“Hey, Syl?” she called, moving through the store. “I might be gone a little longer than usual. Any problem?”
“No. I’ll be here. See you when you get back.”
Parking in Christopher’s parking lot, heading into the building, knocking on his door, she felt as if she were heading toward some nefarious dealings. She was meeting a man for lunch. So what?
So there were butterflies in her stomach and she was fidgeting with her hair when he opened the door.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
Her cheeks might have turned the faintest bit pinker.
“You really came. I wasn’t sure you would.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I just wasn’t sure.”
He stepped back and she walked in, left her boots by the door, let him take her jacket and hang it.
“Hungry?” he asked.
“Ravenous. What are we having?”
“Egg-salad sandwiches and tomato soup.”
“I love tomato soup! And egg salad, too.”
“Well . . . everything’s ready.” He gestured to his kitchen table. “I just have to pour the soup. Sit down.”
The dishes were some of her old green ones. The sandwiches were plump with egg salad between thick-sliced nine-grain bread, with curly red lettuce showing around the edges. Each sandwich was cut in half and accompanied by a little pile of tiny dill pickles. The silverware was mismatched. Paper towels substituted for napkins. The centerpiece was the fat red candle and holly ring he’d bought the day they were together at Gustaf’s. The candle was lit though it was a bright, sunny day.
He put two bowls of steaming tomato soup on the table and sat down.
“Christopher, this is lovely.”
“Nothing fancy, like I promised.”
“Curly red lettuce.”
“I learned about different kinds of lettuce when I worked at the Red Owl store.”
“And a centerpiece.”
“Largely because of you. If I remember correctly, you were the one who said it’s impossible to be lonely with a candle glowing in the room. That’s why I bought it.”
“I think I recognize the dishes.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“I got them when Bill and I were first married. It was back before the price of gas fiew sky-high. Gas stations used to offer premiums to get customers to come in. A free dish with every fill—that’s where these came from.”
“They serve the purpose.”
“Yes, they do. They make me feel right at home.”
They both smiled, biting into their sandwiches and getting egg salad caught on the corners of their mouths.
She asked how Judd was doing, if he’d seen him lately. Christopher said he made sure he saw him every week. This week he’d taken him to the police weight room and let him work out a little.
She asked about Christmas, if there’d be any sort of holiday for the boy at home. He told her that parents like Judd’s usually got guilt pangs at holiday time and did something for their kids. He also said it was high drug- and alcohol-use time of year, so one never knew what could erupt.
She asked him if he’d ever thought about becoming Judd’s foster parent.
“No,” he answered. “I’m there for him when he needs me, and he knows that. He understands that life dealt him a tough hand, but that he’s got to play it out. I’m only there to help him do that. But I’ve never wanted to have kids of my own, either adopted or otherwise. I’ve known that since I was twelve years old, forced into the role of parenting my sister.”
They sipped their hot soup, ate their sandwiches. He looked at her hands, holding the bread.
“What’s that on your fingers?”
She dropped the sandwich and hid the hand in her paper towel on her lap. “Dye. I was working with heather this morning. It’s sprayed with this awful stuff that stains just like ink.”
He reached over, found her wrist in her lap and carried it up to the tabletop.
“You don’t have to hide your hands from me, okay? They’re honest hands. I like them.”
They finished their food and he said, “Sorry, no dessert. It’s too hard to keep in shape eating desserts, and fat cops can’t run fast when they need to . . . so . . . this is it.”
“I don’t need dessert either. This was just perfect.”
She rose with dishes in her hand. He took them from her. “Leave them. That’s my job.”
She was his guest, she realized, and conceded. “All right.”
He picked up the soup bowls to rinse while she wandered into the living room and found herself unable to resist testing the soil in every flowerpot there, then looking into the Christmas tree stand to discover it nearly dry.
“Christopher, shame on you. You’ll burn the place down if you don’t keep your tree watered.” She went to the kitchen and asked, “Do you have a coffeepot I can fill it with?” At the kitchen sink she filled the pot, and returned to the living room. On hands and knees, pouring, she realized there was only one gift beneath his tree and wondered who it was from.
He shut off the water and came into the room just as she finished pouring and sat back on her heels. The coffeepot was taken from her hands and discarded to one side as he sat down beside her on one hip, a hand braced on the carpet.
“The gift is for you,” he said. “I want you to open it.”
“For me?”
He nodded. “Open it.”
“But it isn’t even Christmas yet, and I don’t have anything for you.”
“You’re here. That’s all the gift I need. Open it.”
The box was wrapped in silvery-blue foil with a gauzy silver ribbon. The package was shaped like a necktie box. She opened it as eagerly as a child.
Inside she found a plain white business envelope. From inside that she pulled two plane tickets and a color brochure from Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. She barely gave the tickets a glance, but opened the brochure and avidly ran her eyes over photographs of trailing wisteria, statuary, glass houses and profuse blooms of many kinds. On second glance, she saw the tickets were to Philadelphia.
“A trip?” she said, raising excited eyes. “You’re giving me a trip?”
