Spanish Disco (23 page)

“Okay. I’ll call you, Sophia.”

I hung up. The mermaid was gone. She had floated away. I had let her go. Tossed back to Copenhagen.

I picked up the phone again and placed a call to Michael.

“Hello?”

“Fuck you, Michael. You’ve avoided my calls and won’t return e-mails. I was hoping you’d been in a car accident so you’d have a good excuse.”

I heard him inhale. “Cassie?”

“Yes, of course it’s me. Who else would open with ‘fuck you’?”

“Oh, regularly my dear old sainted mother calls me and says, ‘Fuck you, son.’ But she calls me ‘son,’ not Michael, so I suppose that’s how I will tell you apart.”

I smiled despite feeling water rush by me in a torrent. I needed another drink.

“You’re mother’s dead, so you’re lying. Doesn’t matter. I’m coming to see you.”

“Sure you are.” At that moment, a voice over the P.A. system called out a flight number.

“What was that?”

“What?”

“That voice.”

“I’m at the airport.”

“You are not.”

“Don’t believe me. I’ll be at your place by tomorrow morning, and if you haven’t cooked me breakfast, I will turn around and come home.”

“Shit.”

“Shit? Fine, you don’t want me to come, Michael.”

“No, you bloody, stupid girl. I’m just not ready. You can’t.”

“Well, it’s too God damn late, Michael. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

I hung up the phone before he could respond and walked back over to my gate. I kept hearing my breath and thought maybe Lou was right. Maybe I should make them poke me to check my coma status every once in a while.

I sat and waited until they called my flight. I reminded myself to breathe. Breathe like a diver. Take in the air in my tank. The plane will not crash. The plane will not crash. And Michael and I just might not hate each other.

The possibilities were staggering. At least they seemed that way after a tequila and five tranquilizers. I rose unsteadily on my feet and headed toward the plane.

33

“M
iss?…Miss?”

From the fuzzy recesses of my brain, I was aware of two things: someone was poking me…harder by the minute, and I was drooling.

“Hmm?” I sat up, my head throbbing, and wiped the corner of my mouth.

“Hot towel?”

“No. I really just want to sleep my way to London. That way, I don’t have to think about crashing.”

The flight attendant, a frosty blonde with a neat chignon, pale English skin and rose-colored lipstick looked worried. Her nametag read “Claire.”

“You mustn’t worry about crashing.”

“Yeah, well I’m going to every waking minute. So that’s
why I don’t want to be woken up until we get to London.”

“Would you like a pillow?”

“Sure.”

While Claire went to find me one, I stared at the phone in front of me. Through the miracle of modern technology, I could talk to Michael mid-flight. What did “I’m not ready” mean?

I plugged my credit card into the phone and dialed.

“Fuck you. What the hell does ‘I’m not ready’ mean?”

“Mother? I’m sorry, but Cassie is finally coming to see me and I don’t have time to chit-chat.”

“I mean it, Michael. I will turn around and fly back to Florida. This was your idea, and now I’m coming and you tell me you’re not ready?”

“I just meant that I will have to stay up half the night cleaning and getting this place in order and grocery shopping for coffee and ordering you fresh roses. I’ll send my driver to pick you up. What’s your flight number?”

“Your driver. That’s so…I don’t know. So English.”

“Your flight, Cassie,” he demanded.

I gave it to him and heard how nervous he sounded.

I said, “Now you’re not sure, are you? If we should meet. I told you I don’t screw on the toothpaste cap and I don’t pick up after myself, and I drink too much and eat too little. Terrible food. Loaded with MSG. Takeout. And there you were, Michael, blithely ignorant. Telling me it would all be wonderful if we could just meet. We were destined to be together. And now you don’t know because
it’s all about to become reality. It’s that way with fantasy, dear. Prepare to be disillusioned. I
am
as terrible as I say I am.”

“And I am not everything that I have said I am. But it is too late for me to fix that. I just promise to explain it all.”

“Explain what all.”

“It’s complicated.”

“You’re married, aren’t you?”

“No.”

“You have seven bratty children.”

“No.”

“You have a ghostwriter and are not the brilliant author I think you are.”

“No. Just get here, Cassie. Get here so I can touch you.”

I felt myself grow wet thinking of it. I felt my knees briefly weaken and was grateful I was sitting down.

“I have to go. Claire is bringing me a pillow.”

“Claire?”

“My flight attendant. But don’t think this is beauty rest. I assure you I will look terrible tomorrow. Hungover and red-eyed and skin all dry and hair a fright.”

“Sounds charming. I’ll make eggs.”

“See you, then.”

“Yes, see you.”

I hung up and fell into the dark, empty dreamless sleep of drugs and alcohol. I was tired of thinking about Michael. I welcomed the blackness as it descended upon me like a heavy blanket.

34

C
laire, with her perfectly clipped English accent, was trying to rouse me. I landed back to earth from the blackness of my drug-induced night with a thud.

“We’re here.”

“Where?”

“Heathrow. We’ve landed. Everyone else has deplaned.”

