Chapter 39…Transgressions…
"Do what?"
I don't answer. Instead I march over to the bank of dimmer light switches and turn them all up high. Much better. I turn around and he's right there, barely inches away.
"Come on! Tell me. Because I can tell you that nothing you say could erase my good mood today. What grievous sin do you have to accuse me of now?" His smile is open and easy and almost sweet. Happy.
The crime he should be accused of is annihilating all this week's hard work of forgetting the feel of him, the look of him, with one dance and one radiant sunlit smile. But what comes out is, "You smile too much!"
He lifts back his head and laughs with unchecked joy. And it rings out into the room over the chords of the new song that starts playing and I find myself smiling back. Totally against my will. But who could resist his elation?
"I've been accused of many things." He leans in, eyes like shimmering points of sunlight on the water. "Most of them true. But never smiling too much." I can only stare, wide-eyed at his merry face. "Would you rather I frowned?" He affects a mock stern frown that is worse than the jubilant smile. I playfully hit his shoulder.
"No! Because that's cute, too!"
His smile comes back, this time more of a crafty grin. "Ahhh…so you do think I'm cute?"
"You always do that, too—fish for compliments!"
"Only from you, because I know you don't find me attractive."
"Why do you keep saying that?!"
For a millisecond, there's a flash of sheepishness across that beautiful face. And yes, dammit…that's cute, too. "Because I might have overheard you saying exactly that to Emory. In the laundry room. In Philly." Oh hell, what did he hear?
"You sound like a board game. But your clue is completely wrong, proud Professor Peacock, who has surely looked in a mirror before and knows he's a stunner. I never said that."
"Ha! I heard the words 'No' and 'attraction' right there together."
"How do you know we were talking about you, anyway? Not everything is about you, you know." Lately, though, it seems as if everything is. "But despite that, you misheard. And you always do that, too, you know. Eavesdrop. You really shouldn't! You can misapprehend things, misinterpret words, misjudge meanings."
"Okay, Miss Judge, jury and executioner," he laughs. "So far the cumulative charges laid against me include smiling too much, being cute, being proud as a peacock, eavesdropping, oh, and let's not forget dressing like a dandy, glaring and smirking, acting like a jerkwad, being a pendejo, and a host of other transgressions, I'm sure." He lifts his hands in front of him, palms up, one crossed over the other.
"Go ahead and arrest me. I'm already your captive." He pauses, watching me, then leans in even further and his nearness alights every atom in my entire body, his lips are just…right there…close enough to kiss. My eyes close of their own volition, overcome by the riptide that is him.
I swallow. Hard. Audibly.
I feel warmth at my ear and a whispered, "But handcuffs could be kinda hot!"
The one tried and true thing that pulls me out of this dangerous current is guilt. Of course. My old standby. Guilt that I shouldn't feel this way—not after everything this week—I shouldn't want to kiss him. Not now. Not when… I shake my head and pull back, opening my eyes.
"Are you being fl…fli…flirty?"
"Flirty? Flirty? That's another thing I've never been accused of." And there's that ringing laugh again.
"Oh, please, you flirt with everyone!" I roll my eyes, remembering him at the restaurant in Philly, turning Martin's little sister into a puddle of pink mush. I say with a theatrical flourish, "Rosita you already are a star!'" I take his hand, gallantly and very mockingly bending to kiss it.
When I glance up from my lowered position, his eyes are closed. By the time I've straightened to standing, he's smirk-smiling again.
"She was a child and I was giving her a compliment right in front of her parents," he says primly, pedantically even, as if explaining the intricate rules of cricket to a novice. "It was safe. Innocent flirting to a child does not count as being flirty, which, I might add, might be my new favorite word. Regardless, I have never been, and would never be, flirty with anyone who might misinterpret my meaning." For a moment, his eyes bore right into mine.
Oh, right. How could I forget? I'm safe. Skinny, gawky child. Well, at least keeping this forefront in my mind—skinny gawky child, skinny gawky child—does alleviate the last vestiges of guilt.
"Why are you so happy?" I demand. Somehow this comes out like an accusation, too.
"And there's another charge that's never been laid against me."
Oh jeez, I am such a baka, because his words "laid against me," reverberate in my mind. I turn to straighten a perfectly straight pillow on the chair behind me before the other part of what he said hits me. My eyes whip back to meet his. "Are you never happy?" This pulls at my heartstrings. I want him to be happy. Always.
