A Different Kind Of Forever (17 page)

“There was something in your face, when Angela was talking about him,” Michael said.
 

“It was a long time ago,” Diane repeated. “I’m hungry. And I need to cool off.”

He kissed her. “Okay.”

By the second week of July, Sam French began casting for ‘Mothers and Old Boyfriends’. Diane began spending time at Merriweather in the mornings. She was enthralled by the whole process. They were casting ten male and eight female roles, and because the Merriweather program had been so well received for a number of years, the caliber of people auditioning was high, many known theater and television actors from Manhattan.
 

In ten days, they had a cast, and they began to read through her script. It was then that her real work began. She and Sam discussed which lines were working, which sounded hollow, where the laughs were. Diane was not a good collaborator, but she knew Sam was thinking only of the best for her play, and she made extensive notes on his suggestions, as well as suggestions from the cast. It was difficult for her to see characters that she created and felt belonged to her become absorbed by the actors, and the line between the character and the person portraying the character became blurred.

Michael listened to her, nodding in sympathy as she tried to articulate her frustration. They were sitting in her back yard, and she was pacing her patio, trying to explain. He grabbed her, pulled her into his lap, and kissed her soundly.

“I know exactly how you feel. There were times I’d write a song, spend all this time on, it, agonizing over each note, and the band would hear it, and they’d be, like, ‘that’s the best song you’ve ever written, man’, and I’d be thinking how fuckin’ great I was, then Seth would say, ‘hey, maybe we should do this’, and Phil would say, ‘let’s change this chord’, and in fifteen minutes, the best thing I ever wrote would be completely different. It sucks. I know how hard it is to turn this over to somebody else. But unless you want to act all the roles yourself, you’ve got to allow for a little, well, freedom of interpretation.”

“I know. I guess the whole time I was writing, I never thought it would be actually performed, so what’s been in my head for all this time is hard to shake loose.” Diane kissed him right behind the ear, then began taking small bites on his neck

“Your neighbors are watching,” Michael murmured as she slid her hand under his shirt.

“Are they holding up scorecards?” She asked. “I think we deserve at least a 9.2.”

“I think we deserve even more, but we either have to wait ‘till it gets darker, or maybe go inside.” His hands were moving up the inside of her thighs.

She stood up, grabbed his hand, and led him into the house.

“You don’t text.”

“Neither do you.”

“Yes, I do. I text the girls all the time, especially now that they’re down the shore.”

“Who would I text? All the people I need are right here.”

“You don’t Tweet, either.”

Michael laughed. “Seth is in charge of all that. He’s the maven of all Social Media.”

“And you don’t have a Facebook page.”

“My life isn’t that interesting. What would I put on a Facebook page?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Isn’t yours the generation that must be in constant contact with everyone and everything?”

“Maybe. I’m an old-fashioned guy at heart. I don’t even like talking on the phone all that much. My cell is five years old. I’m not even sure I can text.”

“Your fans must be disappointed in you.”

“If they knew I was spending the morning naked in bed with you, some of them would be very disappointed.”

“True. Do you think if people found out about us, it could hurt your career?”

“Are you kidding? You sexy older women are very in right now. I’d be the envy of all my fans.”

“Ah. Is that why you keep coming around?”

His hand, which had been resting lightly on her stomach, suddenly moved.

“That’s one reason. Here’s another.”

They fell into a pattern as the summer wore on. The nights they spent at Diane’s, they would cook out on the grill, often asking Sue Griffen and her husband Pete to join them. Michael and Pete were both Mets fans, and after dinner, Diane and Sue would take a walk around the neighborhood and the two men would watch the ball game together. Sometimes, Sharon and her husband Richie would come by and the four of them would go out to Richie’s favorite pub. Richie played darts, and he began coaching Michael, who was a quick study and became fairly proficient. Sometimes, all three couples would meet at one home or another for drinks. Michael liked her friends. They liked him as well.

