Invitation to Provence(3)
The house was set back from the street with a narrow paved path and patches of grass on either side. It was painted forest green with tan trim. Four steps led up to a sweet little front porch that just cried out for a rocker, the kind with a slot in the arm to hold your glass and a slatted rest for your feet, but Franny had never yet had enough spare money to buy one.
She found a parking spot and jumped out, stopping at her mailbox for the usual bundle of bills, junk mail, and catalogues. She didn’t even notice the square cream envelope with the French stamps. She took the four steps up to the porch two at a time, then just two more strides to the front door where, as always, she tripped over the loose plank that she’d been meaning to fix for ages. She thought it was really quite dangerous and she’d better do something about it this weekend.
Sadly, though she loved animals, there was no dog or cat of her own to greet her because she didn’t have the home-time an animal needed. Without their friendly barks and purrs, the small house seemed too quiet. She tossed the mail onto the kitchen counter already cluttered with leftover takeout cartons and bundles of half-dead flowers in pottery jars. Six days a week the house was a mess. On the seventh, a Sunday (what else), she cleaned it up. Today was only Wednesday and stuff spilled from drawers and cupboards, old coffee mugs sat around on top of piles of unread books and magazines, and a trail of discarded clothes led to the bathroom, where she was headed now, flinging more onto the heap as she went. She hadn’t been born a slob—it was purely a matter of the proper allocation of time, of which there never seemed to be enough.
She barely had time to shower and throw on some clothes—jeans, a white tank top, a lacy blue crocheted shawl against the later ocean-night chill, turquoise flip-flops, and the dangly fake turquoise earrings she’d picked up at the drugstore and thought so sexy, though she certainly was not feeling sexy tonight. She was too worried about her meeting with Marcus.
Stopping just long enough to check her appearance in the mirror, she tugged at the tank top, hoping Marcus wouldn’t give her that cool up-and-down look that said without words that he thought she looked as though she’d just thrown herself together. Which was the truth. She had. Still, she left her heavy, pale-blond hair loose and sprayed on a generous amount of the ginger-flower perfume. Her cheeks were flushed from rushing, and she looked about nineteen years old instead of thirty-five.
On her way out she quickly tidied the hodgepodge of flea-market bargain furniture, desperately plumping cushions, shoving old newspapers into a pile, because Marcus always came back with her, and he hated what he called her “squalor” and her cheap but eclectic and colorful furnishings.
She got back in the Explorer, heading down the California Incline and onto Pacific Coast Highway. The ocean glimmered on her left like an iridescent pewter bowl, joggers trotted along the beachside paths with their dogs running alongside, and small children dashed happily in and out of the waves, unwilling to call an end to the day.
She remembered clearly the night she’d first met Marcus, a classic tall, dark, handsome guy with a shy smile and bold eyes that had met hers across a table a year ago. It was at a birthday dinner for a friend, and he was with a pretty girl to whom he wasn’t paying much attention. Instead, he kept looking at Franny, couldn’t seem to take his eyes off her in fact. Franny had sipped her wine, trying to act cool, glancing occasionally at him over the top of her glass, wondering if she was misreading that message in his eyes. And she wasn’t, because later he came over to her and said, “You know, you have the most magical blue eyes. I felt as though I’d gotten lost in them. It’s as though I’ve known you for a long time, maybe even in some other life.”
Now no man had ever said anything like that to her before and of course she was knocked out by it, so when he asked for her phone number, she gave it to him. There was a message waiting on her machine when she got home. “I can’t stop thinking about you,” he said. “Please say you’ll have dinner with me tomorrow night.”
Franny found him irresistible, like catnip—one sniff of him and she was crazy. Unfortunately, Marcus lived in Atlanta, where he was in property development, building new condos for singles. He came to L.A. twice a month, then he’d promised to make it over more often. And those first few months were heady. They made love all the time, or at least all the time he could spend with her. He sent her flowers and often called just to say goodnight. Lately, though, he’d been too busy to get out to L.A. so often and then he’d been distant, as though his mind were somewhere other than on her.
Franny still wouldn’t face up to it, but in her heart she knew the writing was on the wall and she wondered whether it was better just to finish it right now and save her pride. She realized Marcus was behaving badly and that she was stupid to take it, but he was like a bad habit she couldn’t shake. She kept hoping that she was wrong and that he really loved her.
She was so caught up thinking about Marcus, she almost rear-ended the Honda Civic in front of her. This time her sigh came from her gut. The only thing certain in her life was that, as usual, she’d skipped lunch—no time—and she was starving. She only hoped Marcus wouldn’t be critical of her hearty appetite. And dammit, if he was, she would just tell him to get lost. Oops, she’d almost missed the turnoff. She quickly slid the Explorer across two lanes, eliciting a barrage of horn honking as she sped onto Channel Drive and made a jerky stop in front of Giorgio’s.