The Vanishing Year(23)
I look back to see Henry standing in front of Br?lée, watching the van peel away, his hand raised in a jaunty wave.
? ? ?
Back at La Fleur d’Elise, I clean up. Putter, wash buckets, rinse bins, inventory foam bricks, wire, beads, dusting spray. I have nowhere to go. I could go home, rattle around the apartment, wait for Lydia and her terrible date. The worst that could happen is that she’d come home, draw the curtain between our beds, and engage in raucous sex. No, thanks.
The bell clangs out front and I dump the last bucket before wiping my hands on my apron and making my way out front. Henry Whittaker stands in the showroom, eyeing the refrigerator filled with arrangements. I stop and stare, unable to find the right words. The right tone. Haughty? Bitchy? Funny?
When he sees me, he smirks. “These are your plans?” He gently extends his hand, a large white box wrapped with a red bow.
“What is this?” I tilt my chin at him but I don’t take the box.
“A book and a dress.” He bows slightly. “Zoe Swanson.”
I push my hair out of my eyes. “How did you . . . ?”
“I have connections.”
I can’t tell if he’s serious. He sighs, sets the box on the counter, and pushes it with one finger in my direction. “Go on. Open it.”
I do. On top of a pile of tissue paper, sits a book. I pick it up, turn it over in my hands.
“Anna Karenina?” I raise my eyebrows.
“What’s not to love? Suburban unrest in nineteenth-century Russia?”
I set the book aside. It’s old. I wonder, briefly, what edition. I wonder if he somehow knew it was my favorite, or if it was just a guess. A guess.
The dress underneath is heavy, beaded and eggplant. The book was a hit, the dress, a miss.
“Eggplant is my least favorite color,” I tell him. Rude. Evelyn would be appalled.
“It’s not eggplant. I prefer to think of it as bat orchid.”
I can’t help but laugh at this. Truly, men in general are fairly bad at banter. I’ve spent many a night tossing out jokes to good-looking dates, only to have them fall flat on the two-top table between us, with a puzzled smile. Henry is surprising.
He elaborates. “I heard once that there’s no such thing as black flowers. That if you were to breed a true black, you’d make a million dollars. That all flowers are really deep shades of purple. Some might say . . . dark eggplant. Is that true?”
He steps closer to me, his chest inches from my face. He doesn’t seem to care about personal space or social acceptability or my not-so-subtle back-off signals. He doesn’t know how much I loathe the touch of strangers.
“That’s true.” I whisper. “But you already have a million.” I’ve turned into that girl. The one who plays it cool then gives in, much too quickly. The coy temptress turns giggly. I straighten my shoulders, try to get it back.
“I do.” He whispers back. “Come with me. Please?”
“I . . . I need to shower and do my hair, makeup. I live all the way in Hoboken,” I protest weakly.
“Come to my apartment. I’ll give you all the privacy in the world. I promise. I have a car.”
“I . . . no. I can’t.” I smooth the back of my hair flat against my skull, a nervous tic.
“What do you want? What would make you come with me?”
His voice is so earnest and his eyes so pleading that I almost cave right there. I do cave, internally, it’s over. Hook, line, sinker. My idea of dating is going home with the drummer of a band, tiptoeing past his roommate passed out on the sofa, and try to have quiet orgasms and, later, quieter escapes. I rarely proffer a phone number. I like this, my distant, detached life.
I slant my eyes at him, coquettish, for fun. “Convince me.”
He laughs, his head tipped back until I can see the inside of his mouth, behind his teeth. “You want me to woo you, then?”
I place my hand on my forehead, a mock swoon. “Exactly. Woo me.”
He leads me out into his car, which is waiting for my inevitable yes (I wonder if his driver has ever seen anyone say no). We drive to his apartment, which is appropriately spectacular, shiny and glossy with high ceilings and gleaming surfaces, modern furniture, tall windows, rooms as big as my entire apartment. I follow him to a guest room, complete with en suite bathroom. The shower I use would hold my entire bathroom. By the time I’m dressed and trussed and fluffed, I feel like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, minus the whole prostitution thing. An array of cosmetics, all new, waits for me to pick and choose. The whole setup leaves me baffled. Does he just keep all this, waiting for a woman? Is this his schtick? Then I figure, what do I care? I envision my dark apartment.
When I emerge into the hallway, he gasps. If there is a script for this movie, this moment in my life, it would have been written exactly as it played out. My heart hammers and my hands shake and I know in that instant, like the sappiest of romance movies, that this man will change my life.
At dinner, he is attentive. It’s his dinner, I learn. He’s the host. He barely pays attention to anyone else. Do you need more water? More sorbet? Another glass of wine? I laugh and wave him off. You wanted me to woo you. So, I’m wooing you. He hovers, this man, in his God-expensive suit and finely crafted leather shoes. His colleagues are curious, I imagine, about the defiant-looking girl with the pierced eyebrow and the spiky hair wearing an elegant dress. They are kind but dismissive. Henry doesn’t tell them what I do for a living, that I’m practically hired help. His assistant is nice, in a self-serving way, as though he cast Henry as Daddy Warbucks and me as Annie, and maybe, just maybe, his good deed will make the paper. I catch his eye throughout the night, and he winks in a way I presume he means to be reassuring but does nothing to reassure me.