Chapter Three

That evening she ran into Dante as she was leaving the Studio. He had his coat on and she couldn’t tell if he was coming in or going out. He left the people he was talking to, members of the company, and came across the hall to her. He faced her in a very intimate way that thrilled her.

“How are you doing, Little Sunshine?” he asked Laura. This reminded her of how once upon a time her husband had also used silly pet names for her.

“I didn’t do very well in class tonight,” she responded. “I had a lunch date today and it seems I overdid it on the food. I couldn’t even get started tonight in class.”

He only stared at her, not answering. “I have to get back there.” He gestured toward his friends, one man and two women. “Do you want to see Terry Jacobi, Sunday night?” he added, probably as an afterthought.

“Yes, I’d like to,” she replied immediately. “No, I mean, I don’t know if I can. What time would it be? Eight? I can arrange that. I have to go out of the City, but I’ll be sure to meet you before eight.”

He looked at her narrowly. “If you can’t make it, say so.” He was short with her and glanced back at his friends.

“Yes, I can make it. I’ll meet you there. It’s the Dance Workshop, isn’t it?”

“That’s right.” He was appeased. “If you change your mind, leave a message for Ronnie at the theatre. A quarter-to-eight will do, mademoiselle. Sharp.” He flashed his strong white teeth at her then went back to the laughing group of dancers.

It’s nothing but a date, Laura told herself. No, it isn’t even a real date. Be calm. You won’t ask him to come over, even for coffee. You won’t encourage him in the slightest.

She retreated to the safe predictability of the health club. Today, she was tired. Nine times out of ten, she had tons of energy, but today had knocked the oomph right out of her. The afternoon had been a tedious rush of redesigned ads, liquor ads, which she especially hated working on. She dropped in happy partygoers, wishing she could throw at least one obvious lush into the background.

She sank onto one of the wooden benches in the sauna, lying flat with a sigh. One-hundred-ninety degrees was all she needed at this very moment to bake the weariness right out of her bones.

In a little while, she began to sweat and sat upright, crossing her legs underneath herself, lotus-style. She recognized the woman across from her as a dancer from the Studio.

Just as Laura was about to make some casual remark, the woman greeted a friend coming into the sauna. Laura didn’t recognize the second woman, however, but could tell that she was a dancer, too.

Laura was somewhat curious to hear their conversation, so she stayed inside the sauna a while longer. The two women were talking about, of all things, men.

“I know he sees a lot of other women,” said the Studio woman very casually. “I don’t care. Let him. I see lots of other men. We aren’t living together, after all, and even if we were, we’d both need our freedom.”

“I don’t like it when Bobby runs around on me,” protested her friend. “I know I shouldn’t be jealous, but I am. Although I go out with other men, I still hate him for dating other women. I could definitely stay at home if he could.”

“I don’t care who Dante sees,” said the Studio woman. “He comes back every time.”

Laura continued to remain in place, though she was far hotter than she needed to be. The women spun their conversation further, but altogether in general terms, and nothing more of interest to Laura was said. She had to run for the cold shower before her internal juices began to boil.

How strange women have become, she mused to herself. Oh, yes, and men too, I suppose. That anything of value could be accepted on such a casual basis was inconceivable to her. Therefore, she had to conclude that the relationships in question weren’t important ones. She believed, because she wanted to, she supposed, that this woman and Dante weren’t ‘meant for each other.’

The next morning, Laura had some anxiety about her two Sunday dates. She wanted to call Richard and check the scheduling with him, but wasn’t sure of the name of the gallery where he worked. Lillian certainly wouldn’t know since she thought he slaved on Wall Street. Laura could probably call Ford and get in touch with Elise for Richard’s phone number, but she didn’t feel that would be exactly wise.

Laura stewed about it for a while. Certainly Richard couldn’t think that a date beginning at one o’clock could last all day. But what if his family had some sort of special dinner in mind? She took part of her lunch hour to call fifteen art galleries. Fourteen had never heard of the man. The fifteenth knew his name because they had some dealings with him. A kindly older gentleman gave her the name and number of the gallery where Richard worked. She would never have found it herself because it didn’t seem to be listed online.

Her heart was beating much faster than usual when she dialed his number. “It’s only a business arrangement,” she reminded herself. He wasn’t in, but she left a message.

Things finally slowed down in the afternoon, and she went downstairs and brought back a soda for herself and a tea for Roger. Roger told her she had gotten a phone call on the office phone, and that the caller had said he would try to call back. She checked her email, but nothing there. Why hadn’t she asked for his email as well?

