Beloved Stranger (7 page)

“Are you having the baby christened in Colombia, Rick?” asked Jane Hutchinson.

“Of course. That’s where my family is.”

All of this was news to Susan. They hadn’t even discussed the subject of Ricky’s baptism. Susan had assumed that Ricardo would want him baptized Catholic and she didn’t plan to object. She herself was Congregational, but her family had never been churchgoers. She hadn’t noticed that Ricardo was much of a churchgoer, either, but he had made a point of their being married by a priest.

He might also have made a point of discussing his plans with her, she thought now as she watched his oblivious profile. Her chest felt tight, the way it always did when she was upset. “You never told me we were taking Ricky to Colombia,” she said in a low voice to him a little later in the meal.

He looked surprised. “Of course I did,
querida
. I said we would go to Bogota for Christmas. Don’t you remember?”

“For Christmas. Not for a christening.”

He shrugged and gave her his charming, boyish smile. She was getting to know his expressions very well. This one meant, Oh well, I didn’t think it was important, but if you want to make an issue of it, I’ll humor you. “I didn’t think it mattered to you,” he said patiently. “Would you like your mother to be there? I’ll give her airplane tickets.”

That wasn’t the issue at all. The issue was that she wanted to be consulted before plans were made that involved her and her baby. It wasn’t that she objected to Ricardo’s plan; she just wanted to be part of the decision-making process.

“That’s not it,” she said softly. “We’ll talk about it later, at home.”

He looked a little surprised but then his attention was claimed again by Jane Hutchinson. In a few minutes the conversation had become general.

“You’re different from the girls Rick used to date,” Bev Seelinger said to Susan as they freshened their makeup in the ladies’ room after dinner. “Somehow I knew you would be.”

Susan fought a brief battle with herself and lost. “What kind of girls did he date?” she asked.

“Oh, the tall, sultry model type. But I never for a minute thought he’d marry any of them. In fact, I sometimes wondered if he’d ever marry at all.”

Susan put her comb down and looked curiously at her companion. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” the other woman answered slowly. She flashed Susan a quick grin. “It’s not that he doesn’t like women. God, when I remember how those model types used to be all over him.” Bev frowned. “It’s odd, now I come to think of it, that I never pictured him as married.”

“Perhaps he was too much the playboy type,” Susan said with an effort at lightness. She felt guilty discussing Ricardo like this. She felt almost that she was betraying his privacy. But she couldn’t help herself. She knew so little, even now, about this man she had married.

“No,” Bev was saying decisively. “That’s not it. He certainly had a lot of girlfriends, and he certainly has a sex appeal that would knock over your eighty-year-old maiden aunt if he turned it on her, but that’s not it. It’s just that—somehow, one always sees Rick as essentially alone.”

Susan stared at Bev’s healthy, outdoor face. It was not the face of a deeply perceptive woman but, Susan suddenly realized, that was what she was. “Yes,” she said softly after a minute, “I know what you mean.”

Bev smiled at her gratefully. “I don’t know what got me started on this topic. I hope you don’t feel I’ve been out of line.”

“No, of course I don’t.” Susan put her comb back in her purse. “Are you ready? Shall we go?”

Susan thought about what Bev had said as the evening progressed to after-dinner drinks and a three-piece band for dancing. As she had watched the World Series on TV and read the ecstatic press reports, she had tried to comprehend, to analyze, the astonishing popularity of her husband. It was not just his baseball talent—other men were equally talented, she thought. It was something about him, something inherent in his character, that made him what he was: Rick Montoya, American idol.

She watched him now, relaxed and laughing among his teammates, and even here he stood out. He was one of them but he was still, always and incontestably, his own man, invincibly private behind all the outward good cheer. Susan, always deeply sensitive to the vibrations of another spirit, had long apprehended this solitariness in her husband. It was the thing in him that most frustrated and fascinated her.

“Dance with me?” Ricardo’s voice broke into her reverie and she looked up into his dark eyes.

“Of course.”

