On the open road, he accelerated. She gasped for breath. For a moment Larissa saw herself from the heavens, from the blue sky, saw herself as the birds saw her, on the back of a bike behind a young man, her hair in a swirl, riding fast, near fresh April. The sensation of speed, unable to catch her breath, of danger, of exhilaration, of fear mingled with spring and sunshine, of the undeniable life-yell of Wow, made her miss her right turn on Summit and in a mile, or three, she had to nudge him to turn around. Another blazing moment behind his back.
Finally Kai turned onto Bellevue, coasted down the gentle slope, and Larissa saw herself once again as she was, not as she wished she might be, because he pulled into the driveway of her gray, black-shuttered house.
“You all right?” He eased to a stop behind her Escalade.
She got off the bike, took off his helmet. “Sure,” she said, her face flushed from the speed, the wind.
Taking the helmet from her, Kai smiled infectiously. “There’s nothing like it, is there? Maybe some other time I can take you behind town, near the Watchung reservation and the Deserted Village. Like we did with your Jag. I can burn some serious rubber on that road. The Ducati’s nothin’ but engine.”
“See, the problem with you is you think that’s a plus.”
He laughed. “I’ll call you when the nav’s installed.”
“If I’m not here, just leave a message.”
“You want me to call you on your cell?”
“Oh. Uh—” A stutter. “Yeah. Sure.” And just like that she gave him her cell number.
Her back was to the house, but she saw him eyeing it, top to bottom, the skyscraper trees, the ebony shutters, the volume, the breadth of it, taking it all in, the fresh gray paint and the red tulips lining the paved walk, the manicured sloping lawns, the decorative lamp posts. “So this is where you live.” He whistled. “Wow.”
“Thanks. We didn’t always live here.”
“I imagine not. You have to earn a lot of pennies to live in a place like this.”
She assented silently.
“What does your husband do again?”
“He’s the CFO of Prudential Securities.”
Kai whistled again. “He must be pretty proud to live here.”
Again she silently nodded. “He says the only way he’s ever leaving this house is when they carry him out of it feet first.”
Kai blinked approvingly. “And what about you?”
There was a second’s pause. “Yes, me too, of course,” she said quickly. “Where could you possibly go from here?”
“And, more important, why would you want to?” Kai started up his bike, revved his engine. “Listen to how secluded it is. My bike sounds like an airplane with the echo off the golf course. Hey, is that your mall across the highway?” Lightly he laughed. “That’s sweeeet. Seeing the shopping possibilities from your sparkling windows.” He raised his gloved hand in a goodbye. “I’ll call when it’s ready, ‘kay?”
In the silence of her Bellevue life, Larissa heard his bike gunning it up the road away on Summit Avenue as she walked up her driveway and let herself into the empty house. Then she sat in her kitchen and waited. Not waited, just…sat in her house, clean, spic-and-span, at the island, cup of coffee in her hands, and tried to catch a glimpse of herself in the black granite, seeing only the glimpse of herself on a motorcycle at forty. She should go let Riot in from the backyard. She should start up the computer and compose the casting call notice. She should call Ezra. She should take the Escalade and drive to Pingry and order the books. She should…
The phone rang. It was Maggie: would Larissa like to grab some lunch? Instantly Larissa agreed. Anything to get her mind off things. She met Maggie in the parking lot of Neiman’s.
“What, no Jag today?” Maggie’s hair was colored, curly, dark red. She looked good after having recently been under the weather; she was even sporting some light makeup.
“Nah, the kids have stuff in the afternoon,” replied Larissa, prodding her friend away from the truck. “Come on, I’m starved.”
“I heard you’re courting trouble,” Maggie said, all twinkly and ironic, as they sat down in the checkered cafe.
“What do you mean?” Why did Larissa sound so shrill when she asked? Neiman’s Cafe was empty. It was just the two of them and seven waiters.
