The Merchant of Venice Beach (11 page)

Although . . . the past repeats itself. After all, I still have a massive crush on a hot Latino.

Carla was wasting no time getting the tearoom ready for the remodel. Suzanna, after repeating and repeating her “I don’t care what happens with Eric and Carla” mantra, came upon them, heads together over the dining room table.

“Suzanna!” Carla said. Suzanna scrutinized her, but Suzanna knew she wasn’t acting guilty or uneasy. “Eric and I have been going over the schedule . . . and I think we can get everything done by your birthday.”

“That’s less than two months away.”

“It’ll be tight, but I really think we can do it,” Carla said.

“Hey, Beet,” Eric said. “We need to find a carpenter.”

“Carla, you must know carpenters,” Suzanna said.

“You can’t afford my guys.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Suzanna said. “I’ll check on eBay.”

“Check craigslist,” Eric said.

“You check craigslist,” Suzanna retorted.

“Is it my tearoom?” Eric said. “I’ve got the bookstore all day and classes every evening. . . .”

“Kids, kids, no fighting,” Carla said, laughing.

“Speaking of classes,” Suzanna said to Eric, looking at her watch, “you better go. It’s already seven-thirty.”

Eric jumped up, kissed both women on the tops of their heads, grabbed a backpack full of books, and headed out to his finance class. Once she was sure the coast was clear, Suzanna stood up. Carla broke out in a huge, conspiratorial smile.

“Salsa?” Carla asked.

“Salsa,” Suzanna said, grabbing her purse and heading out the door.

Every week before dance class, she promised herself that she would try some sort of flirtatious move in order to hit on Rio. After all, Alamar had adored her. But once she got to class, all her fantasies crumbled. She could see that half the female students had the same MO.

Suzanna would look disdainfully at the other women—how sad they were. After all, he taught dance for a living. Clearly he had no interest in them, any of them. Suzanna would catch a glimpse of herself in her low-cut wrap top and perfectly fitted dance pants and think:

I am so pathetic I can barely stand myself!

Rio showed the class a new step and they tried it out as a group first. Then they went into dance rotation. When Suzanna first started dancing, dance rotation made her a little nervous, but rotating proved interesting. Even though she was busy trying not to make a fool of herself, there were moments here and there when she actually learned something about her dance partner.

Andy snagged her blouse during a spin.

“Sorry my hands are so rough,” he said. “Occupational hazard.”

Suzanna was about to politely ask what his occupation was, but it took almost the whole class period for her to rotate back to him, and then the question seemed forced.

She’d started to recognize several of the regulars in class. Besides Lauren and Andy, there were Sandy and Alexia, a pair of sisters in their early twenties who could have been cast as a pair of mysterious Swedish spies should the need arise. They were very nice, but Suzanna was a tiny bit jealous that they seemed to improve at an accelerated rate. During one of their dance rotations, Suzanna was again dancing with Andy and she mentioned how good they seemed to be getting, while he and she were, well, progressing a little more slowly.

“They go to the salsa clubs every weekend,” he said, “so they get in a lot more practice. Maybe we should go sometime.”

With that, Rio called “change partners”—and she was left wondering if she had just been asked out on a date.

“Try to keep your upper body still,” Rio said to the class. “Like
so . . .”

He started to move to the music; his shoulders were barely moving, but his hips were a tornado of activity. One of the great pleasures of this class was that it was not only perfectly acceptable to be staring at their teacher’s glorious crotch, it was actually encouraged.

Lauren was also watching Rio. She was looking perfect, as usual. Her dark hair had a gorgeous blue cast to it. You could only see it when the light from the disco ball hit it just right. Understated. Elegant. She made Suzanna feel lumpy and clumsy whenever she danced by her, Lauren’s hair catching the glint of the ball whose light was streaking picturesquely across the studio.

Suzanna actually thought about tripping her one day.

She just brings out the worst in me.

As much as she obsessed over the beautiful, taut dancer, Suzanna realized she was a complete nonentity to Lauren. She felt as if she were back in high school again with all her insecurities bubbling to the surface.

“Are you having problems with the step?” Rio asked.

Suzanna blushed, realizing that her mind had wandered.

“No, I . . . no.”

“Please concentrate.”

Suzanna was relieved when he returned his attention to the class. She rotated back to Andy.

“He’s tough,” Andy said.

Suzanna, embarrassed, tried to change the subject.

“So . . . occupational hazard. What do you do?”

“I’m a carpenter.”

PART TWO

NAPA VALLEY

CHAPTER 9

Although she was nervous about the remodel, Suzanna took comfort in the fact that everything seemed well thought out and planned. She put great store in plans. Suzanna’s parents, Martin and Virginia Wolf, had not always been planners. Months before Suzanna was born, they bought and converted a rundown old barn in Napa, California, into a cavernous home. Determined to get the new house finished before the baby arrived, Suzanna’s mother was so intent on installing some salvaged wainscoting that she ignored her labor pains until it was too late, and Suzanna was born at home. Her father used to say you could sum up Suzanna’s early life by saying she was born in a manger and raised by Wolfs.

Haha.

Both of Suzanna’s parents were born in the early 1940s. They were among the very first baby boomers, and life had taken them through a fairly exhausting roller-coaster ride of cultural mores. The 1950s saw them cowering under school desks, waiting for the Big One to go off while the 1960s had them bearing witness to the deaths of the Kennedys and Dr. Martin Luther King, protesting the Vietnam war, and fighting for women’s rights.

