My Deja Vu Lover (2 page)

  
“Didn’t take driver’s ed,” I said.

  
At the table nearest our booth two women, about our ages, leaned toward each other. They were dressed Nordie style, casually expensive, carefully mismatched outfits. One spoke with angry intensity that made her voice carry. “I had a veil and Mom decided she didn’t like the way it fit on my hair, and there I was, five minutes before I went down the aisle, Mom with her comb out, messing around and nagging me and I wanted to deck her but, oh, you’ll see, you’ll probably go through the same crap.”

  
Cyd said, “April, you were probably in an accident when you were a child. You’ve forgotten.”

  
“I was driving.” The frantic terror rose in my mind again. I wanted so much to make Cyd understand but I’ve never been good at expressing myself.

  
She said, “Maybe it was your mother driving, maybe you remember her hands on the wheel. You know how nervous you are in cars?
 
I bet that’s it, you were in an accident, or maybe a near miss, something when you were three or four, something you’ve pushed into your subconscious.”

  
I tried to speak slowly, stay calm, but my voice burned in my throat and turned into a frantic whisper. “It wasn’t a memory or a nightmare. That crash was real and I was there. Driving. Not an accident. I wanted to wreck that car. I was furious with the man sitting next to me. I wanted to hurt him. But then I saw you and Tom and Macbeth staring through the windshield of the oncoming car and I didn’t want to hit you. But I couldn’t stop.”

  
Cyd said, “Drink your coffee. I’m going to go order lunch. Bet you skipped breakfast, huh? Never mind about that next interview. I’ll call and change it for you.”

  
“What about your job? You’ll be late.”

  
“I’ll phone and tell then I’ve got ptomaine. We’re so behind, nobody’s going to fire me.”

  
I grasped the edge of the table to keep my hands from shaking. “I can’t eat. Listen, Cyd, this happened. Or it is going to happen. I don’t get premonitions, never have, but maybe?”

  
“Definitely not a premonition,” Cyd said in that flat, confident voice. “Tell you what, when palm trees start growing in Seattle, I’ll start to worry.”

  
Macbeth sometimes calls me the waterworks because I am no good at controlling my emotions. I cry through movies, happy or sad, they do that to me, so there I was again, face suddenly burning, hot tears running down my face.

  
Cyd offered to go home with me but what for? I told her I was probably upset about the morning interviews and I’d be fine. What I didn’t tell her was that I needed the afternoon alone in our apartment pulling myself together, not talking to anyone.

  
“All right,” she said, “go home and eat something. Get some rest.”

CHAPTER 2

  
So that’s what I did, went home, hung up my wet suit on the shower curtain rod, pulled on sweats. Then I went back out to the front room and turned on the TV and set the sound at blast level. There was nothing on in the afternoon of interest but it created light flickers and noise I could ignore. If I played CDs on the stereo the music would have overwhelmed me, the mood I was in, and left me crying.

  
Cyd and I had been roommates in college, stumbling over each other’s backpacks, bumping into each other’s open closet doors for two years. When Cyd and the guys graduated four years ago, college ended for me, too, even though I had only made it through three years and had barely enough credits accumulated to account for two years. I was weary of signing up for classes that were filled, or forcing myself to sit at a desk under a strip of fluorescent light committing to memory facts that bored me. And I was sick of staring at blank Blue Books in attempts to create exam answers to questions whose origins evaded me.

  
The U had fulfilled my requirements. I’d tramped across its wide acre of new bricks surrounded by block-shaped buildings, and jogged the tree-lined paths past its old Gothic-architectured heart. In its crowded housing and musty coffee shops I had found what I wanted.

  
During my early teens my parents had divorced. I’d been sent off to boarding school and then to college on a trust fund left for me by a grandmother, but what I wanted was family. And that’s what I found with my friends.

 
               
So when the three of them graduated from the U, I went with them, renting an apartment on Capitol Hill with Cyd. Gave her an excuse to put off living with Macbeth.

  
“We’re okay for a weekend,” she once explained to me, and I thought okay was kind of cold, but judging other people’s sex lives is maybe not possible. “If I move in with him, we won’t last three months.”

  
As Tom and I didn’t have a relationship to figure out, that worked. There’d been a series of romantic disasters during those three years on campus. Between brief and sometimes steamy affairs with others, Tom and I had what could only be called casual sex, occasional, wonderful, and never discussed afterwards. Okay, we sometimes discussed sex, but we never discussed our lack of a relationship.

  
Tom and I liked each other and wanted to remain friends. Does it say something about both of us and our inability to commit to anything if I explain we agreed firmly on one point? Friends lasted, lovers didn’t.

  
When Tom found another girl, and he always did, guys do, I’d do some private weeping. But there was no point being jealous when I wasn’t willing to play the steady girlfriend role. Had he ever asked?
 
Sort of, in the middle of lovemaking, and afterwards we both pretended it had never happened.

