Getting Warmer (12 page)

Jonathan put down his glass, leaned over the table and took my free hand. He looked me in the eye. “I’m not seeing anyone else. I don’t want to see anyone else.”

“Okay.” I exhaled.

“The message on my machine—it was from someone I used to go out with. It’s been over a long time, almost a year, but she still . . . for a long time she kept holding out hope. And calling. Pretty much every day. And stopping by unannounced.”

“Was this The Slasher?”

“No, The Slasher was a couple of years ago. This was The Stalker.”

I felt an odd sense of relief. Compared to these women, I was downright normal.

Funny thing about alcohol: it makes you lose your resolve. When we finished the bottle of wine—we were inside and enjoying our salad course at this point—I still hadn’t told Jonathan that I was a high school English teacher. In my defense, though, I hadn’t told him any new lies, which was a warped kind of progress.

“So what about your mother?” I asked him. “Did she ever remarry?”

“Nope. After my father left her for another woman—”

“Younger?”

“Naturally. After that, my mother became a certified man-hater. I can’t count how many times she’s said to me, ‘All men are assholes. Except you, of course.’ She did all right financially, though. When my father left, he didn’t have a lot of liquid assets, so she had to settle for land. In the nineties, she sold it all and bought herself a nice spread in Santa Fe.”

“And what about your father’s third wife?”

“Evil.” He grimaced. “Thought my father had a lot more money than he did because he lived in a huge house that he’d bought for next to nothing. She was always whining about wanting to take a cruise, then after they’d get back from the cruise, she’d whine that they should have taken a better cruise line. She hated me, of course. The way she saw it, money spent on my food and housing could have been put to better use at Saks.”

“Did he go right from her to Krista?”

He shook his head. “No, there was a big gap. Let’s see . . . Janelle and my dad divorced the year I turned nineteen. He left her right before he was set to make a small fortune selling a big parcel in Chandler. After that, he was single for more than ten years. Single-ish, anyway. He had a lot of girlfriends. A couple even moved in with him for a while. But no one got a ring until Krista.”

“And you’re not that crazy about Krista.”

He shrugged. “She’s okay. Could have been worse.”

The waitress came and picked up our empty wine bottle. “Can I get you another?”

We said no and asked for more water. When I finished my water, I’d tell Jonathan the truth.

I never even touched the glass.

Audition notices went up on Tuesday. They were supposed to go up on Monday. My first duty as assistant director was to design and post them, a task that sounded simpler than it was. Creating the flyer was easy: I sat down at the English department computer and typed up the time and place of the auditions. I named the play and listed the available roles.

But when it came time to print, the computer froze up. I had to reboot (which, to me, means “turn it off and turn it back on again”), and by then the document had vanished. I typed it again, saving it on the hard disk this time. I congratulated myself on my foresight when the machine crashed again. I didn’t have to reenter the document. I did, however, have to hunt down a blank CD, finally begging one off Neil Weinrich, the pompous math department head, after assuring him that I would bring in a new, blank disk the next morning. By this time, I had to teach a class.

At lunch, I took the disk to the Media Center, where I successfully managed to send the document to the printer—only to discover that the printer was out of paper. Actually, the whole Media Center was out of the “right kind” of paper, and the Media Center Specialist (what we called “a librarian” in the old days) refused to allow the “wrong kind” of paper into the printer, even though I assured her it wouldn’t do any damage. Lunch was almost over by then, anyway.

In the end, I took some of the “wrong” paper into my classroom and wrote the information out multiple times while my college prep students wrote an in-class essay, the main difference between in-class essays and out-of-class essays being that in-class essays actually got written.

The class, with the exception of Katerina, scurried out the minute the bell rang. She lingered by my desk, talking about
Romeo and Jules.

“I read it over the weekend,” she said. “It was totally amazing.”

“It’s powerful,” I concurred. (I still hadn’t read it.)

“Hey, what’s that?” Robert asked, appearing breathlessly at my desk a full two minutes before the bell. Ever since Katerina had shown up, Robert had been remarkably punctual. For her part, Katerina always hung around my desk until the last possible moment. I wondered whether her chronic lingering should be attributed to her fondness for me or her attraction to Robert. I suspected the latter and felt oddly jealous.

