sentence at times.
“No,” Jeremy said tersely, “Kelly. I kept asking her what was wrong, but she wouldn’t tell me or couldn’t tell me. From Seattle to here, she just cried and cried.”
I felt a rush of impatience. It seemed to me that sometimes twenty-something daughters and tantrum- throwing toddlers had a lot in common. After all, I hadn’t put all kinds of roadblocks in the way of Kelly’s romance with Jeremy, one that, to all outside observers, had seemed destined to fail. Now here she was raising hell over my relationship with Mel. It didn’t seem fair. If I was willing to treat her as an adult, didn’t I deserve the same courtesy? And eight straight hours of crying seemed to be overdoing it.
“Look, Jeremy,” I said. “This makes no sense. Kelly’s mother and I divorced years ago. Karen’s been dead for almost four years now, and I can’t for the life of me imagine why, all of a sudden, Kelly should take such an intense dislike to Mel. I mean, last weekend everything was hunky-dory. Now, less than a week later, Mel is evil personified. How can that be?”
“I don’t understand it either,” Jeremy agreed miserably. “Gotta go.” He hung up, just like that. Obviously Kelly had finished putting the kids to bed.
“What was that all about?” Mel asked as we climbed into the Mercedes.
I shook my head. “Kelly’s still mad at me, I guess, but she’ll just have to get used to it. I’m not giving you up.”
Mel gave me a radiant smile. “Good,” she said. “I’m glad to hear it.”
“Now tell me about tonight,” I said. “What am I in for exactly?”
“The pre-gathering gathering is in the Presidential Suite up on the thirty-fourth floor of the Sheraton,” Mel told me. “That’s for SASAC board members and their spouses and/or partners only. It’s the time when we all stand around having drinks and congratulating ourselves on what a great job we did. Then, at eight, we’ll go downstairs for the fund-raising banquet itself. That’s in the ballroom.”
My tux, which had fit perfectly only a few short minutes before, suddenly felt too tight. “I’m going to a cocktail party?” I groused. “Oh, goody.”
“I talked to the catering staff,” Mel assured me. “They’ll definitely have nonalcoholic beverages available.”
“Right,” I muttered. “I can just imagine. God save me from the nincompoop who invented virgin margaritas.”
Back in my drinking days I pretty much regarded myself as the life of any given party-after I’d had a couple of shots of McNaughton’s, that is. Give me enough booze, and I’d overcome my natural aversion to small talk. I could chitchat away with the best of them, and swap off-color jokes with wild abandon. I always thought my party behavior above reproach, although, if my first wife were still alive, I’m sure Karen would have a few choice words on the subject.
Riding the elevator up to the Sheraton’s Presidential Suite without having had the benefit of any liquid courage I found myself having second thoughts about the whole thing-second thoughts and very damp palms. Mel must have been reading my mind, or maybe she noticed my hands were so sweaty I could barely manage the elevator buttons.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “It’s going to be fine.”
And it was. I stepped into the spacious but crowded room and discovered, to my immense relief, that I was properly attired. Thanks to Mel’s timely intervention, my tuxedo held its own with every other tuxedo in the room. That definitely improved my outlook. And Mel didn’t just measure up to the other women-she outshone most of them. That made me feel even better.
She knew everyone, of course, and was immediately caught up in first one conversation and then another. Wanting to make myself useful, I wandered over to the bar and ordered a tonic with a twist for me and a glass of Merlot for her. Then I settled in by the windows and stared out over the surrounding glowing high-rises to the distant darkened mass of Elliott Bay, twinkling now with moving ferries and a border of reflected city lights.
“Great view, isn’t it?” someone said.
I turned to look. The man standing beside me was about my age and size. Since there were no conveniently placed tables, he, too, was holding two drinks-a rocks glass with an amber liquid that was probably Scotch and a glass of white wine.
“Name’s Beaumont,” I told him. “J. P. Beaumont. Since we both seem to be functioning as window dressing at the moment, I guess we’ll have to shake hands later.”
The man chuckled. “Cal Lowman,” he said. “You’d think they’d be able to spring for a couple of tables at things like this so we wouldn’t have to stand around looking like a pair of idiots. I always wanted to be a drink stand when I grew up, didn’t you?”
Cal Lowman was a name I recognized. He was a senior partner with one of the big-deal corporate law firms in town-Henderson, Lowman, Richards, and Potts.
I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood, raised by a single mother who supported us by working as a seamstress. She made a meager living by sewing knock-off copies of designer dresses for Seattle’s social elite. All through grade school I had to endure endless teasing over showing up each day in one or another of my mother’s homemade shirts. Eventually I fought back, winning some and losing some and being sent to the principal’s office on an almost daily basis. The fights didn’t stop for good until I was in high school and was old enough to get an after-school job at the local theater. Only then did I achieve the pinnacle of sophistication by showing up at school in a store-bought shirt.
But America’s a great place. Here I was, decades later, having a tuxedo-clad male bonding conversation with one of Seattle’s prime movers and shakers.
“Your wife’s on the board?” Lowman asked.
This is one of the reasons I’m no good at chitchat. If I couldn’t explain Mel Soames’s position in my life to my children, how would I manage with this stranger? Mel most definitely was not my wife, but the more dispassionately accurate U.S. Census Bureau term, POSSLQ-a person of opposite sex sharing living quarters-just didn’t do it for me. And we were both far too long of tooth for the old standby terms of boyfriend/girlfriend to apply.
“Mel Soames is my partner,” I said finally. “And yes, she’s on the board.”
Just then the woman we had met days earlier at the California Pizza Kitchen arrived on the scene. She was dazzling in a strapless green silk gown topped by an amazing emerald necklace. “Hello, there,” she said to me. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.” Then, reaching past me, she collected the glass of wine Cal Lowman had been holding.
“So you’ve already met my Anita?” Cal asked with a possessive smile.
As I said, Cal was about my age. Mel is fifteen years younger than I am, and this delectable piece of arm candy was far younger than that.
I brushed off my conversational skills as best I could and tried to measure up. “Briefly,” I said. “But I’m not up on exactly what you do.”
“I’m retired,” Anita told me, sipping her wine. “And trying to make the world a better place. That’s why I started the SASAC in the first place.” She turned to Cal. “Okay,” she said, “time to go to work. There’s someone I want you to meet.”
She dragged him away so unceremoniously that I was surprised Cal didn’t object. Their abrupt departure left me wearing the conversational equivalent of two left feet.
About that time Mel showed up and relieved me of her glass of wine. “So let me guess,” I said, nodding in Anita and Cal’s direction. “Now that Anita’s hooked up with a sugar daddy like Cal Lowman she can forgo working for a living and can afford to devote herself to charity.”
Mel gave me a bemused look. “There you go,” she said. “You’ve fallen back into that age-old trap of gender stereotyping. You’ve got this story upside down and backward. If anybody’s a sugar daddy, it would have to be Anita. She left Microsoft at age thirty-three with a pocketful of loot. That’s where she met Cal-at Microsoft. She plucked him off Microsoft’s team of corporate legal beagles and took him home to play house. A lot like you and me, babe; only, in our case, you’re the one with the moolah. Anita could probably buy and sell Cal Lowman a dozen times over.”
That’s when it came home to me. Times had changed; women had changed. My second wife, Anne Corley, had died and left me with an armload of money, but tux or not, I was still that unsophisticated hick from Ballard. No
