I held the phone, listening to dead transatlantic air until the operator informed me it was time to make a call. What had just happened? A perfectly good editor-author relationship had gone up in flames. How could he love me? We’d never met, as he so stubbornly kept pointing out.
In the past, I’d stared at his cover photos feeling mildly like a jellyfish and woozy inside. He was sexy. But he was there, and I was here. It was perfect. No morning chit-chat. No fighting over toilet seat lid etiquette. No one badgering me about my weird hours, my caffeine addiction, my overindulgence in tequila sunrises. No one yelling at me when my gut screamed out over my combined poor habits and I was writhing on the bathroom floor—no “I wish you’d see someone about that.” Michael was my ideal non-lover. And if he thought about it long enough, he’d realize it, too. I’d just let it all sink in to him. Maybe he was having a post-writer’s block orgasm from our most recent phone call.
I turned my attention to the serious pile of Goodwill clothes amassing on my bed. I hated to shop but realized I didn’t have a month’s worth of clothes to take. Time to hit the mall, then visit my father.
In a place where pink palaces reign, the malls are enough to make a practical woman don a burlap sack. Overpriced is a mantra, and over-the-top is a Boca staple. I pulled up to Bloomingdale’s and forced myself to go through the doors. I am seriously mall-phobic. I think it’s those faintly Night of the Living Dead-like makeup counter women. I’m fond of my slightly flawed face the way it is—crooked smile, full lips, and freckled nose included. I even like the tiny scar by my right eyebrow where Billy Monroe stabbed me with a pencil during a second-grade fight. Billy ended up with a black eye. I called it even.
My shopping technique is simple. I head to Ann Taylor and find a shirt I like. Then I buy it in seven colors. Next I find pants I like. I buy three of the exact same pair in the same size, eight. I do the same with shorts. I toss a scarf and a new purse on the pile. Buy two pairs of size-nine shoes that look comfortable. I don’t try anything on. I have them ring it all up. I am out the door in less than fifteen minutes. The Ann Taylor girls see me coming from three stores away and sound some sort of “Bitch alarm.” They steer clear of me ever since I told the manager, “Look, I am about to spend seven or eight hundred dollars. I don’t want any help. I don’t want anyone to talk to me. If you stay out of my way, then I will return several times a year to spend roughly the same amount of money. Deal?” She had nodded, and I’ve been shopping there for four years.
After damaging my credit card, I left the mall and drove to Stratford Oaks Assisted Living Facility.
“Mornin’, Charlie.” I smiled at the security guard in the fern-filled lobby.
“Mornin’, Ms. Hayes.”
I had hoped to be able to really talk to my father, but today wasn’t going to be one of those days.
“Sophie!” He smiled broadly at me and called me by my mother’s name. I hate that I look like her.
“Jack.” I smiled warmly, approaching him, this half-stranger who no longer knew me by my real name most of the time. He looked thinner by the day. They told me he resisted all foods but pie. Why pie? They used to go to some place down in Greenwich Village and order pieces of it after the theater.
“Come here, Sophie. I have to tell you the funniest story.”
I listened to his tales of authors and editors in New York’s 1940s literary circles. My father had worked for Simon & Schuster. I laughed where I was supposed to laugh and feigned shock where I was supposed to feign shock. I had heard all these stories many times before. “Sophie” patted his bony hand and smiled and went along with the whole charade. I waited patiently for a moment when lucidity would peek through like a ray of sunshine streaming down from behind a cumulus cloud. Sometimes I was rewarded, feeling like some people do when they see a magnificent beam filtering down—that perhaps there is a God in heaven after all. Other times, the clouds stubbornly shut out the sun, leaving both Dad and me in dreary grayness.
“Well, Jack, I really must be going.”
“So soon, Sophie? So soon? Our time together is always so brief. I wish your divorce was final.”
“It will be soon, Jack. Then we can be together always.”
The doctors tell me not to go along with his fantasies. “Bring him back to the present,” they say. But I refuse to deny him these afternoons of happiness. He always remembers the same years. My mother and he were dating. It was before I came along. Before she abandoned us both. Before all the heartache.
“I love you, Sophie.”
“I love you, too, Jack.”
The clouds parted.
“For heaven’s sake, Cassie, how long have you been standing there?”
“Only a minute or two, Daddy.”
“Come give your Dad a big old hug.”
I grabbed him tightly, smelling his Royal Copenhagen cologne, rubbing my face against the soft terry-cloth of his blue robe.
“How’s my genius daughter?”
“Just fine, Dad. Guess what?” I said, sitting down on the hassock by his slippered feet.
“What?”
“I’m going to work with Roland Riggs.”
He leaned back in his chintz chair and smiled.
“As if you hadn’t before…but, my God, Cassie, you’ve hit the big time.”
“I know. And I’m going away for a few weeks. To stay with him while we work on his new novel. He lives on Sanibel Island.”
“Bring me back a conch shell.”
I laughed. “I will. Can you believe it? Roland Riggs!”
We talked for about a half hour. I held on to every clear word. Then I could see him growing tired.
“I really need to get going, Dad.”
I leaned over and hugged him again.
“I love you.”
“I love you, too. And I’m very proud of you.”
“I know, Dad. I know.”
I fought to keep the tears from coming and stood.
“Tell me everything when you return.”
“I will.”
“Don’t forget a thing.”
“I won’t, Dad.” I smoothed the hand-knitted afghan over his legs and held onto his hand one last time.
Then I walked down the linoleum floors of the hallway. Royal Copenhagen was replaced by antiseptic hospitalish clean. “I won’t forget a thing, Daddy,” I whispered. I wished he wouldn’t either.
4
“L aptop?”
“Check.”
“Bathing suit?”
“Lou, this really isn’t necessary.”
“Bathing suit?” he said, his voice a little more insistent.
“Check.” Lou was going to send me off with the precision of a military operation. We stood in the parking garage of my building, his black Jaguar next to my yellow monstrosity. Looking like we’d just completed a mob hit, we stared into my trunk.
“Pajamas?”
“I brought a kimono.”
“No can do. Pajamas, Cassie. You cannot sleep naked in Roland Riggs’s house. What