Going Back (5 page)

Brad silently conceded that he
couldn’t afford that. But he wasn’t going to admit it to her. There
was something irritatingly patronizing about her attitude. Maybe
this was her way of knocking him down a peg.

“Here,” she said, tapping a few
keys on her computer and then swiveling the flat-screen monitor so
it faced him. “This site has the most recent Multiple Listing
Service properties. I have a few places in mind I’d like to show
you, but I’ve got to make a phone call first. Why don’t you scroll
through the site and see if anything catches your eye.”

She rotated in her chair and
reached for the telephone. Brad understood that he’d been
dismissed.

He shifted forward in his chair and
studied the thumbnail photos of houses listed for sale, and the
accompanying descriptions enumerating each house’s features. He was
unable to translate a few of the abbreviations, but he couldn’t ask
Daphne to interpret them for him; she was busy talking to another
broker on the phone, setting up a appointment to view a house that
afternoon.

Even if Daphne weren’t on the
phone, Brad probably wouldn’t ask her to clarify the book’s jargon
to him. She had already gotten the upper hand enough this morning.
Brad saw no need to parade his ignorance before her.

Had she really gotten the upper
hand, though? Peeking over the monitor’s frame, he contemplated the
woman seated across the desk from him, chatting easily with her
colleague on the phone and absently twirling her index finger
through a curling lock of hair below her ear. She certainly seemed
harmless enough when he viewed her objectively.

Maybe she had no desire whatsoever
to knock him down a peg. Maybe he was just being
defensive.

Of course, that was all it was. He
felt defensive because Daphne was no longer the inept, ungainly
co-ed she used to be. He felt defensive because she had improved
with age much more than he had, and because she seemed to have
risen above the past much more effectively.

“See anything you like?” she asked,
breaking into his ruminations.

He jerked his head toward her.
Daphne was smiling pleasantly, and Brad did his best to adopt her
cool affability. Returning her smile, he shrugged. “I’d rather look
at what you’d like to show me,” he told her.

“All right,” she said, pulling her
briefcase from the well beneath her desk and shoving back her
chair. As soon as she stood, Brad leaped to his feet. He knew his
manners, and he wanted to impress upon Daphne that he
did.

Just a bit more defensiveness on his part, he
muttered inwardly, wondering why the hell he felt such a strong
desire to win her forgiveness.

***

HE WAS better looking than she’d
remembered.

Not that she had ever considered
him bad looking, Daphne admitted as she steered her car through the
late-morning traffic toward the scenic park that was one of
Verona’s most charming assets. Since Brad seemed relatively
unfamiliar with the area, she planned to take him on a brief tour
of Verona, the Caldwells, Cedar Grove—the towns her office of
Horizon Realty served—to give him a feel for this part of New
Jersey. While she drove, she pointed out interesting landmarks and
provided useful information: “That road will eventually lead you to
Bloomingdale’s, if you like to shop,” or “Here’s the entrance to
Caldwell College,” or “This is one of the better golf courses in
the area.” It was her standard speech, altered to suit the
individual client. She wasn’t sure whether or not Brad played golf,
but she doubted he was all that interested in the local school
systems.

As she spoke, she glanced
frequently at him. Each time she did, she was struck by how
handsome he was. His hair was still thick and black, cut in a
casual style that was just barely short enough to be acceptable in
the business world. His eyebrows were thick and dark, too, and his
complexion had a robust golden glow. His burnished coloring created
a startling contrast with his eyes, which were an unexpectedly
clear light blue. He had a strong chin, a straight nose and teeth
as white and even as an orthodontist could dream of. But it was
those piercing blue eyes that Daphne kept returning to, eyes much
too beautiful to belong to a man.

He had always been handsome. But
back in school, Daphne had never really considered him her type.
He’d been good looking the way a movie star might be: the kind of
good looking about which, as Phyllis used to say, “You wouldn’t
kick him out for eating crackers in bed.” Brad Torrance was someone
whose appearance Daphne had admired from a distance, someone whose
attention she’d never bothered trying to attract. He was Eric’s
friend and she was Andrea’s, so their paths were bound to cross
every once in a while. But when it came to getting crushes, Daphne
preferred to keep her fantasies well within the realm of the
possible.

