“I had to carry her from the beach to the parking lot,” Nick said abruptly, as he went around to the back door of his car and opened it. The teenager had been leaning against the door and nearly fell out. She didn’t stir. He picked Teresa up and threw her over his shoulder. “So it’s no problem for me to carry her for you now. I’m used to it.”
They walked quietly down the path toward the house, Monica Silver leading by a few steps. Nick watched her walk in front of him. She moved effortlessly, like a dancer, with almost perfect posture. Her dark hair was wrapped up at the back in a chignon. It must be very long, he thought to himself with delight, imagining her hair flowing down her beautiful back.
It was a warm and humid Palm Beach evening. Nick was sweating by the time they reached the entrance. “Could you do me one more favor, Nick?” Mrs. Silver asked. “Could you carry her up to her room? My husband’s not here and the help has all gone to bed. And I doubt seriously if she’s going to get herself together well enough to climb the stairs, even with my help, in the near future.”
Nick followed Mrs. Silver’s instructions and carried Teresa through the atrium, into the living room, up the entry steps onto the platform, up the left flight to the second floor, and then into her bedroom. It was huge. In her room Teresa had a king-size bed with four posters, a giant television, an entire cabinet of movies for the VCR, and a sound system that would have been a credit to any rock and roll band. Bruce Springsteen posters and photos were all over the room. Nick laid Teresa gently on her bed. She murmured “Thank you,” indicating to him that at least she was semiconscious. Her mother bent over her and gave her a kiss.
Nick left the two of them alone and went back down the stairs into the living room. He could not believe that somebody really could live in a house like this. Why the living room alone was bigger than the house in Falls Church where he grew up. He wandered around the room after he came down the stairs. There were original paintings on the walls, crystal glass chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, and art objects and bric-a-brac both on the tables and in every nook and cranny. It was all too much for him. He was overwhelmed.
He felt a hand on his shoulder and involuntarily recoiled. Monica Silver chided him, “Goodness, you’re jumpy. It’s only me.” He turned around to look at her Was he imagining it or had she somehow combed her hair and put on fresh makeup in the few seconds they had been separated? For the first time he saw her in the full light. She was the most beautiful woman that he had ever seen. His breath was taken away and he felt giddy. Outside he had not been able to see her skin clearly. Now he found himself staring at her bare arms, following the elegant contours of her neck. Her skin had the smoothness of ivory. It called to him to touch it. Watch yourself, Williams, he heard a voice inside him say, Or you are going to be outrageous. He tried to calm himself.
But it was useless. He could not take his eyes off her. She was saying something. She had asked him a question. He had not even heard it, so dumbfounded was he by what was happening, by where he was. She was leading him somewhere in the house. His imagination was running wild. She took him into a small room with a table and told him to sit down.
“It’s the least I can do,” she was saying, “to repay you for what you did for Teresa. I know you must be hungry. And we still have some great food left over from the party tonight.”
Nick was in a breakfast nook just off the kitchen. To his left a door led to the patio and then outside, into the back yard. The lights around the huge swimming pool were still on. He could see manicured gardens with roses in bloom, chaise longues, colorful umbrellas, white iron tables with twisted, lacy legs—he could not believe that it was all real. He felt transported to another world, a world that existed only in books and movies.
Monica Silver laid out some food on the table. Smoked salmon, onions, capers, cream cheese, two different kinds of bread, plus a dish of some other kind of fish that Nick did not recognize. “That’s marinated herring,” she said with a smile, noticing Nick’s quizzical expression. She handed him a wine glass. He took it and unconsciously looked her straight in the eyes. He was transfixed. He felt weak and powerless, as if he were being drawn into her deep brown, bewitching eyes, into her world of richness and luxury and beauty. His knees were weak, his heart was racing, he could feel his fingers tingling.
She poured some white wine in his glass and then in her own. “This is a brilliant Burgundy, Clos des Mouches,” she said, touching her glass to his with a light tinkle. “Let’s make a toast.”
She was radiant. He was enthralled. “To happiness,” she said.
They talked for over three hours. Nick learned that Monica Silver had grown up in France, that her father had been a small, struggling fur merchant in Paris, and that she had met her husband, Aaron (the biggest of the big Montreal furriers), while helping her father at the shop. She had been seventeen at the time of the whirlwind courtship. Mr: Silver had proposed just seven days after they had met and she had accepted immediately even though her husband-to-be was twenty years older. She moved to Montreal and married him before she was eighteen. Teresa was born nine months later.
Nick told her that he was in his junior year at Harvard, majoring in English and French to get a good liberal arts education and prepare himself for either law school or graduate school. As soon as she found out that he was in his third year of French, she switched and spoke to him in her native language. Her name became Monique. He missed some of what she said, but it didn’t matter. He understood the gist of it. And her dramatic voice plus the sound of the foreign language only increased the power of the spell already cast by the wine and her beauty.
Nick also tried to speak French from time to time. Whatever self-consciousness he might have ordinarily felt was swept away by the magic of the setting and their growing rapport. They laughed together easily at his mistakes. She was gracious and charming when she corrected him, always adding “mais vous parlez fran,cais tres bien” in the early part of the evening. Later, as their conversation became more personal (Nick talked about his problems with his father; Monique wondered aloud if there was anything a mother could do with a teenage daughter except hope that some basic values had been learned), Monique changed to the more personal “tu” form in talking to him. This established an additional intimacy between them that deepened in the wee hours of the morning.
Monique talked about Paris, about the romance of the streets, the bistros, the museums, the history. Nick visualized it all and felt transported with her to the city of lights. She told about her dreams when she was growing up, about walking in the sixteenth arrondissement among the wealthy and promising herself that someday… He listened closely, enraptured, an almost beatific smile upon his face. In the end, Monique had to tell him that it was time to go because she had an early tennis lesson in the morning. It was after three o’clock. He apologized as they walked together to the door. She laughed and said that it had been fun. At the door she reached up and kissed him on the cheek. His heart soared out of his body at the touch of her lips. “Call me sometime,” she said with a playful smile, as she closed the door behind him.
For over thirty hours Nick thought of nothing but Monique. He talked to her in his mind during the day; she was his lover in dreams at night. He called her once, twice, three times, each time talking to her answering machine. The third time he left her his phone number and address and suggested that she try to get in touch with him when her schedule would permit.
By noon on the second day after his evening at the Silvers’ Palm Beach mansion, he started to calm down, to realize that there was no sense in his continuing to worship the image of a woman he had met for a single evening. Especially a woman who was married to someone else. In the late afternoon he went out on the beach to play volleyball with some of the other college students he had met during his first days in Florida. He had just served an ace when he thought he heard his name being called by a husky, accented voice that was absolutely unmistakable.