Getting Warmer (33 page)

“What?”

I pictured Suzette: the perfect blond hair, the regal bearing. “Like you were a couple.”

He closed his eyes for a moment. I could hardly breathe. “You don’t know who Suzette is, do you?”

I shook my head.

He looked me in the eye. “Suzette is The Stalker.”

“
What
?”

“She’d finally stopped calling me. I thought she’d moved on, found somebody else. I figured it would be okay to ask her about the internship.” He shrugged. “I’m on the verge of changing my phone number.”

“Then, why?” I asked. “Why did you call her about Robert?”

“I wanted to help you out. Help your student. And I’m glad I did. Robert’s a good kid.”

I smiled at him. I expected him to smile back. Instead, he gazed off into the distance. I pulled my plaid blanket up to my neck.

The gondolier broke our silence. “May I sing to you?”

His mournful aria floated out into the night as he continued to pole down the meandering, man-made lake. I peeked at Jonathan’s face just as the cloud slid past the moon. He looked sad, but maybe it was just a response to the haunting music. The gondolier’s voice lifted and rose, finally ending on a long, high, warbling note. “Would you like me to sing another song?” he asked.

Jonathan’s mouth twitched. “You know any country and western?”

I laughed. I held Jonathan’s gaze. “I’ve missed you,” I said.

He looked down. My heart pumped violently. Finally, he looked up. “I’m just—I can’t . . .” He shook his head. He looked up at the gondolier. “Can you take us back to the dock?”

I bit my lip, holding back tears.

“Can’t,” the gondolier said.

“Excuse me?”

“The guy at the launch, your friend—” He twisted around to look back at the shore, where Jill, Lars and Nicolette waited. I could see the glow from the fire pit. “Your friend said I couldn’t bring you back until you’d kissed.”

“You don’t have to,” I said. I looked at the gondolier. “Just take us back. Please.”

“It’s okay,” Jonathan said. He leaned forward and kissed me, briefly, gently, touching me only with his lips. My mouth tingled as he pulled away. We sat opposite each other, staring.

The gondolier stopped the boat but didn’t turn it around. “Yeah, um, that wasn’t long enough.”

“Excuse me?”

“Your friend said it had to be at least twenty seconds. He told me to time it.” He shrugged. “That was a second and a half.”

I stayed quiet. Jonathan and I held each other’s eyes. Finally, he moved over to the seat next to me. He looked up at the gondolier. “Okay, start the clock.”

He put his arms around me this time, loosely at first and then tighter. His kiss grew harder, hungrier. I put my hands on his neck and then on the back of his head, drinking him in. From a distance, I heard the gondolier say, “Eighteen, nineteen, twenty.” We ignored him. The gondolier broke into a Patsy Cline song.

“That’s more like it,” Jonathan murmured.

I covered his mouth with mine before he had a chance to reconsider the kiss. It was more leisurely than before, less desperate. Finally, we pulled apart, resting forehead to forehead. “I don’t know if I can ever trust you,” Jonathan murmured. “I’m afraid you’ll lie to me again.”

I kissed his eyebrows, his eyelids, his nose. I rested my forehead back against his. “I’m afraid you’ll run away from me,” I whispered. “That you’ll leave me all alone.”

“So I guess we’re even,” he said.

“I guess we are.”

The gondolier began to turn the boat around. “I can take you back now.”

“Just a few more minutes,” Jonathan said. He tilted his head and kissed me lightly.

“Sorry, but your time’s almost up,” the gondolier said. “If we’re not back in five minutes, I’ll have to charge you for another ride.”

“Give us another half hour,” I said, running my hands through Jonathan’s hair. “The guy on the dock will pay for it.”

The wedding was held in my parents’ backyard on a brisk but sunny Saturday in late January. The movers had finished carting away the furniture two days earlier; the cleaners would come on Monday. By the end of the following week, the high-ceilinged stucco house would belong to the Sandlers, and Marjorie Wamsley would be tooling around Scottsdale’s gated communities in yet another new luxury SUV.

“Always a bridesmaid,” Jill muttered, sucking in her breath and yanking up a side zipper. I thought I heard something rip, but I knew better than to say anything.