The afternoon dragged by without her hearing from Richard at all. She went to class and didn’t see Dante, either. And she didn’t see Dante’s girlfriend at the club. She went for a nice long swim because she had the pool to herself for once, and stopped at the corner deli for an extra-large apple juice. She went home and cleaned her house, then read the parts of the Times left over from two Sundays before.

Finally, she remembered. She went to a pile of magazines and pulled out the Vogue she’d seen Lillian in. She searched for the pantsuit spread and scrutinized the models, hunting for their names.

She knew which one was Elise when she saw her though, because, as it turned out, she had seen the perfume commercial. Elise was an extraordinary looking woman, no two ways about it. Though Laura had heard that, had somewhat expected that, still, she was surprised. Richard was attractive, but he wasn’t a god. And he wasn’t vastly wealthy. And, furthermore, he seemed quite unassuming and sincere. Elise must be a nice person, Laura decided. Elise and Richard had a special, close relationship.

If Laura had harbored any small hope about Richard at the back of her mind, she let it go. Richard and Elise were entitled to their happiness, and Laura wasn’t going to intrude, even by a pinch of underlying desire. Not that she had any reason to desire him, after all. She had met the man only once and knew nothing about him.

Laura was brushing her teeth when the telephone rang. She rinsed and answered. Richard apologized for calling so late. He had been busy all afternoon, then had to get her phone number from Lillian again, who hadn’t been home all evening.

That was fine, Laura said. She led a very busy life herself. Richard said he’d wondered about what she did. He wished he’d found out more about her the other day.

Laura was happy at his saying that.

Then Richard explained exactly what he’d meant. “I don’t want to sound as if I don’t know you at all when I introduce you to my grandfather. But you haven’t changed your mind about going, have you? I hope that isn’t why you called earlier.”

“No, I haven’t changed my mind. I wanted to make sure that we’d be back in the City fairly early though. I have an important date at eight o’clock.”

“Yes, that’ll be fine,” Richard acknowledged. “Elise and I have a dinner to go to around that time.”

“Good,” said Laura. “Thank you for calling. See you on Sunday.” She hung up.

On Sunday he came to collect her at her building. Since Sundays weren’t bad for parking in her neighborhood, he was able to actually come upstairs. She had cleaned the apartment, for some reason, although she wasn’t planning on inviting Dante to come home with her later on. Still, she was a little embarrassed when Richard came in. She had only junk, worse junk than what he must think of as junk. What she thought of as nice were some drawings she had by complete unknowns.

He looked at her pictures very seriously, making small comments. For the most part, he saw as she saw, liked what she liked, and for the same reason. He even appreciated her flower pictures, color sketches, that she was sure must be vastly boring to anyone but her. They were simple, ordinary, but with a certain feeling.

“Who did these?” he asked about the sketches.

“I did,” she admitted with mixed apology and pride.

He stared at her. “So you’re an artist,” he muttered. He seemed to feel that she had held that back from him deliberately, perhaps to make him feel foolish at his own assertions of being a painter.

“I’m an artist by a sort of bent,” she explained. “But I’ve been trying to bend myself in another direction for the past few years. I’m a dancer by choice. Or I would be if I could take more than one class a day. One class a day doesn’t even keep me limbered up. I’m stiff for half the class, slightly warm for the rest.” She gave Richard a rueful smile.

He was still staring at her, as if, having seen her before, he had nonetheless missed her and was just looking at her for the very first time. She blushed and turned. “We’d better go, hadn’t we?” she mumbled. She cleared her throat. “I wouldn’t want to be late getting back to the City.”

“Oh yes, your date.” He moved to accompany her to the door where his eye fell on the issue of Vogue that she had unthinkingly left on top of the pile. He looked at Laura curiously.

Laura was very practiced at covering the little embarrassments of life. “There’s a picture of Lillian in this month’s Vogue. Do you want to see it?” she offered.

“Oh, Lillian,” he remembered. “I’ve seen it, thanks. Elise has some stuff in this issue, too.”

“Does she? I’ll have to look for it later.”

He held the door open. “I forget what the Vogue thing was,” he said. “I think it was ski outfits.” Either Elise worked an awful lot (which she probably did) or (and) he was a trifle bit negligent.

He drove a Volvo. Laura would never have known what kind of car it was—she was better with vegetables than she was with cars—except that he told her. He told her the gas mileage, too, and a couple of other things that she promptly forgot.

She was happy to leave the City for a change—not that they were going very far out. Laura hadn’t been away since she had gone home last Christmas. Her vacation, taken in the spring, had been occupied with having her apartment painted, and with dance.

