Going Back (4 page)

The dark-haired woman ushered him
to a short hallway leading to the rear of the building. The first
door they came to was open, and the woman indicated it with a wave
of her hand. “That’s Daphne’s office.”

Brad approached the door quietly.
It wasn’t that he wished to sneak up on Daphne, but he did want a
chance to see her before she saw him. He was hoping that catching a
preliminary glimpse of her might somehow prepare him for this
meeting, give him an idea of what to say or a clue as to how she
felt about spending a day with him.

He waited until the middle-aged
woman had returned to her desk in the front room before peering
inside Daphne’s private office. Like the front room, this back room
was brightly lit. In addition to photographs of houses, the large
bulletin board occupying the far wall contained a big calendar with
notes and schedules scribbled inside each date’s square. Another
wall held a few framed documents, one identifying Daphne as a
licensed Realtor, another claiming that she was a state-certified
assessor. A cloth-upholstered loveseat rested against a third wall,
and two matching chairs faced the broad oak desk where Daphne sat
talking on the phone.

She looked good, Brad thought with
inexplicable relief. The telephone receiver blocked part of her
face from his view, but he could see enough to know that the past
eight years hadn’t been unkind to Daphne. Her hair was the same
flaxen shade he remembered, but the frizz had relaxed somewhat,
shaping small, bubbly curls that tumbled loosely to her shoulders.
She still wore eyeglasses, but the frames she had on, a
honey-colored brown with stylish rectangular lenses, flattered her
more than did the wire-rims she’d worn in college. Her nose was too
small for her face, but it managed to hold her eyeglasses in
place.

Brad’s gaze shifted downward to the
shapeless linen blazer she had on over a simple silk blouse of
bright turquoise. A narrow gold wristwatch adorned her slender left
wrist. She looked a bit thinner than he had remembered. The sweep
of flesh under her jaw was smooth and taut, and her cheeks were
hollow beneath her angular cheekbones. Her nails were polished. As
she spoke into the phone, her voice was soft but solid.

It occurred to Brad that Daphne
Stoltz was no longer the clumsy, gawky college girl he remembered.
She was clearly a woman on her way, poised and accomplished. He
directed a silent curse at Andrea for having failed to warn
him.

“Well, it’s only my opinion,”
Daphne said into the phone, “but if you’re planning to move in a
couple of years you’re better off with the variable. The rates are
going to have to go up eventually, but the variables are still a
couple of points lower. Either way, you’ve got to get the
application process started right away. If there’s a good chance
the interest rates are going up, the bank is going to sit on your
application.... Fine. Just get the paperwork started, and let me
know if you have any problems. Take care.” She hung up and swiveled
to face the doorway.

“Hello, Daffy,” Brad
said.

As soon as the words hit the air,
he regretted them. He ought to have called her Daphne; it would
have been more respectful. It was just that when Andrea talked
about her she usually referred to her as Daffy. Brad had called her
Daffy in college, but there didn’t seem to be anything particularly
daffy about her right now.

She stared up at him as he hovered
in the doorway, awaiting an invitation to enter. The lenses of her
eyeglasses made her eyes appear flat, a pale green. She had on
lipstick, he noticed, also a pale hue. Her coloring seemed
strangely washed out, but Brad acknowledged that a darker lipstick
would have made her look like a clown.

She wasn’t pretty. She hadn’t been
eight years ago, and she wasn’t now. But there was a directness
about her looks, an unpretentiousness that Brad admired.

“Hello, Brad,” she said, her voice
as quiet and cool as it had been during the telephone conversation
Brad had eavesdropped on. He inferred from her impassive tone that
she intended to treat him the same way she’d treated the person
she’d been talking to on the phone: as a client. “Come
in.”

“Thanks.” He entered the office,
surveying it one more time before he sat in one of the chairs
across the desk from her. His vision took in the calendar, the
African violet residing on one corner of her desk, the tidy oak
bookcase behind her. The leather upholstery of her chair. The plush
area rug. “What are you, the boss here or something?” he
asked.

She favored him with a tentative
smile. “I’m in charge of this office, if that’s what you mean,” she
replied. She folded her hands above her blotter, and Brad focused
for a moment on the tapered shape of her fingers, the enameled pink
ovals adorning each fingertip, the amethyst ring on her right ring
finger. No wedding band, he noted. If Daphne had been married and
Andrea hadn’t informed Brad, he would have throttled Andrea the
minute he returned to New York.

Not that he cared one way or
another about Daphne’s marital status. He just wanted to be
prepared, that was all.

“So,” he said, wondering if he was
coming across as awkward as he felt. “How have you
been?”

“Fine,” she said.

A heavy silence descended over the
office. Brad shifted in his chair, balancing one leg across the
other knee. He inspected the brown leather loafer on his foot, the
length of khaki trouser covering his leg, the brass buckle of his
belt, the faint wrinkles webbing his cotton oxford shirt beneath
his jacket. Daphne’s outfit would be appropriate for the C.E.O. of
a multinational corporation, and here he was, dressed like a prep
school sophomore.

“How did you wind up in real
estate?” he asked, anxious to break the silence. “That wasn’t your
abiding goal in life when we were in school, was it?”

Once again, Brad wished he could
have retracted the words. He didn’t want to reminisce about when
they were in school. He didn’t want to dredge up old memories about
what an asshole he’d been back then. In his entire life, there had
been perhaps only two occasions when Brad had done something he’d
subsequently been profoundly ashamed of. One of those occasions had
occurred when, at the age of five, he’d made fun of the way a
neighbor with cerebral palsy spoke. The other had occurred with
Daphne, and he certainly didn’t want to spoil the day for both of
them by reminding her of it.

