The Secret Keeping

by 

FRANCINE SAINT MARIE

These novels are works of fiction and products of the author’s imagination. Any similarity to real persons, places, events or the like is simply a coincidence.

Copyright ©-2009 The Author, Francine Saint Marie

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 9781419682360

Cover art and design by Francine Saint Marie © 2006

Questions or comments? Send them to: [email protected] or [email protected] 

“It’s sexual.”

“Sensual, did she say?”

“No, I think she said sexual.”

Spring was negligent this year and the irrational exuberance in Frank’s Place was undoubtedly a product of its delay.

“I said sexual.”

“We thought you said sensual, too.”

Friday’s happy hour had turned positively muggy.

“Sexual. Sensual. What’s the difference, anyway?”

The popular corporate watering hole was swollen to capacity, hot with the heat of a synthetic spring and the dark suits usually found in there seemed finally to bloom, adorned at last in their blossoms of polyester, powdery pastels and paisleys, and polka dots as bright and gay as poppies.

Off in the corner with the rubber tree plants, Lydia Beaumont sat, dressed entirely in black. Still wearing her overcoat, she gripped her half-empty glass and skeptically viewed the display.

“I just had a dream about you,” a seersuckered youth suggested in her ear.

“Oooh,” she replied, dismissing him with a flick of the wrist, “nice line!”

She was waiting on spring for her second wind and nothing this year could force its entry. Winter, the identical twin to the dreary fall that had just preceded it, continued to grip the city and Lydia couldn’t help feeling suspended in a permanent autumn. The balmy air of Frank’s tonight, with its harsh perfumes and heavy colognes, only made it feel worse.

True spring. She had fruitlessly searched all week for signs of it, but even the cherry trees seemed to have given up hope.

“Liddy!”

Tonight Lydia’s coat felt heavy and made of hair and she was certain she was being choked by the button of her shirt collar.

“You’re looking like a tourist, Liddy.”

Lydia turned in her chair, smiled obliquely. “Hey, Del,” she asked, “what’s the difference between misapprehension and mere apprehension?”

“Ms. Apprehension…life’s not a spectator sport,” Delilah chirped, walking away.

“Hey, what’s a four-letter word for love?” someone from their table shouted.

“Laid!” another blurted and the group erupted with predictable guffaws.

It had been another rough week. Lydia was sick of the work crowd and she only felt a little guilty about it.

She checked the time and faked a laugh. Her sentiments had somehow slipped beyond volatile this evening.

She checked them, too, as she always did.

A four-letter word for love? WORK. She had loved her work. But now the weight of it bore down harder and harder with every passing year and Lydia could no longer recall the reasons why she had pursued her profession. The ever increasingly younger throng she presided over were not like her when she was their age.

They were difficult to manage and she hated to see them on her time off. All these revved up self-starters, fancying themselves galloping mavericks in the market place, all of them developing pronounced limps at the slightest hint of regulation. How she longed this year for a bona fide blast of warm spring air.

She glanced around, taking stock of who was there, who to avoid if she could help it. Friday the place was crawling with them. She was pleased to discover the blond reading contentedly at her window seat. Came in often. Obviously from a more civilized tribe, Lydia thought, as she studied the woman’s cut of clothes to discern which one.

From…?

Unknown. Mostly rookies tonight, Lydia lamented, looking elsewhere. Lots of rookies from work infesting the place. Everywhere she went these days, every year more of them, each new onslaught more trying than the last. Busy, busy, busy. Shaking things up, knocking things down, fixing things, things that weren’t broken. Her rookies, stacking risk upon risk like little toy blocks, scorning her advice as though they weren’t obliged to take it, swaggering into happy hour like they owned the place.

Civilization. She sat back in her chair and drank deeply to the concept.

Lydia Beaumont was only thirty-six and still climbing, but she felt obsolete of late, frequently lonely in the new and improved world of international finance. The changes, too, did not impress her. Things were different, that’s for sure, but they had gotten worse not better. A whole universe was being driven now on nothing but bald speculation and baby-faced chutzpah.

A breath of fresh air would be so nice. She’d love a breath of fresh air.

Love, loved, loving. She had, on an impulse just yesterday, looked it all up in an old college dictionary: to hold dear, to cherish, a lover’s passion, devotion, tenderness, caress, to fondle amorously, like, desire, to thrive in. That one had appealed to her sensibilities the most, the reference to thriving, as in, “the rose loves sunlight.” A very nice idea. She drank to that, too, framing the woman at the window seat in the wineglass, her blond head of hair an elegant flower stuck in Frank’s bawdy bouquet. Thriving there alone, amidst the dandelions.

Love, loved, loving. All kinds of love in the world. That blond loves her solitude. She loves her book.

Perhaps just as a rose does, she loves sunlight, too, sitting in a window on Fridays in the waning afternoon light. Loves. Who knows what else she loves? Is she somebody’s long stemmed rose placed in a vase on a sunny windowsill? If so, she’s a white rose, all that blond, the creamy skin. What does mom say a white rose represents? Uh-oh. Love and her mother and the mysteries of roses! Lydia laughed at herself and surveyed the working horde.

A barely-thirty crowd again. She was more and more convinced that it may indeed be a world only for the very young. There seemed to be nowhere she could go to get away from them. They dominated her landscape these days, light and shiny and strangely bold beyond their experience, disregarding reality and all its real consequences, always skipping out, just at the right moment, before their wings melted off. She could trust them at least for that much.

Honor and chastity–a white rose represents the faithfulness of its giver, or so her mother claimed. Lydia sipped at the blond in her glass. Perhaps a yellow rose, then. What does yellow mean? She’d have to ask her mother. Why not just plain red? Oh, no. She could guess at the significance of that color. No, not red, for godsakes!