The time of year was moving on toward winter and most of the leaves had already fallen. Still, some few trees were hanging onto their moment, glorious in their burnt umber desire to alert I-91 to the change in the seasons. “Look here,” they called Laura, “did you make the most of the precious summer months? Have you gathered and stored for the coming winter?”

Laura breathed a sigh of liberation. She worked so hard, was constantly on such a well-oiled treadmill that even a few hours without responsibilities were a treasure to her. But no, even this was a business trip of a kind. Her duty was to make Richard’s grandfather like her. To trick the old gentleman into thinking that she and Richard made up a couple.

She thought of her own two grandfathers, both of whom she had known before their deaths. She didn’t like the idea of tricking either one of them. She had loved her grandfather Masters especially well. He was a sweet old man who had taken great delight in Laura’s existence. He had been a special friend to her and had bribed her to come visit him with rewards of peanut butter cookies and hot buttered milk.

Laura watched the scenery, then observed Richard as he drove. For a moment a great longing arose in her to return to the days when she had been an innocent bride, when she had trusted her husband and had felt secure with their relationship.

“Have you ever been married?” The question simply slipped out and immediately Laura could have bitten her tongue. This wasn’t her favorite subject, so why had she brought it up?

“No, never.” That seemed to end it and Laura felt an inward sigh of relief. Richard glanced at her. “Elise and I talk about getting married,” he added, hesitantly.

“But you think it might be better to wait?” Laura smiled.

“No.” Again he paused. “It’s Elise. She’d like her career to go even farther than it has. She’s interested in Hollywood. Making movies. Maybe she wants to marry Ryan Herbert.” Richard twisted his mouth to show he was being ironical about Elise marrying the biggest new Hollywood heartthrob.

“Arrested for DWI,” Laura comforted him. Yes, she did look up celebrity bios. For whatever reason, that made her think of Dante’s girlfriend. Something was wrong about her, and not just for Dante, but for any man who had a heart. Elise was another one, she suspected, a woman with a touch of ice in her soul. No, that wasn’t fair. Elise was probably a decent person; she certainly knew Richard better than Laura did. Maybe that was why Elise wouldn’t pin her hopes on him alone.

“And you?” Richard was asking, interrupting her thoughts. Oh no, not that particular question.

“Maybe I’ll drawn an autumn scene,” she said. “If I should have an hour free.”

“Have you ever been married?” he persisted, despite her avoidance.

“Yes,” she said shortly. “When I was young.” Her tone of voice didn’t encourage him to pursue the matter.

The drive upstate took about an hour and a half. They talked, for the most part, about painters, about museums, about the galleries and what shows were on. He described his work to her in more detail.

They took the Cold Springs exit on the thruway and ten minutes later wound up in front of a dignified old house that reminded Laura very much of the one in which she’d grown up. She felt like running up the walk and throwing the door wide open to let them know she was home.

Richard’s grandfather made Laura think of the golden autumn trees; he clung stubbornly to the comfortable side of growing old. If it was an inheritance that Richard actually had his eye on, he would have some time to wait.

As Richard introduced Laura to his grandfather, a sparkle in Mr. Turner’s eyes seemed to say, “Now, Richard, this is more like it.” His obvious enthusiasm made Laura blush at her own part in the deception. She had a powerful impulse to explain to him the actual circumstance.

Mr. Turner brought them into his writing room and gave them each a sherry to ward off the autumn chill. Then he turned his gaze toward Laura. “Tell me about yourself, child,” he requested.

She liked him for doing that, and his interest in her was so genuine she began to tell him something of her life. That she had grown up in a house somewhat like this one, built by her great-granduncle; that her whole family was mostly builders and architects; that her father was an architect; that her mother had been a nurse before she’d married; that Laura had wanted to be an architect herself when she was young; and that one semester in school, she had studied structural engineering.

Mr. Turner looked from her to Richard and seemed to guess fairly easily that this was all news to Richard. At length, he inquired, “How long have you and Richard known one another?”

“Not terribly long,” Richard confessed. That went part of the way toward salving Laura’s conscience.

Pretty soon, Richard’s father and mother arrived, and shortly after, his sister, her husband, and their two kids. Apparently Grandfather Turner’s was the Sunday gathering place for lunch.

Laura felt at home with Richard’s family. They were attractive, well-mannered people who knew how to conduct family life with humor and without too many squabbles. They made Laura feel welcome too. Finally Mr. Turner said, “I’d like an afternoon hand of bridge, if you don’t mind. Richard, you join me. Laura, do you play?”