They met as students at a protest rally at Temple University in Philadelphia, but after awhile they got pretty burned out, what with trying to save the world. They got their college degrees and a marriage license. They put the ills of the world on the back burner, moved to New York City, and started their own lives. Erinn was born in New York, but by the time Virginia was pregnant with Suzanna, the Wolfs had decided that New York was no place to raise a family. They moved to California with their twin professorships—he, English, she, history—with no great plan other than to teach and raise their children. Except for the occasional renovation to the barn–house, the senior Wolfs’ lives didn’t change much in thirty-some years—until Martin died in a car accident. He had been crossing Route 29 and was smacked down by a drunken tourist’s rental car.

“Poor Father,” Erinn said to her sister after Virginia called with the sad news. “He would have hated that he died a cliché.”

Erinn and Suzanna made it a point to visit their widowed mother often. The eight-hour drive from Santa Monica to Napa gave Suzanna and Erinn a chance to get to know each other a little better. By the time they made the return trip, they were often ready to kill each other.

Suzanna had to admit that her mother was doing alarmingly well. Suzanna knew her mother had loved her father, but she seemed to have blossomed these last few years.

“It’s amazing what life holds in store,” her mother said to her visiting daughters. She was looking in the mirror and arranging her new hairstyle. “I never thought what life might be like without your father. I miss him terribly, but I’m discovering all kinds of new things about myself.”

Erinn and Suzanna looked at each other in alarm. They were not the sort of family that discussed intimate details—and the younger Wolfs had no interest in hearing about what these new discoveries might be. A haircut—OK. They could talk about that. But anything more confidential than that and the conversation would come to a screeching halt.

Suzanna sometimes wished that the women in her family were a little more open with each other. The fact that her mother—her mother—was ready to experience life in an entirely different way,
really made Suzanna think.

“I don’t want to wait until my husband dies before I find myself,” Suzanna had said to Erinn on a ride back to Southern California.

“Don’t you think you should find a husband?” Erinn said. “Before you kill him off?”

Suzanna turned up the radio. Erinn wasn’t sensitive about not being married, but Suzanna was getting touchy, as much as she hated to admit it.

Virginia used to say that Martin and she had enough haphazard knowledge to get them through life . . . in the sixteenth century. Thank God she had a sense of humor. It wasn’t easy going through life named Virginia Wolf, especially if you were a college professor. One of Suzanna’s earliest memories was of her mother coming into the house and saying to Martin, “If one more student tells me, ‘I’m not afraid of you, Virginia Wolf,’ I’m going to scream.”

Virginia was a professional woman all her life, and she had flirted with the idea of keeping her maiden name. There was some professional pressure to do so. But she always insisted that it was important that a nuclear family all share the same name. That might have been true, but Suzanna always suspected that it might have had something to do with the fact that her maiden name was Fudgett, and anything had to be better than that.

When Suzanna was in fourth grade, a new kid joined the class. Her name was Candi Cane. The other kids just laughed their heads off when the teacher introduced her, but Suzanna burst into tears of empathy. She could just envision the poor girl coming home every night for the rest of her life wearing the look she knew all too well from her mother.

Suzanna befriended the poor girl, who turned out to be kind of a jerk. Carla was in the class, too, and Suzanna had hoped to share the misery, but Carla was always one of the cool kids, so trying to saddle her with Candi Cane was not in the cards. Suzanna stood steadfastly by Candi through the rest of the school year—on principle—and was thrilled to find out at the beginning of fifth grade that Candi’s father had been transferred to the Midwest.

For as long as Suzanna could remember, Carla had been in her life. Suzanna’s father used to think it was hilarious to introduce the Caridis as “our closest friends” since Carla and her family lived next door at a winery. Carla’s father used to brag that his grandfather came to Napa in the 1900s and the family had been in the wine business ever since. The fact that his grandfather shut the winery during Prohibition and it remained shuttered until 1972 didn’t seem to faze him.

Although insanely busy with her architecture practice, Carla still helped run the bustling winery alongside her father. She was loyal to a fault.

When she wasn’t stealing boyfriends.

Suzanna could still remember the first time they’d met.

Or she thought she remembered. The two of them had relived it so many times that it almost seemed like a movie they had seen. They were both pretty sure they had their story straight, even though they still argued about some of the details.

They were about five years old and the Caridis were having an open house after installing some new oak barrels at the winery. The Wolfs were invited. Erinn was fifteen and bowed out. Suzanna’s parents went—and dragged along a grouchy Suzanna, who, even at five, knew that an open house at a winery was not a place for a little kid to have a good time.

But then she met Carla—also having a lousy time, even though it was her family’s winery. The two girls eyed each other for awhile: two five-year-olds take a while to warm to each other, no matter what adults think.

Suzanna was a shy kid, but Carla seemed to have the genetic material of a Vegas showgirl. She craved admiration and basked in the attention of the adults. But adulation will hold a five-year-old’s attention for only so long, and Carla eventually turned her high beams on Suzanna, who had the habit of sucking her thumb when she was nervous. Erinn would call her “Suckagawea” to shame her, but basically, their folks were the kind of parents who thought she’d grow out of it when she was good and ready.

Suzanna and Carla stared at each other in the Caridi’s huge front hall.

“Only babies suck their thumbs,” Carla said.

“Nu-uh,” Suzanna said. “I suck my thumb and I’m not a baby.”

Mercifully, Carla seemed to accept this logic and asked Suzanna if she wanted to go see the new wine barrels before the adults did. Anything that even remotely hinted of getting ahead of the grown-ups sounded tantalizing, so she went.