He took her hand and they moved out onto the floor. The band was playing “Moon River,” and Ricardo’s arms came around her and held her close. She had not been this close to him since that night in the blizzard, the night Ricky had been conceived. His body felt so strong against hers, so big. The music was slow and dreamy and she relaxed against him, supple and light, following his slightest move effortlessly. When the song was over he looked down at her, his eyes warm and very dark. “That was nice,” he said softly. She didn’t answer and the band began another slow song. “Again?” he asked, and she nodded and moved back into his arms. “What a shame we have to wait three more weeks,” he murmured against the silky softness of her hair. And at that moment, seduced by the intense magnetism of his nearness, Susan had to agree.

Chapter Six

“I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” Susan wrote in her journal one evening two weeks after the dinner in New York, “but I can’t seem to organize my life and get down to writing anything. There’s no excuse, really. Maria does the housework and a great deal of the cooking. I only have the baby to deal with. But somehow there never seems to be any time.”

She sighed and looked out the window. The main problem, she thought, was Ricardo. He had spent the last few weeks building shelves in the baby’s room and he had had the foundation poured for an addition to the garage. He had come home a week ago with a new Volvo station wagon for her, which needed garage space as the present two-car garage housed Ricardo’s Mercedes and the new sports car he had won as MVP of the World Series. When they got back from Bogota he was going to have the new garage addition framed out and then he would finish it himself.

All of these were Ricardo’s projects but they seemed to eat incessantly into Susan’s time. He needed someone to hold his hammer, to hold a board straight, to run to the store for sandpaper. She had to drive the new Volvo over half of Connecticut before he was satisfied she was competent to handle it alone. She wondered sometimes if it wasn’t his strategy to keep her so occupied that there wasn’t room in her life for anything else.

“The problem is,” she wrote reflectively, “that I don’t feel confident enough to demand time for myself. Who am I to say I’m a writer? Who am I to say I need time away from my husband, my child? Who am I—a mediocre scholar, a shotgun wife—to make any kind of demand of Ricardo? And yet—I feel I must make it, that if I don’t, I’ll suffocate.”

She was sitting at the desk in her bedroom and now the lights of a car caught her attention as they swung into the drive. Ricardo was home.

Ricardo was home and she would go downstairs to greet him, to ask him about his dinner, about his speech, about the people he had seen. He would smile at her good-naturedly, that famous ingratiating grin that had charmed millions, and shortly afterward she would go to bed in her own private room.

Next week, of course, she would see the doctor and all of that would change.

It frightened her, the prospect of sleeping with him again. He had seemed so confident these last two weeks, so toughly competent in all his undertakings, so calmly dominant where she was concerned. And yet he scarcely touched her, never kissed her. She didn’t like to admit it, but she was afraid of him. She was afraid, inexplicably, of his maleness, his capability, his way of “dealing” with her. When the time came he would take her to bed with the same casual expertise with which he did everything else. He would impose his own implacable reality upon the hazy memory of that night in New Hampshire, and she was afraid he would destroy it. For some peculiar reason she was unable to associate the Ricardo she knew with the Ricardo of that night. They seemed two separate and distinct people. She felt as if she would be going to bed with a stranger.

* * * *

“You’re just fine, Mrs. Montoya,” the doctor told her reassuringly. “You can resume sex without any problem. Would you like me to give you a prescription for birth-control pills?”

Susan said yes and then had the prescription filled before she drove home. She also stopped at Lord and Taylor and did a little shopping. Ricardo was speaking at a Little League sports dinner that evening and Susan wanted him to be gone before she arrived home, so she delayed for as long as she could.

She was successful; the sports car was gone when she peeked into the garage before going into the house. Maria was waiting, ready to go home, and Ricky was indignant because his dinner had been delayed.

It was a very long night. Susan fed Ricky and put him to bed, then, knowing it would be impossible for her to write, she switched on the TV. At eleven she fed Ricky once again, took a shower and got into bed. Her room seemed very large and very strange. They had moved the baby’s crib into the nursery a few days ago and she was alone. She closed her eyes and tried to go to sleep, but all her muscles were tense with waiting. At twelve-thirty she heard the sound of Ricardo’s car on the drive.

