Looking for Laura, page 26
Sally wondered if Laura was fat.
Todd checked his watch. “When is dinner?”
“At seven. Why don’t I get you two settled in the meantime? I’m afraid I didn’t catch your names….”
“Settled?” Todd asked.
Claude Macy’s smile was so bright Sally wished she hadn’t left her sunglasses in the car. “I assume if you’re colleagues of Laura’s from Winfield College, you’ll be staying for the night. No problem. We have plenty of empty cabins. What were your names again?”
“Todd Sloane,” Todd said, offering his hand.
Claude shook it, then extended his hand to Sally. “Sally,” she said, opting not to mention her last name, in case Claude mentioned it to Laura. If she heard Driver, she’d know Sally was related to Paul, and she might lie low until they left.
“So, you’ll stay the night, then. Do you have any bags?” Claude’s expectant gaze shuttled from Todd to Sally and back again, as if he assumed it would take both of them to answer the question.
Sally wasn’t sure what it would take. She smiled hopefully at Todd, who said, “We were planning to take a room at a motel.”
“Oh, no. Absolutely not,” Claude declared. “The nearest motel is over an hour away, and it has an infestation problem. It’s run by locals, if you catch my meaning.”
Sally caught his meaning: the poets of Mondaga Colony were still engaged in hostilities with the local residents. Maybe no bullets were being fired, but guerrilla warfare included casting aspersions on the local motel. Which, she acknowledged, wasn’t exactly local if it was an hour away.
“Let me take you to a cabin,” Claude insisted. “It’ll be so much nicer than that old mildewy dive. We’ve just had all the cabins cleaned last week. The water’s been turned on, they’ve got heat and electricity and they’re ready to be used. Please—I insist. Winfield friends of Laura’s are always welcome here.”
Sally glanced at Todd, who shrugged. “I’ll get our things from the car.”
“Why don’t we all head out together, and we can go directly to the cabin. Ah, this is going to be so much fun,” Claude went on, clapping his hands yet again. “Laura is going to be so surprised.”
Indeed she would be. Sally followed Todd and Claude outside into the nippy air. “Are you a writer, too?” she asked him, partly to get an idea of how he might relate to Laura and partly because she was curious. He seemed much more bubbly than she’d expect of a poet. Of course, she’d never met a poet before, so she had no way of knowing how bubbly the average poet was. The closest she came to an acquaintance with any sort of writer was the fellow in black who spent every morning at the New Day Café, penning his master opus into a spiral notebook. He certainly wasn’t bubbly.
“Playwright,” Claude told her. “I work with the New York Poets Theater in Manhattan during the winter. I’m sure you’ve heard of them.”
Sally smiled vaguely. She’d never heard of them.
“And I always come up here in April to help get the colony opened, along with Laura and the other usual suspects.” He chortled at a joke she failed to get. Taking Sally’s bag from Todd, he waited for Todd to haul out his own bag, a black rectangular suitcase with wheels and a telescoping handle that would have been easy to drag around on a smooth surface but was not at all suited for the uneven, needle-strewn ground. “The folks here now are all helping us to get the place whipped into shape. Hawley Dandrick is here.” Claude spoke his name portentously, implying that Sally was supposed to know who Hawley Dandrick was. “And Tabitha Shula. She comes every year in July, but she’s completing work on a book-length prose poem and needed a few weeks to finish it, so I told her to come on up and get some writing done between chores. It’s going to be a masterpiece, I’m sure. Tabitha doesn’t know how to write anything less than brilliant.”
Sally could imagine.
“And the Ross twins came. They’re brainstorming the third book in the Cargill series….”
She had no idea what he was talking about, but she let him ramble. He was carrying her bag, after all, leading the way around the mansion and down a trail that meandered through the dense woods. Glancing over her shoulder, Sally saw Todd lugging his wheeled suitcase by the handle, his gaze hard and assessing. Claude’s daffodil-yellow sweater was the brightest thing in the forest.
As her eyes adjusted, she began to notice the buildings scattered through the woods, set on paths that branched off from the trail they were hiking. Small and rustic, the cabins reminded her of the Mondaga Colony sign at the entry to the compound. Except for the mansion, this place felt a lot like a Boy Scout camp.
