Or I should say, for Dirk’s girlfriend.
Dirk himself was a great improviser when he performed in front of an audience. His instincts came to life as he fed off the attention of the crowd. Aside from a few canned jokes here and there, there was no script. There was no crimping his style. He had to be free to follow his whim, while she, home alone without an audience, had already internalized the precise instructions that applied to her. She rarely deviated or transgressed. She had grown so accustomed to her straitjacket she was no longer conscious of it until now that it was off, and she felt strangely unprotected without it.
What had Ed Parsippany’s editor said? That her last three books sucked. That she was just phoning it in.
Well I was, Wanda admitted. I was. There’s no soul in my writing because I don’t live anymore. Because my spirit is trapped and my life is stale and all I can do is to keep on doing the same old thing. Same fight with Dirk. Same resolution. Same plot in my books. Nothing changes.
The vinegar was next. Austin didn’t tell her how much. He just watched. She whisked in the mustard, then fresh-ground pepper. Too little at first. A taste, and then four more twists of the peppermill.
She dipped her finger in, then licked it. “Taste,” she said.
This is where the hero does something provocative and sexy, she thought. Coats his finger with the tangy dressing, with that pepper that gives it a kick, and the smooth lubricating oil, and then he sticks it in my mouth for a taste and draws it out slowly as we stare into each other’s eyes.
Austin wasn’t her hero.
He put his own finger to his own mouth. All he offered was a smile of approval. Simple and genuine, comfortable and familiar, like home.
She tried not to show how sad she felt at the awareness that simple smile aroused in her, at how that glimpse of home reminded her that she had been living for years in exile from herself.
Where is Hannah, she wondered. What have I done with her?
Maybe she couldn’t hide it. Maybe he saw the flash of sadness. Maybe that was why he kissed her.
It wasn’t the swoon-inducing hero’s kiss that came on page ninety of all her novels. It was short and simple, matter of fact, an ordinary exchange between two people utterly at ease with each other.
“His hands,” Trevor whispered as he sat on the couch. “What do his hands look like?”
He paused, breathing quietly. Then, in a barely audible whisper, “What do you see in his eyes?”
“Look,” said Hannah as she paced the rug. “The fog.”
It had thinned to the point where the daylight was almost bright enough to cast shadows.
“How’s your stomach?” Trevor asked.
“Better. Keep working her. Quietly, subtly, like you’re doing. Don’t push too hard, but don’t let the pressure off either. Not even for a second.”
23
Dirk had gotten up from his place at the head of the table and was giving a lecture. He was halfway through the second bottle of Cabernet, which was two glasses too far for him. Every time he got drunk on wine, he fell in love with himself all over again, and now he was standing at the far end of the room with a stack of his students’ papers, reading aloud their mistakes.
“If I was to do it over again,” he read, then paused dramatically, like Hamlet contemplating the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
“If I WAS to do it all over again,” he repeated, emphasizing the gravity of the grammatical error.
He slammed the paper roughly against his knee so that it made a jarring slap.
“The public school system,” he thundered, “has failed to teach an entire generation the proper use of the subjunctive mood. Would anyone like to venture a guess as to how that sentence should be written?”
Austin and Wanda sat side by side at the table. “Does he want us to answer?” Austin whispered.
Wanda shook her head. “He doesn’t even know we’re here. He’s just rehearsing for next semester.”
She felt a little thrill as Austin took her hand beneath the table.
“You hardly touched your steak,” she said.
“If I WERE to do it all over again,” Dirk announced. “Were!” He stood with his back to them, hands on hips in an angry stance, looking up as if he were talking directly to God.
Wake Up, Wanda Wiley Page 9