“Look. I realize I have no right to ask this, but could you…?
Could…? Shit! Would you take me on a romantic date?”
“Hi
Audrey.” Jack is feeling grateful for caller ID. “Any specifics on that?”
“You don’t
know? I wanted you to just know.”
Jack takes
a second to analyze this request, but his brain is not getting far.
“Jack?”
“Look.
Audrey. I am always delighted to hear
from you, but you gotta admit, this is a little outside your usual behavior. So
rather than expecting me to read your mind, could you just… tell me what you
want?”
“Just tell you? Just like that? Just ask
for what I want? That’s insane! Dinner, in a real restaurant. I’d like you to
dress up nice – no tie, no suit, just nice. And then, most of all, I’d really
love it if you would dance with me.”
That last
one seems highly unlikely. But Jack knows that he is never, ever going to say
no to Audrey LaBrea.
“So when
would you like to…”
“Two
hours?”
“Really? I
mean… really?”
“Um… yes?”
Audrey’s voice sounds like the voice of someone who is chewing her fingernails.
“Will you
have any respect for me if I admit that I, in fact, am doing nothing on a
Saturday night?”
“Will it
get me a date?”
“Yes.”
“I will
respect your brains out, honey.”
“Well
then!”
“But until
I give the word, let’s pretend that I am a lady.”
“Of
course.”
Ill-informed
about Monterey restaurants, Jack negotiates a rendezvous at the Sanderlings.
The drive down is foggy and chill, so he rules out any ideas of patio seating.
He’s waiting next to a gas fireplace outside the entrance, enjoying a salted
hot chocolate, when Audrey makes her appearance, wearing a long purple coat
with a fake fur collar that frames her face in the manner of a czarina. Jack
greets her with a half-dozen white roses. Audrey responds with a smile she’s
been saving since high school.
“The lady
requested romance?”
“Yes. But I
didn’t expect the gentleman to go for extra credit.”
“Get used
to it, honey.”
He kisses
her and takes her inside, where they’re seated across from the fishtank. The
orange clownfish seem like old friends.
“Red or
white?” he asks.
Audrey
sniffs at her roses. “Unless I miss my guess, they’re white.”
“The wine.”
“Oh! How
about red? I want to feel toasty.”
Audrey
removes her coat to reveal a little black dress, with the emphasis on “little.”
Jack finds the oxygen getting a little thin. When the waiter arrives – a
Japanese man named Jun – Jack orders a Stag’s Leap cabernet.
“Very
good!” says Jun. “I’ll be right back.”
“You know
wine, too?”
“I am
entirely faking it, honey. But Thompson has a lot of Stag’s Leap around the
house, and it seems to be good stuff.”
“Okay,”
says Audrey, laughing. “I’ll stop peeking behind the curtain.”
“Thank you.
And speaking of peeking, that dress… Well, if I was gay, I’d say it was fabulous!”
“If you are gay, you’ve been doing a tremendous
job of faking it.”
“During
sex, I just imagine that you’re Ben Affleck.”
Audrey
laughs for a long, long time. It almost seems like she’s using it for therapy.
The barometer ticks on.
“So how did
you find this place? It’s lovely.”
“Had a
meeting here with a heartstricken friend.”
“My
compliments. I love the ultrasuede shirt, by the way. It goes so well with your
eyes! Oh Jack, I don’t know if I tell you enough, but… I know I’m undependable,
but I like you so much that I don’t want to see you too much, because I’ve seen
the terrible things that familiarity does to people. Isn’t that awful?”
More puzzle
pieces. But he has his instructions, and psychoanalysis is anything but
romantic. He sees the word swordfish
and decides that he would like to eat exactly that.
He hadn’t
really investigated the dancing part, but it turns up right on schedule,
nonetheless, adding to the growing veneer of his romantic competence. A
three-piece jazz combo kicks up in the lounge, not thirty feet from their
table, and Jack notices Audrey’s attentions drifting that way all during
dessert. After signing the credit slip (feeling grateful for the per-diems he’s
been getting from Thompson), he stands and says, “Would the lady care to dance?”
“The lady
would,” says Audrey, and they stroll to the lounge, a tasteful cubbyhole of
blonde woods and pastel paintings of tropical birds. Audrey deposits her purse
at a table and proceeds to a broad square of hardwood next to the piano.
Jack doesn’t
know much of dancing. He went to a few dances in high school, and did manage to
find the occasional female to join him in the sea of couples. But they never
did anything terribly creative. It was largely an excuse to wrap your arms
around a member of the opposite sex, to feel their breathing, smell their hair,
touch their limbs, and to sway in a nondescript clockwise drift, careful not to
bump into the other couples. A few of his schoolmates – largely the music geeks
and cheerleaders – were into the retro swing craze then sweeping the teen
population. Their kicks and whirls seemed to Jack like a foreign language, and
he envied their grace and rhythm.
With
Audrey, doing not much is really not a bad alternative. He’ll stand there and
stare at her if she wants him to. But he suspects she’ll want more. He does
know enough to at least strike the right posture: left hand holding hers, right
hand resting on her waist. He has never actually done this before, but he’s
pretty sure he saw it in a movie. It does make a certain sense – it gives him
the feeling of steering them forward, like a small ship. Predictably, things
with Audrey are never going to be that simple.
“Will you
spin me?”
“I’m not
sure I know how.”
“First,
lift my hand to about six inches higher than my head. Then, draw it forward,
away from us, and follow my spin. You might also give a little push on my waist
to give me a little momentum. One, two, now!”
