Into the Fire(7)
He’d spotted her in front of a quarter slot machine, twisting a strand of silken black hair around her finger, a near-empty bucket of quarters in her lap. She’d left her sandals on the floor, one bare foot propped on the base of the empty stool beside her. Dark eyes and red lips against pale-as-milk skin. She looked like an artist’s sketch, alluring and complicated, deep waters moving beneath that tranquil fa?ade.
Max’s friend was lost to a roulette wheel, so Max had rushed over to change in a fiver, casting glances over his shoulder all the while, worried she was a vision that might vanish. For the first time since junior high, he had to work up his nerve to approach a member of the opposite sex.
“Can I sit here?” he asked, jingling his bucket.
“I’m having an unlucky run,” she said, not looking up. “If you’re smart, you’ll get as far away from me as possible.”
“Don’t worry,” he said, “I’m not that smart.”
At this she favored him with a wry smile.
And right on cue his first pull of the one-armed bandit hit triple cherries, coins sheeting clamorously from the chute. Two hundred twenty bucks paid out in quarters felt like a million.
Along with a half dozen onlookers, she’d congratulated him. He’d gathered up his money and his courage and said, “I’d really like to buy you dinner.”
They were close enough then that he could breathe in her perfume, orange blossom and vanilla. He didn’t know much about fragrances, but it smelled expensive.
She regarded him with a dark gaze. “So you got a bunch of money and now you want to ask me out?”
“In fairness,” he said, “I wanted to ask you out before I got a bunch of money. But now I can afford to.” He shrugged. “I was just looking for an excuse to sit next to you.”
She bunched her lips and studied him, but he could see the amused grooves at the edges of her eyes, and that optimism he’d felt earlier swelled in his chest.
“Okay,” she said, “but we’re splitting the bill.”
She came from money, a lot of money, her parents owning a thousand or so housing units in less savory neighborhoods around Greater Los Angeles. They had used the purse strings to control her for so long that, she confessed reluctantly over surf ’n’ turf, she’d thought that was just how families worked.
As promised, she insisted on going dutch, but she let him buy dinner the next night back in Los Angeles and the night after that. “No strings attached,” he said when he reached for the bill.
“You mean I don’t have to sleep with you?” she said.
“You don’t even have to make eye contact with me.”
“Thank God,” she said, leaning into him.
It wasn’t a fast and furious courtship, but their lives had slowly vined together. Texts during the day. A change of clothes left in a bottom drawer. Grocery shopping together.
And then more.
They’d been together almost a year when, after a midnight screening of Alien at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, she’d snuggled into him on the picnic blanket and quoted one of their favorite songs: “‘Let’s grow old together and die at the same time.’”
He looked into her eyes and saw what she was really asking. “Prop plane going down over the Serengeti?”
She smiled. “I was thinking tragic scuba accident whilst on geriatric travel tour.”
In the flickering light of the projector there among the cinephiles and tombstones, he’d felt a surge of gratitude so intense it brought tears to his eyes. “Violet McKenna,” he said, finding a knee. “Will you?”
“Hell yeah I will.”
They kissed, and the folks around them, shushing them violently moments before, had burst into applause.
After that, in their occasional overlaps, the Merriweather clan took to Violet. How could they not? In her, it seemed, they’d finally found something to recommend Max. They started inviting him—them—around more, folding him back into the family with Waffle Sundays and Taco Tuesdays. “Don’t screw it up,” his father told him at every parting, nodding at Violet and wearing a smile that wasn’t a smile at all.
On the other hand, Violet’s parents, old money at least by California standards, disliked the idea of the relationship. That meant little to Violet. Between her kindergarten-teacher’s salary and Max’s construction work, they were getting by just fine, freeing her to cut the strings by which her parents had controlled her. If anything, their disapproval lent a Romeo and Juliet sheen to the courtship.
When they’d asked Max to the inevitable brunch at the Sierra Madre Four Seasons, Max agreed, hoping for a fresh start. Once the twelve-dollar orange juice was poured, Clark cleared his throat. “So, Maxwell. What exactly is your angle?”
Sensing now that it would be a short meal, Max folded the starched napkin back along its ironed lines and rested it on his place setting. “My angle is I love your daughter.”
Gwendolyn blinked a few times through the amber-tinted sunglasses that she wore day and night. “If you saw fit to move on, we’d certainly be willing to ease the transition. Maybe buy you a car.”
“A car,” Max repeated, unsure that he’d heard correctly.
“I know it feels quite romantic between the two of you,” she said, sipping her Arnold Palmer, “but we’re from different worlds. Violet’s a complicated girl. How are you going to take care of her? By loving her?”