At Michael’s, there were a string of guests that came and went even if Michael was not at home. Mark Bender would come by to sail into the middle of the lake, then spend the day fishing. Theresa Milano, Michael’s first childhood love, would drive in on days off, swim laps for an hour, then fall asleep on Michael’s shady, perfectly mown lawn. His family came by often, to sail or to fish, often staying for dinner and far into the night.
 

Members of the band dropped in and out, checking on the progress of Michael’s work. They were starting to lay down tracks for the singles on the soundtrack. The Martone brothers did not want to spend any more time away from home, so the band decided to do as much work in Michael’s studio as possible. The band worked quickly together.
 

She started making dinner at Michael’s, two or three nights a week. She would stop by the store on her way back from Merriweather, and come back to his house with bags of groceries. Fred Chu, a Buddhist and vegetarian, never accepted her invitation to join them. He cooked and ate his own meals in the apartment he lived in over Michael’s three-car garage. Diane loved to cook, and Michael would often wander out of his studio to watch her. Seth and David Go would join them. For Diane, it was like cooking for a new kind of family.

She was careful they didn’t spend a full week together. She found reasons to spend a night alone. She would drive down to the shore to see her daughters, staying at a motel. She would start cleaning her house, pulling closets apart, calling Michael late in the afternoon saying she was going to stay there and finish up. She would catch the bus to Manhattan and spend the night at Rachel’s.
 

For the first time in a long time, Diane felt she was slightly out of control. Her feelings for Michael were a complete surprise to her. Her physical desire for him was intense. She would find herself, in the middle of the day, doing something as ordinary as washing dishes or watering plants, when a sudden wave would come over her, beginning as a throb deep in her belly and moving up, a physical jolt, leaving her breathless and wanting.
 

But she knew, and not just from the many nights that she slept peacefully beside him without passion, that it was not just his touch that held her to him. He had a boundless energy and enthusiasm about everything that she found a complete delight. They could talk about any subject. They laughed a great deal together. When she was with him, the world was in sharper focus. When they were apart, she found countless things to remember to tell him, to ask him about. Her solitude was no longer a comfort to her. It was just time spent waiting to see him again.

She thought that she was in love with him. She would turn to Jasper and say the words aloud, trying on the sound of them.
 

“I think I love Michael.” Her voice was always in a whisper when she said it. The cat would blink wisely in response. She would take a deep breath and go on with her day. But the thought was always there, crowding out the quiet and carefully planned life that she imagined she would be living.

“I think I love him,” she would say to herself, driving out to his house. She sometimes reasoned that Michael was so irresistible to her because she had married relatively young. She had missed the sexual adventures of other women her age. She had slept with only a few other men before meeting Kevin, her high school sweetheart and a couple of brief college flings. She had loved Kevin deeply when they married. She was twenty-one, just out of college, and he, being five years older, had not wanted to wait. She continued to love him for many years into their marriage, and had remained faithful to him, despite the attention other men may have paid to her.
 

She wondered if she was just another sexually frustrated middle-aged woman responding to the attention of a younger man, but she dismissed the idea, because she realized that the spark that had been there from the very beginning, the thing that had drawn her to him from the very first day, was still going strong. He made her happy. From the moment she met him, it was not just passion he stirred in her. It was more. It was joy. And she had no idea what to do next.

If she was away more than a day, Michael would drive over to her house, unannounced. She was always there, waiting for him. Sometimes, he would come around the back of her house, and see her in the yard, tending her roses. He would wait outside the gate, not wanting the brass bell to give him away, and watch her as she weeded or raked. Her movements were quick and graceful, her concentration complete. She did not realize he was there, watching her, until he would call to her, or push open the gate. Sometimes he would walk into the house, and she would be in the kitchen, music blaring, dancing alone in front of the stove, and again he would watch her until he could resist no longer, and he would join her, and they would dance together in her tiny kitchen.
 

