was warm and sunny. It was promising to be a good spring. The Ducati was parked on the side of the white building.
“Perhaps,” he replied with a shrug. “I admit I don’t often have men on the back of my bike behind me.”
She looked at it. He looked at her.
“We’re going on the bike?”
“It’s the only wheels I got.” He looked her over. She was wearing jeans, boots, a leather jacket. She was certainly dressed for the bike. He hopped on first, handing her his helmet. “You take it. I only have the one.”
It felt too loose on her head, and she couldn’t get the strap under her chin to close. Kai had to climb off the bike to help her. Adjusting the helmet with both hands, he put his fingers under her chin to clip the buckle shut. His face, tilted close and near her chin, was clean-shaven, smiley, friendly. His breath smelled of coffee. “It’s going to mess up your hair,” he said. “But you don’t mind, right? You hardly think about hair.”
“Har-de-har-har.”
He was back on the bike. “Hop on, and hold on,” he said. “That’s the most important thing.”
“The hopping, or the holding?”
“The holding.”
She hopped on, like onto a horse, one leg over, the other in the stirrup. She’d never been on a horse or a bike. She wanted to ask him what she was supposed to hold on to; nothing to hold on to but the rider and his brown leather. Larissa grabbed the sides of Kai’s jacket. Her knees were flanking his denim-clad legs. It was weird, too close, inappropriate. She would never hop on the back of Gary’s bike, or Brian’s, with his unwashed hair.
“You gotta hold on,” Kai yelled to her, revving up the engine. “Once I push off, you’ll go flying if you don’t grab on tighter.”
“Well, don’t push off, okay? Go very slow.”
He pulled out onto Main Street and zoomed down the road. “Go slower!” she squealed, the wind whipping her hair under the helmet. She wasn’t sure he could hear her.
“If I go any slower,” he yelled back, “we’ll lose our balance and fall off.”
“God, why does it seem like a jet plane?” she said when he had stopped at a red light.
“All right, peanut the speed demon. I’ll walk the bike to your house.” He revved the idling engine. “Tell me where you live again.”
She directed him as best she could with the road over his shoulder. She smelled the leather of his jacket. Not wanting him to ride through Summit where the owner of the Summit Diner and Ricky’s Candy knew her, where all the gas station attendants, candy sellers, ice cream makers, shoe purveyors, dry cleaners could wave hi to her strapped to the back of a black and lava-bright Ducati Sportclassic, Larissa took him instead on a roundabout route, down Route 24 service road, avoiding town. She wasn’t doing anything wrong, and yet she didn’t want to ride through Summit with his helmet on her head. Because there was no difference in the appearance of things between wrong and right. Both looked exactly the same. A young man in a leather jacket and jeans, whizzing through a small suburban almost greening town on his flame Ducati, while a long-haired woman of a certain age, married with three children, a possible member of the Women’s Junior League of New Jersey, was astride the back of his bike, both hands gripping his waist, her face close to his back, close to his jacket.
On the open road, he accelerated. She gasped for breath. For a moment Larissa saw herself from the heavens, from the blue sky, saw herself as the birds saw her, on the back of a bike behind a young man, her hair in a swirl, riding fast, near fresh April. The sensation of speed, unable to catch her breath, of danger, of exhilaration, of fear mingled with spring and sunshine, of the undeniable life-yell of Wow, made her miss her right turn on Summit and in a mile, or three, she had to nudge him to turn around. Another blazing moment behind his back.
Finally Kai turned onto Bellevue, coasted down the gentle slope, and Larissa saw herself once again as she was, not as she wished she might be, because he pulled into the driveway of her gray, black-shuttered house.
“You all right?” He eased to a stop behind her Escalade.
She got off the bike, took off his helmet. “Sure,” she said, her face flushed from the speed, the wind.
Taking the helmet from her, Kai smiled infectiously. “There’s nothing like it, is there? Maybe some other time I can take you behind town, near the Watchung reservation and the Deserted Village. Like we did with your Jag. I can burn some serious rubber on that road. The Ducati’s nothin’ but engine.”
“See, the problem with you is you think that’s a plus.”
He laughed. “I’ll call you when the nav’s installed.”
“If I’m not here, just leave a message.”
“You want me to call you on your cell?”
“Oh. Uh—” A stutter. “Yeah. Sure.” And just like that she gave him her cell number.
Her back was to the house, but she saw him eyeing it, top to bottom, the skyscraper trees, the ebony shutters, the volume, the breadth of it, taking it all in, the fresh gray paint and the red tulips lining the paved walk, the manicured sloping lawns, the decorative lamp posts. “So this is where you live.” He whistled. “Wow.”
“Thanks. We didn’t always live here.”
“I imagine not. You have to earn a lot of pennies to live in a place like this.”
She assented silently.
“What does your husband do again?”
“He’s the CFO of Prudential Securities.”
Kai whistled again. “He must be pretty proud to live here.”
Again she silently nodded. “He says the only way he’s ever leaving this house is when they carry him out of it feet first.”
Kai blinked approvingly. “And what about you?”
There was a second’s pause. “Yes, me too, of course,” she said quickly. “Where could you possibly go from here?”
“And, more important, why would you want to?” Kai started up his bike, revved his engine. “Listen to how secluded it is. My bike sounds like an airplane with the echo off the golf course. Hey, is that your mall across the highway?” Lightly he laughed. “That’s sweeeet. Seeing the shopping possibilities from your sparkling windows.” He raised his gloved hand in a goodbye. “I’ll call when it’s ready, ’kay?”
In the silence of her Bellevue life, Larissa heard his bike gunning it up the road away on Summit Avenue as she walked up her driveway and let herself into the empty house. Then she sat in her kitchen and waited. Not waited, just … sat in her house, clean, spic-and-span, at the island, cup of coffee in her hands, and tried to catch a glimpse of herself in the black granite, seeing only the glimpse of herself on a motorcycle at forty. She should go let Riot in from the backyard. She should start up the computer and compose the casting call notice. She should call Ezra. She should take the Escalade and drive to Pingry and order the books. She should …
The phone rang. It was Maggie: would Larissa like to grab some lunch? Instantly Larissa agreed. Anything to get her mind off things. She met Maggie in the parking lot of Neiman’s.
“What, no Jag today?” Maggie’s hair was colored, curly, dark red. She looked good after having recently been under the weather; she was even sporting some light makeup.
“Nah, the kids have stuff in the afternoon,” replied Larissa, prodding her friend away from the truck. “Come on, I’m starved.”
“I heard you’re courting trouble,” Maggie said, all twinkly and ironic, as they sat down in the checkered café.
“What