Seems Like Old Times (20 page)

"What, then? Everything was fine, then I left for
baseball camp and you turned completely cold. It was as if you'd flipped a
switch. One day we were in love, and the next...You went to San Diego to go to
school instead of Los Angeles, but you didn't say why. You wouldn't talk to me;
wouldn't explain."

Memories washed over her. "You're wrong. I tried to
explain."

"You said a lot of words. You never told me the
truth."

She stared at him.

"I thought...so many terrible things," he
admitted. "Why, Lisa? Won't you tell me?"

What could she say? The truth screamed in her head, but
she couldn't do that to him, or to herself. It had been pushed far in the past,
and had to stay there.

"I was confused," she said finally, weaving the
lie she'd learned to live with. "I was...I thought I was doing what was
best--for you as well as for me. I thought I shouldn’t see you--
that
you needed to concentrate on your baseball
career."

He drew his hand away from hers.
"Stop.
It was more than that, whether you admit it or not. Tell
me,
was it that easy for you to forget me?"

"No." She felt pressure behind her eyes. "I
never did."

"Then, I don’t understand--"

"Please. It was so long ago. It was a mistake, one of
many mistakes." Her body trembled and she folded her arms, hugging them to
her chest.

As if he, too, needed to put distance between the
emotional
bond
that connected them still, he stood and
went over to the window, resting his hands on his hips. "It's so foggy out
you can't even see the trees in the front yard."

He did nothing she could see, but as always, he drew her
to him. She stood at his side, also facing the window. "Perhaps they
aren't there anymore. Perhaps nothing is." She took a shuddering breath.
"It's so strange, Tony, being here...in Miwok...with you. I feel as if
I've drifted away somewhere, that I'm not quite the same person, and it's not
quite the same year as shown on the calendar."

"Things in some ways are the same," his words
echoed hers, but his voice was hollow, "and in some ways altogether
different."

"I don't know what to make of it. The Lee Reynolds
I've been in New York seems to grow dimmer with each passing day, but Lisa
Marie isn't here either. She's gone. She doesn't exist anymore. I know that.
Yet, it's as if I'm drifting as aimlessly as that fog bank. And everywhere I
look, it's the past I see."

"I know one thing," he said as he slipped his
arm around her shoulders and drew her against his side. "The past might
haunt you sometimes, but it's gone, no matter how much you might wish
otherwise. And there's not a damn thing a person can do about it." His
embrace was both a sanctuary and a prison, offering security and bliss, but
asking for promises she could not keep.

She shut her eyes a moment,
then
glanced at him, her voice so soft he barely heard it. "I can't help but
think
,
if things had turned out differently, of what
might have been."

He heard a wistful longing in her voice that tugged at
him. He couldn't let her do this to herself.
Or to him.

He placed both his hands on her shoulders and held her
straight out before him. "The funny thing about people, Lisa, is when they
see life in a certain
way,
they make choices that fit
what they see. As strange as people may seem, they're remarkably consistent
creatures. Time after time, given the same circumstances, they'll make the very
same choices."

Her shoulders sagged under the weight of his words.
"So Lisa Marie will always choose to become a journalist, and Tony will
always choose baseball."

"Was that how you saw it, Lisa?"

"Wasn't it?"

He pulled her into his arms in a hug, as brotherly as he
could manage. He shut his eyes, as if not seeing her could protect him against
the feel of her, the scent of her, but it didn't. He was rocked by her
nearness, by the need that was always just below the surface when she was with
him.

He wanted her as much as when he was a boy. No, he
realized.
Even more.
Back then he didn't know an iota
of what he knew now about loving a woman. But he still remembered the pain of
losing her. Once was enough. Choose baseball? He had no choice. And in a way, a
much worse way, neither did she.

Lisa left him once, and she had already told him she was
leaving again. This time, he was not going to let it shatter him.

He set her from him and turned to tend the fire.

She folded her arms again, hugging them tight against her
rib cage so as not to reach out for him. What was happening to her? Why? Why,
suddenly, this longing?
this
ache?

