“That’s not enough?”
“No!”
“Okay, so how much time do you need?”
She ran her hand through her hair. “I don’t know…a year or two.”
“I gotta go to bed,” he said. “I gotta get some rest. I feel like death.” He dragged himself up from the chair and shuffled off to the bedroom.
“The plane leaves at seven-thirty tomorrow morning. I have a cab coming at six. You decide what you wanna do. There’s a seat reserved on the plane if you want it.”
He disappeared through the bedroom door, and Louisa heard him flop onto the bed. She followed him in and removed his shoes. “Can I get you anything. Some soup or tea?”
“A gun,” he said. “Get me a gun and shoot me.”
She drew the quilt over him. “You’ll feel better tomorrow.”
“You really think so?” he asked hopefully.
“No,” she said. “You’ll probably feel worse.”
Chapter 10
At six the next morning, Louisa heard Pete stomp down the stairs. All night long she’d wrestled with her feelings, and she still hadn’t reached a conclusion. He knocked on her door, and she hesitated in answering. She sat hunched in her bed, covers pulled up to her chin, not sure what she should say to him. He knocked again, she sighed and went to the door.
“Morning,” he said, his face stiffening at the sight of her in her nightgown. “Looks like I’m going alone.” He had two suitcases, a laptop, and Spike in a cat carrier. The cab was waiting at the curb.
“I’m sorry,” Louisa said. “I can’t.”
He gave her a slip of paper. “If you change your mind, this is my address. There’s a map on the back, and my phone number.”
“How’s your cold?”
“I’ll live.”
They both stared down at their feet. The silence was awkward. Spike yowled, and the cabdriver beeped his horn. Pete said something rude in reply.
“Call me,” Louisa said.
“Sure.”
She adjusted his scarf. “Take care of yourself.”
“I will.”
“Will you be coming back to Washington?”
“Of course I’ll be coming back to Washington,” he said. “I live here.”
“Gosh,” Louisa said, “no need to get cranky about it.”
“No need to get cranky?” His voice rose an octave. “I asked you to marry me, and you turned me down as if I were yesterday’s potatoes! And besides, I have a cold. People are supposed to be cranky when they have a cold.”
He took a wad of tissues from his pocket and blew his nose. “If you have problems with the apartment, call the property manager. You have his number.”
He gave her a set of keys. “Keys to my apartment and keys to the Porsche. The Porsche is garaged on the street behind us. The number is on the paper I gave you. Use the car if you want.”
The cabdriver leaned on his horn. “I have to go,” Pete said to Louisa.
She bit down on her lower lip to keep it from trembling. “I hate good-byes.”
“The plane doesn’t leave until seven-thirty. There’s still time to change your mind.”
She shook her head.
He sneezed twice and blew his nose again. He picked up the cat carrier and trudged down the steps to the cab.
Louisa raised her hand to wave, but he never looked back. He was hurt and angry, she thought. She leaned her head against the doorjamb and watched the cab drive away.
“I can’t go with you,” she said. “I’m not a California person. I don’t tan well, I fall asleep on one glass of wine, I don’t know how to give fake kisses. What would I do if I got invited to a barbecue at Tom Hanks’ house?”
A blast of freezing air swirled up her nightgown, reminding her that she was standing on the porch. She shivered, as much from gloom as from cold, then firmly closed the door and retreated back to her warm bed.
She’d always imagined a marriage as being comfortably boring. It was a place to feel safe. A place to relax. She shook her head sadly. She’d never be able to relax in California.
To begin with there were all those starlets named Bambi. She peeked under the covers at her flannel-wrapped body. She’d have to get breast implants and liposuctioned if she wanted to compete with Bambi. She’d need lip augmentation to give herself that pouty look, and Mr. Ray’s hair weave, and rhinoplasty, and a full set of caps.
It took an hour and a half to go through all of the reasons why she couldn’t go to California. She ran out of reasons just as the paper thunked against the front door, so she threw the covers aside and swung her legs out of bed. She stuffed her feet into her slippers, belted her robe around her, and set forth to enjoy her morning ritual. She made the coffee, tuned in to NPR, read the paper, and ate an English muffin as a special treat.
At eight-thirty she dressed in sweats and sneakers and began cleaning her house. She vacuumed, polished, scrubbed, and scoured until every surface was shiny clean. She cleaned the toaster, the range hood, the oven, and the refrigerator. She cleaned her closets, rearranged her drawers, and put down her new shelf paper. She cleaned until eleven-thirty at night.
At eleven-thirty she stood in front of her full-length mirror and assessed her thighs. They didn’t need liposuction, but they weren’t up to Bambi’s standards, either. Louisa burst into tears and went to bed. Hormones, she told herself. She was just suffering a small endocrine imbalance. She was sure she’d wake up the following morning feeling peachy dandy.
The second day she did the laundry. She ironed all the sheets, pillowcases, and towels. She ironed her underwear, her jeans, and her T-shirts. She polished the leaves on her plants, scoured her garbage can, and tried to wash her car, but the water kept freezing.
She told herself she was doing all of these things because the following week she was going to do serious job hunting. Once she went back to work for real she wouldn’t have time to scrub the grout with a toothbrush, she told herself.
Deep down inside, she knew better. She’d known the moment the cab had disappeared from view. Maybe she’d even known sooner than that. Maybe she’d always known. She was going to go to California. She wasn’t sure what she’d do after she got there, but she was going all the same. And before she stepped off into the unknown, she’d needed to set her life in order.
She baked a double batch of chocolate chip cookies and ate half of them for supper. She put the rest of the cookies in a straw basket, wrapped it in cellophane, and tied the cellophane together at the top with a yellow ribbon. She packed two small suitcases with summery clothes and set them beside the front door. She hadn’t canceled her paper or emptied her refrigerator. She wasn’t sure how long she’d be gone. She painted her nails in bright red to bolster her self-confidence and went to bed.
Louisa’s mother looked at the newly polished houseplants sitting in her foyer, at the little black car sitting in her driveway, and at her daughter, dressed in a lemon-yellow linen suit.
“Let me get this straight,” her mother said, holding the basket of cookies. “You’re going to California.”
“Yes.”
“This is very sudden.”
“It’s something I have to do,” Louisa said.
“Like when you were seven and you had to see how a bathroom scale worked so you took ours apart? And when you were nine you had to see if you could climb to the top of the Szalagy’s oak tree, and the fire department had to come get you down?”
“Yup. Just like that.”
“I don’t suppose this has anything to do with your screenwriter friend?”
Grandma Brannigan stood in the kitchen doorway. “You aren’t going to go out there and live in sin, are you? You know what they say about giving out free samples, don’t you?”
“He’s asked me to marry him,” Louisa said.
“He don’t look like the marrying kind to me,” Grandma Brannigan said. “Besides, I saw that flashy car he drives. You know what they say about men who drive them fast cars. They say their body parts aren’t all what they should be.”