He appears to contemplate the question for a moment. "I've never thought about it before," he shrugs wistfully before his sunlit smile appears again as if a cloud has passed over it, come and gone. "All I know is I'm in a good mood now because, for one, I get to spend the day with you!"
"You shouldn't say such nice things!" This comes out like both an accusation and a plaintive wail because I am just so at sea right now. He banished me from Falk all week! I don't understand.
He laughs easily again. "Should we add saying nice things to the list of crimes?" I nod. "Would you rather I say mean things?" My eyebrows knit together and I chew on my lip as I contemplate this. I shrug at him because, yeah, I almost would; it's decidedly less confusing. "Once again you're hilarious." He thinks I'm joking. "And an anomaly. You know there are any number of women who would've killed for…" Wisely, he purses his lips together to stop what was sure to be an arrogant assertion about all of his women wanting some scrap of a kind word from him.
I don't want to think about that either, so I ask, "There's another reason you're in a good mood? You said, 'for one.' So what's the other reason?"
For just a moment, his face is wide open, vulnerable. "Because I've decided to take a risk."
I could tell him about the risk I decided to take this week, but instead I exclaim, "What? Mr. I've-climbed-into-a-ring-to-fight-people-for-money is risk averse? I don't think so!"
"There was no risk in that—undefeated, remember?" He cockily smirks. And yeah, somehow that's cute, too. "But I guess I should say I've decided to be brave in a different way. As for the how, that's for me to know and you to find out."
This cocksure Leif is more familiar ground, I know how to handle this one—tease him. "How do you know I don't have a date already lined up today?" I smirk back at him. "Or ten other dates, for that matter. One right after the other."
He leans in again, grinning, making my insides flutter, "Because I heard from the proverbial horse's mouth that you have neither the time nor inclination to date."
"Well, things can change, you know," I mutter, looking away. If ever there was a time to tell him they have, it would be now. Right now.
Right. Now.
I meet his gaze and maybe I am going to, but he lunges and suddenly I am airborne. My feet have left the ground.
Literally.
Leif has grabbed me by the waist and is twirling me around the middle of the room and I find a ridiculous sound is coming out of my mouth that I have never made before, drowning out whatever he is laughingly saying.
Dios mio, I am squealing like a little girl.
My foot hits something causing a loud rattle that can be heard over the music. He sets me down on the back of one of the sofas and I'm a little dizzy.
"I'm so sorry. Are you okay?" Leif kneels down to inspect each of my calves and ankles in turn—I'm still in my short pajamas with a silk robe over them—and I can't answer because his hands are branding my skin with fire. "I forgot how long your legs are."
Honestly, that was the perfect thing for him to say because I needed the reminder of my spindly legs. Sadly, it does nothing to douse the conflagration overtaking me. "Did I hurt you?" I nod first—of course he did—but then shake my head. He still has ahold of my legs as I stare down at him; he's practically caressing them now. He lifts his eyes up to mine as a devilish gleam alights his entire face. One eyebrow rises. "Want me to kiss it and make it better?"
Good God, no! I might never recover from that.
I jump down from the back of the sofa and turn toward what it was my legs hit and get to work redirecting. "I'm just glad I didn't knock this over. My grandmother made it." It is at least a seven-foot tall wooden and wire sculpture of a tree, with mostly blue, and some green and clear bottles stuck on the end of the branches. I go into the safety of straight up tour guide/docent mode.
"It's a bottle tree. In Hoodoo tradition, roaming night spirits were said to be captured in bottles where they couldn't get out. Then in the morning the sunlight would destroy them. She loved New Orleans and the traditions that came with the West African descendants that settled there, although the idea of capturing spirits in bottles is also part of ancient Arabian folk tales, like the genie in the bottle." He moves close behind me and I shuffle around the tree, away from him, and keep talking.
"She appropriated this particular Hoodoo tradition and made it her own, collecting bottles from every country she went to. Grandmother claimed this particular bottle tree would capture people's prejudices and…hold on a sec." I bend over to a power strip behind the base to turn it on. The bottle tree lights up from the numerous fairy lights wrapped throughout it. "The lights would illuminate them to the holder and eradicate them. She named it the Present Tree, not as in gift, but like being present, because you can't really be present, you can't really see the truth of what's right in front of you in the now if you're mired in past prejudice."
