She, Myself & I (6 page)

“You have a boat?”

“Come on, I’ll show you.”

I followed him as the pavement of the parking lot gave way to a dirt and gravel path. We wound around the main building, a rustic, two-story structure with a screened-in porch that faced the glassy blue lake, down a steep incline, and then finally onto the long, sun-bleached dock where boats were lined up smartly in their individual slips. The majority were motorboats, some tall and opulent, others squat and utilitarian. I figured Zack’s would probably be one of the latter, but he surprised me by stopping at a white sailboat, small in size and impeccably maintained. The mast was up, although the sails were down, piling up on either side like a deflated parachute.

Zack hopped nimbly onto the boat and reached for my hand. The water gently lapped against the hull as the boat shifted under his weight. I hesitated, my feet firmly planted to the creaking dock.

“I have to tell you—I’m not really a boat person. I went on a cruise once, and I spent the entire time being sick to my stomach. All of the rocking and the swaying and the rocking and the swaying,” I said.

Zack laughed. “It looks pretty calm out there today. Why don’t you give it a try, and if you start to feel seasick, we’ll come right back?”

I noticed that there was a small gap in his front teeth. And the hair poking through the open neck of his polo shirt was a reddish blond.

Yes,
I thought. I was definitely up for a fling. What the hell. After everything I’d gone through over the past few years, I deserved it, didn’t I?

I took his hand and step-hopped into the boat. The sailboat dipped and swayed under my weight, and I faltered for a minute—the last thing I wanted to do was fall in the lake—but Zack held on to me until I was safely sitting on the hard plastic bench built into the side of the boat. He handed me an orange pillow to cushion the seat—“It doubles as a life preserver, not that you’ll need it”—while he hustled around the deck, raising the sails, releasing the rudder, and finally untying the boat. He stretched out a leg and used it to push the boat back from the deck, before nimbly moving to the stern and taking hold of the tiller. He brought the sailboat about, and we began to slowly leave the deck, helped along by the light breeze blowing from the south.

I lazed back, one hand dipped in the water, and could feel the tension leaving my body. Huh. Who would have thought I’d find boating to be relaxing?

“Are you from here?” Zack asked, keeping his eyes ahead and on the edge of the lake as the boat skimmed slowly across the water.

“From Austin? No, I grew up in Seattle. My parents moved here when I was fifteen, when my dad got a job at UT. He is—was, I should say, since he retired a few months ago—a professor at the engineering school,” I said. “How about you? Are you originally from Austin?”

“Born and raised.”

“You don’t have a Texas accent,” I remarked.

“No, my mom was an English teacher, and she drummed it out of me at an early age,” Zack said, and this time he turned to look at me. As our eyes met, I felt a well-placed kick to my nearly forgotten libido, which had been numb since Scott had come bursting out of his closet.

“I’ve traveled around quite a bit, as an adult, but I kept on ending up back here, so I decided to stop fighting it,” Zack continued.

“Where have you traveled to?”

“I spent a year backpacking around Europe and went just about anywhere my Europass took me. After college, I joined a group that sent English teachers to foreign countries, and through that I spent one year in South America and another in Japan. I still try to travel when I can, although now that my business is picking up, it’s hard to get the time off,” Zack said.

As he spoke I became increasingly uncomfortable with how far Zack was veering from my original impression of him. College? English teacher? Well traveled? Successful business? I’d thought he was just another typical Austin guy who had not yet evolved past his undergrad years. They were everywhere, and were pretty easy to pick out, what with their almost universal enthusiasm for live music, cycling, and “Keep Austin Weird” bumper stickers. I’d thought the retro pickup truck was a dead giveaway.

“Wow. How did you get from teaching to carpentry?”

“Now, that is a story that is very long, and not at all interesting,” Zack said.

I raised an eyebrow. “Now I’m intrigued,” I said.

“You really shouldn’t be. Okay, I’ll give you the abbreviated version. I signed up for the teaching program after my college girlfriend and I broke up, and I just wanted to get the hell out of Austin. I ended up in a town called Cochabamba.”

“Where’s that?”