Evidently, his comment didn’t
disturb her—unless the flicker of a shadow across her eyes was a
reflection of her emotions rather than the overhead light on the
lenses of her glasses. Her lips curved into another tentative
half-smile, and she said, “No, Brad. It wasn’t my abiding goal in
life.”

Damn. Was he imagining that her
tone was accusing, or was it really? Was she actually trying to
tell him that he’d had a hell of a nerve sleeping with her when he
hadn’t even known her well enough to be aware of her career
plans?

Or was it just his conscience speaking, that
rattling old vestige of guilt that he ought to have overcome by
now?

“I kind of stumbled into real
estate,” she explained. Brad was grateful to her for reviving the
conversation when he’d all but let it die. “I held a couple of
merchandising jobs after college, and I took classes in different
things. Somewhere along the way, I decided on a whim to take a
course in real estate, never guessing I’d have an aptitude for
it.”

“Well, you obviously do have an
aptitude for it,” he concluded, gazing around her office one more
time. Merchandising, he thought, trying to remember what Daphne had
majored in. How could he remember something he’d never known in the
first place? Daphne Stoltz had been as much a stranger to him then
as she was now.

He supposed he could always ask
Andrea about what Daphne had studied in college. But if he did
that, Andrea would ask him why he wanted to know—and he didn’t have
an easy answer to that question.

“I understand you’ve been
transferred to a New York-based job,” Daphne remarked.

“That’s right.”

“What’s your field?” she
asked.

Brad might have been consoled by
the fact that Daphne knew as little about him as he knew about her.
But he wasn’t. “Head-hunting,” he answered.

“You mean job placement counseling,
that sort of thing?”

He forced a grin. “I don’t mean the
other kind of head-hunting—you know, the jungle kind, with all that
blood and gore.”

She digested this item with another
impassive smile, refusing to laugh outright at his joke. “Well,
Brad,” she said, pulling a lined legal pad toward her and plucking
a pen from the top drawer of her desk, “why don’t you tell me a
little about what you’re looking for in a home?”

Daphne was no fool. She wanted to
get down to business so neither she nor Brad would have to strain
themselves any longer, pretending that they were enjoying this
banter. He thanked her for her briskness with a tacit nod and said,
“Most important, I’d like someplace no more than an hour outside
Manhattan. The quicker the commute, the better.”

She lifted her eyes to him. He
wondered whether they were really as wide-set as they seemed, or
whether it was an illusion caused by her eyeglasses. He also
wondered why she hadn’t worn her hair at its present length when
she’d been in college. The soft, face-framing shape of it was much
more becoming than the wild waist-length mop of fleece her hair had
been then.

“Are you aware of what housing
costs are like in any community that offers a quick commute to New
York?” she asked.

“I know the prices are way up
there,” Brad said.

“They’re higher
than that,” Daphne corrected him. “They’re way,
way
up there.”

“I know, Daff,” Brad assured her.
“My parents live in New York. I know what property values are like
in this part of the country.”

“We’re talking mid to upper six
figures, minimum,” she said. “For a small but nice condo, or a
slightly larger fixer-upper.”

“Yes, I know,” he insisted—he hoped
for the final time. Daphne didn’t have to lecture him. He wasn’t a
moron.

“Well,” she said, “I don’t want to
waste your time or mine. So let’s make sure we’re on the same
wave-length, okay?” She opened her pen with an ominous click. “How
much will you be earning in your new job?”

None of your
damned business,
he almost retorted.
Personal finances were a subject Brad had been raised to believe
sacred, not open to idle discussion. But he checked the reflexive
indignation that filled him and forced himself to relax in his
chair. “Enough,” he answered evasively.

Daphne’s expression was unreadable.
“I have to ask,” she asserted. “I have to know whether you’re going
to be able to afford—”

“I’ll be able to afford it,” he
said curtly.

She continued to stare at him, her
large eyes glowing enigmatically, her lips twisted into that wry
smile of hers. Damn her, but she was going to win the stare-down,
he realized a fraction of a second before he spat out, “In the
vicinity of two hundred thousand, give or take.”

She made no indication that she was
impressed by his high earnings—or that she was afraid his salary
wouldn’t be enough to pay for housing in the area. “How much do you
have available for a down payment?” she asked emotionlessly,
scribbling a note to herself on the pad.

Again he had to check the impulse
to protest that he was under no obligation to describe his
liquidity situation to her. “Assuming the sale goes through, I’m
going to make a nice profit on my condo in Seattle,” he said
tensely. “Really, Daff, if you show me something I can’t afford,
I’ll let you know. You can trust me.”

A shadow flickered in her eyes
again, and this time Brad was convinced that it had nothing to do
with the overhead light. What she was thinking, he guessed, was
that she couldn’t trust him, and that he had some nerve asserting
that she could.

She could trust him now, though.
Except for a brief lapse eight years ago, he had always been
trustworthy around women. Besides, his presence in Daphne’s office
this morning had nothing to do with his behavior, good, bad or
otherwise, toward women. It had to do with the business of
purchasing a house. Daphne didn’t want to waste her time or his in
showing him houses he couldn’t afford. Fine. He didn’t want to
waste their time, either.

His resentment of her nosy
questions dissipated, replaced by an undefined sense of
frustration. He wanted her trust. He needed it. It would be proof
that she forgave him, that he no longer had to feel guilty about
whatever sins he’d committed so many years ago. It was over, done
with, and if only Daphne would trust him now, he could put the past
to rest.

She seemed to be scrutinizing him,
sizing him up, trying to determine whether he was worthy of her
trust. “Believe me,” he muttered, surprised by the vehemence in his
tone, “I can afford whatever you want to show me.”

Daphne chuckled. “In that case...I
don’t suppose I want to show you the cute little cottage in Upper
Saddle Brook that I’ve got a listing on. The asking price on it is
three-point-five million.”