Starstruck (7 page)

“Dream on,” Liv said. “We’ve seen the last of him. He went to Portland today. Who knows where he’ll be tomorrow. He probably lost his little black book and thinks it might be in my car. He’ll probably ask me to send it on.”

“We’ll see,” Frances said. “I, for one, don’t think we’ve heard the last of this.
After all, he still has twenty-
six somethings that he owes you, doesn’t he?”

Liv had forgotten that.
Oh Lord,
she groaned,
me and my big mouth.

Still, she wasn’t completely prepared when she picked up the phone that evening to hear a gruff, sexy voice say, “Hi.”

“Who is this?” She knew damned well who it was. There wasn’t another voice like his anywhere. But why was he calling her?

“I see you’re just as determined to deflate my ego now as you were last night,” he said, laughing softly. His laughter sent prickles all the way down to her toes, and she sat down abruptly on the wooden kitchen chair.

“Oh, Mr. Harrington, what can I do for you?”

“Come on, Liv,” the voice cajoled. “I thought we
were friends. You can’t call a guy by his last name after you’ve undressed him and put him to bed, can you?”

“I did not undress you!”

“Well, not entirely, maybe,” he allowed. “Made me more comfortable, let’s say.”

“Let’s not say anything, Mr. Harrington!”

“Sorry, I’m just teasing.” She could tell he was grinning. She could see him now in her mind’s eye, the quirk of his mouth, the mischievous glint in his tiger’s eyes. “I’m just really calling to say thanks. I appreciated the blanket. And your letting me stay.”

“I
…
you
…
you’re welcome,” she stammered, disconcerted by hi sudden sincerity.

“Did it make things awkward for you?”

She sat up straighter. He cared? “Well, um, no
…
but
—
”

“I tried to get out before the kids woke up,” he went on. “And none of the neighbors saw me leave. I walked down to a supermarket parking lot and called a taxi from there.” He sounded breathless, a bit hesitant and worried. Nothing like the devil-may-care Joe Harrington immortalized in print everywhere. Imagine, a Joe Harrington concerned about the proprieties of a situation. Liv smiled.

“No, it was, um, all right,” she told him. No sense in bringing up Frances’s thoughts. Those were entirely her own fault after her reference to the twenty-six somethings he owed her. “Well, good-bye.”

“Hey, hang on,” he said quickly, the diffident, nervous Joe suddenly vanishing. “There’s a little matter of the twenty-six kisses I still owe you!”

Liv felt the heat leap to her cheeks. Why had she ever said that to Frances? She would never live it down! “Don’t be ridiculous,” she blurted. “Frances just made some silly remark about you calling me while
I
was out of the office, and so I said
…
Frances thinks you’re just too
…
too
—
” Couldn’t she say anything without sticking her foot in her mouth?

“Marvelous for words? Sexy for my own good?” Joe filled in, laughter rich in his voice.

“That’s the general idea,” Liv agreed dryly. “Anyway, forget it.”

“I don’t want to forget it,” he murmured, his voice velvety in her ear. Goose bumps broke out on her arms. “But,” he went on in a more normal tone, “there’s nothing much I can do about it right now. Tomorrow I’m flying to Hawaii for two days, and then I have to give a series of talks in Texas and Oklahoma or thereabouts. Then, I think, it’s on to the East Coast to sway the Bostonians and New Yorkers with my words of wisdom.”

Liv felt a momentary stab of disappointment, which she just as quickly banished, as he outlined his itinerary. Life was complicated enough without wishing she had a man like Joe Harrington in it, even briefly. “Sounds like fun,” she said brightly. A change from early Madison eclectic, which was the only thing on her horizon, anyway.

“Oh sure.” Joe’s tone was ironic. “Once you’ve seen one airplane, you’ve seen them all. And one hotel room is pretty much like another.” He sighed. “But it’s something that I promised myself I would do.”

“I’m impressed,” Liv told him sincerely, and she was. She had thought he was just a handsome face and a little talent, but there was clearly more to him than that. His commitment to the cause he espoused was very obvious the night he gave his speech in Madison, and he seemed quite willing to put his body where his mouth was for a long while.

“Are you?” he sounded doubtful.

“Yes,” she told him, and was prodded by the feeling that she said it as much because she was sure he needed to hear it as because it was, in fact, true. He sounded bone-weary, and she remembered how exhausted he had looked the night before. It was past ten here, which meant it was only eight on the West Coast, but already he sounded equally tired tonight. “Don’t you have to give a speech this evening?”

“No. I’ve given four today already. That’s enough of inflicting myself on the public for one day. But,” he added, “I must admit, the crowds are good. And if they come to hear me because of Steve Scott and all that rot, at least they seem to leave thinking a bit about the future of the world.”

Liv shifted in the chair and thought how amazing it was to be sitting in her kitchen with a pile of jeans to be mended and the evening paper scattered on the table in front of her, and to be talking to America’s great heart-throb. Somehow he didn’t fit the image, and not because he was less but because he was more. A real, living, breathing man, not some publicist’s dummy. She felt herself warming all over as she listened to him talk on, telling her about the places he’d been today, the people he’d seen—the hordes of young women and the hamhanded public officials who’d dogged his steps—with a surprisingly self-deprecating sense of humor that poked as much fun at his own image as at people who let themselves be swayed by it. She grinned when he paused and told him, “It’s just that you’re so wonderful.”

“I know. I could tell how impressed you were yesterday.”

“That didn’t really have anything to do with you,” she told him now, realizing for the fir
s
t time herself that it really didn’t. It wasn’t Joe, the person, she was annoyed at, it was the symbol of male freedom that he represented to Tom and men like him.

“Explain,” he insisted.

