Derailed

EIGHT

How did they get from lunch hour to the cocktail hour?

From tuna Niçoise and biscottis to cosmopolitans and salted nuts?

Lunch, after all, was something you did with a friend. Drinks was something you did with a good friend. Lunch involved a call to Lucinda, but drinks required a call to Deanna. An explanation for his lateness. It required lying.

And he was as bad a liar as he was a joke teller.

Then again, practice makes perfect.

“I’m working late tonight,” he told Deanna over the phone on the afternoon of their first nighttime date.

“I’m working late again, ” he told her the next time.

And the time after that.

Slowly becoming aware that life was changing for him. That he was spending most of his time more or less waiting for the next time he’d see Lucinda.

Temple Bar.

Keats.

Houlihan’s. Where both of them finally had to acknowledge where this was heading.

Maybe it was the drinks. He’d decided to forgo his usual Cabernet and had opted for a margarita instead. Or two. At a bar where they didn’t skimp on the tequila.

By his second drink, he was seeing things. Or not seeing things. For instance, the rest of the bar patrons had faded away, leaving only Lucinda.

“I think you’re trying to get me drunk,” she said.

“No. I’m trying to get you drunker.”

“Oh right. I forgot. I’m already wasted.”

“You look beautiful wasted,” he said.

“That’s because you're wasted.”

“Oh yeah.”

She did look beautiful—glassy eyes had nothing to do with it. Dressed tonight in something ridiculously short and impossibly snug, stretched this tight over her glossy nylon thighs.

“What did you tell your wife?” she asked him.

“I told her I was having drinks with a beautiful woman I met on the Long Island Rail Road.”

“Ha,” she said.

“What did you tell your husband?”

“Same thing. That I was having drinks with a beautiful woman I met on the Long Island Rail Road.” She laughed, holding her pink cosmopolitan away from her body so it wouldn’t spill on her.

Her husband. Stolid, dependable, nearly twenty years older than her, and poisonously boring, she’d complained to him. Passionate only about golf these days.

“You know . . . ,” he said. “You know . . .”

“What?”

“I forget.” He was going to say something that he had the vague notion he was going to regret later, but he’d lost it when she turned to look at him with those soft green eyes. If jealousy was the green-eyed monster, what was love? The green-eyed angel?

“What are we doing, Charles?” she said, looking kind of solemn now. Maybe she was about to say something she was going to regret, too.

“We’re having a drink.”

“I meant what are we doing after we have a drink?”

“Having another drink?”

“After that.”

He was thinking of a possible answer for that one, but suddenly there was someone else in the bar; they weren't the only two people left in the world. A man of uncertain age had pushed himself between them to get the bartender’s attention.

Only his attention went elsewhere — as soon as he got a look at Lucinda’s legs, that is.

“May I buy you a drink?” he said to her.

“No,” she said, showing the cosmo still in her hand.

“Okay. May I buy you the bar?”

“Sure, go ahead.”

“Excuse me,” Charles said; the man was nearly standing on his shoes.

“I don’t want to buy you a drink,” the man said.

“That’s funny. It is. Only I was talking to the woman here.”

“So was I.”

Charles couldn’t tell whether the man was being funny or just being himself, which could be anything from rude to homicidal. It was hard to tell these days.

“You know, actually, he was talking to me,” Lucinda said to the man. “So . . .”

“A needle pulling thread.”

“All right, we'll leave,” she said.

“Oh,stay, ” he said.

“Excuse me,” Lucinda said, getting up from her bar stool and trying to push past him.

“Something I said?”

“Excuseme.”

“Great. The cunt’s leaving,” he said.

Charles hit him.

As far as he knew, he’d never hit anyone before; he was surprised that hitting someone was just as painful as being hit. He was also surprised that the man actually went down, with genuine blood on his lip.

“He said something very rude to me,” Lucinda explained to several waiters who’d suddenly materialized and stepped between them.

A flushed-looking man came rushing up from the nether regions of the restaurant — the manager, Charles guessed.