He must have been surprised the
night she’d approached him. In the year and a half they’d been
acquainted, the most intimate conversation they’d ever had involved
an analysis of the pretzels being served at a party they’d both
attended. Brad had argued that they were stale, and Daphne had
maintained that they were still edible. From such dialogues great
love affairs rarely blossomed.

What they’d had wasn’t a great love
affair. It was one night, one truncated, vaguely sordid night, the
kind of night that left you with a hangover not just in your head
but in your soul.

It all began with the call Daphne
had gotten that afternoon. Her parents had phoned her with the
splendid news that Helen was engaged to be married. Daphne wasn’t
the type of woman to begrudge her sister such happiness, even if
Helen was two years younger than Daphne. She was in no hurry to get
married; if Helen wanted to tie the knot before she turned
twenty-one, that was all right with Daphne.

What demolished her was that
Helen’s fiance was Dennis Marlow. Dennis, the boy next door, the
boy—and then the man—with whom Daphne had been madly in love ever
since the day his family had moved into the house next to hers when
she was twelve. She and Dennis had done everything as a twosome:
walked, and later driven, to school together, collaborated on
science projects, swapped comic books and perused copies of girlie
magazines purloined from Dennis’s father’s night table. They’d
shared each other’s rock-and-roll CD’s, helped each other with
their homework, provided alibis for each other when one of them was
in trouble.

As they got older, they’d
discovered the facts of life together. They’d kissed, they’d
touched, they’d experimented. They’d been such good friends, such
inseparable pals that it had seemed perfectly natural for them to
learn about their bodies together.

But for Daphne, it had been more
than simply youthful experimentation. She had loved Dennis. He’d
loved her too, she supposed, but as far as he was concerned, it
hadn’t really been a romantic love. Daphne had been his buddy, his
fellow explorer. The incestuous implications notwithstanding, he’d
ultimately come to think of her as a sister.

Or, more precisely, a
sister-in-law. After all they’d been through, Dennis decided that
the woman he truly desired wasn’t Daphne but her kid sister.
Daphne, he would later explain to her, was the greatest, terrific,
one in a million, the best friend a guy could have. What he didn’t
need to explain was that she wasn’t petite and pretty, aspiring to
devote her life totally to a man and ask only for his affection in
return. Daphne wasn’t Helen.

The news of Helen’s engagement
agonized Daphne. She shut herself up inside her dormitory room,
refusing to speak to anyone until Andrea and Phyllis picked the
lock and forced their way inside. When she told them what had
happened, they supplied her with tissues and compassion. They
hugged her, they commiserated, they fed her M & M peanuts. They
took turns inventing gruesome ends for Dennis—to which Daphne would
object, “But then Helen’ll wind up a widow!” or “But then she’ll
have to go without sex for the rest of her married
life!”

“Forget about Helen,” Andrea
exhorted Daphne. “Forget about them both. Eric’s frat is having a
party tonight. Come on, get smashed and forget about the whole
thing.”

“Men aren’t worth it,” Phyllis
added knowingly. “Look how many times I’ve had my heart broken—and
how many times I’ve recovered. I know whereof I speak, Daffy—men
suck, and they aren’t worth crying over. Come to the party with us,
Daff. It’ll do you some good to get out and shop around. A few
beers, and you’ll be saying, ʻDennis who?’”

Daphne let them talk her into it.
After dinner that night, she accompanied Phyllis and Andrea across
the hilly, frozen campus to the fraternity house where Eric and his
friends lived. In the rec room in the house’s finished basement,
the jukebox was blasting lively dance music and kegs of beer were
being emptied at a rapid clip. Daphne rarely refused a glass of
beer during her college days, and every now and then she’d indulge
in a second or even a third glass.