_____

Roses and sunlight. Scant little of either in Lydia’s life these days. Seven PM already. She felt stiff in her chair, her neck and her shoulders hunched, sore from months of being cold. She eyed the window seat enviously, the blond still relaxing there with her mysterious book, posed like it was another day at the beach, casual, with just a splash of reservation, enough to ward off intruders.

Stop. Look both ways. Red. Don’t go.

It was smart to be cautious, always wise to exercise care, especially when it concerned other people’s money. Only punks weren’t alarmed to lose people’s money. Punks wouldn’t mind misleading investors.

Punks were unscathed by plummeting debt ratings, by markets fluctuating hundreds of points an hour, by shortfalls rippling across the globe and eventually hitting land with the destructive force of tidal waves.

Superstorm economics, no big deal. They were so high above it all. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to read a book, Lydia Beaumont wondered, surrounded by a bunch of savages, to really soar above it all?

But it’s the real world, Lydia reminded herself, a newly unsettled one, and savages and their mentors floated above it all. Uncorrected, never uncertain, they rose higher and higher, dirigibles on hydrogen and all those creative numbers. She knew them well. She knew they were addicted to the heights and hooking nearly everyone else they came in contact with; that they were dealers, dealing out highs with their quarterly projections of unsubstantiated growth and their wildly inflated earnings reports. She was always aware of them up there, brash new rulers of an endlessly expanding universe, to which they alone held the secret. Or so they implied in their glossy corporate brochures. They kept her on her toes.

A tangle of wanna-be dancers was putting on the ritz and making a spectacle of themselves. She laughed out loud and then scoffed under her breath. There was no stopping them, no holds barred, she had learned, thinking suddenly of accountants. Good auditors, too, who once knew better worth–they autographed everything that fell from the sky, even if they couldn’t read it.

The blond at the window seat was also watching the dance extravaganza, the corners of her mouth turning up as she saw the enthusiasts darting and jerking to a bossanova they knew nothing about. It was a pretty half smile, the mouth poised as if there was something right on the tip of her tongue.

What would she have to say about all this? What do those lips talk about? Art? The book she read? What kind of a voice comes out of a mouth like that one? Something soft, Lydia bet. Soothing and gentle and tender and…sexy? Or was the right word sensual? Lydia caught the blond’s glance and was startled to find herself staring at the woman. She shifted her attention outside.

On the other side of the glass was the street patio which had long been exorcised of its spirited revelers by the icy winds. It was nothing but a drab sidewalk in winter. They had all been dispossessed of it, forced to haunt the interior of Frank’s Place where they restlessly waited for better weather and the good things that usually accompany heat.

And tonight, Sinatra had the audacity to sing of it…of a summer wind…freshly blowing in…from across a bay…

It was more fun outside, Lydia mused, worrying her collar. Outside she could stand or pace, swing her arms, rise and look around her, and eventually, when the mood struck, as it often did, she could wander off unnoticed, leaving if she wanted to and conveniently forgetting to say goodbye. In here, she couldn’t move and if she got up to go, it’d be a big deal. Her eyes came to rest on the table at the window. Its occupant briefly looked up again from her reading and casually scanned the crowd before returning to it.

Beside her a cork popped. A new bottle. Red. That’s an acquired look, Lydia concluded. Doesn’t want to seem interested. I do that, too. More wine? Not interested? Maybe just a splash.

And yet she’s always there, always deeply invested in a book, always with a glass of something barely touched, always alone and waiting, apparently for no one. She had become a familiar landmark at the window. At least to Lydia.

“Hey, what’s a three letter word for–”

Lydia huffed and cut the speaker off.

Calm was finally descending on the room, but then Sinatra threatened to spoil it all with an urgent song about Peru.

Now that she was thinking about it, there was only one night when Lydia hadn’t seen the woman alone there. A couple had joined her one evening.

Couples…Frank was way up in the air now, inviting everyone to join him. Fly, fly, fly, she heard him suddenly singing. Well, why-the-hell not? Let’s do it, let’s fly, let’s fly away–so then, perhaps the blond had a home nearby?

Lydia absently yanked at the thing annoying her throat and it was only when she felt her collar come loose, saw a button pinging free across the tabletop and ricocheting like a tiddlywink off a sea of abandoned glasses that she came out of her trance. She had been thinking of homesickness.

“You’re scaring me, Liddy! What in the hell are you thinking?”

“You tell me, Del. I’m thinking I need to go to bed.”

“Yeah! But there’s not a decent one left,” Delilah said, on another trip to the bar. “Joe’s here,” she added over her shoulder. “Be a big girl.”

“Please,” Lydia replied, holding up her hand,” or I’ll leave.”

Fly or float your boat to Peru, was Frank’s best suggestion yet. Actually, it wasn’t a bad idea for a quick get-away. Llamas are grand. So are one-man bands…and flutes that toot for you. Peru’s the place, he’s saying.

Or any place warm and sunny, she thought, draining her wineglass. Yes, yes, yes, then.

Let’s…fly…fly…fly…fly away.

Her glass was empty. She attempted to land it on the cluttered tabletop.

God, how she loved that man. Sinatra that is. Seemed like he had a song for every season, emptying a heart full of it, floating to Peru for the winter, moving the rubber tree plants, having a very good year, anywhere, anytime. She shook her head and smiled, drunk for a change, and from the table there came a warning tinkle, glasses clinking as she carelessly deposited her own beside them.

And then, for the sake of falling, he had changed his tune again. Frank was telling everyone to take it nice and easy now. It’s going to be so easy, he was bragging, to fall in love.

Yeah. Now wouldn’t that be something?