"That sounds like Henry," Leif says staring at the beautiful spectacle of it, the lights casting reflections of the bottles on the ceilings and walls looking like sunlight reflecting off water.
"They were such good partners, complementing each other, learning from each other, like the perfect Yin and Yang, that they sounded alike, only with their own spin. Henry says that people get stuck in the inner stories they tell themselves, but it all comes down to the same thing—not being fully in the now, not being fully present, not being aware."
"I thought he's said that stories were the best gifts."
"Yes, but he makes a distinction between sharing yourself and your history through telling stories, and the inner stories you tell yourself, like, say, all people of a certain race or religion are inherently bad, or a certain person wronged you or whatever. As an extreme example, he's said that every warlord he's ever met tells themselves that what they are doing is good. That they are right and just. So they can't even see the atrocities they commit, because their inner story says they are doing the right thing. But on a less extreme example, everyone has some inner story they tell themselves and they're not even conscious of how it informs their actions."
I've put the tree between us and can only see him through the lit up bottles as I say, "I don't really know if Grandmother actually believed in the Hoodoo power of this tree, but a lot of important connections were forged right here in the Salon between people that normally wouldn't have been caught dead in the same room."
I remember something else she said and a soft chuckle comes out of me. At Leif's quizzical look, I tell him, "She said they really could've used this tree when she and Henry first met." He's come around to my side of the tree. Too close.
"He likes to tell that story, doesn't he?" Leif smiles. "And speaking of stories, I've got one for you." I turn my head to look at him. "But later. Tonight." And then he's looking over my head, behind me. "Is it my imagination or does the wallpaper light up, as well?"
And yeah, I tell him the story of the wallpaper studded with crystals and LED lights, too, in a veritable torrent of words. And because this volley of words is like a defense against the pull he has on me, I next tell him about the staircase that goes nowhere, too. I end with, "Everything in this room is symbolic in some way, special." And then I hear myself and add, "Sorry for prattling on. I never used to do that—talk so much."
"You seem to do it when you're talking about some work of art." Or when you make me nervous, I think to myself. "It might be my favorite sound in the world." He gazes down at my look of confusion. "Was that too nice?" I nod and look away again. "Okay, strange one. I take it back anyway because my new favorite sound is you squealing like a little girl."
"I did not. Squeal. Like a little girl." I roll my eyes at him. "You misheard."
"Uh huh. Sure I did. Is that the story we're going with?"
But I'm saved from answering by the raucous din that replaces the soft acoustic song playing over the speakers. Through some feat of engineering, Bea had the salon's sound system wired so it could be controlled from her apartment as well as from here.
This must be Motorhead.
"What the hell is that?" Leif asks.
"That would be my penance for being cruel," I sigh, turning toward the door, eager to escape this auditory assault.
Leif grabs my shoulders from behind, stopping me. He whispers another assault into my ear, "Your dancing was cruel."
"Well, that was sufficiently mean," I say over the racket, my face all aflame. I don't know how long he was watching me, but I was dancing like you should really only do when you're completely and utterly alone. Unless you're Bea. Well, and Henry, too.
I try to walk forward again, but he won't let me. He turns me by my shoulders to face him, lifting my chin so I have to meet his eyes. "What I meant was, your dancing was so beautiful, so exquisite, so lovely that watching you
was like a cruelty." His expression is so sweetly earnest, it is like its own cruelty.
For a moment, I am defenseless against this assault, I am airborne, awake, alive. Present.
Finally, I find some words. "Come with me. I have another piece of art to show you." And to blather over.
Creatively translated, this means…Merde!—I am in deep trouble!
We are standing at the foot of the bed in the Sea God room, gazing at Em's birthday gift to me, or one of them. As usual, she has gone overboard; she is the worst cheater. Yesterday, despite my protestations, she'd bought me two of the outfits I'd tried on, both of them those khaki bottoms and Falk blue tops. She'd said she had to assuage her guilt at not being here for my little party. And then today, per her message through James, I'd gone into her room to find this artwork on the bed, wrapped in that now familiar brown parcel paper. She had to have put it there before even climbing into the bed with me yesterday morning to wake me up.
In the accompanying note, Em had explained that she was so enamored with the art that Megan did for her that she'd gone to Philadelphia to meet her. She didn't tell me yesterday because she wanted all aspects of this gift to be a surprise. The fact that she drove by herself is testament to her appreciation of it. Em wrote that she has more to tell me about that trip, but will wait until she gets back and can do it in person.
