Going Back (17 page)

Brad chased his father as far as
the doorway and watched through the glass until Robert turned the
corner and was absorbed by a throng of pedestrians on Park Avenue.
Sighing, Brad turned away, walked back to the elevator, and
wondered all over again why his parents insisted on being so
obstinate about their relationship.

In less than two minutes, he was
upstairs, ringing the doorbell of the twentieth-floor apartment
where his mother lived, and where he himself had spent the first
eighteen years of his life. When his mother answered, her
appearance revealed no hint of what she’d recently been up to with
her Brad’s father. Her white-streaked black hair was impeccably
coiffed, her face carefully made up, her apparel staid and her
tasteful jewelry in place. Penelope Torrance’s usually expressive
gray eyes, unlike her husband’s, were totally emotionless, lacking
any residual glow of passion.

“Hello, Brad,” she greeted him,
brushing a maternal kiss across his cheek and ushering him into the
apartment. Her bland welcome informed him that, even though she had
to be able to guess that Brad had run into his father downstairs,
she had no intention of mentioning his father’s visit, let alone
discussing what it did or didn’t mean.

Brad dutifully followed her lead.
If he was going to convince her to get back together with his
father, he’d have to do it without mentioning the romantic
interlude they’d just indulged in.

Almost as soon as Brad and his
mother entered the living room, his mother’s housekeeper appeared,
carrying a crystal pitcher of martinis and two matching glasses.
Brad didn’t care much for martinis, but he accepted the cocktail
Grace poured for him, offered his mother a silent toast…and thought
about Daphne.

What shook him was not simply that
she’d barged in on his thoughts when he hadn’t expected it, but
that he was thinking of her in the context of drinking. He wondered
what would happen if he ever brought her to his mother’s house for
dinner. Penelope always insisted on serving martinis before dinner.
It was a ritual about which she brooked no argument. Would Daphne
accept a drink she didn’t want for the sake of good manners, or
would she politely refuse the drink, claiming that she never
touched alcohol? How did teetotalers cope with social
gatherings?

He probably shouldn’t feel guilty
about having driven Daphne to abstinence. For all he knew, he might
have done her a big favor. But still…he would have preferred not to
have been the one to teach her, through wretched experience, what
sort of mess a woman could get into when she drank too
much.

He realized that his mother was
speaking, and he forced his attention to her. At the age of
fifty-seven, Penelope Torrance was, as Brad’s father had said, a
damned attractive woman. Her face was unlined, her throat sleek,
her figure as slender as a teenager’s. Brad doubted that his mother
had ever gained the “freshman twenty” during her years at Mt.
Holyoke.

“Brad, where are you? I’m talking
to you,” she chided before sipping from her glass.

“Sorry.”

“I was saying,” she went on, “that
this house you’re planning to purchase sounds dreadful. I
understand the time pressures you’re facing, and your desire to
return to Seattle next week—but that doesn’t mean you’ve got to
rush into such a major commitment. You’re more than welcome to stay
here with me until you find the house of your dreams.”

“I’ve already found the house of my
dreams,” Brad said, surprising himself. He’d never viewed the
expanded cape in Verona as the stuff of dreams—but now that his
mother had mentioned it, he believed that maybe it was something of
a dream house for him.

The apartment he was in right now
was no dream, even though he’d grown up there. Few of the
furnishings had changed since his childhood. Several knickknacks
had been rearranged, the torch lamps on either side of the sofa
were a recent touch, but for the most part the decor had a
nostalgic, almost cloying familiarity to it. He remembered spending
hours constructing cabins with his Lincoln Logs on the patterned
Oriental carpet; he remembered devouring chocolate-chip cookies and
Mark Twain novels on the couch—until Grace would order him off,
scolding that he was getting crumbs all over the upholstery. He
remembered gazing down through the window at the island of grass
and flowers separating the northbound and southbound lanes of Park
Avenue, and wishing he lived in a house with a yard.

