12 Bliss Street (3 page)

Was he Russian? Mexican? There was definitely something Asian or Indian or Slavic about his wide, flat cheekbones and almond eyes.

The goat served him his pizzeta and a small side salad with feta cheese and lime, then brought a basket of mini corn muffins to Nicola’s table. The food here was unusually good. Chorizo ate the European way, keeping his fork in his left hand. Turkish, Nicola decided. His fingers were thin and long and there was something a little wolfish about him, but in a sexy way. Looking down at the stained tablecloth she let herself imagine his fingers unbuttoning her blouse slowly, and the feel of the shirt over her shoulder blades as he drew it off.

When her own pizzeta came, she plucked three paper napkins from the metal dispenser, then ate the American way: with her hands. The sauce ran over her lips and she wiped her mouth and imagined how his hands would trail from her neck to her shoulders to her spine, his thumbs on the small of her back, his mouth on her throat. She imagined him lifting her chocolate-colored teddy over her head. If she turned slightly Nicola could see his dark hair in the corner of her eye, and she liked this, a little frisson of reality in playland.

“Did you enjoy the pizzeta?” Chorizo asked softly.

She could feel him unfasten her bra. She could feel his warm breath on her back.

“Lost in your own world?” he said.

At that Nicola looked up. He was watching her. His slanted dark eyes made him seem worldly, knowing, as if her mind were an unrolled map before him. Was he wolfish, or more like a fox? All at once Nicola felt both caught and excited—he knows exactly what I was doing, she thought. There was a sign she had often noticed down the street: “Suspicious activities are recorded and forwarded to the appropriate authorities”—a titillating idea. A wave of power rushed through her.

“Exactly,” she said, looking him in the eye.

Did his expression change? He looked at her more closely.

“I’ve seen you here a few times,” he said. “You must work nearby.”

“Very close.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a dental hygienist,” she said.

The lie—where did that come from? As soon as she said it Nicola felt another electrical charge, and the thought came to her that she could do anything, it didn’t matter, what did it matter? The morning was a waste; the whole year, let’s face it, was not so great, but forget it; here she was now, here she was, and she was ready for something unplanned and unordinary.

“You must like mouths,” Chorizo was saying, then smiled, showing his teeth.

And she thought: they have their uses.

*   *   *

Chorizo looked Nicola
over. She surprised him, she really did, and he liked that in a woman. He put away his paper, then moved his chair slightly closer to her table, turning so she could see the birthmark on his neck, which other women said was sexy. Not his wife, never his wife, but some of the others. A vampire’s kiss, one called it. He liked that.

She was bolder than he had imagined. He saw it in her eyes: something pleased her. A woman who likes pleasure; well, well. In the last few weeks he had pegged her as the administrative type—one who pays an unhealthy attention to details. The nurse with pursed lips. But here she is, smiling and showing her palms, which everyone knows is a sign of flirtation.

And then, when she bent down to pick her napkin up from the floor, he saw the shiny chocolate-colored strap under her blouse.

Well, well, he thought again.

Lingerie.

She’s wearing lingerie. And all at once he could picture how she might look without the business suit. Wearing just—was it a camisole? And perhaps matching panties? He could see her on the bed he used, her skin going cold. The peculiar shininess that comes at death. She could be the next one. He definitely saw it. She could be next.

He moved his chair closer.

*   *   *

“And what do
you do?” Nicola asked, picking up her napkin.

“Oh, like everyone else I’m in computers,” Chorizo told her. On the wall behind him stood a picture of a spiky asparagus, and Nicola strained to listen as Chorizo spoke about high-potency something or other. The truth was she didn’t really care about his job. On his wrist he wore a thin silver bracelet and he had a birthmark like a dark fingerprint on the side of his neck.

He had very good manners, she could see that. His eyes never left her face. She wiped pizzeta sauce from her hands and considered. He was kind of a smooth guy. Too smooth? To be honest he wasn’t really her type, but she was feeling good now for the first time all day, possibly all week. And maybe the whole point was that he wasn’t her type.

Plus the mark on his neck was kind of sexy.

“Are you from California?” Chorizo was asking.

