“Paris. Except I have to be back for a two o’clock meeting.”
“Then Paris is probably out. Let’s grab a cab, see where it takes us.”
Michael snapped his fingers… and a cab stopped for us. Interesting.
“What was that?” I asked, my eyes wide.
“Honestly, Jane, I don’t know. I’ve always been able to do it.”
Ten minutes later we were walking around the West Village. First we stopped at a favorite of ours from the old days, Li-Lac Chocolates, at its new location on Eighth Avenue. I was so happy that it was still around. We bought chocolate truffles. Michael said it was “for after lunch.” I told him that he couldn’t tell me what to do anymore, and I ate one before we’d even left the candy store. So did he.
“Copycat,” I said.
“The most sincere form of flattery.”
We walked to Hudson Street and went into a store that sold nothing but amazing, antique cast-iron banks, like the kind in which you put a coin in a dog’s mouth, then press a button, and the dog’s tongue flips the coin into a juggler’s hand.
“Jeez,” Michael said. “This bank costs nine hundred and ninety-five dollars.”
“Money’s no object,” I said grandly. “Would you like it?”
“Don’t go showing off, rich girl,” he said. But he looked pleased, and then right there in the middle of the store he pulled me into his arms and held me close, not speaking. At that instant, I knew exactly what I wanted out of life: this. This feeling, this happiness, this embrace.
We ate lunch in a delightful French restaurant that was called, simply, French Restaurant. Sitting there, eating chicken and pommes frites, drinking wine, we talked, and talked freely, easily, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Us. Being there together as man and woman. Or woman and whatever Michael was. An angel?
We had lifetimes to catch up on. I told Michael about my four years at Dartmouth, where I was the only person in the entire school who refused to ski. He laughed when I confessed that the week I graduated, I joined a religious cult. Weight Watchers.
Michael said, “You don’t need Weight Watchers, Jane. You look great. You’ve always looked great. Don’t you know that?”
“Honestly,” I said, “no. I’ve never known that.”
I actually didn’t tell Michael everything. Even though I told him all the best stories about what it was like to work for Vivienne, I didn’t mention the success of the stage play Thank Heaven. Or that we were going to start shooting a movie about a little girl and her imaginary friend. Who just happened to be based on Michael and me.
When I finally got Michael to open up and talk about himself, he was charmingly modest, but also very discreet. He told me just a little about a few of his favorite assignments over the years. Twin boys in North Carolina, a woman senator’s daughter in Oregon, a few appalling stories about a precocious child actor in L.A., someone I actually had heard of.
“I have a lot of questions about this ‘friend’ thing,” I told him.
“Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of answers. I wish I did, Jane. You have no idea.”
It wasn’t a satisfying answer, but it was probably the only one I was going to get. Then I asked Michael something even more personal that I was dying to know. “Were you ever involved with anyone? Romantically?”
He shifted in his seat and shrugged. “I meet people,” he said, not answering my question. “I like people, Jane. All kinds of people.”
“And I’ll bet they like you.”
Michael didn’t seem uncomfortable. He just seemed, well… reserved. And mysterious, of course.
“Let’s go do something,” Michael said, taking my hand. “Doesn’t matter what.” And he snapped his fingers for a cab.
Forty-four
IT DIDN’T MATTER what we did that day. We could have been digging ditches, and I would have been thrilled.
But we did something much better than digging ditches: We Rollerbladed over the hills of northern Central Park, where the blacktop was smooth and the traffic was sparse. We flew like angels on cement, barely avoiding runners, bicycle riders, dog walkers and their raucous packs of barking dogs. And all the while, I was delighting in his company and thinking, What is happening here? Surely it’s never happened before to anybody else. There has to be some logical explanation. Yet I might have to accept that there isn’t.
I hadn’t been on Rollerblades since I was ten years old. I remembered that my mother called me a “clum,” that is, a person with no natural grace. I did not seem to have improved much with age. At 96th Street, I was practically touching the ground as I tried to make it to the top of one of the steepest hills in the park. My calves and thighs ached. And then suddenly we were at the tip-top of the hill, flying downhill fast, fast, completely out of control. “Michael!” I screamed.
