Going Back (6 page)

Eventually, Brad set his mug down
on the floor beside the bottle. When he removed Daphne’s mug from
her hand to put on the floor with his, she didn’t protest. He slid
his arms around her, kissed her, and eased her backward on the bed
until she was lying underneath him.

She wanted to enjoy it—or else to
block the whole thing out, to put her mind on hold and pretend none
of it was occurring. But she failed on both counts. She remained
painfully conscious of Brad’s weight on her, of his hands peeling
off her clothing and his, of his warm, damp breath tickling the
skin of her shoulder in a tortuous way.

Daphne suffered from more than just
the constant, almost abrasive tickle of his breath. There was the
scratchiness of his unshaven chin as he nuzzled her neck. The pain
of his knee digging into the soft flesh of her thigh. The pressure
of his hard chest smashing down onto her breasts. The stinging
pinch at her scalp when his fingers got snared in the tangled curls
of her hair. His aimless kisses, landing here and there, without
purpose or effect.

Yet she remained where she was,
doing her inebriated best to return his kisses and to shift out of
the way of his bony knees. She remained in the hope that things
would improve, that gradually everything would start to feel
better. She stayed because Brad had such beautiful eyes and she
hoped that somehow, perhaps, those beautiful eyes would transform
the experience into something equally beautiful.

They didn’t, of course. It wasn’t
beautiful. It was embarrassingly quick and bad, and when it was
over, Daphne felt more sober than she’d ever felt in her
life.

“I’m sorry,” she mumbled,
practically shoving him away from her and sitting.

“Hey,” he said hoarsely, extending
his arm. “You don’t have to go.”

“Yes, I do,” she insisted, too
chagrined to look at him. At that moment, she hated them both for
having done what they did—and for having done it so poorly. She was
unable to escape from herself, but she could escape from Brad, and
her only aim at that point was to flee from him before he found out
how much she hated him.

His hand alighted
on her leg, but he couldn’t prevent her from leaving. She swung off
the bed, resenting her sudden sobriety because it forced her to
acknowledge the most peculiar details of his room, imbedding them
in her memory so she’d never be able to forget. The wine they’d
been drinking was a Mosel; the mugs had the college logo imprinted
on them; the book on the top of the pile on Brad’s desk was Volume
One of Kierkegaard’s
Either/Or
. Brad’s blanket was the
same heavenly blue color as his eyes.

Another thing she would never
forget was that Brad didn’t beg her to stay. He didn’t even ask her
to stay. All he said was, “You don’t have to go,” as if the choice
were totally hers.

If it was, she was willing to make
it. She left the fraternity house, went back to her dorm, took a
long, scalding shower and then got into bed, burrowed deep beneath
the blankets, and wept.

That ghastly night had occurred in
late February, which meant Daphne had to spend only three more
months on the same campus with Brad before they both graduated and
went their separate ways. When they saw each other during those
three final months, Brad did a better job than Daphne of acting as
if nothing of any significance had ever transpired between
them—which led Daphne to believe that to Brad, the incident had had
no significance at all. But even when he was pretending
friendliness toward her, he never looked directly into her eyes. He
always steered his gaze to just above hers, as though he were
fascinated with her forehead. And after he asked her one or two
banal “how’s-it-going” questions, he always shifted his attention
away, as if he couldn’t bear to hear her answers.

She recovered. Daphne imagined that
most people had done some horrendous, mortifying, utterly moronic
thing at least once in their lives, and those people with a sane
approach to life ultimately put the memory of whatever they’d done
into deep storage and moved on. If it were possible to go back and
correct one’s mistakes, Daphne would gladly do it. She’d go back to
that night, refuse every glass of beer she was offered, talk for a
few minutes with Brad about how stuffy the basement room was, and
then, when he said he wanted to take his sweater upstairs, she
would respond, “Okay, Brad. See you later,” and march back into the
stuffy basement room in search of someone to dance with.

But it wasn’t possible to go back,
so Daphne did what she could: she went forward.

“When are you going to show me a
house?” Brad asked.

Daphne shot him a quick look. He
didn’t appear bored as he lounged in the passenger seat next to
her, but he was obviously eager to see some residences. “Right
now,” she said, turning back onto Bloomfield Avenue and scanning
her wristwatch. A few minutes past eleven o’clock. They’d have time
before lunch to look at a six-year-old ranch house she’d recently
listed. At $410,000, it was absurdly overpriced, but then
everything in this part of New Jersey was.

Maybe Brad would like it. Maybe
after looking at it and a few other houses Daphne intended to show
him, he’d think of her as a woman who was much too sensible to
drink a lot of beer and jump into bed with a man.

Not that Daphne gave a damn about
what Brad thought of her, of course. Not that she cared the least
bit.

AS IT TURNED OUT, they managed to
look at two houses before lunch. They spent less than fifteen
minutes at the ranch house; Brad stalked through the six small
rooms, poked his head into the narrow bathroom, and stormed out the
front door, grumbling that anyone who’d pay in excess of four
hundred thousand dollars for such a tiny house had to have a screw
loose somewhere.

“I warned you,” Daphne admonished
him. “The housing prices are really inflated around
here.”

“It’s not that I’m unwilling to pay
four hundred thousand dollars,” Brad defended himself. “But I’d
like to get something more than a one-toilet shack for the
money.”

His comment didn’t bode well.
Around these parts, a second bathroom could add upwards of fifty
thousand dollars to a house’s price.

Hoping to put him in a more
receptive mood before they took a break for lunch, Daphne drove him
to a townhouse she had among her listings in one of the elite
condominium complexes. For a price comparable to that of the ranch
house, he could get two full bathrooms there. The master bathroom
even had a sunken marble tub.

