The Social Climber of Davenport Heights (16 page)

“We are the people who
pay
those taxes,” W.D. continued. “And when we get money back, we invest it, do the country some good.”

David nodded and forked himself another piece of cranberry goose.

“You give more money to some low-wage worker, he’s just going to spend it uselessly,” W.D. went on. “Oh, I suppose it helps cheap discount chains and the local beer joint, but it doesn’t do a thing for the economy as a whole.”

“Scott Robbins?” I asked. “Where have I heard that name?”

W.D. looked over at me, obviously annoyed.

“You’ve seen his name a least once a week in the ‘Letters to the Editor,’” W.D. complained. “The damn fool has some stupid opinion on practically everything.”

Not having read the “Letters to the Editor” at any time in my memory, I was pretty sure that was not the source of this familiarity. I mentally scanned the list of people who worked in my office, current and former clients, people at church, the folks that I’d met in charities and service organizations. I
couldn’t come up with anyone. Still, I knew that name, but I just didn’t know from where.

I shrugged and let it go.

T
HE REST OF
Christmas Day was basically pleasant. I volunteered to do all the cleanup and nobody tried to talk me out of it. Having had the main dish and the desserts catered, the job didn’t really take me all that long, but I lingered at it.

Occasionally I glanced into the family room where Brynn, David and his parents played Scattergories with more noise and enthusiasm than I could have ever brought to the game.

W.D. and Edith had been proud and doting with David. They were the same way with Brynn. They treated her as if she were the brightest, wittiest, most delightful human on the planet. And she responded by being exactly what they expected her to be.

They seemed so patrician. So comfortable and at ease with the advantages of their life. As I watched them from the kitchen, I realized that this was the world that I had wanted so very long ago back in that tacky little house in Sunnyside. I had been watching from a distance then. Now, in my own home, I was watching from a distance still.

Brynn was relaxed and charming. She laughed at all her grandfather’s jokes. Though these occasionally covered such
themes as politics and religion, they mostly concerned the personal lives of senior citizens. She gave as good as she got with punch lines of her own on subjects more pertinent to those of her age. But basically they were both finding humor in sex, drinking and bathroom habits.

Edith giggled ad infinitum. The Christmas cognac may have had something to do with that.

David rolled his eyes and accepted the part of reasonable person, condemned to spend the evening with three goofballs.

Occasionally one of them would call out to me.

“Jane! Jane! Did you hear that one?” David asked. “The reason why the chicken crossed the road? To prove to the armadillo that it could be done.”

“Mom, do you know how many sorority girls it takes to change a lightbulb?” Brynn called out. “Two. One to call Daddy for help and the other to pour the Diet Pepsi.”

I listened to them, laughed with them. But I didn’t go in and join them. It wasn’t as if I felt unwelcome. It was more that I didn’t want to intrude on what was obviously a Kodak moment. I gave myself four points for staying alone in the kitchen.

W.D. and Edith left just after nightfall, looking happy but exhausted from their busy day. Edith made a date for shopping with Brynn the next morning. I would never have wanted to visit the mall the day after Christmas. But those two were serious consumers, relishing the challenge.

W.D. moaned, as if the idea of Edith and her granddaughter alone in the mall with credit cards was a fearful thing to contemplate. We laughed appropriately.

As they drove away, David, Brynn and I watched from the porch, arms around each other’s shoulders until they were out of sight. Brynn stepped away from me rather deliberately, I thought, before walking silently back into the house.

David fabricated some urgent business and disappeared for a couple of hours.

Seating herself on the couch in the family room, one leg bent beneath her, Brynn booted up her laptop and was sharing Christmas disaster stories with a chat room from her dorm. Her own undoubtedly included the morning’s confrontation with her overbearing and unpleasant mother.

With no one to talk to, nothing to do and the cleanest kitchen in Davenport Heights, I retired to my room. I combed my hair out, brushed my teeth and dressed comfortably in my sleeping-sheep pajamas.

I lay down in bed and resigned myself to fanning listlessly through the stack of unread fashion magazines that had piled up on my night table. There were a lot of them. I was so far behind, I hadn’t even seen the layout of sexy vampire costumes that promised to
score wild tricks and wicked treats for you and your honey on Halloween
.

