One Way or Another(54)

“Oh, shoot,” Lucy said. “Why can I never get him on the phone? He can’t always be out delivering pizzas, can he, Marthie?” She stopped as a thought occurred to her. “You don’t think he’s out with another girl?” She looked suddenly stricken.

Before Martha could answer, Mehitabel said swiftly, “Well, of course, Martha, since you cannot wait for Mr. Ghulbian’s return then your assistant must. She can take him round, show him what you suggest and what you have completed so far. Lucy can take notes and pass Mr. Ghulbian’s personal thoughts on to you. Right?”

She was looking at Martha as though the matter was settled. No argument, Lucy would stay. But “No, no, of course not,” Martha protested. “She has no car, she must drive back with me.”

“You forget Mr. Ghulbian has a helicopter. Lucy might be home before you yourself, Ms. Patron.”

She threw in the name as though an afterthought, something she scarcely had bothered to remember. Martha thought Mehitabel was quite a bitch in her own icy way. Anyway, she certainly did not want to leave Lucy here alone with her.

“Perhaps I can wait, after all,” she said, knowing she sounded hesitant.

Mehitabel gave her another long look. “There’s absolutely no need to worry, you know, Ms. Patron. Lucy will be perfectly safe here.” She glanced at Lucy, who was eyeing the pie the Tunisian chef was making, a layering of eggplant and tomatoes and peppers and meat, topped with a lid of pastry, which he’d embellished with pretty cut-out pastry leaves.

Lucy was interested; perhaps she wasn’t meant for interior design after all; she might try cooking school. Chefs earned a lot these days, she knew that from watching TV. She inspected her phone again; no message from him. She suddenly hated being seventeen. Older women knew how to deal with men who did not call, men who were, it seemed, not even interested. Oh God, oh God, after what happened how could he do this? She had practically given him her all the other night, and, despite a few previous “mishaps,” it would have been the first time. Other girls she knew had succumbed even younger, or pretended to anyhow, smug knowing smiles and all, while she had said loftily she would hold out for her marriage bed. She’d been joking of course. Sometimes she’d hardly known how she’d kept her legs crossed, and she would certainly have unlocked those knees the other night with him, if she had allowed any more time to pass, in his embrace. There was an old-fashioned word for you. Embrace. Shit. She had been friggin’ entwined! That’s what she had been. And she wanted more “entwining.” With him. She tried his number again, again without luck.

Getting off the phone and coming to her senses, she suddenly understood what Mehitabel was suggesting: that she wait here, discuss the decorations with Ahmet, be helicoptered back later.

“Why not?” Lucy said, feeling gloom settle over her head like a cloud. “He” was never going to call, she might as well just stay here, take care of things for Martha.

“Don’t worry,” Mehitabel was saying to Martha as she took Lucy to sit at the kitchen table. “I’ll make sure she’s fed and watered. Just like a horse,” she added with what Martha believed was humor of some sort.

“Well…” Martha was still uncertain.

“Oh do go on, Marthie,” Lucy said, impatient to get back on her phone. “I’m your assistant, aren’t I? This is what I do.” And she planted her muddy sneakers on another chair and got back to her phone.

Martha gave her a quick kiss and departed, still worried she was doing the right thing, leaving her alone with Mehitabel, in that remote house, while Lucy surveyed the kitchen with hungry eyes. She was always hungry.

Mehitabel knew Ahmet had fallen for Lucy; she had observed the way he looked at her, his delight in her presence, in her youth, the way he mentioned her name, dropping it in the conversation as though by chance. Mehitabel recognized an obsessed man and jealousy dripped through her veins like ice water. In all the years they had been together Ahmet had never so much as expressed any feeling for a woman. Coconspirators, they had known each other’s secrets and secret wishes; understood each other, until now, when Lucy Patron had arrived to separate them, turn Mehitabel’s perfect world upside down; make her future insecure and her innards churn with what she knew, for the first time in her life, was jealousy.





37

Martha’s apartment in London’s Chelsea was not far from Lucy’s basement apartment. She drove there now, already late to meet her friend and coworker, Morris Sorris. Right from the moment she had met Morris, two years before, she’d told him she would never believe he had not made up his own name. He had not denied this but said everybody remembered it so what was the problem. And it was true, people did remember. “It’s always on the tip of their tongue,” Morris declared, smiling, and he’d never yet told Martha what his real name was.

“Not who I used to be,” he corrected her when, devoured by curiosity, she’d asked him, saying how could anybody want to change their name to Morris Sorris.

“Easy. I’ll never be forgotten” was his answer, and of course he never was, though Martha often shortened it to Morrie Sorrie, which offended him deeply.

He was short, very thin, with the haunted eyes of his Spanish ancestry, a thatch of black hair that went every which way and that he swore he could not control, though Martha had caught him several times looking in the mirror and giving it a fluff with his fingers to catch that casual just-out-of-bed look. Which there was no doubt Morrie had: girls flocked to him; the phone calls were endless; the texts; the waylaying outside the house, until Martha was forced to ask him please to control his personal life and keep it out of the way of his work.