“Here we go,” Claude said grandly, leading them to one of the squat brown cabins. He heaved his shoulder against the door to open it, then flicked on a light switch and swept inside, gesturing for them to follow.
For a moment, all Sally saw was the bed. Singular. One wide bed piled with a patchwork quilt and four fluffy pillows. One bed.
She tore her gaze from it to take in the rest—the writing desk, the easy chair with its faded, inviting upholstery, the floor lamp beside it, the windows overlooking the woods. The two doors on the side wall, one opening onto a closet and the other onto a bathroom. The thick maple dresser. The knotty-pine walls. The matching night tables flanking the bed.
The bed.
“As I said, dinner will be around seven,” Claude reminded them. “You’ll see Laura then. And won’t she be surprised!”
Won’t she, indeed, Sally thought as Claude departed, shutting the door behind him. She turned from the door and her vision filled with the bed. “Todd?”
He dropped his suitcase with a thud. “Yeah?”
“There’s only one bed.”
He contemplated this, as if it were news to him. “I’ll sleep on the floor,” he offered.
She looked at the plank floor, covered in several places by thin braided rugs. “You can’t do that.”
“Okay. You’ll sleep on the floor.”
“Todd.”
“We’ll share the bed.”
She opened her mouth, then puffed out a long breath and reconsidered what she was going to say. If she’d still hated Todd, sharing a bed with him would have been no problem. She could have rolled on one side, presenting him with her back and hovering near the edge of the bed. She could have pretended he wasn’t there; she had a good imagination. As long as he didn’t snore or hog the blanket, she could ignore him.
But she didn’t hate him. He had apologized to her. He’d played mellow music instead of Nirvana during the drive. And he’d laughed. His laughter had changed everything.
“We could still go find that motel,” she suggested.
“Sure. The one with the infestation problem.” He crossed the room to the floor lamp and clicked it on, then turned to Sally. “We’re this close to meeting Laura,” he said, holding his thumb and forefinger less than an inch apart. “Once we see her and have our say, we’re probably going to get our asses kicked out of here. Claude isn’t going to extend the hospitality of this wonderful writers’ colony to two people who’ve come to flay his good buddy Laura. So don’t worry about it.”
He had a point. They’d probably wind up at the motel, where they’d be able to rent separate rooms, with separate beds and separate infestations. She’d have her knife back, and Paul’s lover would be left with a sizable dose of guilt—Sally hoped—and the furnishings of this cabin would no longer be relevant to her life.
“All right,” she said. “I won’t worry about it.”
It turned out that Laura Ryershank did miss meals sometimes. Claude relayed to the motley group of writers seated around one end of the long pine table in the main building that Laura was going great guns and couldn’t be disturbed. “When the colony is in full swing,” he explained to Sally and Todd, “some guests prefer to have their meals in their cabins. They don’t want to break up the flow.”
“The flow?” Todd asked.
“The flow of their writing.”
Seated next to Todd, Sally could tell that his esteem of the Mondaga writers was not high. Every time Claude clapped his hands—which he did with alarming frequency—Todd winced. When the Ross twins—Sally couldn’t tell Mickey from Marty; they both dressed in navy-blue crew-neck sweaters and khaki trousers, and their eyeglass frames were identical—talked, he pulled a face. Tabitha Shula, who stood as tall as Todd and had ebony skin and a buzz cut, spoke in epigrams, her voice hoarse from the cigarettes she repeatedly leaped from the table and raced outdoors to smoke. Hawley Dandrick was a burly fellow with a muscular beard and a Hemingway attitude.
Todd seemed to hold them all in equal contempt.
Unlike him, Sally found them fascinating. She pumped them with questions about their writing projects, and they obliged her with verbose answers. The Ross twins were involved in a multivolume series that involved fantasy elements and universe building. It sounded interesting to Sally, although she doubted she’d want to spend thousands of pages on fantasies that weren’t her own. Tabitha had a tendency to declaim rather than speak; she would utter a majestic pronouncement about tribes of women, then bolt from the table to inhale a Marlboro Light on the slate patio visible through the French doors. Claude described his New York Poets Theater, which staged T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral annually. When asked, Hawley blithely reminisced about the Battle of Mondaga Lake. In his version, he single-handedly mowed down three hunters with chunks of granite and deflected a bullet with his steel-toed shoe.