With a disgusted grimace, I decided to just give up the end of the year as a loss. I found a January issue. It was devoted almost exclusively to diet and exercise. There were glossy photos of beautiful fit young starlets in evening gowns, martini in hand, declaring that they had
lost five pounds just by giving up pasta
.

A former Olympic athlete demonstrated her new body-contouring regimen. Just looking at the pictures made me tired, sweaty and out of breath. I pulled down the covers to get a look at my own thighs.

“Well, Jane,” I admonished myself aloud, “it is definitely time for another visit to Dr. Plastic and his amazing lard-sucking machine.”

I skipped through the rest of the weight-loss advice, the dozens of cigarette ads and the lovely scenic vistas touting freshness for
that
time of the month. There was a ten-question
quiz on how to
recognize the clues when your man is cheating
. I glanced through casually.

“I see that building a house with his girlfriend is not mentioned anywhere.”

My intrapersonal conversation was interrupted by a discreet tapping on my door.

“Come in,” I called out eagerly.

I expected Brynn. Amazingly, it was David who opened the door.

He must have witnessed the surprise on my face.

“I saw the light,” he explained.

“I didn’t know you’d come home,” I told him.

“I just got back,” he admitted.

He walked in a little uncomfortably and closed the door behind him. There was a strangeness about his presence. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been in my room. He just hadn’t been in it lately, or when I was lying down.

When he reached the bedside he seemed awkward, as if not sure what to do or where to put his hands. He stuffed them in his pockets first and then pulled them out to wrap uneasily around his own waist.

I scooted over a bit.

“Sit down,” I offered.

He visibly relaxed as he did.

“Is Brynn still up?” I asked him.

“I just said good-night to her in the hall.”

That pleased me. I wanted her to see her father visiting my room. It made us seem more normal.

“I just wanted to talk to you…” David began and then sort of faded off.

“I wanted to talk to you, too,” I admitted. “Brynn was lovely today. She seems very grown-up since summer.”

He nodded. “Yes, she is. Did you two have words this morning?”

“Not much,” I assured him. “I’m surprised you noticed.”

“It’s hard to miss. When you two are unhappy, I get to do all the talking.”

“So I guess it’s not all bad,” I teased.

David chuckled. He was looking at me very intently. There was an earnestness about his expression that was a little bit intimidating.

“What is it?” I asked. “Do I have toothpaste on my nose?”

With a long index finger, he tapped the end of my nose, teasing.

“No, I guess not,” he said. “I was thinking how very young you look when you laugh. It reminds me so much of when we were just kids.”

“What a sweet thing to say.”

“It’s true, Jane. Absolutely true.”

“Thank you.”

He nodded. “I wanted to come in here and tell you that I had a really nice Christmas.”

“Good,” I told him.

“And I know that I have you to thank for that,” he continued. “I know how much planning and effort you put into making this a very special holiday for Brynn and for me.”

I was touched.

“You’re welcome,” I said. “And the earrings you got me were fabulous.”

He shrugged. “Actually, Mom picked them out,” he confessed.

“Oh, that was sweet of her,” I said. I wasn’t surprised. It was exactly the kind of thing that Edith liked. Me, I’d throw them
in the back of the jewelry safe with the hope of never seeing them again.

A silence settled upon us. Not a comfortable silence that would be unexceptional between two people who’d been married twenty years, but an edgy, expectant silence. Both of us wondering what would happen next.

David continued to look at me in that strange, searching manner. It made me nervous. It made me curious. What was he feeling? What was he thinking?

He took my left hand in his own. At first, he just held it, lightly running his thumb over the bright cluster of diamonds on the third finger.

Then tentatively, hesitantly, he brought it up to his face. He pressed it a moment against his cheek and then kissed my palm.

The tenderness of the gesture sent a shiver of anticipation through me. It had been a very long time since David and I had touched.

I missed that. I missed him. If his infidelity made me hesitate, it was only for a minute.

“Oh, David.” I breathed his name like a prayer.

I slid my arm around his neck and edged him closer to me. I raised my mouth up to his own.

“Stay with me tonight,” I whispered one instant before our lips met.

Instantaneously it was foreplay. These were not the gentle, friendly pecks shared between Brynn’s mother and daddy. This was open-mouth sensual exploration, deep, eager and greedy.

“Oh, baby,” David started murmuring. “Oh, baby.” It was his sex-act liturgy. I remembered it very well.