  
Cyd and I had three rooms that were taller than they were wide. A bay window peered out toward the street through the tangle of vine maple that covered the old brick exterior. We painted the walls, cabinets, door frames, radiators, and anything else that took paint. Flat white of course. Macbeth, who knew how to do everything and did it well, built bookshelves for our boxwoods of books, hung a clothes rod across one end of our closetless bedroom, then wired Cyd’s stereo and mounted the speakers near the ceiling. He repaired the leaking refrigerator and the nonfunctioning stove, then shamed the landlord into paying for all the paint and lumber and rods as well as for the wiring and hardware for the repairs.

  
Cyd and I scrubbed the nothing-color carpet. For the first month we rolled out our sleeping bags every night. When my next quarterly check from my trust fund finally arrived, we bought twin beds. With her first paycheck and the attached confidence, Cyd added a couch to her credit card. It was long and soft and gray because Cyd loved gray. I bought throw pillows in a mismatch of colors.

  
Cyd had stood in the center of the room staring at them, the day I came home from a shopping trip with Tom. He followed obediently behind me, his arms so full he could hardly see around the packages. We made a game of ripping off the plastic coverings, dropping them on the floor, and laughed our way into silliness while tossing the pillows at each other and then onto the couch.

  
And then we noticed silent Cyd.

  
“What’s wrong?
 
Don’t you like them?”

  
She said slowly, “The velvet is nice. But you have one green pillow and a gold bolster and a red cushion and a whatever that is --”

  
“Halfway between blue and purple,” I said.

  
“Uh huh. And navy and wine. Plus they are all different shapes and sizes. Why?”

  
Hadn’t she looked at the rod that ran the width of our bedroom?
 
Half of it was hangers with neat gray stuff and the other half was hangers with every color ever invented. At least I was good about keeping my stuff on my side.

  
“Okay, we can take them back,” I said.

  
“Can we?” Tom asked. “We’ve torn off the plastic.”

  
“No,
 
no,” Cyd said quickly, “they’re fine, really.”
 
She had this determined expression on her face, the one she wore when it was time to clean the bathroom. I guess it worked, I guess she decided she could live with the cushions because she never mentioned them again.

 
 
Next, Mac had scrounged up table and chairs from somewhere. He was the one who liked to sit on a chair and eat from a table rather than sitting on the floor yoga-style.

  
Now, with the TV blocking out thinking, I made myself a nest of the velvet cushions on the floor beneath the bay window and worked slowly on a manicure. The concentration I applied to matching the curve of each nail to the other nails kept me comfortably brain dead.

  
Macbeth banged twice on the front door with his closed fist, causing the door to rattle, and then, in case I might possibly know anyone else who knocked that way, he shouted, “April, it’s me!”

  
“Come on in!” I shouted back.

  
He used his key. We were always losing ours. Macbeth was our backup in so many ways. And being Macbeth, he flipped on the overhead light as soon as he entered. Tom would have stumbled around in the gloom, no more aware that dusk had settled than I was, but Macbeth always knew where he was, what he was doing, and how it related to the rest of the world.

  
“What’s with sitting in the dark, babe?”

  
“I’m not reading, mother, so it’s okay, I won’t strain my eyes.”

  
Grabbing another cushion as he crossed the room, he settled himself on the floor beside me. “Cyd phoned. She’ll be working late. She sent me over because she’s worried about you. Something about a bummer day.”

  
Ceiling lights suited Macbeth, have to admit, accenting the neat haircut, clean profile, tailored sports coat, dark slacks. I leaned my head back against the windowsill and treated him like eye candy, not that I would ever tell him so. He was Cyd’s guy.

  
“I’m okay.”

  
“Not coming down with anything?” He pressed the back of his hand against my forehead.

  
“A hangnail, maybe.”

  
“Cyd said you skipped an interview this afternoon.”

  
“How could I go with a hangnail?”

  
“You’re probably the last female on earth who can spend two hours pushing back her cuticles.”

  
I said, “Nobody loves a smartass.”

  
He smiled a quick smile that showed the gap between his front teeth and softened his face. “Babe, you’ve skipped three appointments this week.”

  
“Got my ass kicked twice today. Twice is enough.”

  
“So you’re quitting?”

  
“Typical, Macbeth. Nag, nag. You got that Midas touch, you know, everything works for you. Don’t expect the rest of us to meet your standards.” I said it like a joke but it was true. He could multitask and keep it all aimed at one ambition. Which is probably how he got the nickname Macbeth, short for Macklin Braithe, when he was a child. It stuck. “Bet you were the kid who picked up his games and went home if the other kids forgot the rules.”

  
He kept the smile but it looked forced. “You should go back to school and get your degree.”

  
“I wasn’t learning anything.”

  
“You’ll never get a decent job without a degree.”

  
“Or with one. Look at Cyd and Tom.”