“When did he give you the sex manuals to read?”
“Oh, that. I put my foot in my mouth. After we’d been married a few months, we went to see a movie—I don’t remember what it was—but afterward I thoughtlessly said that I didn’t understand what all the fuss was about, as sex was so boring. Richard said that maybe our sex lives wouldn’t be so boring if I just knew a little about sex.”
“And how did you do at your jobs? Successful?”
She smiled. “Yes. I was always being promoted at ComputerLand, and at the spa they had me teach the instructors.”
“And how was Richard’s CPA business?”
“I see what you’re getting at. He did all right for a while, but then he lost some clients and I think his partners were planning to get rid of him.”
“Sounds to me like you terrified him.”
She sighed. “You know, that did occur to me a few times. I learned to tell him only of my setbacks and my frustrations. He’d listen to my account of something that had gone wrong, then lecture me about how I should have done so and so, and afterward he’d be nice to me for days. I kept promotions to myself, but he saw them reflected in my paychecks.”
“Maybe this other woman looked up to him, thought he was her big, strong hero.”
“Jackrabbits would seem brainy to that woman. I used to spend Friday afternoons trying to help Richard by teaching her how to run the office, how to answer the phone by saying something other than, ‘Yeah, what’d’ya want?’ She was stupid, plain, thick-waisted, thick-ankled, and never washed her hair. She was rude and tasteless and couldn’t comprehend a joke—and she took my husband away from me. When we were getting the divorce, Richard said she was a great deal better in bed than I was. He said that plastic dolls were better in bed than I was.”
“And he knew that from experience?”
Samantha giggled. “Maybe a doll would give him someone pretty to look at now and then. Oh, Mike, I don’t understand it. Why would someone want to hear of the failures but not the successes of someone they loved? I knew Richard was frustrated in his job. That’s why I agreed to support us and give him a chance at big-time success, but he never even tried writing. I don’t think he so much as wrote a single chapter. He used the two years to ski and play tennis and…and…”
“Bang his secretary.”
“Yes! If he disliked me, why didn’t he just ask me for a divorce, then have an affair? Why did he have to make me so miserable?”
“Maybe he thought it was fair to make you unhappy since you were making him wretched.”
“Me? But I did everything for him. I supported him, cooked for him, cleaned for him, ironed his shirts, hand-washed his sweaters—”
“You did all that and still managed to be a success at two jobs? It’s a wonder he didn’t kill you.”
“You’re taking his side!” she half shouted as she started to move away from him.
But he pulled her back to him. “Your ex-husband was a stupid, frightened coward, and his lifelong punishment is that he lost you.”
She hugged him, kissed his shoulder. “Oh Mike. I tried so hard to be what he wanted me to be.”
When Mike spoke, there was a definite whine in his voice. “You don’t try very hard with me. You haven’t hand-washed anything for me, and I didn’t even know you could iron.”
She didn’t laugh in return but was utterly serious. “As far as I can tell, all you want from me is laughter and sex.”
“Found out at last. Meet Michael Taggert, the personification of shallowness.”
Looking up at him, her eyes were filled with what she felt for him. “No, Michael, you’re not shallow. Richard was shallow. Shallow and superficial and petty. You…you know how to love.”
As he kissed the top of her head, he put his hand on her bare breast. “Especially right now. Wanta play ‘sit on the tent pole’?”
“Not again?” she said, giggling. “I don’t know if I’m ready again so soon.”
“Want me to talk you into it?”
“Yes, please,” she said politely, sounding as though she were asking for a second watercress sandwich. “If you wouldn’t mind, that is.”
But Michael had his mouth full and couldn’t speak.
25
Samantha woke after only about an hour’s sleep, but she’d never felt better in her life. She had to pry her body from under Mike’s, lifting his sleep-heavy arms and legs from over her body before slipping out of the bed. Taking the robe she’d appropriated from the back of the bathroom door, she slipped it on and started to leave the room. But she turned back to stand beside the bed, looking down at him as he slept, limbs sprawled across the sheets, relaxed.
Her life was changed now, she thought. Changed forever. Irrevocably changed.
Last night with Mike had changed her, had made her feel freer inside than she had ever felt. Smiling down at him, she realized that she had been changing from the first moment she’d met Mike. The prim, frightened little mouse who’d ridden in her first cab was not the same woman who had done the incredible things she’d done with Mike last night.
It was odd that she was one way with her ex-husband and another with Mike. Richard had not approved of Samantha when she’d laughed too loud or been exuberant about anything, whether she was happy about a promotion or a book she was reading or anything at all. Maybe Mike was right and her being anything but sedate frightened Richard.
For a moment Samantha leaned over the bed and touched Mike’s hair. She didn’t frighten Mike because he was sure of himself, sure of who he was and what he was, and Samantha’s vitality pleased him rather than scared him.
A curl of his hair twined about her fingers. If angels were real, she thought, they’d have hair just like Michael’s.
Smiling at her own sentimentality, she left the room to go upstairs to her apartment to get some clothes.