“For two. Next summer, in July, when everything’s in bloom. You can take whoever you want. I thought you might like to take Sylvia, or maybe even Lloyd.”
“Oh, Christopher . . .” She looked down at the beguiling color brochure again and read aloud, “Longwood Gardens . . . a setting of perfect serenity, with its winding paths, temples, passionate bursts of color . . .”
“I went to a travel agent and she helped me pick which one. She said this is one of the best, and I didn’t think you’d ever done anything like that before. I thought it was time you did.”
“Oh, Christopher . . .” When she lifted her face there were tears in her eyes. She flung both arms around his neck, the brochure crackling against his shoulder. “All my life I’ve wanted to do something like this.”
He hugged her back, smiling at her response, which was exactly the one he’d hoped for. “I’ll bet you’ll meet a lot of people there with blue fingers, and not one of them will be apologizing.”
She kissed him, kneeling in the crook of his hip, tipping her head sharply to one side while his arms spanned half her circumference. Her heart was hammering from excitement over his gift. When she pulled back, she looked square into his eyes and said, “Nobody’s ever given me a gift I liked this much. Nobody reads me like you do, Christopher Lallek. How is it that you read me so well?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s like you see into my head sometimes! If somebody asked me to name the perfect gift for me, I couldn’t even name it myself, yet you knew what it was.”
He only smiled.
Hugging him, she looked at the brochure over his shoulder. “This cost you a bundle, and I know I should object, but I’m not going to. I want to go too badly! Longwood Gardens! My
God, Christopher, you’re too good to be true!”
She kissed him again, both of them so perfectly happy at that moment it could only be celebrated thusly: with open mouths that fit less than passionately because they were both smiling; with appreciative hands that ran over one another’s sweaters; with sheer joy in being together, and alive, and having one another to spend this improbable sunny December lunch hour with.
He fell to his back, taking her with him, and she reveled in lying across his chest, down one half of his body, letting herself kiss and kiss and kiss him, unable to get enough of the delightful pastime after so many, many manless years. Oh, the warm, liquid interior of his mouth, how good it felt again. And the sturdiness and texture of a strong male body—it, too, filled her with a sense of coming back to a pleasure long abandoned. The kiss changed tone and the glossy brochure in her hand became extraneous. She put it on the rough plush of the carpet and slid it away till it tinked against the coffeepot, freeing her hand to slide into his hair. Her right leg lay between his legs and she knew perfectly well what she felt down there; she raised her knee and pressed against it, against the hard, aroused flesh of a man whose desire for her came as a great joy. He raised his knee, too, between her legs, and his head off the floor, rolling them partially onto their sides. He gripped her from behind, hands spread wide on her woolen slacks, catching the curve of her buttocks, thrusting against her while she gave them both some added leverage by putting the sole of her foot on the backside of his calf. He was wearing denim jeans, stiff and heavy through the nylon covering her foot. There had been times after Bill died when she’d wondered if she’d ever do this again, times she’d lain alone in the dark and longed for someone to touch this way, to make her feel alive and sexual.
“Oh, Christopher,” she whispered against his mouth, “you feel so good. Everything about you. Hair, muscle, even whiskers. It’s been so long since I’ve felt a man’s face this way.” She rubbed hers against it, seeking texture from his freshly shaved skin, kissing him wherever she pleased. His hands slid up inside her sweater and cupped her breasts. She shuddered, arched and grew very still, her eyes closed while she absorbed all the wondrous sexual feelings reeling back after all the years. “It’s been so long. Sometimes I’d wonder if I might dry up and lose my ability to do this. Now here you are, making me feel it all again after so many years. It’s all rushing back, making me feel like a woman. And, ohhh, it feels good.”
“What do you want?” he asked in a husky voice while she kissed his face everywhere. “Do you want to make love?”
“I can’t. I want to but I can’t. I don’t have anything and it’s—”
“I do.”
“You’ve been planning this.”
“We’ve both been planning this.”
“Maybe I have.” Her hands were in his hair, but both their eyes were closed. “I thought about the word ‘nooner’ ever since Sunday night, but if I went and got a contraceptive and brought it along, I would have been . . . you know. I couldn’t make myself do it. Christopher, I’m forty-five years old.”
“And hornier than you’ve been since your husband was alive.”
“I’ve got to get back to the shop.”
“Yeah, you feel like you’re heading back to the shop.” Their eyes were still closed. He was caressing both her breasts, sending rivers of feeling from them clear down her limbs. Their legs were still plaited with the sole of her foot wedged behind his calf. He reached behind her as if to unsnap her bra.
“Don’t . . . please. This is far enough. Please, Christopher . . . please . . . I’m too tempted.”
He returned to caressing her through her bra. “We’re going to end up in bed eventually anyway, and you know it.”
“My God, I’m being seduced.” She had thrown her head back and he was kissing her throat.
“Yes, you are.”
“By a boy of thirty.”
“Thirty’s no boy.”
“No, I can feel that.”
“So what do you say . . . Mrs. Robinson?”