Todd didn’t say much as he downed his dinner, a vegetarian lasagna that Sally found so tasty she inquired about the recipe. For all his contrition about having misjudged her, he seemed to be sitting in judgment of their dinner companions—and finding them guilty on all charges, whatever those charges were. Unconventionality, perhaps. Flights of fancy. Overweening self-importance.
“We’d really like to see Laura,” he murmured to Claude. Sally detected a taut thread of impatience in his voice; she wondered if Claude noticed it.
“And I’m sure she’ll be delighted once she sees you, too,” Claude commented amiably. “She adores Winfield. She always speaks so highly of her special friends there.”
Had Paul been one of her “special” friends? Sally wondered. Did she have other “special” friends? Had she been screwing half the town?
“But when the words are flowing,” Claude continued, “you just can’t interrupt them.”
“It’s bad karma,” Tabitha interjected.
“And they must be flowing quite marvelously for Laura to have missed dinner. I’ll have to bring her a tray so she doesn’t starve.”
“We could bring her the tray,” Todd volunteered.
“Oh, no, we couldn’t let you do that. Seeing you would interrupt the flow.”
“Bad, bad karma,” Tabitha intoned.
“But make yourselves at home. Sooner or later, the flow is going to dry up and our queen will emerge. In the meantime—”
“Queen?” Todd pounced on the word. “Is Laura your queen?”
“More like a goddess,” one of the twins said.
“She’s so beautiful,” the other twin added.
“A goddess among poets,” Claude confirmed.
Sally’s spirits deflated. A beautiful goddess poet. No wonder Paul had chased after her. No wonder he’d risked his marriage for her. No wonder he’d saved all her letters.
“Well, we wouldn’t want to do anything that would interrupt the goddess’s flow,” Todd muttered, nudging away his plate. “I guess we’ll have to see her later.”
“There’s plenty for you to do while you wait,” Claude told them. “Right here in the main building we’ve got a library packed with books, and backgammon, and a piano. You can take a stroll around the grounds, although it’s kind of dark, so I wouldn’t recommend that. Or you can go back to your cabin. There’s a phone there. I’d be happy to give you a ring if Laura emerges.”
“I think that’s what we’ll do,” Todd decided for both of them. Sally almost balked. Maybe she’d prefer to play backgammon, or lounge around the piano singing old show tunes with Hawley and the twins. Or traipse about the grounds in the dark until she fell and broke her wrist so she could sue someone.
Going back to the cabin with Todd until Laura showed her goddess face was probably a better option. Smiling and thanking Claude for dinner, she excused herself and left the dining room with Todd.
“This place gives me the creeps,” he grumbled as soon as they were outside, picking their way carefully along the poorly lit path to the cabins.
“I thought those people were interesting.”
“They’re pretentious dilettantes! I know more about writing than they do.”
“You know more about writing news articles, maybe.”
“Which is real writing, not the jerking off these folks do. I mean, what was that crap the bearded guy was talking about—how a writer must hearken to the muse’s siren? Give me a break. A real writer hears a siren and follows the fire engine, because wherever it’s going, there’s bound to be a story.”
“That was his point,” Sally argued. “You obey the siren and find your inspiration.”
“‘Hearken’?” Todd snorted. “What normal person uses the word hearken in a regular conversation?”
“These people don’t have to have regular conversations! They’re artists.”
“Yeah, and the world really needs artists like them.” Sarcasm bathed each word. “I bet they’ve all heard of Vigo Hawkes, too.”
Sally bristled. She’d heard of Vigo Hawkes. “Just because your own life is so limited—”
“My life isn’t limited. I’m just not a bombastic artiste with a swollen ego, like those turkeys.”
“You’re a snob. You’ve got the biggest ego of all.”