He grabbed my hand. “Trust me!” he yelled back.
So I did. And amazingly, we didn’t crash, didn’t wipe out. Michael was taking care of me again, as he always did.
Safe and sound at the bottom of the hill, we flung ourselves onto the thick grass, panting, a few feet away from an old woman in a wheelchair. She was there with a nurse-companion in a starched white uniform.
“I thought you had a two o’clock meeting,” Michael said suddenly, looking at his watch.
“I did. I missed it.” I felt a singular lack of concern. It was interesting.
The old woman was watching us, smiling now. Her companion fixed a shawl around her and began pushing the wheelchair away.
The woman turned and called, “Good luck to you two. You make a lovely couple.”
I agreed. I looked at Michael, but his face gave nothing away. “Are we a couple?” I asked Michael, holding my breath at his answer.
He laughed lightly. “A couple of nutjobs maybe,” he said.
Not what I wanted to hear, but I dropped it.
For dinner we had hot dogs in the park, hot, spicy, and doused with mustard and relish. We walked and talked and eventually we were at my apartment building again.
“Well, here we are,” I said, with crackling wit.
We stood outside the entrance to my building, and Martin the doorman discreetly moved away from us. Yes, I would ask Michael to come up to my apartment now. Of course I would. And Martin would approve.
But as the fateful words were about to come tumbling out of my mouth, Michael leaned in close. Yes, I thought. Oh yes, please. His face was only an inch or so from mine, and my breath caught. I’d never seen him so close, his smooth skin, his green eyes.
Then he suddenly pulled away, almost as if he were afraid of something.
“Good night, Jane,” he said. “It was a perfect day, but I think I’d better go now.”
He turned and walked away quickly and didn’t look back at me.
“I miss you already,” I whispered.
To nobody.
Forty-five
GOOD NIGHT, JANE… I think I’d better go now. How could he have said that? How could it possibly be anything but a crazy, sleepless night for me after a whole day of getting lost in Michael’s eyes? I definitely didn’t want to be alone in my apartment, but here I was.
I walked to the living room and looked out at the city as I munched a couple of Oreos. All right, four Oreos. My floor was high enough to let me see over the other nearby buildings, and I had a great view of Central Park. New York had always been the right place for me, but tonight it seemed even more so, maybe because Michael was out there somewhere. What was he, though? An “imaginary friend”? An angel? A hallucination? None of those made any sense to me. But I had no other answers.
Just then the phone rang. No way did I want to listen to my mother or Hugh getting their panties in a twist. Let the machine pick it up.
First I listened to myself telling the caller to leave a message. Then I heard my friend Colleen’s voice, the one who was getting married. We’d been in Book Club together, Movie Club, Rock Concert Club, Traveling Pet Club.
Nowadays we probably didn’t have so much in common.
“Oh, Janey, it’s Colleen. I wish you were home. We still haven’t talked since I told you about Ben.”
I hurried to the phone and picked it up. “Colleen! I’m here. I was just coming in the door. How are you? I left you a message,” I said. “I told you how I was dying to meet this big-shot Chicago lawyer of yours.”
“I know, but I wanted to hear your voice,” Colleen said, “in real time. I wanted to hear the real Jane.”
“You got her, babe.”
So we talked. When Colleen finished an hour or so later, I could have composed the Chicago Tribune, New York Times, and Boston Globe wedding write-ups on the two of them. Ben, the son of Dr. and Mrs. Steven Collins, had gone to BC as an undergraduate, then to Michigan Law. I wondered if Colleen would change her name, becoming Colleen Collins. Anyway, then Ben had worked for two years in the Chicago D.A.’s office. He had been introduced to Colleen by his sister-in-law at a party on Martha’s Vineyard. He had an apartment overlooking Lake Michigan. Colleen, along with her cat, Sparkle, were moving in. When Colleen began telling me about the wedding-cake fillings, I broke in.