While there, she'd talked Megan into selling the antique painting that was the original inspiration for the leather notebook I'd gotten as Henry's gift to Leif. Megan had acquiesced after asking her uncle and after Em explained who it was for and the particular significance of it to me.
Poor Megan, I'm sure she was Coordinated to within an inch of her life. I can so easily picture Em's doe eyes and sweet Southern accent unleashed on her when she explained that I was in Japan during the earthquake and resulting tsunami. I wonder if Em's eyes teared up when she told my story to the poor girl.
The artwork is a triptych, or would be, but the middle panel of the three is missing. According to what Megan told Em, they bought it at an estate sale—that, Megan had told me herself, although she didn't show me the painting as her great uncle had it at his house—but no one knew where or even what the missing middle panel was. But it is beautiful as is. The right panel is of that traditional Japanese tsunami wave racing toward the shore of a cove and the left is of the cherry tree on the hill whose branches seem to reach toward the wave.
As soon as I'd unwrapped it, I knew exactly where it should go and hung it in the Sea God room above the bed.
Then I called Em, who, wisely, did not pick up. I left her a message saying that she was the absolute worst cheater of the birthday gift rule and when she got back to New York, I was going to hug her, then beat some sense into her, then hug her again. And I thanked her, telling her how much I love it.
She'd texted back to say that she never agreed to the stupid rule in the first place and that, regardless, this is clearly a pot and kettle situation because I cheated too, in buying that early gift for her.
Semantics.
I look over at Leif, silently contemplating the colorfully painted panels, seemingly enraptured, and am surprised to feel that he is warmly clasping my hand, and has been, I think, for the last few moments.
That's when the flash comes from behind us and I hear Bea's voice, "Looks like we've got another cheater."
I immediately and guiltily drop Leif's hand and turn to see Bea lowering her phone and holding an envelope out to me. "Alfie and Omega got you a gift certificate for a mani-pedi. I told them you didn't have plans for today, so they scheduled an appointment for noon."
I take the envelope, relieved that Bea was referring to a gift cheater, not what I was thinking.
Alfie and Omega, nicknamed by Grand-mere, are Alifah and Melinda, best friends who both live with their kids on the third and second floors, respectively. Omega opened a nail salon a few years ago with Alfie as a not-so-silent partner. Alfie writes what she calls ebony romance novels and makes a good living at it. They are two of the many building's residents, and their kids, who have bonded into a kind of family. I'm really just getting to know them now since I've been here so long at one time, although Grand-mere always kept me up on news of them on our near-daily phone calls.
"Where did you find that art for Leif's room?" Bea asks. "It fits perfectly there!"
Throughout this past week, I did reinforce to Bea that there is absolutely nothing romantic going on between Leif and me, practically hitting her over the head with that sentiment a million and one times so she would get it—I never mentioned Adam once—but I curse myself for forgetting to tell her that I changed my mind about this room, really, before we even started choosing furniture for it. Without consciously knowing it then, I changed my mind the precise moment I turned into a pumpkin. But now, it's even more so. I definitely don't want Leif to have a room here or stay over, even for a night. It's definitely not a good time for that. And I can't exactly tell her that now either.
With all the angles you have to think of, keeping up secrets, even if only for a short while, is exhausting.
Of course he latches on to the key part of her words.
"My room?"
I start to sputter out a "No, no. It's just…" right as Bea loudly drowns out my protestations—damn her radio voice!
"Yeah. We spent all evening one day last week finding the perfect furniture and…" How am I going to back out of this one? "…Elle's idea to make it yours, although her grandmother started the room years ago…" Bea, please stop! "…put a chair in the study for you, too…"
Leif turns his whole body to regard the room. When his back is to me, I shoot Bea a look and shake my head. She lifts up her hands in What? gesture and then keeps going with, "…the only thing we couldn't find was art for above your bed. Where'd you get that, Elle?" Bea moves closer to it, mesmerized herself.
Leif turns the full 360 degrees, his eyes stopping on his graduation gift hung on the wall by the desk. I didn't think about that either when I brought him in here to show him the painting.
"Uh…birthday gift from Em," I sigh. "I better go get dressed for the appointment." I start to take a step toward the door when Leif grabs my arm, turning me toward him. I look up at him.
He doesn't say anything as he gazes into my eyes with that look that feels like a searchlight, bright and full of fervor, scorching.
I wrest myself away and walk out the door.
