Paint Me True (9 page)

“Sorry.” This time I purposely lowered my gaze in a flirty way. “So when did you move out here?”

“For my job. Four years ago? How long you been a painter?”

“Ten years-ish?”

“Can I ask how old you are?”

“Thirty.”

He didn’t bat an eye. “Oh, right, well I’m twenty-seven. You’ve been working for a while, then.”

“I guess. I kind of scrape by doing prints and commissions. It’s not an easy way to make money, but it’s flexible. I can come over here to look after my aunt on a moment’s notice.”

“How long are you here for?”

“My return flight’s scheduled for a couple of weeks from now, but I really don’t know. It’s whenever Nora says she doesn’t need me.”

“How is she?”

“She’s fine. Just her usual, stubborn self.”

“That she is. Definitely a memorable case.”

“I’m sorry if she made your life difficult.”

He shook his head dismissively. “No, not really. The NHS staff treat people like sacks of potatoes sometimes, just toss them about and pay no attention to what they need. It was silly of them to send her to us, but I’ve seen odder cases. We had one little girl sent to us because the GP thought she had an eye tumor based on a photograph that someone took of her. I could look in the girl’s eye and see there was nothing. Bloke didn’t even know how to use an ophthalmoscope. Or we had a man once who had an upset stomach and the A&E told him he might have a tumor. No other symptoms, just nausea.”

“Sounds weird.”

“Yeah, it was.” He shrugged.

I wadded up my sandwich bag.

“So, right, tell me about how your aunt met her fella.”

“He walked through the porter’s lodge when she was there and she fell for him and... well, that’s pretty much all I know about what happened here. Later she saw him and he took her to Carfax Chippy.”

“And she liked that?”

“Well, I mean, she ran into him and he flirted with her and talked her out of going to supper at her boarding house. She was totally infatuated.”

“So if he’d taken her down a dark alley without a chippy at the end?”

“Don’t say that.”

“Sorry. Unromantic, I know. But I did work in an A&E for a while-”

“What is that? A&E?”

“I guess Americans call it the ER. Sorry to be morbid. I’ve just seen some spontaneous infatuations end badly.”

“That is morbid.”

“Eh, comes with the job.”

“So, no, he fed her fish and chips.”

“Well all right then. She was into that?”

“Sure. I mean, she’d only just seen him in the porter’s lodge. They didn’t talk or anything, and she thought he was the most gorgeous-”

“Okay, really? That really sounds like something that can end up in A&E. She’d never spoken to him before?”

“Please don’t rain on my parade. I’m trying to learn what I can about the love story so I can paint her a portrait.”

“Right, sorry. Besides, I shouldn’t give you a hard time about going anywhere with a bloke you’ve barely ever spoken to before.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Good point.” I wondered if Hattie would get after me if she could see me now for not testing Colin with a few rejections. The thing was, she’d get after me because he wasn’t a member of the Church. Such people were beneath her notice, which was her prerogative. I just wished she wouldn’t declare it so vociferously in public.

“They must’ve had other dates, other than at the chippy,” said Colin.

“Yeah, I haven’t gotten that far in the story yet. I just got here.”

“Do you find that romantic? Seeing a guy and then having him be so... pushy? Would you like to be told where you should eat supper?”

“Well...”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Sorry, you just reminded me of something a, uh, friend of mine once said. He said the only difference between being a stalker and being the most romantic guy ever was whether or not the girl likes you.”

“Wise words. I mean, there are other differences.”

“Well, yeah.”

“But there’s something to that.”

“Yeah. If my aunt had never seen Paul before, I’m pretty sure him trying to haul her off to a chippy would creep her out. But, I mean, he was being flirty, trying to see if she was interested by asking her to do something little like that with him.”

Colin nodded. “If you say so. How old were they when they got married, then?”

“I don’t know. I’m guessing she was about twenty-one-”

“Twenty-one? That’s child marriage, that is.”

“Yeah, another thing about Mormons, they – or we, I should say – marry young quite often.”

“Are you looking to get married?”

“Eventually.”

“But you’re young. You’re only thirty.”

I suppressed the impulse to thank him profusely for saying that. He seemed sincere that I was too young to be worried about marriage, and if I showed him I felt otherwise, it’d probably push him away. Though, if he thought thirty was young, what did he think of his own twenty-seven years? Did he still consider himself to just be in the dating phase of his life? No commitments? It then occurred to me that he’d probably move in with a woman before marriage. That was a completely foreign concept to me.

He glanced at his watch.

I hauled my mind back from the tangents it’d raced down. “Think I can get some pictures of the porter’s lodge?”

“Let’s go see.”

We hiked back and I snapped a bunch of pictures with my camera phone before we ducked out the little cutaway door in the front gate and stepped onto the pavement outside.

“I need to get to work in a few,” said Colin.

“Oh, okay, well thanks for helping me get pictures.”

“Yeah, this was nice. I can do better though. We should go punting some afternoon. You like punting?”

“I’ve never been.”

“You know what it is, right?”

I had to shrug and shake my head.

“On the river. Wooden boats that you move by... well, punting is when you use a pole and push off the bottom of the river. Like what the gondoliers do in Venice, I think. I’ve never been there. You fancy going sometime? Punting... not to Venice.”

“That sounds like fun.”

“All right, I’ll call you.”

“Okay, great.” That was the best I could do for a last line. The date wasn’t Nora and Paul kind of fabulous, but it was fabulous enough to make me glow all the way home.

L
ater that night, as I checked my email, I saw Hattie log into her account. Nora’s computer was in a little windowed office off the kitchen, though right then the windows were black as it was nighttime.

I opened a chat window and began to type.