“You never know,” I said, zipping up my own, identical dress. It was ice blue with silver beads, a scandalous leg slit and a plunging neckline. Mine sagged at the top. “I’m thinking of sticking some socks in my bra.”

Jill narrowed her eyes. “Not a bad idea.” Her ample cleavage was busting out of the top. The dress didn’t come in Jill’s size; she had to make do with the largest one in stock. “I’m never going to make it through the day,” she grumbled. “This thing is cutting off my circulation.” The dress was supposed to be ankle length, but mine dragged on the floor, while Jill’s ended at mid-calf. Only a couple of the bridesmaids (there were eleven) could carry off the dress. As maid of honor, plump little Dawna pulled rank and wore something else entirely: a midnight blue, drop-waist beaded number. She looked like the mother of the bride—assuming she’d given birth when she was two.

We used my former bedroom—now empty—as the bridesmaids’ dressing room, leaving the master suite to Nicolette. Secretly, I was relieved that the furniture was gone. I couldn’t bear the thought of Nicolette and Rodney having sex on my parents’ bed.

Nicolette looked stunning in a surprisingly simple strapless white satin gown, her hair swept up and studded with white roses and tiny rhinestones. In her arms she cradled a bouquet of white flowers loosely tied with a thick organza ribbon.

“You look like something out of a magazine,” I told her, sneaking into my parents’ old bedroom shortly before Nicolette was to make her grand entrance.

“You think so?” She scurried over to a pile in the corner. She grabbed a worn copy of
Modern Bride
and flipped hastily through. “My inspiration.” She held the page up for me to see.

And there she was: Nicolette. Or, rather, some girl who looked just like Nicolette, right down to the flower and rhinestone placement in her blond hair.

“You look prettier,” I said. She did. “Besides, this girl’s just a model. You’ve got a real groom waiting for you downstairs.”

As for the groom, Rodney looked, like, well . . . like Rodney in white tails and a top hat. The coat strained at his biceps. His cologne was spicy citrus and could be smelled from half a yard away. He waited next to the spa while Nicolette made her grand, slow entrance. His face was flushed, his eyes shiny. At first I thought: oh, no—Rodney’s drunk! And then it hit me: he was simply a man in love. (Who, okay, may have had a couple of beers to calm his nerves, but who could blame him?)

Jill and Lars never had to trick Rodney into taking a gondola ride with Nicolette. Rather, the day after my reconciliation with Jonathan, Nicolette did the obvious thing: she called Rodney. She told him she loved him. He said he loved her, too. She said she wanted a real wedding. He said okay. They figured out a way to make it work on a limited budget. If only all of life’s dilemmas were resolved this easily.

The ceremony was short. Nicolette said something about how much she loved Rodney, then Rodney said something about how much he loved Nicolette—most of which we all missed because Nicolette had insisted I turn on the pool filter, the resulting waterfall being exotic, romantic . . . and noisy. Then some guy named Jim who may or may not have had any legal authority (they were already married, after all) proclaimed them “joined in front of God, their friends, family and community.” Then Rodney kissed Nicolette so sloppily I could hear it over the waterfall and past nine bridesmaids. We were arranged by height; I was second to shortest, beating out Nicolette’s eleven-year-old sister, Daniella, by an inch. Since there was not enough room for us on the flagstones, Daniella and I had been relegated to a gravel patch that was difficult to navigate in my silver stiletto heels.

Not everything had gone according to Nicolette’s glossy magazine dreams. The invitations weren’t engraved. They weren’t even printed. Two weeks earlier, she’d sent a mass e-mail that read:

 

There was no sit-down dinner. Hors d’oeuvres were all that Robert and his crew—Katerina, a few kids from Adventures, and the boys I’d seen him with at the play, all attired in black trousers and white shirts—could handle. Besides, my parents’ backyard, big as it was, couldn’t possibly handle enough tables to seat all of the guests. There had to be three hundred people there.

There was no live band. Rather, Nicolette brought her iPod along with a set of Bose speakers. After a while, I managed to block out the hip hop music. Rodney brought a karaoke machine.