She smiled and opened her eyes, drawing her head down to meet his gaze eye-to-eye. He was smiling, too, teasing her. They lay on their sides on the carpet, reading one another’s faces at close range . . . her rust eyes, his blue ones.
“I just realized I’m doing exactly what I lectured Joey not to do last Saturday night. How do I think I’m ever going to keep on resisting you if we keep this up? Some mother I am, preaching out of one side of my mouth and flirting out of the other, but, damn it, Christopher, you feel so good, I just can’t say it enough. But if we go to bed—what then? Where does it lead? What if someone finds out?”
“You’ve got a lot of hang-ups, you know that? Maybe all it will lead to is us having a good time together, but what’s wrong with that? Enjoying each other in bed seems to me a natural extension of how we enjoy each other out of bed. Furthermore, we’re both single. We’re both beyond the age of consent. We both want it a lot.”
“Boy, you can say that again.” She rolled from him and sat up, feeling shaky and liquid and sensitized. With their legs still tangled she propped an elbow on her knee and rubbed her messy hair back from her face. “All right, suppose we do go to bed. I live in a modernday world with modern-day problems. I’d want to know something about your past sex life.”
He sat up, too—his legs lolling open—and caught one of her feet, put her smooth sole against his genitals and held it there, lightly, with one hand, caressing her through her nylons.
“If a condom isn’t enough for you, just say the word and I’ll be at a doctor’s office tomorrow morning having an AIDS test.”
She might live in a modern-day world, but his remark dropped her chin and left her staring at him. Nothing he’d said today had affected her more than these words: what an act of faith for a man to do such a thing.
“You mean it, don’t you?”
“Of course I mean it. We’ll start with a clean slate.”
She stared at him, struck with a fresh new fear: She thought perhaps—dear God, how could it be?—she was falling in love with him. With a man fifteen years her junior.
He went on calmly, “The last time I went to bed with a woman was about two years ago. We dated for about six months, then she moved to Texas on a job promotion. Before that there were four, I think, going way back to high school. I’ve never been what you might call a ladies’ man. Mostly I’ve been a loner.”
She reclaimed her foot from his genitals and sat on it. She took his hand in both of hers, examining it while spreading the fingers wide, then closing them repeatedly.
After some thought, she looked up into his clean, handsome face.
“I need some time to think about this, Christopher. It still doesn’t seem right.”
“Because I’m younger?”
“Partly.”
He looked down at his hand in hers, its fingers opening and closing. “Well, that I can’t change. I’ll always be younger, and there’ll always be those who might accuse you of robbing the cradle. I know that.”
A dejected silence fell. She put her hand on his shoulder. “I love my gift very, very much. Of all the people I’ve ever known in my life, I’ve never known one as intuitive as you. Not even Bill, and I mean that.”
He looked up and gave her a three-cornered smile. “Well, that’s a start anyway, isn’t it?”
She, too, smiled. “Now I really do have to go back to work. May I use your bathroom first?”
“Sure.”
She took her purse along, brushed her hair and applied fresh lipstick When she came out he was getting her jacket from the closet. He held it while she slipped it on, then turned her by her shoulders to face him.
Angling his head, he gave her a goodbye kiss, gentle and lingering.
When it ended she touched his mouth with the pad of one fore-finger. “Thank you for the lunch.”
“You’re welcome. Anytime.”
“And for the tickets.”
He only s
miled in reply and kissed her finger.
“Christmas Eve,” she said quietly, backing away. “Eleven o’clock. I’ll wait up for you.” One last word came out in a whisper. “ ’Bye.”
13
CHRIS was scheduled to work both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day from three to eleven. That shift, on that particular night, was known to be unusually busy with emergency calls, though most of them were not true emergencies: the calls came from lonely people without friends or family who, rather than face Christmas Eve alone, manufactured ailments and went to emergency rooms. There they found people to talk to, someone to pay attention to them, human hands that touched and cared. Those on duty at the station had come to expect calls from old Lola Gildress, who smelled so bad they had to leave the squad car doors open for a while after dropping her off. Frank Tinker’s gallbladder acted up every year, too. He called every patrolman “sonny” and offered them his snuffbox for a pinch, needed a pop can to spit into while he rode in the squad car and always asked them if they’d mind swinging down along Brisbin Street on their way to the hospital. There, he turned rheumy eyes to a two-story house where he’d lived as a boy in a family of six, all of them gone now but him. Elda Minski called, too, as usual, and flounced out of her front door wearing a flea-bitten fox stole, vintage 1930, and a horrendous sequined turban on her bald head, eager to repeat her story of escaping the Russian Revolution and coming to America to sing opera on the same stages where Caruso and Paderewski had performed. The one they all waited for, though, was Inez Gurney, a sweet old woman curled over like a bass clef, who toddled out of her house taking baby steps—the largest she could manage—carrying a tin of German butter cookies for anyone kind enough to wish her Merry Christmas.
Christopher answered Inez’s call this year.
When he knocked on her door she was all ready and waiting, wearing a home-knit cap that tied under her chin and ancient rubber boots with zippers up the front and fur above the ankles. The heels of the boots never left the ground when Inez walked.