too gently by the arm and pulled her toward a small square of linoleum in front of the jukebox. As he began to move to the music, he said softly, "A general rule of living life with real people, Francie, is not
to end any sentences with the word 'Gucci.'"
Her chest seemed to fill up with a terrible heaviness. She had wanted to make them like her, and she'd only made a fool of herself. She had told a story that they hadn't found funny, a story that she suddenly saw through their eyes and realized she should never have told in the first place.
Her composure had been held together by only the lightest thread and now it broke. "Excuse me," she said, her voice sounding thick even to her own ears. Before Dallie could try to stop her, she pushed her way through the maze of tables and out the screen door. The fresh air invaded her nostrils, its moist nighttime scent mingling with the smell of diesel fuel, creosote, and fried food from the kitchen at the back. She stumbled, still light-headed from the wine, and steadied herself by leaning against the side of a pickup truck with mud-encrusted tires and a gun rack on the back. The sounds of "Behind Closed Doors" drifted out from the jukebox.
What was happening to her? She remembered how hard Nicky had laughed when she'd told him the warthog story, how Cissy Kavendish had wiped the tears from her eyes with Nigel MacAllister's handkerchief. A wave of homesickness swept over her. She'd attempted to get through to Nicky again today on the telephone, but no one had answered, not even the houseboy. She tried to imagine Nicky sitting in the Cajun Bar and Grill, and failed miserably. Then she tried to imagine herself sitting at the foot of the Hepplewhite table in Nicky's dining room wearing the Gwynwyck family emeralds, and succeeded admirably. But when she imagined the other end of the table-the place where Nicky should have been sitting-she saw Dallie Beaudine instead. Dallie, with his faded blue jeans, too-tight T-shirts, and movie star face, lording it over Nicky Gwynwyck's eighteenth-century dinner table.
The screen door banged, and Dallie came out. He walked to her side and held out her purse. "Hey, Francie," he said quietly.
"Hey, Dallie." She took the purse and looked up at the night sky spangled with floating stars.
"You did real fine in there."
She gave a soft, bitter laugh.
He inserted a toothpick in the corner of his mouth. "No, I mean it. Once you realized you'd made a jackass of yourself, you behaved with a little dignity for a change. No scenes on the dance floor, just a quiet exit. Everybody was real impressed. They want you to come back in."
She deliberately mocked him. "Not hardly."
He chuckled just as the screen door banged and two men appeared. "Hey, Dallie," they called out.
"Hey, K.C., Charlie."
The men climbed into a battered Jeep Cherokee and Dallie turned back to her. "I think, Francie, that I don't not like you as much as I used to. I mean, you're still pretty much a pain in the ass most of the time and not, strictly speaking, my kind of woman, but you do have your moments. You really went after that warthog story in there. I liked the way you gave it everything you had, even after it was pretty obvious that you were digging a real deep grave for yourself."
A clatter of dishes sounded from inside as the jukebox launched into the final chorus of "Behind Closed Doors." She dug the heel of her sandal into the hard-packed gravel. "I want to go home," she said abruptly. "I despise it here. I want to go back to England where I understand things. I want my clothes and my house and my Aston Martin. I want to have money again and friends who like me." She wanted her mother, too, but she didn't say that.
"Feeling real sorry for yourself, aren't you?"
"Wouldn't you if you were in my position?"
"Hard to say. I guess I can't imagine being real happy living that kind of sybaritic life."
She didn't precisely know what "sybaritic" meant, but she got the general idea, and it irritated her that someone whose spoken grammar could most charitably be described as substandard was using a word
she didn't entirely understand.
He propped his elbow on the side of the pickup. "Tell me something, Francie. Do you have anything remotely resembling a life plan stored away in that head of yours?"
"I intend to marry Nicky, of course. I've already told you that." Why did the prospect depress her so?
He pulled out the toothpick and tossed it away. "Aw, come off it, Francie. You don't any more want to marry Nicky than you want to get your hair mussed up."
She rounded on him. "I don't have much choice in the matter, do I, since I don't have two shillings left to rub together! I have to marry him." She saw him opening his mouth, getting ready to spew out another one of his odious lower-class platitudes, and she cut him off. "Don't say it, Dallie! Some people were brought into this world to earn money and others were meant to spend it, and I'm one of the latter. To be brutally honest, I wouldn't have the slightest idea how to support myself. You've already heard what happened when I tried acting, and I'm too short to make any money at fashion modeling. If it comes down to a choice between working in a factory and marrying Nicky Gwynwyck, you can bloody well be certain which one I'm going to choose."
He thought about that for a moment and then said, "If I can make two or three birdies in the final round tomorrow, it looks like I'll pick up a little spare change. You want me to buy you that plane ticket home?"
She looked at him standing so close to her, arms crossed over his chest, only that fabulous mouth visible beneath the shadowing bill of his cap. "You'd do that for me?"
"I told you, Francie. As long as I can buy gas and pick up the bar tab, money doesn't mean anything to me. I don't even like money. To tell you the truth, even though I consider myself a true American patriot, I'm pretty much a Marxist."
She laughed at that, a reaction which told her more clearly than anything that she'd been spending too much time in his company. "I'm grateful for the offer, Dallie, but as much as I'd love to take you up on it, I need to stay around a bit longer. I can't go back to London like this. You don't know my friends. They'd dine out for weeks on the story of my transformation into a pauper."
He leaned back against the truck. "Nice batch of friends you've got there, Francie."
She felt as if he'd rapped his knuckles on a hollowness inside her, a hollowness she had never permitted herself to dwell on. "Go back inside," she said. "I'm going to stay out here for a while."
"I don't think so." He turned his body toward her, so that his T-shirt brushed against her arm. A yellow bug light by the screen door cast a slanted ochre shadow across his face, subtly changing his features, making him look older but no less splendid. "I think you and I have something more interesting to do tonight, don't we?"
His words produced an uncomfortable fluttering in the pit of her stomach, but being coy was as much a part of her as the Serritella cheekbones. Even though one part of her wanted to run back to hide in the Cajun Bar and Grill rest room, she gave him her most innocently inquisitive smile. "Oh? What's that?"
"A little tag team wrestling maybe?" His mouth curled in a slow, sexy smile. "Why don't you just climb into the front seat of the Riviera so we can be on our way."
She didn't want to climb into the front seat of the Riviera. Or maybe she did. Dallie stirred unfamiliar feelings in her body, feelings she would have been all too happy to act upon if only she were one of those women who was really good at sex, one of those women who didn't mind all the mess and the thought of having someone else's perspiration drip on her body. Still, even if she wanted to, she could hardly back out now without looking a total fool. As she walked over to the car and opened the door, she tried to convince herself that, since she didn't perspire, a man as gorgeous as Dallie just might not either.
She watched as he walked around the front of the Riviera, whistling tunelessly and digging the keys out of his back pocket. He seemed in no particular hurry. There wasn't any macho swagger to his stride, none of the cock-of-the-walk strut she'd noticed in the sculptor in Marrakech before he'd taken her to bed. Dallie acted casual, ordinary, as if going to bed with her were an everyday occurrence, as if it didn't matter all that much to him, as if he'd been there a thousand times before and she was just one more female body.