“Wow, it sounds like you’ve got everything all planned out,” I said, trying to muster convincing enthusiasm. I loved Colleen, but if she told me she had two little fake mice in evening clothes on top of the cake, I’d probably throw the phone off my balcony.
“Oh, Jane. I did nothing but talk about me, me, me. You’re so great to listen.”
“No problem. That’s what I’m here for. I love hearing you so happy.” And if I was also a little jealous, that was my problem.
“Next time it’ll be you calling me, with the same news. But, listen, what’s new with you?”
“Not very much,” I said. “You know, work, and trying to wrangle my mother into submission.”
Colleen giggled. “As always.”
Oh, I almost forgot, I think I’m falling in love with the most perfect man ever—sweet, funny, and incredibly good-looking—who just might be a figment of my imagination. Other than that, same old, same old.
Forty-six
MICHAEL WAS THERE the next morning.
Patiently waiting outside my building, just as he used to, so many years ago. In the flesh, so to speak. Not a hallucination. At least I didn’t think so.
He had another beautiful white gardenia in his hand.
“Hello, Jane,” he said, looking slightly rumpled and adorable. “Sleep well?”
“Oh yeah, out like a light,” I lied. “You?”
We began walking side by side, in perfect rhythm, just as we used to walk to school each day. So was he watching over me again? Protecting me? Why? Did he even know why himself? Why didn’t he have all the answers? He’d always known everything when I was little. He was never unsure, never hesitant. The fact that he seemed as confused about this as I was made him infinitely more human, somehow.
The weather was chilly for spring, and the sky threatened rain, but nothing could get me down today. I was hopeful, wasn’t I? For the first time in a long, long while.
While we walked, we talked nonstop about everything and nothing, the past and the present—but not the future. Maybe talking with Michael was the best part of this, or of any, friendship or love affair. Although, God knows, I wanted to grab him and kiss him, and, honestly, do a lot more than that. He was a hunk in a way that an eight-year-old just couldn’t appreciate.
“Jane! Want to go in there? For old time’s sake?”
Michael was pointing across Madison Avenue to a familiar little shop of horrors called the Muffin Man. We had gone there on many a guilty morning twenty-some years ago and, to be perfectly honest, I had kept up the tradition.
“Once a sucker for muffins, always a sucker for muffins,” I said. “Lead on.”
As we waited on line in the shop, Michael said, “As I remember, the Apple-Cinnamon-Walnut was your muffin of choice.”
“Still is.” Among others. I’m not that picky, muffin-wise.
We each had a muffin, though I found that I wasn’t really that hungry, which was odd but fine with me. Michael had a coffee frappe, I had a decaf. What struck me most about me and Michael together was how little Hugh and I had ever talked about, or even had in common, really.
Once we were back on the street, and about a block from the office, the skies opened and it poured, coming down in buckets of icy rain.
“We can wait it out under that canopy, or we can make a run for it,” Michael said.
“Run, obviously.” Which was what I felt like doing, running and yelling out loud.
So we raced through the rain, through puddles up to our ankles, around people who were smart enough to have brought umbrellas. I wisely decided to keep the shouts of abandon to myself.
We practically fell through the doors of my building, drenched to the skin but laughing like a couple of kids, or at least challenged adults. Smiling goofily at each other, we naturally leaned closer, closer… Oh God, I wanted this… to happen… so much.
But.
“I’ll see you later,” Michael said, pulling back, losing his smile. He frowned. “Is that all right? Am I… bothering you?”
Oh yeah, you’re bothering me, all right, I thought hungrily. But this time I wasn’t going to let him dash off.
So I grabbed his arm, keeping him in place, then kissed him—on the cheek. The kiss was wet from the rain, but warm from my feelings.
“I’ll see you later. I always want to see you,” I said, and then I just had to add, “I miss you already.”
