The Day After Tomorrow

10

TWO DAYS would not be enough, Osborn decided the following morning. Vera had just gotten out of bed and he’d watched her walk around the foot of it and go into the bathroom. Her shoulders thrown back, unashamedly extending her small alabaster breasts before her, she’d crossed the room with the grace of a barely tamed animal unaware of its magnificence. Purposefully, he thought, she’d put nothing on—not his L.A. Kings T-shirt he’d given her to sleep in but that she’d never put on—nor wrapped around her one of several towels still on the floor, spent trophies of three extended episodes of sex in the shower. It was a way of telling him that the night before had not been a lark and this morning she was embarrassed by it.

Somewhere in the hours before daylight, between the sessions of lovemaking, they’d decided to spend the following day seeing Switzerland by train. Geneva, to Lausanne, to Zurich, to Lucerne. He’d wanted to go on to Lugano on the Italian border but there wasn’t time. Save Lugano for the next trip, he remembered musing in the moments before falling into a wholly spent and soundless sleep. That and Italy.

Now, as he heard her step into the shower, it came to him. Today was Saturday, October 1. Vera had to be in Calais on Monday, the third. That same day he was scheduled to fly out of London for L.A. What if today, instead of touring Switzerland, they flew to England? They could have tonight and all day Sunday and all of Sunday night in London or wherever in England Vera wanted to go. Monday morning he could put her on a train to Dover and from there she could take the ferry or Hoverspeed across the Channel directly to Calais.

The sense of it came in a rush, and without thinking more he reached for the telephone. It was only when he was talking to the female clerk at the front desk, and asking how to dial Air Europe, that he realized he was still naked. Not only that but he had an erection, which he seemed to have most of the time Vera was anywhere near. All at once he felt like a teenager on an illicit weekend. Except, as a teenager he’d never had an illicit weekend. Those things had happened to others, not him. Strong and handsome as he was—and had been, even then—he’d remained a virgin until he was nearly twenty-two and a student in medical school. Things other boys did, he’d never done. Though he boasted he had, just to keep from looking the fool. The villain was, as always, the same, the intense and uncontrollable fear that sex would lead to attachment, and attachment, love. And once committed to love, it was only a matter of time before he would find a way to destroy it.

At first Vera said no, England was too expensive, too impulsive. But then he’d taken her hand and pulled her to him and kissed her deeply. Nothing, he told her, was more expensive or impulsive than life. And nothing was more important to him than spending as many hours with her as possible, and they could do that best if they went to London today. He was serious. She could see it in his eyes when she pulled back to look at him, and feel it in his touch when he smiled and ran the back of his hand gently down the side of her face.

“Yes.” She smiled. “Yes, let’s go to England. But after that, no more, okay?” Her smile left, and for the first time since he’d known her, she became serious.

“You have a career, Paul. I have mine and I want it to continue the way it is.”

“Okay—” He grinned and leaned forward to kiss her, but she pulled back.

“No. First agree. After London we won’t see each other again.”

“Your work means that much to you?”

“What I have already done to get through medical college. What I have yet to do. Yes, it means that much. And I won’t apologize for saying it or meaning it.”

“Then . . .” He paused. “I agree.”

London had been a blur. Vera wanted to stay somewhere discreet, somewhere she would not run into a former classmate or professor—or “boyfriend?” Paul teased—and then be invited to dinner or tea or whatever and have to make excuses. Osborn checked them into the Connaught; one of the grandest, smallest, most guarded, and “English” of all the London hostelries.

They needn’t have bothered. Saturday evening was Ambassadors Theatre and a revival of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, followed by dinner at The Ivy across the street, a hand-in-hand stroll through the theater district, broken by several giggly champagne breaks at pubs along the Way, and finally a long, circuitous taxi ride back to the hotel during which they challenged each other, in sensuous and conspiratorial whispers, to make love without the driver’s knowledge. And did. Or thought they did. The rest of their thirty-six-hour stay in London was spent in bed. And it was neither because of sex or by choice. First Paul, and very shortly afterward, Vera, came down with either food poisoning or a violent attack of the flu. All they could hope for was that it was the twenty-four-hour kind. Which it turned out to be. And by the time Monday morning came and they took a cab to Victoria Station, both, though a little weak and shaky, were nearly one hundred percent recovered.

“Hell of a way to spend a weekend in London,” he said as he held her arm and they walked toward her train.

Looking at him, she smiled. “In sickness and in health.”

Later, she wondered why she’d said it, because she knew she’d put meaning into the words. It was an inflection in her voice that just came out. She had been trying to make it light and funny but she knew it hadn’t sounded like that. Whether she meant it or not she didn’t know, and she didn’t want to think about it. All she remembered afterward was Paul taking her into his arms and kissing her. It was a kiss she would remember all her life, rich and exciting, yet at the same time filled with a strength and self-confidence she’d never before experienced with any man.

She remembered watching him from her compartment window as her train pulled out. Standing there in the massive station, surrounded by trains and tracks and people. “ Arms folded over his chest, staring after her with a sad, bewildered smile, and with every click of the wheels, growing smaller and smaller, until, at last, she was out of the station and could see him no more.

Paul Osborn had left her at 7:30 Monday morning, October 3. Two and a half hours later he was in the duty-free shop at Heathrow Airport, killing time before boarding his twelve-hour flight back to Los Angeles.

He was looking at T-shirts and coffee mugs and little towels with the London subway system printed on them when he realized he was thinking of Vera. Then his flight was announced and he waded through a sea of milling passengers to the boarding area. Through the window he could see his British Airways 747 being fueled and loaded with baggage.

Turning away from the plane, he looked at his watch. It was nearly eleven and Vera would be on board the Hover-speed, crossing the English Channel to Calais. By the time she reached her grandmother’s, the two would have little more than ninety minutes before she rushed off to catch the two o’clock train to Paris.

He smiled at the thought of her helping the eighty-one-year-old lady open birthday presents and then joke and laugh with her over cake and coffee and wondered if by chance she would mention him. And if she did, how the old woman would respond. And then, in his mind, he saw the succession of goodbye hugs and farewells and chastisements for so short a visit as Vera waited for her taxi that would take her to the railroad station. Osborn had no idea where Vera’s grandmother lived in Calais, or even her last name for that matter. Was it her maternal or paternal grandmother?

It was then he realized it didn’t make any difference. What he was really thinking about was that Vera would be on the two o’clock Calais-to-Paris train.

In less than forty minutes his bags were pulled from the 747 and he was in” the check-in line for the British Airways shuttle to Paris.