Laura sat down with them at a card table set up in the living room along with plenty of finger foods for them to snack on. Milly, Richard’s sister, was Laura’s partner. Laura was reminded of the last time she had played. It had been with Shetley and her parents. That day, she thought, but the memory didn’t disturb her.

The game came back to Laura easily enough, at least all that was necessary to bid and play the unspectacular hands she was dealt. Milly was an easygoing player, and several times Laura had to grit her teeth at her partner’s mistakes. Richard made careless errors, too, maybe through enthusiasm, or perhaps through inattention. Mr. Turner played conservatively and made sure that he and his partner were on the winning side.

“Next time, Laura and I will have to be partners,” Mr. Turner commented approvingly.

Milly’s husband, George, had taken the kids to play miniature golf, though protesting all the while that it was simply too cold out. Mr. and Mrs. Decter turned on a football game. This garden-club-looking lady, as things turned out, liked the game as well as her husband. And Mr. Decter had played in college.

Laura enjoyed playing bridge again, but as the rubber seemed unending, she began to get nervous. Finally, she was forced to ask Richard what time it was. Nearly six-fifteen, Richard told her, causing her to rise half-unconsciously from her chair in the middle of a hand. The moment was agonizing. She thought of Sunday night traffic back into the City and wanted to beg God for the loan of a helicopter. How had it gotten so late?

Richard, seeing her distress, leapt up, too. His grandfather looked at both of them from under his eyebrows. In the middle of the hand! seemed to be his attitude. And a good one at that! He laid his cards down.

“What’s going on?” Milly asked, surprised.

“Laura and I have the theatre,” Richard prevaricated. “We’ve been waiting for months to see this one.”

Mr. Turner’s eyebrows shot straight up at that. “Months,” he repeated incredulously, obviously remembering what Richard had said before about the short duration of their relationship.

Richard no doubt remembered also. His cheeks caught fire. Still, he pulled the car keys from his pocket and went to retrieve their jackets, leaving Laura to say genuinely warm good-byes and regrets that they were rushing off. She bent and kissed Grandfather Turner good-bye from an impulse of feeling, rather than from some scheme of winning him over.

In fact, she realized as she got into the car, she had forgotten the purpose of the afternoon in her enjoyment of it. She didn’t know Richard very well—that seemed difficult—but she felt that she had come to know his family to an extent.

Richard raced over some side roads that he knew while Laura sat on the edge of her seat. Once, she asked him again what time it was. It was six-forty-five, already.

“I’m sorry,” said Richard. “But we may make it yet. Where in the City do you have to go, exactly?”

She told him—all the way downtown; he whistled and drove faster. “But don’t kill us,” she said.

He concentrated on his driving for a while as Laura tried to get herself to relax, at the same time attempting to sort out her impressions of the afternoon. “I like your family,” she finally said.

“And they liked you,” he responded.

“How can you tell?”

“I know them.”

“I like the children very much too,” she went on. “Lively but well behaved.”

“Milly had two miscarriages before she had these two.”

“That must have been very sad for her.”

He took his eyes away from the road a minute to see her face, which embarrassed her because of the tears that were brimming over and threatening to run down her cheeks. “Yes,” he said simply. In a minute or so he spoke again. “Do you have any children?” he asked.

It struck her somehow as being a strange question, one that didn’t apply to her. “No,” she answered shortly. “What time is it?”

By some miracle of unspoken prayer, they arrived at the City by seven-thirty-five, which seemed like a major victory to them both. Richard was entirely intent on carrying out his part of the bargain, she was glad to see.

At some point on the East River Drive, Richard mentioned the money he owed Laura. “I’ll send you a check,” he promised her. She felt funny about taking money for a day of enjoyment, but she accepted at once, not wanting him to think she had formed an attachment to him—and so quickly.

Miracle upon miracles! They screeched up to the theatre at five minutes to eight, and Laura jumped out into the uptown Second Avenue traffic, almost getting herself run over. Dante was talking to Maxwell, of all people, when she approached. He grabbed her by the arm as if he wanted to wrench the limb right off. “I would have killed you if I had wasted this ticket,” he snarled in an intimate way that she found rather exciting.

As he yanked her toward the theatre, she looked back. Richard was still sitting in the car, at the curb, watching her with obvious interest. Dante, seeing her turn around, glanced back as well, following the direction of her eyes. He saw Richard and Richard saw him. Maxwell pushed Dante and Laura into the theatre.