'Nothing you should know,' I said. 'But it will mean something to her. And, hopefully, if it should fall into her husband's hands, it won't mean much to him.'
I could see that she liked the conspiratorial overtones. Fall into her husband's hands pleased her.
'Okay,' she said. 'I'll do it.'
The purpose of the lunch was over, but I felt I owed her the full treatment, so I stayed on with her through several more glasses of wine, and increasingly flirtatious small talk. When I finally got her home, she was quite drunk. Much too drunk to conceal her disappointment when I said I wouldn't stay. I felt kind of bad about that, but I guess it was better than having her eager to get rid of me.
'Will you call again?' she said.
'Absolutely,' I said.
'Being divorced sucks,' she said.
'I've heard.'
'Nothing out there but jerks.'
'Heard that too.'
'I had a nice time,' she said.
'Me too,' I said. 'I'll call.'
She put her arms around my neck and stood on tiptoe and gave me a hard open mouth kiss. I did the best I could with it. It would have been ungentlemanly not to respond. Driving back to Boston over the bridge I felt like I may have been guilty of some kind of molestation myself. I decided that when this was over, I'd take her to lunch again. The decision made me feel better. But not a lot.
chapter twenty-nine
SUSAN CAME OVER to my place and Pearl came with her. I had promised to make steak salad and biscuits, and Pearl had apparently got wind of it. She gave me several wet kisses, then raced around my apartment nosing in every place that it was possible to conceal a steak salad. Finally she gave up and hopped onto the couch and turned around three times and lay down.
'Now it's your turn,' I said to Susan.
'Do you mind if I don't sniff behind the bookcase?' she said.
I settled for the several kisses. When that was done, Susan sat on one of the stools at my kitchen counter and poured half a glass of Merlot. She had come from work so she looked very professional in a tan suit.
'We haven't had steak salad in a long time,' she said.
'Well,' I said, 'call me crazy, but I tire of tofu.'
'Fickle,' she said.
I was drinking a bottle of beer.
'I like this Merlot,' Susan said.
'It's Meridien,' I said. 'When we were in Santa Barbara we used to look at its vineyards from the top of that hill we used to run.'
The steak was grilling. I was cutting mushrooms and sweet peppers and celery and scallions with a large knife on a white Fiberglas cutting board.
'In some ways that was the hardest time we've ever had,' Susan said, 'Santa Barbara and all that went with it. But I kind of miss it.'
I turned the steaks on the grill with some tongs.
'I was pretty dependent on you when we first got out there,' I said.
'Well, of course you were,' Susan said. 'You'd been shot and nearly died.'
'That does increase dependency, I suppose.'
There was a lot of activity on my couch. Pearl was rooting the pillows around trying for a better lie. She finally found one that satisfied her and she settled into it with a sigh.
Susan got up from the counter, took her wine glass, walked to the front windows in the living room, and looked down at Marlborough Street. During the fall last year, when fresh corn was a glut on the table, I had wrapped and frozen any ears left over during the time of plenty. Now that fresh corn would be more valuable than ambergris, I couldn't wait to take out a couple of frozen ears and use them. They weren't good as corn on the cob, but thawed and cut from the cob, the kernels were a lot better than the perfect and nearly tasteless ones they sell in the store. I picked up one of the ears I'd defrosted and began to cut the kernels off.
'Magnolias are out,' Susan said from the window.
'Every year,' I said.
I scraped the cut corn into a small bowl, sprinkled it with very little sugar and some chopped cilantro, and put it aside.
'I wonder if my fondness for Santa Barbara might have had something to do with your dependence,' Susan said.
'Well, I was sure at my least,' I said.
'Physically,' Susan said. 'You were, and that maybe is what I'm responding to now. But in some ways you