But she couldn’t. Not to him, not yet. He made her feel strange, alive, real—and the feelings scared her. She had to think about them, digest them, come to terms with them. Rationalize them, she mocked herself. “I don’t think I want to right now,” she said because, somehow, she felt that tonight he had given her a taste of who he was as a person, not a sex symbol, and she owed him the same honesty. “But I am so
rr
y I took it out on you. This call must be costing you a fortune.”

“Don’t you think I can afford it?”

“Probably.” He probably could own the phone company if he wanted to, “But I have this whole stack of
mending to do and I haven’t
—
” She was babbling
now, nervous.

“Okay,” he sighed. “I get the picture. Say hi to the kids for me.” And he was gone. Liv held the buzzing phone to her ear for a full minute before she replaced it on the hook, and when she did so she felt unaccountably lonely. No, not unaccountably. The reason was obvious—and ridiculous—she was missing Joe.

She drifted through the whole next day, responding absently to Marv’s requests and Frances’s observations, nearly forgetting to attend Noel’s baseball game, and marking all of Stephen’s multiplication homework wrong because she thought it was addition.

“Mom!” he howled with an eight-year-old’s righteous indignation. “You were just s’posed to look and see how well I knew ’em, not mark all over ’em with your dumb red pencil!”

“Oh?” It barely penetrated the fog that was her brain. It was like being an adolescent all over again—the constant mooning and aching, the I-wonder-what-he’s-doing-now syndrome that affected her every waking second.
Lord, I should be locked up,
she thought, shaking her head and trying to act like the sane, sensible mother of five that she had been up until two days ago.
Next thing you know I'll be reading movie magazines,
she thought as she scorched her good ivory blouse and decided that she’d better stop ironing before she burned the house down.

It was a delayed reaction to being exposed to a celebrity, she decided. But that was absurd because she’d met former President Carter, Robert Redford and Mother Teresa of Calcutta in the course of her work, too, and none of them had caused her to forget the sevens multiplication table or bu
rn
her blouse.

“Phone, Mom,” Ben hollered.

“Is this the old woman in the shoe?” Joe’s voice asked when she answered.

“You!”

“You were expecting maybe Warren Beatty?”

“I was expecting the termite exterminator,” she said, heart aflutter.

“Disappointed?”

“Not very,” she admitted. “He has at least as many children as I do.”

“God save us,” she heard Joe mutter.

“What do you want?”

“To talk to you.”

“About what?”

“That’s what I like about you. You’re so direct, so straightforward.” He was grinning, she could tell. “What did you do today?” he asked.

Burned a blouse, tied my typewriter ribbon in knots, thought of you, ruined Stephen’s math homework, spelled “through” five different ways in one seve
n-inch story, thought of you…
“Not much,” she said. “Is that why you called?”

“Partly. And partly to tell you the weather in Hawaii is rotten, the surf stinks, the girls are ugly—”

“And you just wanted me to know that?” Liv felt laughter rising within her.

“Sure,” he said simply. “Tell me about Noel’s ball game. Did he get a hit?”

She was more than a little surprised that he even knew about it, and said so.

“Of course I know. Remember, we talked about it at dinner, over the chicken-and-rice casserole.”

Liv remembered kisses at dinner and little else, but she stammered, “Oh, yes, er, well, his team did win. He got a triple, I think.”

“You
think
?”
Joe sounded horrified. “Don’t you know? Ah, well—” his tone turned philosophical “—my mother never knew how well I did either. Or when I struck out.”

Liv thought that Joe Harrington’s even
having
a mother was novel. She hadn’t considered him as a part of a family, somehow. It made him seem far too human. “So what did you do today?” she asked brightly, keeping such thoughts at bay.

He told her about a marvelous reception at the airport in Oahu and about the fabulous luncheon he had attended.

“I thought you never ate,” she said. “I thought you gave the speeches while other people ate.”

“I’m learning to survive on flattery and the smell of food alone,” he told her. “I’ll be nothing but skin and bones by the time you see me again.”

With a blonde on your arm, in some weekly gossip magazine, Liv thought with a grimness that surprised even her. “Poor guy,” she commiserated. “Want me to send you a care package?”

“Only if you’re in it.”

“Joe!” But she knew he was only teasing, and anyway, the threat no longer existed. He was thousands of miles away and her chances of seeing him again, other than in two-dimensional black and white or living color, were virtually nil.

“Tim’s banging on the door,” he said then, and she heard him put his hand over the receiver and shout, “Come in.” Then he said. “I have to go. I’ll call again.” And he was gone.

She never did figure out what the purpose of the call was. But it effectively brightened her mood for the rest of the evening. She hummed her way through folding the laundry and even managed to be pleasant to Tom when he called to say there was absolutely no way he could take Noel and Ben waterskiing that weekend as he had promised.

Joe’s calls kept coming. Not always in the evening. At odd moments throughout the day or night the phone would ring and it would be Joe. They would talk for fifteen or twenty minutes—usually just the banter of good
friends—sharing what they had done that day, teasing and laughing, and Liv stopped being surprised to discover the call was from him and came to look forward to it.

We’re friends, she thought, pleased, and didn’t bat an eyelash anymore when Frances put on her knowing leer and asked if Joe Harrington had called back. It was a standing joke between them now. Frances never knew that, in fact, he had, and that the secret admirer she teased Liv about, whose calls always made her smile for the rest of the day, was none other than Joe Harrington.

So Liv had no one to talk to about her feelings when the day came that he didn’t call. For over two weeks she had heard from him every single day. And then one Friday no call came. He had been in Miami the night before, and she knew that his schedule would be hectic all that afternoon and evening, so she had expected to hear from him in the morning. Marv sent her to Sauk City to interview a potter and she didn’t get back ti
l
l almost noon, but there were no messages on her desk.