“In Bolivia. It was an incredible experience, but also really hard. I was pretty homesick and had a hard time adjusting. So after the year was up, I came home, moved in with my parents, and started working on a master’s in history at UT. I quickly realized that there weren’t a whole lot of jobs out there for historians, and my parents were driving me crazy, so when the program asked if I’d be willing to take another foreign placement, I jumped at it. But while I was home, I met someone . . .”

“Ah. I should have known . . .
cherchez la femme,
” I said, and then immediately felt stupid. Who talks like that, peppering their conversation with stupid French clichés? I sounded like a complete poser.

“Yeah, well, what can I say? She and I stayed in contact while I was in Japan, and moved in together when I got back. I needed a way to pay rent, so I signed on with a local builder. I’d taken up carpentry as a hobby when I was a teenager, and I enjoyed working with my hands, and it was a natural fit. I always thought that sitting behind a desk all day sounded like a prison sentence. No offense,” Zack quickly added.

I shrugged. “It’s okay. I love my job. Well . . . I love practicing law. I am getting a little sick of dealing with feuding spouses. So, carry on. You moved in with your girlfriend, began working for a builder . . .”

“This is much more detail than you need. I was supposed to be doing the abbreviated version,” Zack joked. “Basically, the girlfriend and I broke up. I met Molly, who worked for the same builder that I worked for—she was one of the salespeople who offices out of the model and tries to pawn off the houses on unsuspecting suburbanites—we got married, and she had an affair with our boss. So I was left with no wife, no house, no job, and ended up moving back with my parents for a few months, which gave me all the motivation I needed to start up my own business. I do a lot of carpentry, and I’m just starting to pick up some contracting work. And that’s all the information I’m giving out. Now it’s your turn.”

“Compared to you, I’m pretty boring. I went to Georgetown for undergrad, UT for law school, clerked for a year at the Texas Supreme Court, and then joined the firm that I’m with now. I made partner six months ago, and that’s pretty much it,” I said, realizing that this wasn’t even the abbreviated version. My life was actually so boring that if I took out the gay husband, I could sum it up in two sentences.

“Have you ever been married?” Zack asked.

“Yes, for a few years. We had an amicable breakup,” I lied, and then regretted the forced, overly casual tone. But the last thing I wanted to talk about was my marriage. I know that’s what people do when they first meet—they share this type of basic background information—and it was just one more reason I hadn’t wanted to start dating again.

“Come on, I told you my life story. You have to give me more than that. What about your family? Do you have any other brothers and sisters? Dark secrets? Family curses? Watch your head, we’re going to come about,” Zack said, and pushed the tiller away from him. The boat made a swift, nimble turn, and while I ducked my head, Zack released the sail and tied it to the opposite side of the boat. The sailboat hesitated for a moment before smoothly gliding off in a new direction.

I mentally tallied another point for Zack for letting me slide on the divorce talk.

“One other sister, Mickey, who’s younger than Sophie and me. No dark secrets or curses that I know of. Just the usual dysfunctional fun that every family goes through.”

“Yeah, I know how that goes,” Zack said. “Are you hungry?” With one hand still on the rudder, he grabbed the cooler and started to rummage around inside it with the other.

“Here, I’ll do that,” I said, and took the cooler from him. I popped off the plastic lid and began to pull out the goodies within. A bottle of pinot noir. A turkey sandwich on cranberry-walnut bread. Pâté and cheddar on focaccia. A plastic container of pasta salad. A bunch of grapes. Marinated green bean salad. Chocolate chip cookies.

I rummaged around, found the corkscrew, and opened the wine. I waited for a minute while the boat lapped over a wake caused by a passing motorboat, and once the water was smooth again, poured the wine into two plastic cocktail cups and handed one to Zack.

“Which sandwich do you want?” I asked.

“Whichever. Do you have a preference?”

“I’ll take the turkey,” I said, and handed Zack the pâté and cheddar.

We ate in a companionable silence, putting the open containers of pasta salad and green beans between us and picking at them with plastic forks. The sun had been low in the sky when we started out, and now it began to sink down into the horizon, leaving behind a gorgeous sunset of pinks, aubergines, and hazy grays. The colors reflected on the glassy surface of the water. The lights of the fine houses facing the lake were glowing, illuminating the perimeter of the lake as the sky darkened.

“It’s so beautiful out here. I had no idea. I would have gotten into a boat earlier if I knew,” I breathed, soaking it all in. The colors, the view, the pleasant bite to the breeze as the night cooled.