The café’s fluorescent lights blinked for a moment, a line of long, sharp clouds overhead, and Nicola hesitated then told the truth. “I was born in Ohio.”

“Ohio. I’ve always liked the sound of that name.”

“But I grew up all over,” she lied, twisting her napkin. She told him her parents were in the foreign service and her first memory was when she lived in Nigeria and a chicken attacked her—a story her college roommate once told.

“I’m from Turkey,” Chorizo told her. Nicola nodded, she’d guessed that, and looked down at his loafers—polished brown affairs that seemed to be woven from thin strips of bark and then glazed.

“A little town you’ve probably never heard of called Kas.”

That surprised her. “Kas!” she said, looking up at him again. “I’ve been to Kas! I bought a rug in Kas! I loved that town. I ate fresh calamari for breakfast there every day, just caught that morning.”

This was the truth, though on the last day there she felt too sick to go out afterwards, and later Scooter wouldn’t let her buy a lobster-in-a-box in the Boston airport while they waited for their connection home. Chorizo asked her where she had bought her rug and when she described the store he said, oh yes, the owner was married to the Australian who worked in a jewelry store next door. They spoke about the cafés along the harbor and the underwater excavation led by a professor from Massachusetts, which Nicola and Scooter (she didn’t mention Scooter) had seen from a tour boat.

“Kas is a beautiful town,” Chorizo said, picking up his water glass. “It’s unfortunate that it has no beach.”

“The ports aren’t deep enough for the cruise boats. You’re lucky in that.”

Chorizo pulled in even closer and put his water glass down on her table—a gesture Nicola found oddly intimate. His hand so nearly brushed hers that she could feel, for a moment, a sudden warmth. “Ah, but they bring in money,” he said. “Now, Egypt. Have you ever been to Egypt?”

“I’ve always wanted to see the Temple of Isis,” she told him.

“An interesting cult. There’s a legend that she preferred eels for her breakfast. She sent her best fishermen to catch them and they always went in the dark, when there was no moon.”

“Because eels come out at night,” Nicola said. “To feed.”

“That’s right.” He nodded. “The ancient priests who took care of her temple bathed five times a day.”

“After visiting the purgatorium,” Nicola said.

Chorizo said, “So you know about this too?”

He smiled then, and Nicola, placing her twisted-up napkin on the table like some kind of offering, smiled back. Her heart was racing. She didn’t just feel good, she felt great. She felt as though she were flying, or might fly, or at least knew what it felt like to fly—the sensation of strength in her arms (or wings or whatever), and the lift and the power and the speed.

*   *   *

Chorizo watched her
listening to him and he couldn’t help smiling, she seemed so young and so genuine, and she smiled back not knowing that he had his plans and they might include her.

The waiter came to take away the spidery nest of food left on her plate, and while she was looking away he calculated quickly: about five feet five, say a size eight. Many things were in his favor. They were in a corner, no one was looking at them. A chance meeting, that was good too.

What comes is meant to come, he thought.

The waiter stepped away with the plates. Nicola looked back at Chorizo.

He understood the signal. It was his move.

“I have an idea,” he said. He looked at her steadily. If all went well he would never be able to return to the café—he couldn’t risk it. A pity. He did so enjoy their pizzeta, but that was—what was the phrase?—the downside of the trade.

He smiled again.

“Let’s do something foolish,” he said.

Three

After lunch Nicola
went up the side staircase of her building and in through the fire door—which claimed to be alarmed but wasn’t—so she would not have to see anyone right away. The hallway was empty; the whole floor seemed empty. Group lunch, she guessed. She hated the smell of this side of the building, which had recently been recarpeted, and went straight to the bathroom, which was large and cold with exposed pipes and a cement floor and a large poster of Audrey Hepburn in tights.

The door closed behind her. No one was here, thank goodness. Nicola went over to the mirror and looked at herself. Oh, my God, her hair looked just terrible. She touched it, trying to rearrange it back into something more reasonably called hair, then started to cry.

Oh Christ, oh God, she was thinking. What was wrong with her? Things had been going so well with Chorizo. Outside it looked like rain, but it had looked like rain for days without anything and newscasters were beginning to throw around the word drought. Nicola was just looking for a tissue in her purse when she heard a movement in one of the stalls and someone said, “I’ll be gone in a minute.”