"Would you like more coffee, Lisa?" he said, his
back still to her as he struggled to maintain the composure he had nearly lost.

"It's very late. I should go."

A jazz saxophone played softly in the background and the
fire logs snapped and popped. He straightened and brushed the ash from his
fingers against the back of his jeans before he faced her, his expression
carefully neutral, then picked up her jacket and held it open.

She slipped it on. The light from the fireplace cast a
warm, orange glow over the soft lines of the living room furniture. She liked
this room. It was a room that shouldn't know loneliness. Not his. Not hers.

He held open the front door and she forced herself to walk
toward it. But as she stepped in front of him, he reached out and placed his
hand on her arm. Even through the jacket she could feel her skin burn where he
touched her, she could feel her heart nearly stop, and her breath catch. Her
eyes flashed to his, then drifted downward to his nose, his lips. She wanted
him with a force that left her weak and trembling.

His fingertips rose to her cheek, then to a stray wisp of
hair near her ear, brushing it back away from her face. He cupped the back of
her neck.

"You know, don't you, that if I were to kiss you, I
wouldn't want to stop?" The words were thick in his throat.

"If you were to kiss me," she whispered, "I
wouldn't want you to stop."

His fingers trailed against her jaw line, his thumb slowly
tracing the side of her face as his eyes softened and grew warmer. Blood
pulsated hard through her body. It was all she could do not to wrap her arms
around him, pull him against her, and kiss him hot and slow and sensuous. But
she hesitated, and then it was too late.

She felt as if a wall separated them and she was suddenly
scared to death of what would happen were she to step over to the other side of
it. She thought of the words he had spoken earlier about the past being over.
It was. Lisa Marie had grown up.

And so she turned away from him and walked out the door.

o0o

Her conversation with Bruce that night was very short. He was
too angry to talk after learning she wouldn’t be home for the dinner party at
Baldwin’s.

The next morning, Miriam was up early. She was packing
lunches when Lee walked into the kitchen. "What’s this?"

Miriam’s face turned fiery red. "I’m going to a rodeo
in Salinas with Gene. I think it’s the biggest one held in California, and it’s
going on this week. I’ve never been to a rodeo before, so I said yes.
I...um...had thought you’d be on your way to New York, so I didn’t mention it.
But now, you’re staying, and I didn’t want to leave you, but then Gene has been
so excited about taking me, and...
oh
, God!" She
pressed her hands to her hot cheeks.

Lee grinned. "I think it’s great that you’re going,
Miriam. I didn’t know you wanted to see a rodeo."

"I didn’t either." She bustled about, her eyes
avoiding Lee’s as she began building huge sandwiches of cold meats and cheeses.
"Gino used to ride in them--he rode the bulls. The goal is to hang on for
a certain amount of time. Can you believe it? He made it sound so
exciting!"

"You call him Gino?"

"I don’t know where he found the nerve," Miriam
mused, lost in thought about the man. "I’d be afraid to touch a bull, let
alone try to sit on one."

Lee laughed. "Well, you and
Gino
, have
fun."

"Oh, I will.
And...um
...don’t
worry about me if we don’t get back tonight."

Lee’s eyebrows shot up. "Oh?"

"
It’s
three hours to Salinas
and another three back. Gino will be driving, and if he seems too tired to
drive all the way home..."

"Ah, of course, can’t let that happen."

Miriam eyed her stiffly, daring her to say another word.
"My feelings exactly!"

After Miriam and Gene left, Lee faced the job she dreaded
more than any other. In fact, she had planned not to do it, but to throw
everything in Judith’s bedroom away after the house sold. Now, though, in the
big empty house, she decided to do things the right way.

Memories flung themselves at her the moment she stepped
into the room. Struggling to keep her thoughts
focussed
only on what she was doing, she unfurled a Goodwill bag, opened her mother's
top bureau drawer, scooped up armfuls of underwear, nylons and nightclothes,
and shoved them into the bag.