“I know. That’s why I decided to build out here,” Zack said.

I turned to him, surprised. “I thought you were living with your parents,” I said.

“God, no. I did for a few months, but I could only take so much of listening to them having the same argument every single morning about who reads which section of the paper first. Now I’m renting a house over near Ramsey Park and trying to find the time on weekends to finish my house. I thought I was going to have a chance last week to work on it, when the job I had scheduled fell through, but your sister talked me into doing her kitchen. She can be pretty persuasive,” he said.

“That’s a nice way of saying that she’s a spoiled brat,” I commented.

Zack laughed. “No, not at all. It just seemed really, really important to her to get it done. I’m glad I could help.”

“How does it look? I haven’t been over there since last week. Have you finished?”

“I’m just about done with the cabinets and countertops. I’m going over tomorrow to install the backsplash,” Zack said. He squinted at the sunset, and glanced over his shoulder to see how far we’d wandered from the dock. “I think that we’d probably better turn back before it gets too dark.”

I considered it to be a good sign when Zack parked his car outside my building and walked me in.

This is it,
I thought, my pulse picking up. I normally hate this part, the first time with a new lover. There’s so much pressure. Not just performance anxiety, but having to worry about how to play it:
Is it too soon? Too late? Does he think I’m easy? Neurotic? Cold?
I think that our mother’s generation had it easy in comparison—nice girls waited, fast girls put out. So all you had to do was figure out which category you were in and proceed accordingly.

But with Zack, I already knew that we weren’t going anywhere, so there was no pressure. I could be as brazen as I liked and not worry about the repercussions. I felt a surge of energy flood through me, a loosening of limbs, an openness in my lungs.

“Do you like living here?” Zack asked me as we walked through the navy blue carpeted lobby of my building and stood by the elevator bank. We looked at our distorted reflections in the brass elevator doors while we waited for the elevator to arrive. Zack hadn’t put his arm around me or even taken my hand, which seemed a little odd. Most men aren’t exactly subtle at this stage.

“Yeah, I do. It really suits my needs. There’s a gym in the basement and a pool in the back, and I don’t ever have to worry about mowing the lawn.”

The elevator doors opened with a
bing,
and we stepped inside.

“The thing I never liked about apartment living was always being able to hear my neighbors walking around or fighting or having sex. When I first moved back to Austin, my girlfriend and I had an apartment near campus, and we used to call the guy who lived above us the Sixty-Second Man. It was hard to look him or his wife in the eye,” Zack said.

“Ah,” I said, not sure where to go with that one. Maybe this was his way of being subtle, of introducing the topic of sex in a roundabout way.

The elevator stopped at my floor, and we walked to my apartment. I pulled out my keys, unlatched the lock, and opened the door.

“Well, I had a great time,” Zack said, hanging back, while I went inside and dropped my purse and keys on my front hall console table. I turned around and looked at him, surprised that he hadn’t followed me.

“Aren’t you coming in?” I asked.

“No. I should get back. It’s getting late. But thanks for coming sailing with me,” Zack said.

He hadn’t even stepped across the threshold. I stared at him. Was he rejecting me? Why? What was wrong with me?

“You don’t want to come in for a . . . ,” I trailed off. I was going to say “nightcap,” but it sounded too affected, like something out of a Doris Day movie or an episode of
The Love Boat
. And “cup of coffee” was synonymous with sex ever since the
Seinfeld
episode where George’s date invited him up for a cup of coffee, and he hadn’t caught on that she was inviting him to bed. Although since that’s exactly why I was inviting Zack in, maybe that wasn’t a bad way to go.

“Coffee?” I finished.

Zack smiled. “Rain check,” he said.

“Oh. Sure,” I said, crestfallen.

And then Zack did step into my apartment, until he was so close, I could see the faint white line of a scar acquired long ago under his left eye. He rested one hand on my waist, and kissed me. His lips lingered on mine, and I leaned toward him, wrapping my arms around his neck, savoring the warm bulk of him against me. But just at the point when I thought he’d step even closer and maybe reach up to cup my breasts or slide his hands down over my bottom, Zack pulled back, breaking off the kiss. My arms fell limply away from him and hung uselessly at my side.