The first thing she noticed about her apartment was that the door Mike had put his foot through had been replaced, but she’d known he was going to have it done so it didn’t surprise her. After opening the door, she halted, thinking she was in the wrong room and turned away, but then she turned back. Of course this was her apartment, she told herself, but it was now very different.
The walls of the living room were still dark green but now the curtains were of cream-colored chintz printed with big dark pink roses gathered on a ribbon of green the exact shade of the walls. A fat club chair, upholstered in the same chintz, was next to a large couch covered in a rose pink the same shade as the roses in the chintz. An Aubusson rug picked up the pink and green of the furniture. Behind the couch was a long, narrow table of light-colored wood, marquetry baskets on the leaves and the top. Two black papier-mâché sewing tables, their surfaces wrinkled with age, were at either ends of the couch.
Walking slowly, as though if she moved too fast, the dream might evaporate, she went toward the bedroom, and upon entering, she drew in her breath.
The bedroom was done in shades of blue, what looked to be hundreds of shades of blue, ranging from very dark to so light as to be hardly discernible as blue. The walls were papered in a stripe of two shades of ice blue and the windows were curtained with a dark blue silk that was almost purple. In the middle of the room was a huge four-poster draped in an airy cotton of the palest blue imaginable. When she walked near the bed and looked up, she saw that the underside of the canopy was done in what she knew was called a sunburst design, with the fabric radiating from a central medallion in tiny gathers out to the edge of the frame. The spread of the bed was a fine, soft blue cotton trapunto-stitched in a design of flowering tendrils.
“Do you like it?” Mike asked from behind her.
She turned to him, so overcome with emotion that she was unable to speak. That he’d done this for her, done this beautiful thing, was beyond her understanding. As she looked at him she remembered the night she’d spent in his arms and she knew that now she was free to touch him, touch him any time she wanted.
Her arms slid around his neck, hugging him to her. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you very much.”
“Want to try out the bed?” he asked, kissing her neck.
She laughed. “I wouldn’t want to mess it up.”
“We’ll be careful,” he said enticingly as he took her hand and started leading her toward the bed.
It was as she was climbing onto the bed that she looked at the pretty blue clock on the bedside table. “Mike! It’s nine-fifteen. The furniture is to be delivered to the nursing home at ten o’clock.”
“They’ll figure out where to put what,” he said, drawing her onto the bed.
But Samantha pulled back. “We have to be there.”
With a groan, Mike lay back against the pillows, each of them edged with Battenburg lace. “I’ll go only if you promise to spend the afternoon in bed with me.”
“If I must,” she said with a big, weary sigh.
When Mike made a lunge for her, she squealed and ran for the bathroom, where she pulled up short. The bathroom still had dark green fixtures and the countertop was still covered in dark green marble, but now all the accessories, even the light fixtures, were in the palest pink. Pink glass jars ranged along the back of the countertop and along the wall of the tub; beautiful pink towels monogrammed with SE hung from the racks; and the walls above the green tile were papered with a design of pink roses.
She turned to Mike standing behind her. “Who did this?”
“Jeanne.”
“Your sister?”
When he nodded, Samantha started asking questions about how she’d been able to do it all in so short a time, when had Mike arranged it, and how had he known this was exactly what she liked? On and on the questions went as she ran from one room to the other looking at everything, Mike behind her, basking in her obvious pleasure.
During the night she had told him that Blair had told her about his money, and he had been very glad to see that it hadn’t seemed to affect her. Now, he thought that he was freed from keeping secrets from her. He no longer had to be careful not to mention the family jet; now he could share with her the good news when a stock split and earned him a quarter of a million dollars; now he could buy her that little gold watch she’d nearly swooned over in Tiffany’s windows.
“If you don’t get dressed,” he said, “you’re going to miss the delivery of the furniture.”
After one more very grateful kiss to Mike, a kiss that almost made them even later, Samantha ran to get dressed. It was while she was in Mike’s bathroom, where her makeup was, that she said to him, “You know what really bothers me about that nursing home?”
Reaching around her, trying to get to his shaving lather, he said, “Besides the smell of the place, besides the personnel, besides the ugliness?”
“Yes, besides all of that. There is nothing to do in that place. I don’t remember seeing so much as a magazine anywhere. If Jubilee had been put in a place like that and his piano was taken away from him, I doubt if he would have lived past eighty.”
Mike looked at the three square inches of mirror that Samantha had left him and said, “If you hurry and get dressed we’ll have time to stop on Fifth Avenue and pick up some books to take to your grandmother.”
Samantha laughed. “Michael Taggert, is that a bribe to get me out of your bathroom?”
“Will it work if it is?”
“Yes,” she said, and after planting a kiss on his shoulder, she scurried into the bedroom.
Minutes later they entered the revolving door of a big Fifth Avenue bookstore. Mike was surprised to see that Sam was not only no longer afraid of revolving doors, but seemed to have mastered them.
When they were inside, Samantha turned to Mike, feeling a little shy. He’d said she could buy magazines, but how many? What with her several shopping excursions, she envisioned her credit card being run through the little machine and the machine, like a cartoon character, clutching its belly and laughing. “Uh, Mike,” she began, “what kind of budget do I have?”