“Maybe you should all leave,” he said after ascertaining what had transpired. It wasn’t difficult — the man Charles had punched to the floor was still in the process of getting up, and Charles was still rubbing the hand that punched him.

“Sure,” Charles said. “Why not.”

He retrieved Lucinda’s coat from the cloakroom, aware that all eyes were on him, though the only eyes he cared about were green and widened with gratitude.

Well, weren’t they? Hadn’t he just kicked sand on the bully, rescued the maiden, defended her honor?

It was blustery outside, cold enough to turn his breath to vapor.

“Get a cab to Penn?” she asked, her eyes tearing up from the chill—or was it from the emotion of the moment? From the exhibition of his prowess?

“Forget the train,” he said. “I’ll call a car. I’ll get a car and drop you home.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe that’s not a good idea.”

“Why’s that?”

“I don’t know. Someone may see us.” The first open acknowledgment of illicit doings.

“Someone might see us on the train, too.”

“That’s the train. Strangers sit on trains. Its different.”

“Okay. Whatever you want.” His arm was on her arm — he hadn’t realized he’d put it there, but he had, and he could feel her body heat beneath the coat. Like the fever beneath a chill.

“I just don’t think the car’s a good idea.”

“Okay.”

“I might do something I shouldn’t do.”

“Like pass out?” He was trying to be funny again—emphasis on trying — but maybe it wasn’t the time to be funny, because he could almost swear she was leaning in toward him, that she’d somehow gotten closer than she’d been before.

“Like maybe eat you,” she said.

“That settles it,” he said. “I’m getting the car.”

She kissed him.

But kissing doesn’t quite do it justice. It wasn’t kissing as much as mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, because he felt himself coming back from the dead.

When they pulled apart, and they didn’t do that for what seemed like a day and a half, they both caught their breath as if just beached from the sea.

“Uh-oh,” she said.

His sentiments exactly. Or maybe just oh. An exclamation of wonderment and unbridled joy—okay, not totally unbridled, since there were just a few complications lurking around somewhere.

Yet those complications — which had names and faces and legitimate claims to his love and loyalty — suddenly seemed to re-cede like the bar patrons from moments ago and fade away into a peripheral world.

In the car ride home they snuggled in the backseat, snuggling the kind of word you generally stop using past a certain age. It felt both warmly familiar and achingly new.

They kissed again, too. And he kissed not just lips, but several parts of her, the nape of her neck, the faint scar on the inside of her arm — playground accident—her dark, downy eyebrows. One eye on the driver, who now and then would glance in his rearview mirror, the other eye on each other, and he’d have to say that each other looked pretty good. Flushed faces—hers for sure, and he could also feel the heat on his own, though it wasn’t the heat, it was the humidity. As if they were enveloped in a swollen raincloud ready to drench them to the bone and him all ready to dance through the puddles afterward like Gene Kelly.

When they lip-locked over Van Cortland Avenue, when they squeezed hands past the shadow of Shea, when they nuzzled on the exit ramp to the Grand Central Parkway—he was willing to wager that no one had felt exactly like this before, even though he knew it was a lie. The number one sin of the hopeless addict: denial. And he was addicted, wasn’t he? It seemed as if he couldn’t go two exits without kissing her. That he couldn’t make it through three songs on the radio — 101.6 FM, Music to Make Out By — without running his hands up and down her body.

“Slow down,” she said once they made it off Exit 8E of the Meadowbrook Parkway — no meadow, no brook, just parkway. She was saying it to the driver, but she might as well have been talking to him, because if he didn’t slow down, it was possible that he would overheat — one of those unfortunate victims you see littering the highway on their way to somewhere important.

“I don’t want you to drop me in front of the house,” she said. “My husband’s home.”

“Whereis your house?”

“A few blocks up. Over here is fine.”

They stopped at the corner of Euclid Avenue — the name of a tree that no longer exists on Long Island.

And Lucinda said: “Meet me on the train tomorrow.”