“Four-twenty, and you don’t get a
private yard?” he griped.

“That’s the concept behind a
condominium,” she reminded him, her patience beginning to wane. “No
private yard means you don’t have to mow your lawn or weed your
flower beds.”

“What the hell do I need a marble
tub for?” he muttered, marching out of the building and heading
down the winding front walk toward Daphne’s car. “I never take
baths. I’m a shower person.”

In an effort to mollify him, she
brought him to one of the more expensive restaurants in Verona for
lunch. They didn’t have to wait long to be seated, and as soon as a
waitress neared their table, Brad requested a scotch on the
rocks.

“Iced tea,” Daphne said when the
waitress asked if she wanted a drink. The waitress left them with
menus and departed.

“You’re going to make me drink
alone,” Brad deduced, his tone laced with suspicion.

Given that Daphne no longer partook
of liquor, her companions invariably had to drink alone. “I don’t
drink when I’m working,” she explained. It wasn’t the whole truth,
but it wasn’t a lie, either.

Brad leaned back in his chair and
regarded her across the linen-covered table. “Is that your
strategy? You get your client smashed, and he’ll agree to buy
anything for any price.”

Daphne smiled demurely. “I have the
feeling, Brad, that no matter how smashed you got, you’d still put
up a fuss about a house you considered overpriced.”

“In other words, any house around
here.”

She held onto her smile, refusing
to let him rile her. She knew that, given the comfortable income
he’d be earning in his new position, he could afford any of the
houses she planned to show him today. And he couldn’t be as shocked
about the prices as he pretended to be—he’d insisted that he was
aware of the inflated housing costs in the area. All of which meant
that what was bugging him was something essentially unrelated to
the house and the condo Daphne had shown him.

What was bugging him, she surmised,
was the identity of the real estate broker showing him the
houses.

The waitress arrived with their
drinks and asked if Daphne and Brad were ready to order their
meals. Daphne lifted her menu, skimmed it and asked for a bowl of
gazpacho and a garden salad. Brad cast her an unreadable glance,
then took her menu from her, handed it along with his to the
waitress and requested a hamburger. “Are you on a diet?” he asked
Daphne once they were alone again.

Daphne scrutinized him carefully.
She studied the smooth fall of his glossy black hair across his
high brow, the square shape of his jaw, the thin line of his lips,
the brilliant blue radiance of his eyes, and finally his neck. It
was still one of the nicest necks she’d ever seen on a man. It was
the sort of neck that tempted a woman to graze it with her lips—if
she was sober and responsible, and if he was more than passively
receptive.

“What makes you think I’m on a
diet?” she asked. She had hoped her voice would emerge sounding
amiably detached, but it didn’t. She came across as petulant, as if
she were eager to rise to Brad’s unspoken challenge and wear as big
a chip on her shoulder as he was wearing on his.

“You’ve lost weight since college,”
he said.

“I’m surprised that someone like
you would even notice,” she shot back, then bit her lip and cursed
her temper. How could she have uttered such an snide remark in
front of him? How could she have allowed herself to appear so
touchy?

Her caustic
comment had an unexpected effect on him. Rather than rallying with
an equally insulting comeback, he softened. His lips curved in a
hesitant smile and his eyes remained on her as he reached for his
scotch glass. “You
have
lost weight, Daff. The fact of the matter is,
you’re looking great.”

She accepted his compliment in the
spirit in which it was given—a simple observation, devoid of
ulterior meaning. “I was too fat in college,” she reminded him. “I
was still carrying around the ʻfreshmen twenty’ when I
graduated.”

“The ʻfreshmen twenty’? What’s
that?”

“The twenty pounds lots of girls
gain their freshman year of college.”

“Why do they do that?” Brad asked,
apparently fascinated.

Daphne laughed. “I don’t know,” she
admitted. “Maybe it has to do with leaving home for the first time.
All of a sudden, you don’t have your mother on your back, nagging
you that if you aren’t pretty you won’t get a date for the prom and
your life will be ruined.”

“Did your mother do that?” Brad
inquired.

Daphne tried to interpret the
gentle undercurrent in his voice. He sounded a touch indignant, a
touch amused that mothers would put such pressure on their
daughters. “Yes, she did,” Daphne answered honestly. “And I did go
to my senior prom. I can’t say whether or not it’s saved my life
from ruination, but I did get a prom date.”

“Whoever he was, he was lucky,”
Brad said.

Why was Brad suffering from this
sudden compulsion to flatter her? Evidently he felt the need to
make amends for his earlier surliness. “Whoever he was,” she
responded before taking a sip of iced tea through the straw, “he’s
my brother-in-law now.”

“Oh,” Brad said,
then lifted his glass and drank. His gaze lingered on Daphne as he
swallowed and lowered the glass back to the table. As her statement
registered on him, his expression sharpened and his smile faded.
“
Oh
,” he repeated
apparently struck by the notion that something in the situation she
had just described wasn’t quite kosher. “He’s your
brother-in-law?”

“He married my younger sister,”
Daphne explained. “Even though he and I went to the prom together,
we were never that serious.” There were times for candor, but this
clearly wasn’t one of them. Daphne hadn’t intended to discuss
anything personal with Brad. Just because she had accidentally
exposed a piece of her past, she didn’t have to compound her error
by letting him know how badly her erstwhile prom date had wounded
her. If she did, she might slip even further and inform Brad of
precisely what she’d done in her mindless effort to console
herself—and that particular subject was definitely and permanently
off-limits, as far as she was concerned.

“I didn’t know you had a sister,”
Brad commented. Then he rolled his eyes heavenward and swore
softly. “It’s ridiculous, Daff—the last two years of school you and
I traveled in the same circles, and yet we know so little about
each other.”