He hated them being apart. Gordon Prescott was bearing down on him, a huge, suffocating cloud that blotted out everything else. Michael spoke to him sometimes four or five times a day. FedEx delivered revised tapes several times a week. Prescott wanted him in Toronto. He wanted to know at every moment what Michael was doing, and Michael, used to the freedom of writing alone, under no restraints, was in agony. Diane was the one cool, soothing presence in his life. The nights she was not with him he spent awake, on his studio, with David Go, or Seth. Without her there, the movie pressed down upon him relentlessly. Her presence forced him to live a normal life.
 

They went into Manhattan together. Diane went to see Shakespeare in the Park. Michael followed gamely. He was not passionate about theater the way she was, and he did not like New York, but her excitement was contagious. They had dinner with Rachel. Rachel’s boyfriend, Gary, was a third year law student, clerking at a large firm on Madison Avenue. He was also a huge music fan, and he and Michael would get into long, rambling discussions of obscure bands, European bands, and techno-music. Gary was twenty-five. Rachel and Diane slipped back into their old relationship, much to Diane’s relief.

By the first week of August, Michael and David Go began to try to figure out what Toronto would be like for them. David thought they would need six weeks to record the score, at least. The tracks for NinetySeven were almost complete. Joey and Seth would produce the rest of the soundtrack, so Michael would not be needed for any further recording. Gordon Prescott did not believe in time off. Michael knew it would be a grueling time, not only physically, but he would be away from Diane.
Thank God it’s only Toronto
, he thought. He could fly back easily enough, for a day at a time. And she could fly up to see him on the weekends.
 

“What are you doing?”

Diane was in his bedroom, on her mat. “It’s called the Gate Pose.”

“Yoga? I didn’t know you did yoga.”

“Hey, a girl is entitled to a few secrets, you know?”

“Sure. Okay, what’s that one?”

“Downward Facing Dog.”

“Really? It looks like Take Me From Behind.”

She collapsed on the mat in a fit of giggles. “Michael, I was trying to focus.”

“Me too. I gotta tell you, that is a very good look for you.”

She wiped her neck and chest with a towel that she threw into the colorful tote bag she carried back and forth to his house.

“You’re taking home your towel? Why?”

She threw him a look. “I don’t want one of your minions doing my laundry.”

“Minions? I don’t have minions.”

“Of course you do. You have a person for everything around here.”

“No.”

“No? Then who does your laundry?”

He grinned. “I take it downstairs, knock on the secret panel, give the password, a blind, one-eyed gypsy takes it, and the next day, it reappears in the closet. Isn’t that how everybody does it?”

She had rolled up her mat, and now swatted him playfully with it. “You are impossible.”

He grabbed her. “Maybe. But since you’re all hot and sweaty anyway, want to try that Downward Dog thing again?”

“Tomorrow night I’ll be staying at my place,” she told him, stretching her legs out in front of her. They were out on the terrace of Michael’s house, sipping wine, watching the sun set over the lake. Diane had cooked dinner for them. “Sharon’s got the girls together. We’re all hitting the town.”

“Ah. The mythical Girls Night Out. What is it you all do together, anyway?”

“Well, we’re currently plotting to take over the world by manipulating the stock market to resurrect all the tech stocks, which we’ve been secretly buying up all year long. Then we’ll sacrifice a couple of chickens, and drink and dance naked around a statue of Simone de Beauvoir.”

Michael raised his eyebrows and nodded. “That’s what I would have guessed.”

Diane smiled. “We’ll go to Maxwell’s, probably. We can walk there, so we can all drink, and we’ll probably dance, but with our clothes on.”

“What a disappointment.”

“Then we’ll sit around and drink some more and talk about our kids and our jobs and complain about men.”

“Complain about men?”

“Oh, yeah. It’s inevitable.”

“God. You all are going to crucify me, right?”

“No.” Diane patted his hand. “You’re the new guy. I promise we’ll be very kind to you.”

“Gee thanks. I like your friend Sharon, but I would not want to be on her bad side.”

“Don’t worry. She likes you too. She thinks you’re cute. And besides, you told her you could get her Lyle Lovett’s autograph.”