Frances was cutting. “Horny isn’t an emotion, Anne. It’s a glandular condition of the young, which you are not. Depression isn’t an emotion, either, but many people find therapy and medication a lot more effective than having sex with a college student.”
“He’s not a college student. He’s a teacher at the art college.”
“I don’t give a shit what he is, Anne, it’s not like I’m ever going to be his friend.”
A neighbor walked by with her small dog, looking over at the raised voices. Anne and Frances both nodded and waved, and the neighbor nodded back, then paused for an awkward moment while her dog peed on the lawn. She made the classic eye roll that said, Sorry, my dog’s peeing on your grass, what can you do, I can hardly drag him off trailing piss across the sidewalk, and the two women at the door smiled and waited.
As the lady moved off Anne suddenly sighed and walked away, and Frances turned and shut the door. Back to work, everyone, nothing to see here.
• • •
Across the street, Bill Horton looked up at the sound of a door slamming. Anne Porter was walking away from Frances Bloom’s house, carrying a bag of something. He watched her, noting the cool way she moved, the slenderness of her figure accented by the simple jeans and loose sweater she wore. She was one of those women you couldn’t help noticing, whatever the context. They came in all shapes and sizes these women, the women he mentally labeled “alluring.” It was an old word, a word his father would have used, but it worked. All women could be attractive, many women were sexy, lots and lots of them were appealing and intelligent and funny and loving, but only a select few were like Anne, unreachable and, he mentally shrugged, alluring.
Now she was getting into her car, her hand on the top of the door the last thing he saw; her slender wrist torquing as she lowered herself suddenly filled his mind with the thought of seeing that wrist against a pillow as he pushed himself into her. Her car pulled away, carrying the image with it. He sat back from his desk and laughed at himself. In his forties, currently separated from a woman less timeless than Anne, but much warmer, he hadn’t had sex for nearly a year and sometimes the teenage boy who lived in his dick appeared. He didn’t even like Anne very much; there was something mocking that went along with her elegance, but you didn’t need to like a woman to imagine fucking her. He wondered how different human history would have been had evolution selected for that.
The phone rang, and he knew immediately it was his wife, Julie. Right now they were apart, but for Bill the separation was only physical.
“Hello, you.” Her voice was lovely, as ever; it might have been the thing he missed most about her. He’d always loved listening to her talk: to him, to the guy at the grocery store, to their son, even to their lawyer. Deep and melodious, with a laugh always buried somewhere inside it, it was what he’d been attracted to first. He’d heard her talking to someone else behind the library shelves, and managed to wander around in time to see her. He’d found himself staring at books about accountancy, hoping she would notice him. She had.
“Hello, yourself,” he replied now, a dozen years later, still in love.
“How’s today?”
Bill frowned, trying to remember. “Fine. Frances took him off to school. I’m working on twenty-four seconds of music to go behind a dancing . . . hang on . . .” He looked on his desk for a piece of paper. “. . . a dancing Danish.”
“Danish what?”
“No, just Danish. The pastry.”
His wife laughed, then coughed. “What is it dancing about? Is it happily dancing because it’s thrilled by its frosting, or is it drunkenly dancing alone in the liquor aisle?”
“Is your cough worse?”
“No. Tell me about the Danish.”
Bill sighed. If she didn’t want to talk about something, she wouldn’t. That was the way with her. She was like a cat, his wife, in many ways. Mysterious. Beautiful. Happy to be alone. And totally disinterested in pleasing anyone else unless she wanted to. Not in a mean way, at all, but in a way that didn’t expect anyone to do anything for her, either. He felt a mild frisson of anger, but ignored it. They’d fought hard for a long time, and now they were trying to keep the peace. He certainly wasn’t going to be the one to throw the first stone.
“The people at the agency didn’t give the Danish a backstory. The brief is simply this: ‘The music cue is twenty-four seconds long, should have a polka rhythm, and suggest energy and happiness.’”
Julie snorted. “Well, that’s plenty of background. The Danish enjoys polka music. The Danish is happy. The Danish feels energetic.”
“Which is sad, seeing as, presumably, it’s going to get eaten shortly.”
“Not that one. That one got plucked from obscurity to star in a commercial.”
There was a pause. He could hear her drinking water. “Is the cough really better?”
“I didn’t say it was better, I just said it wasn’t worse. It’s fine, don’t worry about the cough. Tell me about Lucas, what did he say this morning?”
“He repeated his request for a cat.”
“That was all he said?”
“No, he said he doesn’t like Cheerios anymore, then he said he wanted to wear different shoes than the ones I could find, and then, when he had me on the ropes about the shoes, he suddenly zigged and mentioned the cat.”
He could hear her smile. “Are we going to get him one?”
“Maybe. Maybe when you come home.”
A pause. “Or maybe if I don’t.”
“You will.”
“OK.” Bill heard voices in the background. “Hey, Adelaide just showed up. I gotta go.”
“Busy day?”
She sighed. “Same old same old.”
“Will you be able to Skype tonight? Lucas