“Ezra told me how you got into Leroy’s grill and into Fred’s. Well done.”
Calm down, Larissa.
“So why’d you finally agree to do it?”
“Because your husband begged like a pauper. He didn’t know how else to stop Leroy.”
“No one can stop Leroy.”
“Thank God differential equations are too hard for a ten-year-old.” Larissa ordered squash soup and a Waldorf salad with grilled chicken. Maggie got a Neiman’s sampler. While Maggie was ordering, Larissa surreptitiously glanced into her purse, to make sure the cell phone was on ring and not on silent.
“But are you really going to do Much Ado About Nothing?” Maggie shook her head.
“Yes, that’s my compromise. Apparently I have to compromise. I wanted the airy Comedy of Errors. But no. I had seven naysayers. They insisted on something other than what I wanted. Well, fine. They got their way.”
“But see, Ezra said Leroy and Fred don’t want to do Much Ado anymore.”
Larissa laughed deliciously. “Oh, they don’t want to do it anymore! As I suspected. Then why’d they suggest it?”
“They said just to put something out there.”
The monkey bread came; the girls dug in.
“I knew it,” she said. “All that yackety-yak just to be contrary. Well, too late. And too bad. We’re doing it.”
They spent the rest of lunch talking about Bo, whose boyfriend, Jonny, was close to getting a job, and about Ezra, who was so overworked, with his three classes, running the English department and overseeing the theater department that the other day he actually forgot the name of his only child. “And I mean, forgot, Lar. He blanked at Dylan, as if he couldn’t understand why this cranky drummer boy was in his house.”
As they were paying, Larissa’s cell phone rang. The caller ID read Passani, K.
“Hello?” Was he calling her from his cell phone and not from work?
“Hi. It’s Kai.”
“Hey.” She fought the impulse to turn her back to Maggie so she wouldn’t have to talk to him with her face showing.
“Car’s ready,” he said. “Are you going to be able to pick it up? I know school must be letting out soon.”
“Yeah…and I’ll have my son with me.” She nodded to the waiter, to Maggie, to give her the receipt to sign, to leave a tip, to take her credit card, to close her purse, to get up, push the chair back, all the while on the phone with him.
“Well, look, how about I bring the car, and you two can give me a ride back. That okay?”
“That’s okay.” What else could she do? There was no way she could leave the car at the dealership overnight. What would she tell Jared? “On second thought, let me leave it overnight. I’ll pick it up tomorrow. The kids have…things this afternoon.”
“You sure? You don’t need it?”
“I have my truck.”
“Well, fine. I’ll bring it to you in the morning then?”
She was about to say fine, all this with Maggie watching, listening—to everything! But then remembered she blew off theater today, and she couldn’t not show up again tomorrow. “I’ve got stuff to do in the morning. Noon?”
They agreed he would bring the car to her house at noon. He had a good phone voice. Of course he did. Of course he would.
Larissa hung up without saying anything, Maggie’s eyes interfering with her inane courtesies.
“Who was that?”
“Jag dealership.” How nice and passive! “They installed a nav system.”
“What do you need one of those for? Where do you go? Can’t find your way to the mall, Lar?”
“Oh, funny today, Mags.”
With the check paid, they traipsed across the black-and-white tiled floor.
“You didn’t tell me your car was in the shop.”
“It’s not like it’s in the shop. Nothing’s wrong with it.”
“So why didn’t you tell me about the nav earlier when I asked where your car was?”
Larissa sped up. If she wasn’t able to answer Maggie’s questions, how in the world was she going to answer Jared’s?
“You bought what?” said Jared, setting down his dinner fork, which signaled the heightened level of his commitment to the conversation.
Larissa shrugged—her most nonchalant shrug. “The car was supposed to come with it. We got a model without it. But it’s supposed to have it.”
Jared was silent. “Larissa, it’s not what the car is supposed to have. It’s not whether or not you need it.”