Now, finally—if Daphne didn’t blow
it—that wish might come true. He might get his house and his yard,
his flower beds and his tree-framed views of the sky. It was
possible to make amends for the past, after all. It was possible,
if one was willing to put forth the necessary effort, to compensate
for the shortcomings of one’s past, to overcome one’s mistakes and
disappointments, and put things the way they ought to
be.

If only he could convince his
parents of that, perhaps they’d work harder to repair their
relationship, not just for sex but for love, for the sake of their
marriage. Perhaps they could journey backward to the point where
everything had started to go wrong for them and do it over again,
properly this time. If an afternoon of lovemaking could erase the
the resentment, why couldn’t it rekindle the love? Why couldn’t it
at least nourish the friendship?

***

THE SHRILL RING of the telephone
jolted Daphne awake. As she cursed and groped blindly for it, her
brain staggered toward consciousness. Once her hand landed on the
phone, she opened her eyes. Through a blur of sleepiness and
myopia, she read the digits on the alarm clock next to the phone:
one-two-two-eight. She cursed again, then lifted the receiver to
her ear. “What?” she growled.

“Daphne, it’s Brad,” Brad
whispered. “I just got back to Eric’s apartment, and Andrea left me
a note on the kitchen table, saying that you called. I’m sorry for
getting back to you so late, but—”

“Oh.” Daphne struggled into a
sitting position and shoved a heavy tangle of blond curls back from
her face. “Oh. Yeah.” She knew she was communicating less than
coherently, but there wasn’t much she could do about it except wait
until her brain clarified itself. After a minute, feeling
semi-lucid, she managed to say, “Hello, Brad.”

“I had dinner at my mother’s this
evening,” he went on, his gabbiness giving her an opportunity to
wake up completely. “I wanted to get back here earlier, but my
mother was on a tear. All I did was say something about what a fine
couple she and my father make, and she was off and running. For
three hours I had to sit there, listening to a blow-by-blow
description of every argument they’d ever had, every disagreement,
starting with whether to hold their wedding reception at the Pierre
or the Plaza, on through whether they should have named me Brad
Michael or Brad Stephen, whether I should have gone to Collegiate
as a day student or Exeter as a boarder, whether they should have
bought a vacation house in the Hamptons or the North Fork… To go by
what my mother said, there was not a single moment in their entire
wedded life when they weren’t at each other’s throats.”

At first, Daphne was nonplussed.
When she’d left a message with Andrea to have Brad call her, she’d
assumed that he would be anxious to hear about her negotiations
with the seller of the house he wanted to buy. Instead, all he
wanted to do, apparently, was vent about his mother.

That was all right with Daphne. If
it made Brad feel better to talk to her about his parents, she had
no objections. “Maybe her memory is more accurate than yours,”
Daphne suggested. “Or maybe she and your father tried to shield you
from their fighting when you were younger, so you were never really
aware of it.”

“I was always aware that they had
their ups and downs,” Brad insisted. “They never hid their
arguments from me. But so what? People can disagree with each other
and still make a perfect couple. My parents belong together. They
need each other; they’re good for each other. They’ve been arguing
for thirty-five years. I can’t imagine why they want to stop at
this point.”

“Brad.” Daphne sighed, then allowed
herself a weary smile. Despite her drowsiness, she was touched that
Brad had chosen her, of all his friends, to unburden himself to,
even if he was doing it at an ungodly hour. Besides being touched,
she was still amazed to think of Brad as someone who would have to
unburden himself at all. She’d never had any basis for thinking he
was as neat and well put together emotionally as he was physically,
but given the externals of his life—the wealth, the career the
success, the bedroom eyes and sexy buns and all the rest of
it—Daphne was having trouble accepting that he suffered from actual
human anguish on occasion.

“You want me to shut up,” he
guessed, sounding appropriately contrite. “I know, it’s
late.”

“I wouldn’t mind the time,” she
assured him, “except that I’ve got to go to a closing at nine
o’clock tomorrow.”