She stopped crying. “Who is that?” she asked.

“Nicola?”

“Audrey?”

“What’s going on?” Audrey asked from inside the stall. Her voice sounded faint, as if passing through a sieve.

“Oh nothing,” Nicola said. She thought she might start crying again. “It’s just, you would not believe what a bad day I’ve had and how awful my hair looks,” she said.

Audrey came out and washed her hands and looked at Nicola, then she soaked some paper towels in cold water.

“Your hair doesn’t look so bad,” she said. She gave Nicola a wet paper towel. “Here, put this on your eyes.”

“Thanks.”

“What is it, Scooter?”

“Scooter?” Nicola had forgotten about him. “No. God, no. No, it’s just, there was this man at lunch today. At the café. I’ve seen him there for the past couple of weeks, actually, but today for the first time we began to talk and it was amazing because I was, to tell you the truth, I was fantasizing about him while I was eating and I don’t know, I was into it, and then out of nowhere he began to talk to me. It was like he knew what I was doing, that’s what it felt like at least, and I found that very exciting, it was very exciting, and our conversation was … it had a rhythm, you know? When things are, I don’t know,
going.
And then we got to the part where he asked me out. And you know what I did? I said no.”

“Why did you say no?”

“I don’t know! He said he was taking the afternoon off to see the Picasso exhibit, and did I want to come? And although I was expecting something—well, really I thought he was just going to ask me for my phone number and maybe that was what freaked me, this immediate decision. I got all timid and I did what I always do, I said no.”

“You don’t always say no.”

“I always say no, my first response is always to say no.”

“What about that other guy, the C.P.A.?” Audrey asked. “What happened to him?”

“Oh, he had really chubby fingers, which was especially apparent when he wore his wedding ring.” Nicola took the paper towels off her eyes and looked in the mirror.

“No way!”

“Yeah I ran into him at the Safeway last weekend and he was wearing this wedding ring.”

“Okay, so he’s not a good example,” Audrey conceded.

“I feel like I’ve flunked math class
again,
” Nicola said.

“You’ve never flunked a math class in your life.”

“But I know what it feels like.”

Audrey laughed and gave Nicola new wet towels and took the old ones and resoaked them.

“To say I’m disappointed in myself just doesn’t begin to cover it,” Nicola said. She adjusted the silk teddy inside her shirt. “There’s something very fraudulent about me, you have no idea. I like to pretend I’m something I’m not.”

“Welcome to adulthood,” Audrey said.

“I’m not kidding.”

“Neither am I.”

They laughed, looking at each other through the mirror. Audrey had a round face and dimples and she could be incredibly feisty. The first time they met Nicola thought, Well, I won’t be friends with
her.
But it didn’t turn out that way. Audrey worked out every morning before work and her arms were incredibly strong and Declan, her husband, could lift his own weight. He was from San Diego, where they sold surfboards at yard sales, and he got his first boogie board at something like age three, then moved on to skateboards in kindergarten. Every Saturday he and Audrey either drove three hours north to ski board or three hours south to surf, and in addition they were building a house in Marin by themselves. Nicola usually went over to their place after work to drink beers and complain about Guy and to see her dog Lester, who lived with them since her own landlord wouldn’t allow pets.

Nicola lifted the wet paper towel to check the puffiness of her eyes. She thought of Chorizo’s fingers, the silver bracelet on his dark wrist. Even his awful shoes were somehow endearing.

“I wish I could just say yes,” she told Audrey. “For once in my life I would like to say yes.”

“I think you do okay.”

“Do you remember Francis? From our freshman year? Maybe this was before I met you. He was a senior and premed and he was really funny. There were always old dirty clothes all over my room and he made up this game called sockball that he used to play with my dirty socks.”

“Anyway,” Audrey said.

“Anyway,” Nicola said. She touched her eyelid. “One night he came over and he said he had something to say to me but that he was embarrassed and he thought he would be more comfortable if I had a bag or something that he could put over his head while he was saying it. But I didn’t have a bag. So he said, what about a towel? So I gave him a towel and he put it over his head and then he told me he liked me and would I go out with him some time.”