The Forgetting Time(3)

“Why shouldn’t you tell me?”

She glanced at him. She couldn’t believe she had opened herself up to him—that she was falling under the admittedly considerable charms of this businessman from Houston who wore a wedding ring.

“Well, you’re a—”

“A what?”

A stranger. But that sounded too childlike. She grabbed the first word she could think of: “A Republican?” She laughed lightly, trying to make a joke out of it. She didn’t even know if it was true.

Irritation spread like brushfire across his face.

“And that makes me what? Some kind of philistine?”

“What? No. Not at all.”

“You think that, though. I can see it plain as day on your face.” He was sitting up straight now. “You think we don’t feel the same things you do?” His brown eyes, which had been so admiring, bore into her with a kind of wounded fury.

“Can we go back to talking about the curry?”

“You think we don’t get our hearts broken, or break down crying when our children are born, or wonder about our place in the grand scheme of things?”

“Okay, okay. I get it. You bleed when pricked.” He was still staring at her. “‘If you prick us, do we not bleed?’ It’s from the Merchant of—”

“Do you get it, Shylock? Do you, really? ’Cause I’m not so sure you do.”

“Watch who you’re calling Shylock.”

“Okay. Shylock.”

“Hey.”

“Whatever you say, Shylock.”

“Hey!” They were grinning at each other now.

“So.” She glanced at him sideways. “Children, huh?”

He waved away the question with one large, pink hand.

“Anyway,” she added, “what’s it matter what I think about anything?”

“Of course, it matters.”

“Does it? Why?”

“Because you’re smart, and you’re a human being, and you’re here right now at this moment and we’re having this conversation,” he said, leaning toward her earnestly and touching her lightly on the knee in a way that should have been slimy by any rights but wasn’t. She felt a tremor pass through her quickly, outrunning her will to squelch it.

She looked down at her ravaged plate.

He probably lived in a McMansion and had three kids and a wife who played tennis, she thought.

She’d known men like this, of course, but she’d never flirted with one before—a country club man, a man who had a gift for sales. And women. At the same time she could feel that there was something else in him that drew her—it was in the quickness of his glance and the volatility of his emotions and the sense she had that there were thoughts blowing through him at a million miles a minute.

“Listen. I’m going to check out the Asa Wright Nature Centre tomorrow,” he said. “Want to come along?”

“What’s that?”

He jiggled his leg impatiently. “It’s a nature center.”

“Is it far?”

He shrugged. “I’m renting a motorcycle.”

“I don’t know.”

“Suit yourself.” He signaled for the check. She felt his energy swiftly changing course, pulling away; she wanted it back.

“All right,” she said. “Why not?”

*

The center was hours away, but she didn’t mind. She clung tightly to his back on the motorcycle and reveled in the speed, taking in the lushness of the landscape and the chaotic tumble of the towns, the new concrete houses abutting ramshackly wooden ones, their metal roofs shining side by side in the sun. They got there by midday and, having settled into a companionable silence, followed a tour guide through the rain forest, giggling at the names of the birds he pointed out: the bananaquit and oilbirds, the bearded bellbird and blue-crowned motmot, the squirrel cuckoo and boat-billed flycatcher. An ease had set in by the time they were having high tea on the wide veranda of the former plantation house, watching the copper-rumped hummingbirds hover at the feeders dangling from the porch: four, five, six hummingbirds bobbing and whirring in the air, like a magic trick.

“It feels so colonial,” Janie said, leaning back into her wicker chair.

“The good old days, huh?” He squinted at her inscrutably.

“You’re being facetious, right?”

“I don’t know. They were good for some people.” He kept his face blank for a moment, then burst out laughing. “What kind of an asshole do you think I am? I was a Rhodes Scholar, you know.” He said it lightly, but she knew he was trying to impress her. And had succeeded.

“You were?”

He nodded slowly, his quick eyes filling up with bemusement.

“Got me a master’s in eco-no-mics from Bal-li-ol College. Oxford, England.” He spread out the syllables, playing the rube.

He wanted a laugh and she gave it to him. “So shouldn’t you be teaching at Harvard or something?”

“For one thing, I make about twenty times what I’d make teaching, even at Harvard. And I’m not beholden to anyone. Not some head of the department, or president of the university, or spoiled-ass son of a major donor.” He shook his head.

“Lone wolf, huh?”