“This is also a man,” Bella replied, glancing at her. “What’s with you tonight? You nervous about meeting Ada?”
“Should I be? I don’t know her films.”
“She was one of my heroes when I was a girl,” Bella recalled, her face creasing into a smile. “So smart and gutsy and beautiful. Her husband, Luther, was a very fine playwright. The two of them were hounded out of the country by those thugs during the McCarthy era. That was a terrible time, Desiree. A girlfriend of mine whose father wrote for the radio, he ended up committing suicide.” She peered at Des shrewdly. “What is it then?”
“What is what?”
“You’re acting meshuga tonight.”
“Am not. I’m just in a rush.”
“Whatever you say,” Bella said doubtfully. “Have fun.”
“I’ll do my best.” Des was halfway to the door, car keys in hand, before she came back and said, “It’s Mitch. I think he has a problem with our relationship.”
“Tie that bull outside, as we used to say on Nostrand Avenue.”
“Bella, I have never understood what that expression means.”
“Well, what’s the problem-is it the lovemaking?”
“God, no. He’s still the Wonder from Down Under. But the man has something serious on his mind, Bella. He keeps getting all quiet and far away. Which I’m, like, he is never.”
“Maybe it’s that book he’s been trying to write. How is that going?”
“It’s not, near as I can tell.”
“Then that’s probably it. Men can get very strange when their work isn’t going well.”
“Men can get very strange come rain or come shine. But it’s not the book, Bella. His words say otherwise.”
“Why, what did he say?”
Des took a deep breath before she replied, “He said, and I quote, ‘I wonder if we’re getting in too deep.’”
Bella’s face dropped. “Oh, I see… And what did you say?”
“I said, ‘Why, do you think we are?’ To which he replied, and I quote, ‘It could certainly appear that way.’ To which I said, ‘Appear that way to whom?’”
“Hold on, you actually said to whom?”
“I did. This girl’s got herself a proper education.”
“And what did Mitch say to that?”
“Jack. Not one damned word.”
Bella considered this carefully. “Desiree, I’m not necessarily hearing qualms here. Mitch could simply be trying to engage you in a dialogue about your feelings.”
“No sale. If he’s not getting cold feet, then why raise it at all?”
“You do have a point,” Bella admitted, sticking out her lower lip.
“Besides, when we first got together we swore we’d never do this.”
“Do what?”
“There are two subjects we agreed that we’d never, ever obsess about-our slight cultural differences and our future. That’s written in stone, Bella. It’s a rule.”
“Tattela, we’re talking about a relationship here, not a nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Rules like that are made to be broken.”
“Not by me they’re not.”
“Okay, here’s a kooky idea-have you tried talking to him about it?”
“I can’t. I get all uptight and then I start feeling this horrible panic thing coming on that I haven’t had since I was fourteen. And, excuse me, but kooky?”
“So I’m not hip. Shoot me.” Bella furrowed her brow. “What kind of panic thing are we talking about?”
“We’re not talking about it.”
“Why not?”
“It’s incredibly embarrassing, that’s why not.”
“If you can’t tell me, who can you tell?”
“No one, I’m hoping.” Des stood there jangling her keys. “He’s met someone else, must be. Someone who he has more in common with. Maybe it’s another movie critic. No, no, that can’t be it. They all look like nearsighted mice. At least, that’s what he told me once. But maybe he was lying to me about that. Maybe they all look like Cameron Diaz. Or maybe he lilies nearsighted mice. Or maybe he…” Des stopped and came up for air. “I don’t know who she is, but when I find out I am going to hurt her.”
Bella shook her head at her. “Desiree, that man absolutely adores you, and he’d never give another woman so much as the time of day. He is not Brandon.”
“I do know that.”
“Do you? I don’t think so. If you ask me, you’re still schlepping your baggage around with you like Willy Loman with his sample cases.”
Des shot a hurried look at her watch. Past seven now. “Okay, then how do you explain the dead shark?”
“The dead what?”
“He made me watch Annie Hall with him last week-I’d never seen it before.”
“Did you like it?”
“It was okay, if you like watching white people whine for two hours. But there’s this scene with Diane Keaton on the airplane, when Woody says that a relationship is like a shark, it has to keep moving forward or it dies. ‘What we have on our hands is a dead shark,’ is what he says.”
“I remember the scene,” Bella said, nodding.
“Why did Mitch pick that movie for us to watch?”
“It’s a classic.”
“World’s full of them.”
“It’s very romantic.”
“Bella, it compares true love to a killing machine.”
“He screened Psycho for you a couple of weeks ago, did he not?”
“And your point is…?”
“Has he proceeded to hack you to death in the shower with a big knife?”
“No,” Des admitted. “Not yet, anyway.”
“Desiree, I want you to stop and listen to me very carefully,” Bella said sternly. “You have to believe in him. You have to believe in the two of you. If you don’t, you’re going to sabotage the best thing that’s ever happened to you, and you won’t have anyone to blame but yourself.”
“Bella, I’m not sabotaging anything,” she insisted. “And I’m not playing a head game. I know the signs. I know the man. I know where this is heading.” Des drew in her breath, her chest tightening. “Mitch Berger is getting ready to break my heart. And when he does, you may as well just dig me a hole and shove me in, because I am not going to survive. Not this one. I will die. Hear me? I will absolutely die.”
CHAPTER 3
Astrid’s Castle was perched high atop an exposed granite cliff that overlooked the Connecticut River about ten miles upriver from the village of Dorset. For drivers heading north to Boston on Interstate 95, the immense stone replica of a medieval fortress was hard to miss, looming there as it did above the river, so majestic, so improbable, so floodlit. Many people, especially those who wrote travel brochures for the state’s tourism office, thought Astrid’s looked like something straight out of a fairy tale.
Mitch thought it looked more like the main attraction of Six Flags Dorset. If such a place existed. Which, happily, it did not.
A gate with stone pillars marked its entrance on Route 156. During the summer, when tourists flocked to the