That night, she didn’t bother to
count how many glasses she indulged in.

The air in the frat house basement
was warm and humid, and the lighting was kept to a minimum. Bodies
gyrated on the dance floor at the center of the room, where all the
furniture had been cleared away. The volume of the jukebox was
cranked way up, causing the chairs and benches shoved up against
the walls to tremble slightly whenever a bass riff was
played.

Thinking back on it, Daphne would
remember little else about the party itself. What she would
remember most vividly was that the basement was stuffy and noisy,
that the only two solutions to these problems she could come up
with were to drink more beer and to leave the party, and that when
the first solution began to pall she turned to the
second.

She staggered out the door and down
a short hallway to the stairs. Brad Torrance was seated on the
bottom step, rolling up the sleeves of his shirt. “Hey, Daffy,” he
greeted her amiably, craning his neck up to view her. He didn’t
bother to stand in her presence.

“How come you’re out here?” she
asked, pleasantly surprised that she wasn’t slurring her
words.

“It’s too hot in there,” he said.
He lifted a sweater from the step beside him. “Can you believe I
was wearing this? I came out here to cool off.”

“It’s much more comfortable out
here.”

“Yeah.” Belatedly, Brad rose to his
feet. Daphne noticed that he’d opened the top two buttons of his
shirt. He had a nice neck, she reflected, strong but not too thick,
rising elegantly from the horizontal ridge of his shoulders. All in
all, he was a knock-out. A bit too good looking for her, but she
definitely wouldn’t kick him out for eating crackers.

It dawned on Daphne, as she
contemplated Brad’s wonderfully proportioned physique and dimpled
smile, that Dennis Marlow wasn’t the only man in the world. In her
besotted condition, this thought struck her as a profound
revelation.

“Well, I’ve got to take this up to
my room before somebody rips it off,” Brad declared, shaking the
wrinkles out of the sweater.

“I’ll come with you,” Daphne
invited herself. Sober, she would never have suggested such a
thing. But that night, she was drunk and she didn’t care. All she
wanted was to forget about Dennis, forget she’d ever loved him,
forget that her sister was more desirable than she was. All she
wanted was for Brad to prove to her that, despite Dennis’s
rejection of her, she was still a woman worthy of a man’s
attention.

It was a hell of a lot to want, but
at the time Daphne didn’t think she was asking for too
much.

Brad weighed her offer for a
minute, then shrugged. “Sure. Come on up if you’d like,” he said,
stepping aside so she could join him on the stairs.

His room was on the top floor of
the fraternity house, in a converted attic room beneath the eaves.
He’d gone to some effort to decorate it. A framed Modigliani nude
gazed across the room from the wall above the bed, a rug had been
thrown over the linoleum floor and matching curtains framed the
dormer windows. The room was tidy, books and papers stacked neatly
on the desk and toiletries lined up in a row on top of the bureau.
The bed was made. In retrospect, it would occur to Daphne that Brad
might have straightened up his room and made his bed because he’d
been planning to pick up a woman at the party and bring her
upstairs. He’d been planning to score.

In retrospect, lots of things would
occur to her. But not then. She wanted to be beyond thinking that
night.

Brad folded his sweater and placed
it in a bureau drawer. Then he crossed to his desk and opened
another drawer. “Would you like a drink?” he asked, switching on
the fluorescent lamp above the blotter.

“Okay,” Daphne said
stupidly.

Brad pulled an already open bottle
of wine from the desk drawer and tugged out the cork. Then he
turned off the overhead light, leaving most of the room in shadow.
He led Daphne to the bed and they sat together on it, side by side.
He filled two ceramic mugs with wine and handed one to
her.

They didn’t talk. They sipped their
wine, sitting so close on the mattress that their thighs nearly
touched. Daphne stared at the small pool of bluish light the
fluorescent lamp spilled onto the surface of the desk. She wondered
why she couldn’t taste the wine she was drinking, why she couldn’t
feel Brad next to her. She wondered why she felt so
cold.