“No. I’ve just got the most sense.” He yanked open the cabin door and stomped inside. “I swear, if the Battle of Mondaga Lake ever gets fought again, I hope someone lets me know. I want to enlist in the hunters’ army.”
Sally stomped in after him and slammed the door behind her. “You’re a jackass, Todd. Those people were lovely, but all you can do is sit in judgment of them. You can’t begin to open your mind to the possibility that the whole world isn’t filled with jackasses like you!”
“Anyone who uses the word hearken is a jackass in my book. Especially if he uses it in reference to the muse.”
“What word would you use in reference to the muse?”
He circled around on her. The lamp by the easy chair spilled golden light behind him, turning his face into shadow. “I don’t believe in muses! When you run a newspaper, you have deadlines. None of this touchy-feely creativity shit.”
“That’s because you aren’t a poet.”
“Thank God I’m not!”
She wanted to argue, but when she slowed down long enough to think, she realized that she agreed with him. Thank God he wasn’t a poet. Poets had affairs with other people’s husbands and wrote sappy letters. Todd…
Todd was who he was. He wasn’t introspective or elegant or sensitive, but he was honest and loyal. And he didn’t use the word hearken in ordinary conversation, which—if she was going to be as honest as he was—she considered an asset.
She became aware of the silence in the cozy cabin, the warmth of the light emphasizing the dark forest beyond the windows. She became aware of Todd standing before her, just two strides away, staring at her. She became aware of the bed behind him, and the energy inside him, and the fact that she liked the sound of his voice, even when they were arguing, as much as she liked the sound of his laughter.
She wished she could get back to arguing with him. Arguing was safer than thinking about how tall he was, how broad his shoulders were, how long his legs. It was much safer than thinking about the remoteness of their cabin, the icy bite in the air outside, the thick quilt and plump pillows on that damn bed.
“Sally,” he murmured, sounding hoarse.
She had to say something, or do something. “Maybe I ought to give Rosie a call and see how things are going.”
“Things are going fine.” He took a step, halving the distance between them.
“I’m sure they are, but—”
“Sally.” One more step and he blocked the bed completely from her view. Which was good, she told herself. She didn’t want to think about the bed, not when Todd was so close to her, when he was sliding his hand under her hair to her nape and bowing his head, when she felt the heat of his mouth an instant before it captured hers.
They’d kissed before. She knew what to expect. She could handle it.
No. No, she couldn’t. Not when they were alone like this, far from home, not when she’d lived so many long, lonely months without sex, not when he stood before her so big and real and male, not when he’d said the most romantic words a man could ever say to a woman: I’m sorry.
She couldn’t handle it at all. So she went ahead and kissed him back.
His hand fisted in her hair. His other hand swooped around her waist and hugged her tight. She slid her hands inside his jacket so she could cling to his shoulders, and she let herself go. She remembered how powerfully she’d reacted the last time he’d kissed her, but this was different. This was hot and deep and less than three feet from a bed.
Without breaking the kiss, he shoved her cardigan down her arms. She shoved his jacket down his. Still kissing, he tugged at her jumper. She fumbled with his shirt. He stroked her cheeks, her ears, her throat, dug his fingers into her hair and pulled out the barrettes. She nuzzled his chin and felt the scratch of his day-old beard against her lips.
Together they staggered to the bed and tumbled onto it. She kicked off her sandals; he kicked off his loafers. He stopped kissing her and reached down to stroke her bare legs. They’d been cold, but his hands warmed them. Big, blunt, manly hands, tracing the contours of her calves, the creases behind her knees, shoving the jumper up and out of his way so he could caress her thighs.
She made another futile attempt to unbutton his shirt. If only he’d stop moving, if only she’d stop moving. But she couldn’t, not when he was running his palms along the fronts of her thighs that way, creating heat and friction that made her want to burst out of her skin. He stopped long enough to tear off the shirt himself, then hauled her jumper over her head. She pulled off her own shirt and he shucked his pants. The faster they finished undressing, the sooner he would put his magical hands back on her, so she scrambled out of her underwear and watched him dispense with his boxers.