Edunmar
: Sooo, I had a date tonight.

HattieZ
: With????

Edunmar
: Just some guy. Real nice. Very good looking.

HattieZ
: I would hope so. Did you follow Rule One?

Edunmar
: Did you? With Mike?

HattieZ
: Yes!

Edunmar
: What?

HattieZ
: I told him that if he wanted to go out with me, he had to try harder. I wasn’t going to just get up and go whenever he wanted, and the next time he asked me to go to the movies with him, I said no.

Edunmar
: Then what happened?

HattieZ
: He called again an hour later and asked if we could go to dinner, and I said no, so then he upped it to dinner at a fancy restaurant. I finally said yes, but only if he promises to turn off his cellphone. No texting allowed.

Edunmar
: Wow. Congratulations.

HattieZ
: You were so right! So tell me about this guy.

Edunmar
: Not much to tell, yet. Like I said, way good looking. Not sure how I feel about him.

HattieZ
: Still, that’s awesome! You want me to torment Len? I should totally tell him next time I see him.

Edunmar
: Leave him alone. He’s not worth it.

HattieZ
: True. Well, wish me luck on my second first date with Mike!!!

Edunmar
: Good luck

She logged off and I went back to my email. No new messages, so I shut down the computer and went upstairs to resume sketching. My aunt had already gone to bed, so the house was quiet as I settled into my usual spot under the lamp.

I hadn’t told my friends about my first date with Len. I’d dressed casually for it in jeans and a plain cotton shirt and then spent the better part of an hour on my face. I didn’t want to look like I had makeup on, but I wanted the benefits of makeup. I wanted to make my eyes look grayer and my lips fuller and my skin nice and smooth. Cosmetics is a difficult medium.

I tried to suppress the dread that welled up inside when his car pulled into my driveway. He was nonchalant when he came to the door, and his cargo pants and shirt looked relatively new. There were no dangling threads, no thin spots about to turn into holes, just a lot of wrinkles. One thing about working an office job and being a Saint, he wore his formal clothes a lot more than his informal clothes.

“Hi,” was all he said.

“Hi.”

And those were the only words we uttered to each other for the first two and a half hours of the date. We drove to the theater - which is an almost thirty minute drive from my house - in silence and once we were there and at the cash register to buy our tickets, I opened my purse to get my wallet and he dismissed the gesture with a wave. Even when the cashier asked if we wanted popcorn, Len told her he’d like some, then looked at me to see if I wanted some too. I nodded, reached for my wallet again, and he held out a hand to stop me. I was relieved when he got two tubs, rather than having us share one.

I barely remember the movie. I just remember munching popcorn while Len kept stealing glances at me. For whole long sequences, when the screen was bright enough to illuminate our faces, he’d stare at my profile, as if wondering why I was there. I wondered if the screen was bright enough for anyone else to see I was there with him.

On the ride home, I was the one to fold. “So, if you meant for this to be a one word date, sorry to break the streak here.”

He flicked his gaze over at me and chuckled. His car was an old Ford Focus, well kept but showing its age. There were some water spots on the upholstery on my side and the top of the dashboard was faded. “Sorry,” he said. “Just keep waiting for you to figure out that you really did go on a date with me.”

“And do what about it?”

“Let me guess. You didn’t tell Jenna and Hattie about this.”

“Excuse me?”

“Sorry. Be honest, though. That... was your house I just passed.” He turned left in order to go around the block.

“I’m not that awful,” I said.

“I didn’t use the word awful.”

“Yeah, but everything you say about me-”

“You know, I do not think that you not wanting to date me makes you awful. I’m not that arrogant... and I just passed your house again... Sorry.” Again he turned left.

“You think I’d never be interested in you?”

“I think you
aren’t
interested in me. Quiet here for a min. I don’t want to miss your house again.”

I sat quietly while he made the last left turn, flipped on his turn signal, and stopped in front of my driveway.

“Okay,” he said, as he turned in. “So, made it. Hope it wasn’t too unbearable for you-”

“That doesn’t really make a girl’s heart melt, to be told that the date was ‘unbearable’.”

“For you. I don’t mean me.” He looked at me for a moment, then turned and let his forehead hit the steering wheel with a thud. “You want to go back to just being silent?” When I didn’t reply, he hit his head against the steering wheel again.

“Could you please stop? I feel kinda bad whenever I drive a guy to self harm on a date.”

He lifted his head and gave me a sheepish smile. “Sorry.” He seemed to collect himself then. “Thanks for going out with me. It was fun.”

Guys always said that on dates with me, but recently, it had begun to sound forced. Just a matter of politeness. I rarely got asked on a second date, and never a third. No one even tried to hold my hand anymore. It had been years since I’d sat through a movie with a guy who had his arm on the armrest, waiting for an opportune moment. The days when I’d kept my hands folded neatly in my lap, rejoicing at how frustrated a guy looked as a result, were an old and hazy memory.

Len pulled his parking brake, shut off the engine, and gave me a quizzical look.

I hadn’t gotten out of his car. I just sat there. Worse, I didn’t want to get out of his car just then. When I did, my last date in a long time would be over, and I’d have to face up to the fact that I’d had it with Len Hodge. Instead, I looked down at my hands.

Len shifted in his seat and touched my cheek with his thumb. “You okay?”

His touch startled me, and I felt my eyes grow hot with tears I didn’t dare shed. I wasn’t okay. I wanted to be ten years in the past, when I was one of the cutest girls in the ward and had just begun my career as a professional artist. People had been jealous of me. I had a cool job and trendy clothes and no shortage of guys lining up for dates. When anyone asked me out, I’d actually had to consult my calendar before I gave an answer.