“No explanation necessary. I’ll let
you get back to sleep.”

“Brad,” she said swiftly, before he
could hang up. “Don’t you want to know about the house?”

“Oh—right! The house. What did the
seller say?”

Daphne’s smile widened and she drew
her knees up under the covers, forming a tent with her sheet. “He
said five-thirty-five, take it or leave it.”

“Five-thirty-five?” Brad repeated,
perplexed.

“Five hundred thirty five
thousand.”

“But...but that’s lower than you
and I discussed. That’s much lower than I was willing to
go.”

“Take it or leave it,” she said,
smothering a laugh. “He doesn’t want to haggle, he just wants to
get the house sold. I swore you’d be a sure thing—no problems as
far as your qualifying for a mortgage or anything like that. And he
said he wanted to cut through the crap and settle on a
price.”

Brad let out a restrained hoot. “No
kidding? Daffy, that’s fantastic! You’re a genius.”

“I’m a businesswoman,” she
asserted. “I want to see the sale go through, too. Shall I tell him
you’ll accept his price?”

“You mean you haven’t already? Of
course I’ll accept his price.”

“I’ll telephone him tomorrow. And
I’ll get a contract written up right away. You may have to do your
mortgage application long-distance, but I can help you with that if
you and the bank need a go-between.”

“Thanks, Daphne,” Brad said
earnestly, his tone low and intense. “I mean it. Thank
you.”

“You’re welcome. Now go to bed and
dream about your soon-to-be new home.”

She heard a strange sound through
the phone, something that might have been a cross between a gasp
and a laugh. Then Brad said, “You’re clairvoyant, Daff. Go back to
sleep—and thanks again.”

Before she could ask him to explain
his cryptic remark, the line went dead.

She wasn’t clairvoyant. She wasn’t
even that good a listener when it came to other people’s problems.
Whenever Phyllis embarked on one of her self-pitying monologues
about Jim, Daphne invariably wound up cracking snide jokes. On
those rare occasions when her sister Helen telephoned and griped
about her marriage to Dennis, Daphne seized whatever excuse was
handy to end the call. She had little patience for people who had
so much more going for them than she did, yet who constantly
demanded sympathy from her.

But she didn’t mind listening to
Brad talk about his parents. For one thing, he wasn’t asking her
for sympathy; his focus was totally on his parents’ well-being, not
on his own disappointment. For another, she liked knowing that his
life wasn’t as flawless as it seemed on the surface, that he cared
deeply for his loved ones and ached for them. And for another, she
was honored that he considered her trustworthy enough to confide
in.

But clairvoyant? What was that all
about?

A hectic day lay ahead for her, and
she was too tired to puzzle out his strange comment. Besides the
closing she was supposed to attend the following morning, she had
arranged to meet Bob Battinger for lunch and discuss the
possibility of Horizon Realty’s extending her a loan to finance her
share of the partnership. Now that reality had set in, she was
beginning to wonder whether she could afford to become a partner.
What with her mortgage, her car payments, and two more years of a
college loan to pay off, she was teetering on the edge of financial
panic.

But she was too tired right now to
worry about that, too. So she plumped the pillow beneath her head,
closed her eyes and drifted off almost immediately. One thing
Daphne never had to worry about was her ability to fall asleep,
regardless of the challenges that might be lying in wait for her
when she rose.

***

IT WASN’T CLAIRVOYANCE that
compelled her to drive past the expanded cape on her way back to
the office from what had turned into a marathon luncheon with Bob
Battinger the following afternoon. They’d met at one o’clock,
tossed around various financial strategies during the course of
their two-hour meal, and then stopped in at a bank branch where
Daphne did a great deal of mortgage business to discuss loans with
one of the loan officers there. Bob seemed much more optimistic
than Daphne about her ability to carry an additional loan—but,
then, it was easy to be optimistic when someone else’s money was at
stake.