That was me: taking chances, living large. Booorn to be wi-iild…
Michael gave me a last, affectionate look. Then I got into the crowded elevator and punched my button.
I couldn’t help singing again, “Booorn to be wi-iild.” I had no problem with letting my freak flag fly.
God, I was happy.
Forty-seven
MICHAEL WAS ACTUALLY really happy, in a tortured kind of way.
So he got together with a few of his best friends and told them about Jane, about how they’d met again, that she had bizarrely remembered everything about him. “The hot fudge sundaes, our walks to school, the terrible, terrible day I left her, everything!” The group was supportive but astonished. None of them had ever experienced anything like it. “Just be careful, Michael,” said Blythe, whom he was probably closest to among them. “For your sake, and for Jane’s. They’re supposed to forget us. That’s how it works. That’s how it’s always worked. Something strange is happening here.”
“Oh, you think?” said Michael.
* * *
AT 5:45, he showed up at Jane’s office, as he’d promised he would, and said good evening to his new friend, Elsie the receptionist.
“I don’t think Jane’s expecting me,” he said.
“Think again,” said Elsie. “She’s expecting you. She’s been expecting you for most of the day.”
Elsie buzzed Jane, and a moment later she appeared, looking fresh and rosy-cheeked. Was she blushing?
“I told you I was bothering you,” Michael said.
“He really is annoying,” Jane confided to Elsie.
“Please. Annoy me,” said Elsie, who was well into her sixties.
The rain had started up again, but Michael had brought an umbrella. They headed all the way to a restaurant on the Upper East Side called Primavera, talking as if it had been months since they’d seen each other, instead of hours.
“So do you watch TV?” Jane asked, avoiding a puddle by walking closer to him.
“Mostly cable,” Michael said. “Like Deadwood and Big Love.”
“I like those too!” Jane said. “What else do you do? What are some of your other interests?”
Michael thought. People didn’t usually ask him about himself. As Claire de Lune had said, he was a terrific listener. “Um, I love live football games,” he said. “I love Corinne Bailey Rae. NASCAR. Cézanne. The White Stripes.”
&nb
sp; Jane laughed. “So… everything.”
He grinned. “Pretty much.”
“What did you do today?” Jane asked, looping her arm through his.
“I met some of my friends,” he admitted. “Friends who are… in the same line of work. And I went for a long run. And I napped.”
“Well, isn’t that special,” Jane teased him.
“Hey, I’m on vacation, remember?” he said. By that time, they were at the restaurant, and it struck Michael: Was this a date? It felt like a date.
Forty-eight
“SO HOW WAS YOUR DAY?” Michael asked as soon as we had sat down and sent the waiter bustling off to get a bottle of Frascati for us.
I made a face. “Not too bad, considering that I had six separate meetings with Vivienne.”
“Age sure hasn’t slowed her down.”
“Not much. Maybe a little bit. Lately, anyway. You know, I’m producing this film, a small movie, nothing major. A confection, I guess you could call it.”
“Like Chocolat,” Michael said, and he smiled. “I loved that movie.”
There was a pause. I was trying to think of how to say this without giving too much away.
“Go on,” Michael said. “Tell me about it. I like hearing about your work.”
“You’re probably the only one,” I said, trying not to laugh too bitterly. “Anyway, we have a coinvestor on the film named Karl Friedkin. When I went past Vivienne’s office this morning, after we got drenched in the rain, who should be sitting there but Karl Friedkin? So I asked MaryLouise, my secretary, about it. Know what she said?”
“That Vivienne is on the hunt for a new husband. Her fourth, right?”
I dropped the piece of Italian bread I’d been gesturing with and stared at Michael. “Amazing. MaryLouise knew too. I’m the only one who didn’t. I must be impossibly dense.”
“No. You’re just a nice human being. So your mind doesn’t go that way without some provocation.”
“And yours does?” I asked.
“Let’s just say that I’ve seen your mother in action. You know that she loves you, though?”