“Money or time?” he asked impatiently.
“Both.”
Looking at his watch, he said, “You may buy everything that you can get to the cash register within twelve point six minutes.”
“Point six?”
“It’s now point four.”
Samantha had once read that where women made their big mistake in marriage was the morning after the wedding. In an effort to please their husbands, they often made them breakfast and served it to them in bed, thinking that this morning was special and that they would only do this on “special” mornings. But the man took the breakfast in bed as an indication of what to expect for the rest of their married lives and was therefore disappointed over the coming years whenever he had to eat breakfast at a table.
It wasn’t as though they’d been married yesterday, but they’d, well, experienced some togetherness. Now Mike wasn’t looking at her with lust, but looking at her as though he were her…well, her husband. He was being patronizing and she didn’t like it. No doubt he thought she’d pick up a couple of books and a few magazines, then he’d smile in a fatherly way and say something like, “Are you happy now?”
Samantha smiled at him. She was going to show him that she wasn’t going to be like the bride who brought her husband breakfast in bed, and she was going to teach him a lesson in the process. He was rich enough to afford what she was going to do to him in the next twelve minutes.
“Okay, Mr. Got-Rocks, you’re on,” she said with one eyebrow raised in challenge as she turned to the clerk behind the register. “I need two shopping bags, FAST!” The bored young woman handed them to her.
Samantha first made her way to the mystery section, since she knew something about those books. Grabbing all of the Nancy Pickard, Dorothy Cannell, Anne Perry, and Elizabeth Peters books off the shelves, she dumped them into the open bags at her feet.
Standing near her in the science fiction section was a tall, well-dressed man who was pretending that he wasn’t watching what she was doing. Samantha had noticed in the time she’d lived there that New Yorkers liked to pretend that they were sophisticated, that they’d seen everything there was to be seen, but the truth of the matter was that they were insatiably curious—in fact, nosy. They were always aware of what the person next to them was doing, always trying to see something they hadn’t seen before, for New Yorkers seemed to Samantha to love anything out of the ordinary. It’s just that it takes a lot to do something a New Yorker considers extraordinary.
When this man saw Samantha frantically dumping books into the bags, he asked, “Are you entering a contest?” Curiosity always overrides manners in a New Yorker.
“Yes,” Samantha said. “I’m with a nursing home and I get to keep all the books I can buy within twelve minutes.”
At that the man’s face lit up. “May others help you?”
“Of course,” Samantha said. Mike had said nothing about others helping or not.
“I might be able to choose science fiction for you and my wife could help with the bestsellers list.”
Within four minutes flat, everyone in the store knew about the lady in the contest and everyone wanted to help. Two tall black boys with razored haircuts (one of them with a Z on his temple) asked if she wanted some magazines.
When Samantha said, “One of each,” the boys looked as though they’d won the jackpot. With a jump, they slapped hands, then took off for the big magazine stand.
A man with two children volunteered to select games, and a woman said she’d buy audiotapes. A very nerdy-looking young man said he could pick out videos for her
When the twelve minutes were up, Samantha skidded to a halt before the register with her arms full of Silhouette romances and the stacks and stacks—and stacks—of books, tapes, magazines, and videos in front of the check-out counter startled her. But she wasn’t going to back down.
“Is this all yours?” the clerk gasped, her eyes wide. When Samantha—not looking at Mike who had been
watching her in disbelief—nodded, the girl said she had to get the manager.
By the time the manager got to the register, everyone in the store, most of whom had participated in the buying, were standing to one side and watching solemnly.
“I hope you can pay for all of this,” the manager said sternly.
Samantha nodded as the clerk picked up the first book and held the electronic eye over the code bar, but then Samantha yelled, “Wait!” and everyone drew in his collective breath. Was Samantha going to chicken out?
“What kind of discount are you going to give me?” she asked the manager.
At that the New Yorkers burst into approving applause, for they recognized one of their own. It was a bit later, after quite a bit of discussion that involved several people, that a discount of twelve and a half percent was agreed upon.
After all the purchases were rung up and Mike had paid with his credit card, the people helped carry the many bags into the street to get a taxi. They had the misfortune/luck to get one of the rare taxis with a native New York driver who told them they could not put all that stuff in his vehicle. There is nothing a New Yorker likes more than controversy so there erupted a bit of a “discussion.” Tourists began taking pictures of the real, live, honest-to-God New Yorkers having an argument in the middle of the sidewalk. They’d heard about such things happening but hadn’t really believed it was done; their mothers had taught them to argue only in private.
“I did it,” Samantha said when she and Mike were alone in the taxi. But then maybe alone wasn’t the right word, for covered wagons hadn’t been packed as solidly as this car was. She had two bags in her lap, four under her legs and two behind her back. A Judith McNaught audiotape was protruding from her purse (she thought she might listen to it before passing it on) and gouging her right kidney rather painfully. “Twelve minutes flat. Right on time.”