Jack feels
more like follower than leader, but the trick seems to work. Audrey completes
the spin and returns, his right hand settles back on her waist. She smiles.
“Good boy!
I think you might be trainable.”
After a few
more spins, she introduces a second move. They separate, facing each other, and
join hands. Jack pulls her into a spin to his right, holding his left hand over
her head, and pulls it back down to wrap her in his arms. After a pause, she
spins back out to the starting position.
This is
when the barometer ticks forward and Jack begins to get ideas. Wrapping, then
unwrapping. Audrey is a Chinese puzzle box; it is Jack’s job to tie her into
knots, and then to undo those knots. On their next foray, they wind their
linked hands around each other’s necks, then release and run their hands along
each other’s arms, until their fingers catch together. The barometer recognizes
immediately that this has led them away from the starting position: he is
holding her right hand in his right hand. He solves this imbalance by pulling
her into a spin along his front, releasing his hand so he can receive her arrival
– left hand to right, right hand to left. Two times later, Audrey changes it
up. They repeat the neck-wrap, but they hold the position, walking a
half-circle, tango-like until he stops and she continues, walking around his
back, accepting his left hand with her right and returning again to the
starting position.
Each time
Jack accomplishes a move, he is greeted by a wider smile. The band keeps
playing, the blood moves quicker, and Jack begins to create. At the starting
position, he crosses hands with Audrey (enjoying her look of surprise) and
spins her around, creating a whirl of arms over her head like the spokes of an
umbrella. Then he steps to one side and walks her around, ending with an
accelerated spin that leaves Audrey breathless. Next, he places her right hand
behind her back, reaches around to take it with his right and unwinds her like
a top. Then he realizes that he can turn a spin into a double or a triple just
by speaking the number to his partner. Losing himself in the flurry, he begins to
do things that he can’t explain. In the midst of a spin, he passes her hand to
himself, behind his back. A little later, he decides that he should spin at the
same time that Audrey is spinning, and somehow the geometry works, contrasting
orbits that cancel each out.
After that,
he begins to discover the nuances. His leads become more forceful, assured. He
reels her further out and brings her in faster, catching her waist and letting
the gravity carry her around. He begins to understand the position of his feet,
squaring them to the task. He learns to savor the time between spins, holding
Audrey closer, pressing the back of her hand to his chest, changing up the
pattern of his steps and feeling Audrey match them, as if she, too, has a
barometer. To smile, to laugh, to steal a kiss. As the band plays the final,
tinkling stretches of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” he tells her that she
must have faith, then braces his knee and lowers her into a dip that touches
her hair to the floor. Her expression is half panic, half ecstasy as he holds
her there a full three seconds.
“Absolute
trust,” he says. She relaxes and smiles. He kisses her and pulls her back to
her feet, acknowledging the ache in his legs. They return to their neglected
table, where their Irish coffees have gone completely cold. Audrey refuses to
let go of his hand.
“How did
you do those things?”
“I had no
idea I could do any of that.”
“Give me a
tender, tender kiss.”
Which he
does, their lips barely touching, then pressing together for a lovely second.
When he pulls away, she opens her eyes.
“Now I want
you to come to Monterey with me.”
An hour
later, they are pushing into the familiar animal territories of intercourse
when she places a hand on his chest. “Slowly, gently. Not always, honey. Just
tonight.”
In the
morning, Jack comes downstairs to find a humble living room with cream-colored
carpets and walls of Tuscan orange. A pile of photography books, neatly fanned
out on a coffee table made from a slice of redwood burl. A wreath of seashells
over the fireplace. Pastel posters from art and wine festivals. And the best
thing of all, a fresh pot of coffee and a coal-black mug from the Monterey
Aquarium, holding down the corner of a neatly written letter.
Dearest handsomest Jack:
I want to thank you so much for last night. You are a
phenomenal man, and the way you learned to dance so quickly – unless you’re
taking secret lessons at Arthur Murray, I think it’s some kind of miracle.
I must now admit, I was using you for a bit of
therapy. My rather colorful last name comes from Tiger LaBrea, my third husband
– the last man to court me before I lost my belief in romance. He was a
newspaper reporter in Las Vegas. Last week, I learned that he had been shot and
killed, apparently for a story he wrote on gambling-industry corruption. I was
devastated, and I suppose I wanted to revisit some of that romance. Tiger loved
to dance.
I am amazed at your humanity, your warmth and
elegance, and I believe that once I come out from this cloud of grief, I will
have to acknowledge the idea that I am falling in love with you. Give me a call
in a few days, and this time the dinner’s on me.
Love—
Audrey
PS I’m
running late. Could you feed the pigeons? (Gray container next to coop.)
Jack reads the letter a
second time, then fills his coffee mug and carries it onto the small backyard
deck. Against the fence he finds what looks like a dresser with all the drawers
taken out, covered in chicken wire. A dozen stout-looking pigeons in various
combinations of blue stand stock-still in the foggy air. Jack finds a large
metal scoop in a covered wastebasket full of grain, fills it up and tips it
into a metal feeder hanging on the chicken wire. The grain spills into a
trough-like device inside the coop, and the pigeons scramble for position,
grunting and flapping. Ah, thinks
Jack. Now I am their god. Now they love
me as much as Audrey LaBrea.
The
word “love” strikes a membrane in his forehead and rings out like a drumhead,
sending a chill across his shoulders and down through his thumbs. He digs the
scoop back into the grain and presses the lid back into place.
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