His home is almost exactly as I’d expected. The top floor in a towering glass high-rise. There is a majestic view of English Bay on one side, Coal Harbour on the other. Whispers of ocean and far mountains beyond. Everything is as I’d seen it at sea level, but from here it is dwarfed to perfect miniature. It is beautiful.
“Do Vancouver views get any better than this?” I ask.
“Not much,” he admits. “That’s how I ended up here.”
“It’s all about the view?”
“Sure. And the jetted tub. Check it out.” He leads me to three bathrooms, one after the other, each more exquisite than the last.
“Multiple bedrooms, as well.” he says with a leer. “You can take your pick.”
“I’ll want one close to where you are,” I quip back, a line he finds uproariously funny.
We have a lovely day, followed by a relaxed evening. He makes us dinner: some confection he calls his specialty that involves pasta and spinach. And cheese. He pours us glasses of twenty-year-old wine and we perch on stools at a counter in the kitchen that affords us a stunning view of the city. Sunset followed by nighttime cityscape. And all of it is breathtaking. All of it takes my breath away.
“So beautiful you could die.”
He looks at me sharply. “What is it with you and dying all the time?” he says, and I can’t read his voice.
“I … I don’t know. I’ve … I’ve lost people. I guess that’s what it is. It brings it closer. Makes it more real.”
“Your husband,” he says.
“Yes. Him … and others. Listen, I’m enjoying myself so much with you. I don’t really want to talk about this now, okay?”
“Sometime maybe?”
“Yes. Okay. Sometime. Maybe.”
We both know it is a lie.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
IN THE MORNING I wake up alone. I’m disoriented momentarily, but it all comes back to me quickly. I am in a glamorous cave a quarter mile above downtown Vancouver, Canada.
I am in a large and comfortable bed. The sheets are impossibly luxurious: thick and soft at the same time. White. And covered with a white duvet. It is like resting inside a cloud.
I don’t know right away what has woken me. When I realize, my stomach responds instantly. Coffee. Bacon. Onions. Other good things. I was not hungry, and then I am.
He has left his robe at the foot of the bed for me. Huge and white, a spa robe several sizes too large for me, and so I move towards the kitchen, now encased in yet another cloud.
“Good morning, beautiful.” His face lights in a smile when he sees me. My heart flips a little in my chest in response to that light. One can wait a lifetime for a glance like that. “My robe looks good on you.”
“Too big.”
“Made for you,” he says, pushing away from the stove quickly and enfolding me in his arms. “Made just for you.”
We end up back in bed before we get around to breakfast. After a while, he gets up to go to the office. He eats cold food on his way out the door, but before he leaves, he drops a kiss on my forehead and a key fob on the bed.
“Make yourself at home. And if you feel like it this evening, there’s a new restaurant I’ve been wanting to check out. You’re a good excuse.”
“Again, with the excuses. I don’t know how I feel about that.”
“Dork,” he accuses.
“And the key,” I say, ignoring his crack. “Aren’t you afraid I’ll rob you blind?”
“Not particularly. As far as I can see, you’re the most precious of the contents of this apartment.”
I just look at him, my heart in its own cloud. I don’t know what to say and a part of me feels dangerously close to tears.
Without him in the space to warm it, the apartment is even more massive. I drink the coffee he left for me and nibble on the cold eggs and bacon, then roam around the space dwarfed by his bathrobe, looking at his stuff.
He has a sort of media room, and I imagine some overpriced decorator determining it should have a sports theme. I wonder if the signed balls under glass or the framed signed jerseys were his own acquisitions or some decorator’s buy. It seems to me it matters. It speaks either of a personal passion or an urge to impress. I am curious which one it is.
Not that it will matter in the end—I remind myself of that. I have to keep reminding myself.
I turn on the television, then spend a quarter hour figuring out how to make the channels work, remembering a time when there was only on and off.
When I finally locate the channels, the first thing I see is his face. The other him. The one I’d briefly forgotten. William Atwater. It fills the sports-sized screen hanging on the wall above the baseballs trapped inside plexiglass. His face is so large and clear on the very good television. Too large and clear. High definition. I can see every pore.
He is beautiful, in his way. I think again how very normal he looks. How guy-next-door. Pale blue eyes, smooth skin marred only slightly by the acne he has yet to outgrow. There is a collar on his shirt and color in his cheeks and there appears to be nothing remarkable about him other than a sort of casual beauty. My stomach turns at the thought of it. How can this be? How can there be people who would do such things walking among us and there is nothing about them to set them apart? I feel as though there should be some visual marker, something off-kilter about his appearance. A scar on his forehead. A brand. Crossed eyes. Not quite a tail or horns, but something. But there is nothing like that. At all.
People would say that about me. The thought