There was no professional photographer. However, Dawna assured Nicolette she would make “the most awesomest wedding memory book ever.” Since Dawna was in the wedding, her husband used one hand to hold onto little Chenille (who we all worried would fall into the pool) and the other to snap pictures with the family camera. Nicolette’s mother (who looked way too young to have a married daughter) snapped compulsively, too, as did at least thirty other guests, including eleven-year-old, eyeshadowwearing Daniella, though she mostly took pictures of Robert.

None of it mattered. Jonathan, who looked staggeringly handsome in a dark suit, crisp white shirt and red tie, called in a favor from a party supply business. They supplied wine, highball and martini glasses, plenty of folding chairs, and several long tables to hold the mountains of gifts. Since Rodney hadn’t had time to round up attendants—or, perhaps, this being his fourth time down the aisle, he had simply exhausted the patience of his nearest and dearest—Jonathan served as a kind of de facto usher, guiding the guests to the rows of borrowed chairs.

Lars manned a bar stocked mainly by the teachers, who, in a merry affront to their chronic respectability, came bearing jugs of vodka, six packs of beer and boxes of wine. Lars served drinks like a professional. Actually, having been turned down by the charter school, he was a professional—he’d taken a job at the Happy Cactus to hold him over until he could find another teaching position.

“Good to see you, Lars,” Dr. White said, approaching the bar. She wore a pale pink suit, the skirt calf-length and slit, and a ruffled blouse. Dr. White made pink look like a power color. She ordered a Cape Codder—“Make it weak, please”—and asked Lars about his job hunt.

“I’m evaluating several possibilities,” he said. “Weighing my options.”

“We all miss you at Agave, you know. And we wish you well.” Dr. White smiled at me. I’d come by for a soda (there were an awful lot of my students here, after all). “I’m glad you came to your senses, Natalie,” she said. I’d withdrawn my resignation hours before Dr. White was going to offer the job to someone else.

His back blocking Dr. White’s vision, Lars dumped a liver-threatening amount of vodka into a highball glass, added a splash of cranberry juice for color and garnished with a lime. “Here you go.” He smiled.

Dr. White reached for the glass. “Oh, my—that’s a bit bigger than I expected.”

Lars smiled angelically. “It’s mostly juice.”

Within an hour, Dr. White had commandeered the karaoke machine. She looked like Aretha Franklin. She sounded like a drunk high school principal.

Finally, Nicolette and Rodney piled their gifts into the back of Rodney’s new truck. “Good thing I got the new truck,” he remarked. “The gifts wouldn’ta fit in my old truck.”

Nicolette didn’t respond. Instead, she picked up an especially pretty box and shook it lightly next to her ear.

The guests left soon after; it was approaching dinner time, and the hors d’oeuvres and cake, while delicious, had been a bit sparse. Robert and his crew picked up the abandoned napkins and put the dirty glasses back into their plastic crates. Well, the crew did most of the work; on my way to the bathroom, I practically tripped over Robert and Katerina, who were clutching each other next to the kitchen island. They both turned bright red (as did I) and scurried off to wipe the counters.

Finally, it was down to Lars, Jill, Jonathan and me. Lars dug out a bottle of chardonnay he’d squirreled away under the bar and poured us each a glass. We trudged over to the spa. Jill and I hiked up our shimmering dresses (we’d long since abandoned our panty-hose and heels), settled onto the flagstones and dipped our feet into the water. I had just turned on the heat; the water was still chilly. The men joined us, taking off their shoes and socks and rolling up their trousers.

“Brr,” Lars said.

“It’ll warm up soon.”

Lars splashed the water with his toes. “So, Nat, how’s the new place working out?” I had just moved into Jill’s old apartment; she and Lars had rented something together near Old Town.

“I’m not there very much,” I said, shooting a glance at Jonathan. He smiled. “And what about the two of you?” I asked. “How’s living in sin?”

“When I leave my clothes on the floor, Jill says I am being passive aggressive,” Lars said.

“You are,” Jill said.

“And she says I suffer from narcissistic tendencies.”

“You do.”

He took her hand. “But I think she likes me anyway.”

The water grew warmer and warmer until my toes began to glow. In the giant saguaro, a woodpecker
rat-tat-tatted
away. On the far side of the yard, a rabbit hopped into view and nibbled on some sprinkler-sustained plants.