“Oh.” I tried to think but my temples were beating the inside of my brain. “I’ve changed my mind. Take me back to Miami.”

“We can’t do that. You’d have to make new reservations and…you are kidding, right?”

I pitied the perfectly orderly Claire and pulled myself together. “No. I’m not, but I will get off your plane. This plane, which you so magnificently landed in London.”

Staring at me as one perhaps stares at Great Aunt
Gertrude when she does her amazing “turn the eyelids inside-out trick” at the family reunion, the stewardess helped me gather my things and leave the plane.

My first order of business was to get a bit of the hair of the dog that bit me. Then take a Percocet for my world-class headache. I searched the near-empty terminal for a bar, and instead spotted a well-dressed man in a chauffeur’s cap waiting patiently by my gate. He waved at me and started walking briskly in my direction.

“Miss Hayes, so glad you could make it.”

“And you would be?”

“Charles…Charlie. I’m Mr. Pearton’s driver…and cook and chief bottle-washer.”

“Well, I look a fright, and my head is killing me. And I just don’t think I’m ready to see Mr. Pearton.”

“Well, we have an hour’s drive. There’s champagne waiting in the car, and you can freshen up in the ladies’ room. I’ll wait.”

“I don’t think you understand. I can’t believe I’ve flown over here on a night’s notice. Normal people don’t do things like this. Not that I’m normal. But I really don’t think this is the way Michael and I should meet.”

“Well, I for one, ma’am, have been waiting six long years for you to come to London. I have listened to him talk about you. I know what he goes through when he writes. I know he can’t write without you. So you see, I’ve waited quite long enough, and I’m prepared to wait until noon for you to freshen up. The loo is over there.”

I stared at Charlie. He was ageless. An old man who had
long since stopped aging and was simply well-preserved. His hair was trimmed, his hands neatly manicured. He had a few wrinkles near his eyes, and his skin was liver-spotted but pink and rosy by his cheeks. His blue eyes twinkled, and I knew, without a doubt, that he would indeed wait forever but I was
going
to meet his employer.

In the brightly lit ladies’ room, I looked positively sick. My skin was pale and pasty. I stuck my tongue out at my reflection. White…chalky. I sighed and took out my makeup bag. I brushed my teeth, spitting into the sink of the British Airways terminal bathroom, silver and gleaming, and now full of my toothpaste. My hair was beyond help, so I merely pushed and poked it so all the matted curls wouldn’t be in the one lone place I had smashed my head against the seat. I applied fresh makeup, smoothed my sweater, and went out to face Charles and customs.

Michael’s car was a Bentley. “How English of him.” I smiled at Charles.

“She’s a dream to drive.”

I climbed into the back seat and put my carry-on next to me. Charles sat in the front seat—on the “wrong” side, of course—and we were off, pulling through the quiet streets of early-morning London, foggy with a slight drizzle.

Charles kept looking at me in the rearview mirror. I felt my curly hair growing frizzier by each damp second I was in England. Frizzier, for me, is not a good look.

“I know.” I smiled at Charles. “You’re thinking ‘All this excitement for her?’ A shower will help me immensely, I assure you.”

“I wasn’t thinking that at all. I was thinking how happy he is going to be to see you finally. It will do him a world of good.”

“A world of good? Why? Does he have writer’s block again?”

“I can’t say, ma’am. I can’t say. But it will do him good. Very good.”

Michael Pearton’s writer’s blocks were legend around the office. Not only did I have to talk with him for hours on the phone to nurse him out of it, we all had to hold our breath. More than once we had already planned out a cover and jacket only to discover he had trashed his original ideas and gone off in another direction—A. B. Our codes were B. B.—Before Block—and A.B. for After Block.

Charles kept glancing at me in the rearview mirror, a worried expression on his face. “You really don’t know, do you, ma’am?”

“I really don’t, but you’re scaring me.”

“I’m just glad you came…for his sake.”

“Charlie, I needed to come for my sake.”

I half-dozed and before I knew it we were pulling up a long, somewhat bumpy drive to an English country manor.

“I had no idea he lived in such a majestic house.”

“It’s been in the family forever. A bit drafty but lovely, Miss Hayes. You should see it when the gardens bloom.”

Charles parked the car. I heard him inhale deeply as he opened my door.

“Are you nervous, Charlie?” I glanced at him.

“Just a bit, Miss Hayes.”

“Well, if I’m going to call you Charlie, you have to call me Cassie. And we’ll all know shortly whether this is a huge mistake, won’t we?”

He led me up the steps and into a large foyer.

“I’ll put your bags in your room. He’s waiting for you in his study. That door over there.”

Hoping my knees wouldn’t fail me, and surprised I had forgotten my headache in all the anticipation, I walked over to Michael Pearton’s door and opened it.

35

I
n the grayness of the London morning, the study was dimly lit with a small lamp on a desk. A fire filled the room with the scent of pine.

“Cassie.” Michael smiled at me, and I felt my breath rush out of me. It was as if my soul left my body and traveled somewhere to be pieced together whole again. It landed back in my body with a force like the hammering of my heart, and I knew I was whole.