Beneath my palms, his shoulders and back were strong and muscular, more so now than in his youth. His kisses were
better, too. And his touch more confident, more skillful, more seductive.

“This feels good,” I told him.

He threw the covers back, scattering slick glossy magazines all over the room. With nimble fingers he began undoing the buttons on my flannel pj’s.

I had never attempted to repress my sexual desire. But for the last several years, I had mainly ignored it. I tried to channel that energy into my work, my social life. And I was not too prudish to ease my own frustrations, but there is nothing in the world quite as captivating and gratifying as another human body pressed up against your own.

I slid my hands underneath his shirt and lightly raked my nails against the softness of his skin.

“Oh, baby,” he murmured as he bared my breasts. “You look good, you smell good.”

“I am good,” I assured him as I clicked off the bedside lamp, allowing the silvery shimmer through the skylight to illuminate us.

He chuckled lightly as he nuzzled against my bosom.

I threaded my fingers through his hair. My breath caught in my throat at the touch of his tongue.

“You always were good,” he told me.

That was the truth. In bed, I had always been good. And he had been, too. That night was no different. We knew all the ways to caress each other, tease each other, tempt each other. And neither of us hesitated to make full use of that knowledge.

Fired up, laughing, kinky, we romped on the mattress like newlyweds. David stuffed a pillow behind the headboard to keep it from banging against the wall. I dragged off his briefs with my teeth.

We giggled. We panted. We moaned.

It took a while for me to get to the edge. I wrapped my legs around him tightly, urging him on. He stayed with me until my climax and then he came a half minute later.

We lay there in each other’s arms, catching our breath as the sweat on our bodies gleamed in the moonlight. I felt wonderful. Totally exhausted, yet somehow brimming with energy, as well.

I wanted to giggle, to kiss him, to hug him. I wanted to relive the moments just past. To marvel together about how wonderful it felt and how well we understood each other, how intuitively we satisfied each other’s need. I resisted the desire.

David was quiet, thoughtful, as he sometimes was after sex. I decided to let him slip into that place in his heart where he went without me.

I did plant one more kiss on his cheek.

“That was fantastic, darling,” I told him. “I’m wrung out like a dishrag and never enjoyed it more. Let’s not wait so long before we do it next time, okay?”

I don’t know what he replied, if anything. The moment I lay my head against the pillow, I was asleep. I awakened late in the morning and he was already gone. He probably had an early tee-time.

Two days later we got Brynn on her plane to Colorado with hugs and kisses and admonitions to be careful. The holiday hadn’t been a complete disappointment, but I was a little down anyway. I had tried so hard to make her time with us fun and special and pleasant. Not just because I wanted her to visit us more often, but because that was the kind of relationship I wanted to have with my daughter. I wanted to be a good mother. I wanted Brynn to have a good family life. I wanted our home to be a source of strength for her.

The simple things can sometimes be the hardest to attain.

David appeared as thoughtful as I was myself. We walked the long concourse and took the train to short-term parking without much discussion at all. When we reached the Volvo, I spoke for the first time.

“Just drop me off at home, I think I’m just going to hang around the house this afternoon.”

That wasn’t really such a good idea. I’d already taken off all four days that Brynn was home. Since the accident my sales had gone way down. I really needed to get something closed before the year was out. Somehow my heart wasn’t in it.

“Home is where I’m headed,” David answered. “I think I’ll play hooky this afternoon, as well.”

“You don’t have a golf game?”

“No,” he said. “I canceled.”

His words surprised me. And worried me a bit, as well. It was a cool crisp afternoon with sunshine and blue skies. David played golf almost every day and certainly every pretty day.

“Are you not feeling well?” I asked him.

“Oh no, I’m fine,” he assured me.

He certainly looked fine. He seemed a lot happier than usual. It was the kind of inner cheerfulness and optimism that had attracted me to the man in the first place. Amazingly, I’d forgotten that. I’d forgotten how his upbeat, positive attitude had so intrigued me.

I’d thought that it was an outward manifestation of status and money. Over the years, however, I’d discovered that most of the wealthy and privileged, at least the ones I’d met in this city, were not nearly so pleased with life.

It was just David being David. Deliberately choosing to see the world at its best.

I attributed today’s inner glow as residual joy at having Brynn at home.

“She really looks so grown-up in those new clothes,” I said.

“Who?”

“Brynn.”