“What is it then?” she said casually, her pleasant face on, the smile at her lips.
“It’s that you would, could, spend three thousand dollars of our money without even bringing it up in a five-second conversation first.”
“I know. I’m sorry about that. Honest, that was a mistake on my part. It was an impulse buy. I’d gone in for service, and then ordered it on the spot without even asking Brian how much it cost. I thought it would only be a few hundred bucks. By the time they installed it and I paid for it, I was as shocked as you, believe me, but I was already in for a penny.”
“Three hundred thousand pennies.”
“I know.”
“Do you have the receipt?”
“I do. It’s in my bag. You want to see it?”
“I don’t want to see it, but I do need it for our records.” His eyes were on her, not blinking. “Who did you buy it from?”
“What?”
“Who did you order the system from?”
“Brian, I told you.”
“Who’s Brian?”
“The service guy in the back.”
“Not Chad?” He paused. “Not Kai?”
“Never got to the front of the dealership, honey. I’m really sorry.” She smiled sweetly. “Jared, I know it’s a lot of money to spend all at once, but strictly speaking, what’s the difference between spending it all in one gulp, and buying four or five pairs of shoes or boots, which I do all the time without calling you up on the phone, interrupting your board meetings, saying, sweetie, I saw this awesome pair of Gucci’s; do you mind?”
To Jared’s credit, he mulled that one over. “The difference,” he said at last, “is of degree. It’s too much, it seems out of the ordinary.”
He was right. That’s what it was. Out of the ordinary.
Larissa rushed to Pingry in the morning to sit with Sheila and Leroy and line by line edit Much Ado down to high school production size, chewing the pencil between her teeth, mindful of the time, ten, eleven, nearly noon.
“I gotta run, guys,” she finally said.
“But we’re not done!”
“Can you finish up? You have some very good ideas. Just a couple of things: Sheila, don’t cut too many of Don Pedro’s lines; he is after all the conscience of the play. And Leroy, same goes for Benedick, who is the hero. Even in a comedy that role is given some prominence.”
“Um, did I cut something you didn’t want me to?” asked Leroy, sensing a rebuke.
“I’m thinking you should probably keep the line when Benedick says, All hearts in love speak their own tongue,” Larissa said with a smile, counting out the beats before she could bound out of doors. “But otherwise you’re doing great. See you tomorrow.” My merry day isn’t long enough despite what Shakespeare says, she thought, seeking comfort in math, 5.2 miles in twelve splendid minutes.
She was a few minutes past crisp and windy March noon when she found her Jag in the drive, but Kai not in it. Did he leave already? She saw the back gate by the garage ajar and when she walked around the side of the house to the back, she found Kai chasing Riot all over her yard.
“He was barking at me,” Kai said, running up to her, panting. “I petted him, but he clearly had other things in mind. Not a very ferocious dog, is he?”
“No, she isn’t,” said Larissa. “She is a mashed potato. She would show you to the good silver if we had any.”
“Come on,” he said, even the whites of his teeth teasing her, “you must, in that house. What’s her name anyway?”
“Riot. Like you, we thought she was a boy.”
Riot was bumping Kai’s knees with her head, having brought the three-foot stick back. Kai wrested it away, threw it for her, and then chased her across the yard, yelling, “Riot! Give it! Give it back!” It was Riot’s favorite game. Pretending to fetch the stick and then being chased by a human for it. She could play it all day. How did Kai instinctively know this? Seeing him run after her dog in her back yard, like a carefree kid, filled Larissa with a troubling heaviness on this blustery day, like the new leaves were clogging up the drains of her heart.
“Hey, you want a lemonade?” Did she even have lemonade?
“How about ice water?”
She left him with Riot and went into her kitchen. As she fixed him a glass, she watched him from the window. There was such young joy in his movements.
He came in flushed and perspiring. “What am I going to do with my shirt?” he said. “I look like I’ve been rolling in it.”
