The Seduction of Goody Two-Shoes

a long time ago, when I was…”

“Married?” Ellie ventured when he left it unfinished. Then, momentarily emboldened by his soft affirming chuckle, she got as far as, “How did-” before stopping herself with a hand clapped across her mouth. “Sorry,” she mumbled, more resentful than contrite. “Forgot myself there for a minute.”

She listened to the night’s sounds…the rustle of breezes in tropical foliage, the far-off barking of a dog. The faint sound of a throat being cleared. She pushed abruptly away from the arch and let out her breath in an exasperated rush. “Dammit, McCall. I don’t think I’m a nosy person. Really. I mean, it’s normal for strangers forced together by circumstances to ask each other questions. It’s not prying, it’s…it’s just trying to find a common ground. Like, ‘What do you do for a living? Where are you from? Are you married? Have any kids? Read any good books lately?’ Then you go from there. Maybe you find out you don’t have anything in common with this person and you never want to see them again as long as you live. Or, maybe you hit it off and you’ve made a new friend. How are you ever going to know if you don’t talk? ”

There was a long pause. Then, just as Ellie was uttering a whimper of pure frustration, the raspy voice came again. “Maybe I just like to maintain an air of mystery.” Definitely amused.

Ellie’s frustration morphed into a kind of cautious joy. A little frisson of excitement shivered through her, finding its way into her voice. “You mean, like Batman?”

The cigarette’s ember arced away into the night, exploding in a tiny shower of sparks as it made contact with the ground. “Batman?” The chuckle seemed easier this time, though loaded with irony. “A superhero? Not hardly.”

“Hey, if you don’t want me to know the real story, you could always make something up,” Ellie suggested. “Then, I’ll tell you something back-”

“Make up something, you mean?”

“Maybe. Who knows?”

“So we stand here and tell each other lies.”

“At least we’d be speaking.” But she felt breathless, suddenly, and not from laughter. And a peculiar shaking deep inside. Did he know? Could he read her so easily? Liar liar, pants on fire…

For a moment there while they’d been talking she’d begun to move closer to him, as if words were an invisible line pulling them together in the alienating darkness. Now she saw the space between them as a zone of safety and shrank back into it, the darkness an ally, protection for her own lies. Necessary lies, she told herself. It wasn’t as if she had any choice.

“For instance,” she went on, but too quickly, her voice too light and too glib, “you could tell me how you and your wife were childhood sweethearts, and she died tragically when she fell overboard on your honeymoon cruise, and that’s why you don’t have any children, and ever since-”

“Nothing so romantic, I’m afraid,” he interrupted dryly. “My wife and I met in college. We’re divorced. Not having kids was a mutual decision-a wise one, as it turned out.”

“Ah,” said Ellie. A dozen new questions were buzzing around in her brain. College? You went to college? Where? How long were you married? Why didn’t you want kids? Was it the divorce that brought you here? Then she remembered. “Is that the true story?” she asked suspiciously. “Or did you make it up?”

“Ah, but that’s the question, isn’t it?” His chuckle was soft and dry as the wind in the bird-of-paradise. “That’s the trouble with lies-after the first one, you can’t ever know what to believe.”

Now it was Ellie who had nothing to say. And suddenly, inexplicably, there were tears welling up in her eyes- where had they come from? Rose Ellen Lanagan was not and never had been a crybaby! But she’d never felt this overwhelming sense of loss and loneliness, either-an intense longing for something she couldn’t even put a name to, but which she knew for certain did not involve lies.

“Your turn,” McCall said softly.

“I beg your pardon?” Ellie mumbled. Had he asked her a question? She’d no idea what.

“Your husband. You told me his name-my name now, I suppose-is Ken.”

“Right,” said Ellie, trying surreptitiously to stop her nose from running without resorting to a telltale sniff. “Ken Burnside.”

“And that the two of you own a pet shop in Portland, Oregon.” There was a pause. “So…if you grew up on a farm in Iowa, how did you two meet?”

“At a ‘Save the Whales’ rally,” Ellie returned instantly-defiantly. Well, it could have been true, dammit!

She heard him mutter, laughing, under his breath. Something that sounded like “Goody Two-Shoes,” and then, “Figures…”

Goody Two-Shoes? Why did he always say that? She sucked in a breath, feeling vaguely insulted and gravely misunderstood. But after holding the breath for a half-dozen or so pulse-pounding beats, she let it out without a sound. What did it matter what he thought of her? The man obviously had no interest in knowing who she really was-even if she’d been free to tell him. She’d bent over backward to be friendly, and he didn’t seem to want to meet her even halfway-which was particularly hard for her to swallow, since she’d always been the kind of person who made friends easily wherever she went. People just naturally liked Ellie Lanagan. Most people. Apparently not this person. Was that why it bothered her so much? Some perversity in her nature, some contrary streak that caused her to be attracted to the one person seemingly immune to her charms?

There. I said it: I am attracted to him. I’m fiercely attracted to a scruffy and somewhat mysterious beach-bum-slash-artist-slash-social-dropout I know only as McCall.

It was almost a relief to admit it. She felt better immediately, though perhaps a little shaky-rather as if she’d finally pulled out a painfully inflamed splinter.

That’s all it is, she thought. Just an attraction. I’ve had them before, though probably never one as dumb as this. Now I can laugh at myself and put it aside. Concentrate on the job ahead of me. Keep my wits about me. Now I can sleep.

“Well,” she said abruptly, “I believe I’ll give that couch another try. Good night, McCall.”

She heard a click, a faint hiss and crackle, and then a soft and ironic, “Good night…Mrs. Burnside.”

After she’d gone back inside, McCall sat for a long time on his bedroom windowsill, smoking and watching the moon rise out of Tropical Storm Paulette’s cloudy veil, contemplating the nature of lust and sin. And, like most people confronted with their own guilt, trying as hard as he could to rationalize it.

Well, hell, he told himself, how was he supposed to remember she was a married woman when she kept forgetting to act like one? Not that she’d openly flirted with him, or done anything overtly improper-besides kissing him, of course, and there’d been extenuating circumstances for that. No, it wasn’t so much what she’d done, as what she didn’t do. She didn’t talk about her husband, for one thing. Every married woman he’d ever met, happy or unhappy, it seemed like they couldn’t seem to get a complete sentence out without mentioning hubby one way or another. It was, “my husband says this,” or “my husband does that.” This woman almost never brought up her husband’s name, unless McCall did so first, and when he did, she’d blush. And that was another thing. It was true that, in McCall’s experience at least, women in love generally tended to light up when speaking of their beloved. But with sort of a happy glow, not going all flustered like this woman did, as if she were embarrassed by even the suggestion of such intimacy.

No, he thought, there was definitely something not quite right with the Burnsides.

Not that it was any of McCall’s business. Happy or unhappy, right or not right, he didn’t get involved with married women. End of story.

Which brought him back to his internal debate on the nature of lust and of sin. For various reasons, McCall wasn’t big on religion, but he did believe wholeheartedly in the concept of sin. Hey, there was right, and there was wrong, no getting around that. And no matter how hard a man might try to get around it, in his heart he mostly always knew the difference. Which was why, at the moment, he was having a little argument with himself over whether lusting after a married woman in his heart was actually a sin. Oh, sure, according to the gospel and Jimmy Carter, thinking was supposed to be the same as doing, but given the nature of human beings, McCall was pretty sure there’d be quite a bit of slack involved there. He figured a man was in the clear as long as he didn’t do anything about his thoughts. Okay, there was that commandment-he couldn’t