“Audition notices,” I said. “You ever think about acting, Robert?”

He looked at Katerina. “I’ve thought about it,” he said. “It looks fun.”

“Maybe you should audition,” I said.

“Maybe I will,” he said, smiling at Katerina.

 

 

“I think I’ve got a Romeo for you,” I told Lars at lunch.

“No way,” Lars said when I named Robert. “I had that kid last year. Totally unreliable.”

“He’s changed,” I said, unconvincingly. He had yet to turn in a single homework assignment, but at least he’d become punctual.

“He’s a good-looking kid, I’ll give him that.” Lars shrugged. “Let’s see how his reading goes.”

 

 

On Wednesday, I invited Jonathan to dinner at my house, a move I immediately regretted: my parents’ home did not look like an invalid’s house. Besides, I can’t actually cook.

“No problem,” Jill said when I told her. “I have some cold Asian pork salad in my fridge. It’s got ginger, sesame seeds—really tasty. You can have it. Buy some good bread, a bag of salad, and you’re in business.”

“What about salad dressing?”

“I’ll whip some up for you.” Jill had finally stopped making fun of Jonathan’s cowboy boots and pickup truck. “You deserve to be happy,” she’d said.

 

 

When he first arrived at the house, he asked for a tour. I couldn’t say no (though I considered it), but I found myself wishing I had hit a medical supplies store on the way home from work. A safety seat in the bathtub would have been a nice touch.

“I call it ‘Boston meets
Bonanza
,’” I said of the décor. In an effort to be Southwestern, my mother had filled her Spanish-style house with Mexican dishes, terra-cotta planters and dried-chili wreaths. Still, she couldn’t bring herself to part with the furniture she had either inherited from her parents or discovered on antique hunts in Maine: the mahogany dining room set, the camelback sofa, the grandfather clock, the Hummels. The overall effect wasn’t eclectic so much as ambivalent.

As we walked up the stairs, Jonathan took my hand. My heart began to beat faster. I’ve seen enough Lifetime Channel movies to know what it means when a man takes a woman’s hand as they head for the bedroom—except on Lifetime, the scene usually cuts to a Tampax commercial the moment they reach the bedroom door.

It was our fourth date, and everyone knows what that means. Okay, in case you aren’t “anyone,” I’ll tell you: after four dates, if you really, really like someone, you can sleep with him without being what my more streetwise students would affectionately term “a ho.”

However, while Jonathan made my skin tingle and my stomach grow warm, I didn’t think we should sleep together until he knew who I was—assuming he’d still want to, of course.

So, when we reached my bedroom, I halted at the door. “This is where I sleep. Not too exciting.”

He peered beyond the door. “No foreign doll collection? No teddy bears?”

“I had a shelf of ceramic animals. My mother gave them to Goodwill before they moved. I’m still not ready to talk about it.”

Still holding his hand, I guided him down the hall to my parents’ bedroom. “The master suite,” I announced. The walls were burnt orange, a tone my mother chose after Mrs. Gillespie encouraged her to “make a bold statement.” It was bold, all right, but my mother said she felt like she was waking up in a pumpkin every morning.

“My mother’s been asking my father to repaint this room for two years, but he keeps putting it off. She says he secretly likes the color, but mostly I think he just doesn’t want to cut into his golf time.”

“It’s good that she’s so aware, though.” Jonathan put his arm around me. “That she remembers having asked before.”

“Come this way,” I said, leading him below an arch. “I like a bathroom big enough to hold a dinner party in. Check out the double-headed shower.” I blushed, realizing what I seemed to be suggesting—and realizing that I liked the idea.

“Actually, I, um . . .”

“Yes?” My face was burning.

“I need to use the, uh . . .”

“Oh! Right.” I showed him the toilet, which was off by itself in a tiny, dark closet. “I’m going to get dinner going—meet me back in the kitchen.”