When she reached the bottom drawer, she sat on the floor
to go through it. Under a layer of scarves and handkerchiefs, a metal framed
picture lay on its face. She turned it over.

It was her favorite portrait of her parents. She'd thought
it was lost.

Judith Reynolds was beautiful in a sparkling rhinestone
necklace and a low cut, royal blue evening gown that showed off her full
breasted but otherwise petite figure to perfection. Her platinum blond hair was
styled like Marilyn Monroe's.

Lee had never been as delicate or beautiful as her mother.
"You're such a cow," Judith used to say to her as she was growing up.
Even now, as Lee watched her diet carefully to stay thin enough for television
cameras, Judith's condemnation rang in her ears.

In the photograph, standing behind and slightly to
Judith's side, his hands on her waist, was Jack. He was much older than Judith,
tall and
breath
takingly
handsome, with dark brown hair, and a sparkling glint in his brown eyes.

When Judith heard he'd been a soldier during the Vietnam
War and had been captured and tortured, she was overwhelmed. He was her hero,
her own Burt Lancaster, just like in
From Here
To
Eternity.

 But what he'd been through was no movie script, and
his nerves had been shattered by his experience.

Lee set the picture upright on the dresser top and looked at
it. Judith’s ideas of marriage to her handsome war hero and the reality of it
were apparently quite different.

Although Lee was only six at the time, she never forgot
the last night of her father’s life.

She’d been asleep, and something woke her. The bedroom
door had stood slightly ajar. Down the hall in her parents' room, she saw
movement and heard loud voices. She crawled into the hall and knelt on the
floor, her nightgown tucked under her knees, trying to make herself small so
they wouldn't notice that she was there. It wasn't unusual for her parents'
fighting to wake her, but something about that night's fight was different.
That night, she was scared.

The hall was dim, but light blazed from her parents'
bedroom. Judith, young and healthy, was leaning over the dressing table, close
to the mirror, applying a fresh layer of pink lipstick to her full mouth.

The crash of her father's fist slamming on the top of the
vanity, shaking and rattling bottles of perfume and make up caused Lisa to
shrink and bite back a frightened cry. A canister of talc fell onto the floor
with a dull thud.

Judith paid more attention to herself than to Jack's
anger. She raised her arms up to fluff her whitish blond hair, then gave her
head a saucy shake so that a couple of strands fell over her forehead. She
plucked at them, making them lay just so, then squirted her hair with her
cologne atomizer.

Lisa hated Judith's dress. Bright pink, the front was cut
in a deep heart shape so that it showed off her breasts. At one time, Lisa thought
her mother looked like the movie star she had always wanted to be. But as she
got older, she realized Judith's look was at least ten years behind the
times--a Marilyn Monroe type in a world of
Chers
and
Jane
Fondas
. She wished her mother would wear the
loose, casual dresses and slacks that other kids’ mothers wore. Men never
stared at other kids' mothers. Even at age six she perceived the uncomfortable
undercurrents.

Her mother ran her hands over the hips of her dress,
smoothing the polished cotton,
then
practiced her pout
in the mirror in between words about going to Hollywood to become a star. She
was sick of wasting her life on a crazy old man and a squalling brat. She’d had
it.

Judith tossed her coat over her arm and picked up her
suitcase. Lisa backed away as her parents walked out of the bedroom.

Her mother was going away, but the most shattering, the
most devastating, was when she heard her father say he was going, too.

She could understand Judith leaving. Judith spent most of
the time bemoaning not being a star. But her father...he wouldn't leave her. He
couldn't. He told her he loved her.

She remembered sitting all alone on the hall stairs,
crying silently before her father came and got her. He picked her up in his
strong arms and said he was taking her to Aunt Miriam’s. She clutched his neck
and cried and begged him not to go. He had promised her he’d be back. He had
promised....

Lee twisted a lock of hair around her finger as she
remembered her terror at being left that way. Why, she’d wondered? What had she
done that made her mother want to leave her? Was she really so unlovable? Had
she really been so bad? But she knew Daddy loved her. At least Daddy would come
back.