It seemed forever before his feet sounded on the stairs. Then the door to her room opened and closed and Ricardo was standing there, his shoulders against it, motionless in the dim glow from the night-light Susan kept burning so she could see if she had to get up with the baby. His face was shadowed and he did not speak—or maybe it was that she could not hear him above the thudding of her heart. Then he came across the room and stood, towering, next to the bed. He said her name.

“Yes?” She hoped, desperately, that she sounded sleepy. “What do you want, Ricardo?”

“Really, Susan, what a question.” He sounded amused.

She was aware of him standing there with every pore of her body. “How was your dinner?” she asked, and sat up, pushing her hair out of her face.

“I don’t want to talk about my dinner,” he said softly, and sat down on the bed next to her. “How did your checkup go?”

“All right.” Her voice sounded squeaky in her own ears. “He said I’m okay.”

“Now that is very good news.” He raised a hand and lifted the hair from her neck. “It’s been a very long wait,” he said, and let the pale silky strands slide through his fingers.

“Ricardo.” She moistened her lips with her tongue. “It’s been a long day and I’m tired. Perhaps we could wait. . . .”

Her voice trailed off. He was taking off his suit jacket and undoing his tie. “No,
querida
,” he said. “We can’t wait.” He dropped the jacket and tie on the floor and started in on the buttons of his blue dress shirt. In a minute the shirt had followed the rest of his clothes to the floor.

“They’ll get all wrinkled,” Susan croaked out of a dry throat. His bare chest and shoulders looked enormous in the dim light of her bedroom.

“It doesn’t matter,” he answered impatiently, and began to unbuckle his belt. Susan shivered and dragged her eyes away from him. She was breathing very quickly.

I’m being stupid, she told herself. It will be wonderful, just as it was the first time. The bed creaked as it took the brunt of his weight and her eyes flew up to his face. For the first time he seemed to apprehend that something was wrong.

“Susan,” he said. “
Querida
.” His voice was deep, caressing. “You aren’t afraid of me?”

It was the voice of the blizzard. “Ricardo,” she said uncertainly, and he answered, “Shh, little one. It will be all right.” And he bent his head and kissed her.

It was an infinitely gentle kiss, infinitely sweet. After a moment he eased her back against the mattress and stretched out beside her, gathering her close against him. She remembered instantly the feel of his body and slowly her arms curved up to hold him. “Susan,” he said in her ear. His mouth brushed her cheek, her temple. “
Dios
, but it has been a long wait.”

She arched her head back to look up at him. “Did you mind?” she asked wonderingly.

He made a sound deep down in his throat. “I am a man,” he said. “Of course I minded.”

“Oh,” breathed Susan, and then he kissed her again. Her lips softened under his and immediately the kiss became more forceful, his mouth opening hungrily on hers in an erotic demand she recognized and involuntarily surrendered to.

It was like nothing else in the world, the feel of Ricardo’s rough callused hands, so incredibly sure and delicate on her body. She melted before the magic of it, opening for him as a flower opens to the warmth of the sun. He seemed to sense the magnitude of her surrender, for his gentle caresses became something more. She had the dizzy feeling of being violently overthrown and mastered, and then, astonishing, her own passion came beating up, answering strongly to his, overwhelming and all-encompassing. When it was over they lay still, locked together, not ready yet to return to their separate identities.

It was he who spoke first. “Do you know why I never tried to see you after that night in New Hampshire?”

His breath lightly stirred the silky hair on her temple. His voice was so soft, so deep, it penetrated her nerves. “No,” she answered on a bare breath of sound.

“It was because I didn’t want to spoil the memory of that night, and I was afraid that if we met again it would never seem the same.” He chuckled. “It was rather like something out of a medieval romance, you must admit: the night, the storm, the beautiful young virgin.”

She had never suspected him capable of such profound romanticism. “I know,” she whispered. “It was—you said it was magic.”

“It was.” He rubbed his cheek against her hair. “I expected you to turn into a unicorn the next morning and gallop off into the mountains.”

She sighed. “And instead I turned into a very pregnant lady whom you had to marry.”