Of course, “getting dinner going” meant taking the cold sesame pork out of Jill’s Rubbermaid containers and arranging it artfully in one of my mother’s Mexican bowls. I did the same for the bagged salad. The bread I wrapped in foil and stuck in the oven to warm.

“It looks wonderful,” Jonathan said when he came down a few minutes later. “Where are the dishes? I’ll set the table.”

As he headed for the patio with the dishes, silverware and napkins I’d given him, he said, “There was a scorpion in the bathroom. But don’t worry—I stepped on it.”

“Good thing my mother isn’t here. Scorpions really freak her out.”

A few minutes later, I walked outside to the patio, holding a tray filled with the various bowls. When I saw the table Jonathan had set, I burst out laughing. “Napkin swans?”

“I spend a lot of time in restaurants, remember.” He bowed slightly and pulled out a chair. “Mademoiselle . . .”

A bottle of Riesling sat uncorked on the table. Still standing, Jonathan poured a splash into my glass. I picked it up and sipped. “Fruity, with oaky undertones. Hints of ginger and fig.”

He broke into a grin. “A wine connoisseur. I had no idea.”

“Not really. I’m just good at pretending.” At this, I felt myself flush. I looked down at my glass as Jonathan filled it. Between us, a candle, half-buried in sand, flickered in a glass hurricane. Jonathan sat down and filled his own glass. He swirled the amber liquid around and took a sip, which he held briefly in his mouth before swallowing. “I would have said apricot overtones. Though I agree with you about the fig.”

“Are you faking, too, or do you know what you’re talking about?”

He shrugged. “Professional hazard.”

I touched my swan napkin. “How did you do this, anyway?”

He picked up his own napkin with two fingers. With a flick, it was a napkin again. “The napkin has to be square,” he said. “The thick commercial ones are best.”

With some regret, I unfolded my perfect swan and laid the napkin flat on the table. I followed Jonathan as he folded, twisted and fluffed. My final product looked nothing like his. “Mine looks more like a pigeon. An old, fat pigeon.”

He laughed and then reached for the bowls, serving me first. “So, what’s happening in the American justice system?”

“Huh?” At first I thought he was referring to some news story. Then I realized he was asking about my job. “Oh, you know. The usual.” I picked up my pigeon napkin and spread it out on my lap. “We’re doing a play.
Romeo and Jules.
I’m the assistant director.”

“Cool.” He speared some pork with his fork. “How are you going to do it with just women?” He put the pork in his mouth, and an expression of bliss flickered across his face. “This is wonderful.”

I stopped mid-chew, then forced myself to swallow. The pork felt lodged in my throat. I gulped some wine. “We’re joining forces with the men’s prison,” I said, making prison sound like an exclusive boarding school. “How’s Krista feeling?”

After all the quizzing I’d done on our last date, Jonathan probably didn’t want to talk about his stepmother—but it beat having me yap about my prison production.

“Krista? Let’s see. She nauseous, she can’t stop urinating, and her breasts are enlarged and tender.” He wrinkled his nose.

“Too much information?”

“You have no idea. This was over cocktails, no less. When she started talking about her enhanced libido, I had to leave the room.”

“Eew,” I said. “Are you okay now, though? I mean, about the baby?”

He shrugged. “I still think it was a terrible idea. My father’s going to be too old to play catch with the kid, to teach him to swim and all that. But maybe I can help out, be a kind of favorite uncle. I always wanted a brother or sister when I was growing up. Better late than never, right?”

I stuck a forkful of salad in my mouth before I had a chance to say any of the things I was thinking: that if he were a kind of favorite uncle, maybe I could be a kind of favorite aunt. That being a favorite uncle is a great warm-up to being a favorite dad.

We gazed at each other over the candlelight. His eyes crinkled. He knew darn well what I was thinking.

An outdoor amphitheater probably seemed like a good idea when the school planners walked the site on a winter day. In mid-September, it was unbearable.

“Maybe we could move the auditions into the multi-purpose room?” I suggested.

Lars pushed his blond hair out of his face. “Girls basketball has dibs.”

“Why don’t they just use the gym?”

“Boys soccer is in there.”

“Since when is soccer an indoor sport?”