He took the drink from her hands, gulped it down, chewed the ice. “We never had a dog,” he said. “We lived in an apartment; hard to keep a dog in the apartment. But I love dogs.”
“Clearly they also enjoy your company.” Riot was standing on her back paws at the door, banging on the screen with her front paws, as if to say, Get back out here, wimp.
“What a great dog.” Kai drummed on the counter, looking around Larissa’s kitchen.
She stood in her quiet house, around her clean black granite and white cabinets and watched him get his work face back. He was usually so composed; now suddenly he was panting. There was something vulnerably undeniably human about it.
“Well, the nav looks pretty good. Have you seen it?”
“No, I came straight in the back.”
“You want me to show you how to use it?”
“Sure.”
“Come,” he said. “Because I’ve got to start heading back. I have an appointment at one. What time is it?”
“Twelve thirty.”
“Yeah, I gotta run. Normally I don’t schedule anything for lunch, but this is a sure sale, the widowed sixty-year-old man wants to buy a Jag for his thirty-year-old girlfriend.”
“Isn’t that a bit of an overkill?”
Kai grinned naughtily. “How else,” he said, “is he going to get her to sleep with him?”
And in the afternoon Larissa stood in front of the mirror in the front hall, staring severely into her face, into her eyes, while the ice cream melted in the plastic bags, still in the trunk of her Jag. A small thing that might eventually be noticed by the discerning youngest members of her family, those who enjoyed eating ice cream. Mom, they might say, why does the ice cream always taste like it’s been melted and refrozen? Why are you bringing home melted ice cream? How long is the drive from King’s, Mom? Isn’t it just four minutes? Does ice cream melt this fast? What are you doing with your afternoons that you need to keep standing in front of the mirror while our precious ice cream turns to heavy cream?
One thing Larissa did not do as the ice cream pooled on her Jaguar floor was write to Che. Dear Che, help me. How do I extricate myself from this awful thing I’m falling into, a thing made geometrically more awful by the stark truth of it: I don’t even write you this so-called letter asking for instructions on self-extrication. I rationalize it away like a college grad, a slightly mocking adult who can reason. I say, how in the world is Che going to help me? She can’t even help herself with Lorenzo. That’s what I say. But the real reason I can’t write to you is because I don’t want to, and that’s worse even than sitting in the car, the knowle
dge of my unashamed and actualized self. I know that all I want is for one o’clock to come, to be upon me faster, so I can see his face, so I can hear his laughing, teasing voice speak to me I don’t even know of what—masonry? Luxury cars? Funerals? I don’t know. I don’t care. I barely listen. Sitting next to him is what I listen to. The leather and Dial soap and denim smell of him in my car, twenty, unmarried, childless. When I look at him, I’m not in the middle of my life but at the very beginning, one of the Great Swamp Revue traveling Jersey in search of a stage, a joke, a performance, something real amid the illusion, or is it an illusion amid all things real? The Jersey Footlight Players is what I am part of again, putting on quite a show on that stage that’s the driver seat of my Winter Gold Jag, and that’s the sordid why I haven’t written you since February. I’m afraid that in my shallow words you will hear the profound truth of what’s happening to me. I’m drawing away from you as I’m drawing nearer the black chasm that’s got him in it, slowly realizing, reluctantly admitting that he is the only thing I want.
8
Auditing Safeguards
The navigation purchase did not ease its way into Jared’s full comprehension over the next few days, and on Saturday night, when they had gathered with their friends for dinner at the house, Jared brought it up again.
Maggie immediately exclaimed, “Jared! That’s what I said to her! Explain yourself, Larissa, to your friends and your husband. It makes no sense.”
“Why do you need a nav system, Lar?” asked Ezra.
“It. Was. An. Impulse. Buy.” Larissa shot Jared a look that she hoped conveyed that if he wanted a woman tonight it would have to be one other than his wife.