Just Friends (16 page)

The final e-mail he found was personalized with a little icon at the top, which Jack recognized as the famous portrait of Shakespeare, in his ruff, peeking out over two crossed quills. Immediately below was the heading, “Bernard S. Parkenrider (Associate Professor, B.A., M.A., Ph.D.).” Jack gave a snort. The text ran:

Dear Freya,

La table est reservé! I look forward to meeting you
tomorrow (and tomorrow and tomorrow, as the Bard would say!).

Yours in great expectation,

Bernard

Well, well. So Freya thought she’d found Mr. Right. Jack doubted it. He ran through the messages again, trying to marry them up with the advertisements Freya had circled. If Bernard was the “university professor,” Jack thought she had some surprises in store. What a silly girl she was. Still, she deserved to be taught a lesson. She had abused his hospitality and intimidated his adorable little Candace. Thanks to Freya, Mrs. Petersen had suffered a nervous breakdown, and Michael was walking around with his ankles showing.

Jack sat for a moment in silent concentration. His mind moved with a speed and infernal energy he hadn’t achieved in months. Within ten minutes he had registered a new hotmail address, laid out a rough imitation of Prof. Parkenrider’s absurd Shakesperean letterhead, and composed a poem to Freya, which he sent purportedly from Bernard.

My Sweet: ‘Tis meet that we should meet

Not like strangers in the street

But somewhere private, somewhere cozy

Far from friends and neighbors nosy.

I’m so glad we’ve made a date

This Friday night arou-hound eight.

If you don’t like me (or my poem)

You can always just go ho-em!

Then he invented a reply to Bernard from Freya.

Dear Bernard,

I am so thrilled to be meeting a genuine scholar! I want to hear EVERYTHING about your work. You may like to know a little more about me before we meet. Besides my “artistic” inclinations, I like to think of myself as an intellectual—though of course I enjoy fun. Among my interests are couple therapy, men’s fashions, and German opera. I also have a keen interest in footwear. My friends joke that I am rather bossy and always like to have the whip hand (!), but I’m sure you can deal with that.

PS I adore hairy legs!

Jack rubbed his hands. That should spice up their romantic little tryst. He reached for the mouse and pressed SEND.

CHAPTER 11

Freya turned off Fifth Avenue and walked briskly toward Madison on high, spiked heels. It was a warm evening, and she felt good to be out in the Friday night bustle, with somewhere to go and someone to meet. Apart from one evening at Cat’s, helping to make lemon polenta cake for yet another da Fillipo family feast, she’d been stuck in the apartment all week, prey to Jack’s grouchy temper and oafish humor, until she was screaming to escape. Jack wanted her out tonight anyway: Candace was coming over to “cook dinner” for him, ho, ho. It had given Freya considerable satisfaction to inform him that, as it happened, she had a date already.

“Oh, yeah?” Jack’s incredulous smirk had been intensely irritating.

“Yes. As a matter of fact, I’m meeting a most interesting professor of English literature. It will be nice to have some intellectual stimulation, for a change.”

This, apparently, was so hilarious that Jack could only raise skeptical eyebrows, as if Freya’s experience could hardly match the kind of “stimulation” he was anticipating with Candace. Men were so crude. Distracted by their own sweaty animal grapplings, they did not understand the importance, to women, of the life of the mind.

Thankfully, there were exceptions. Freya repeated to herself the words of the advertisement that had initially sparked her attention.
DWM, university professor, 39, cultured, humorous, battered but unbowed, seeks superior female for invigorating encounters.
DWM, she had discovered, stood for divorced white male, and she had at once pictured an attractively rumpled figure in corduroy, with amused eyes and a wry smile. They had since spoken on the phone, and she had been struck by his polite, almost courtly manner and his flattering eagerness to meet her. He had even tossed in a quotation from Shakespeare, the subject of his latest “magnum opus,” as he called it. Freya hoped there wouldn’t be too much Latin.

His name was Bernard, pronounced the American way with the emphasis on the second syllable—so much more classy than the plodding English
Ber
nard. Unconsciously Freya raised her chin, congratulating herself on her choice. Ber
nard
was an educated man, mature but not old, tempered in life’s fiery furnace yet not jaded. His taste was for “superior” women, not teenyboppers from the Planet Bubblegum. A blind date was nothing to be ashamed of. If Bernard turned out to be unsuitable for her purposes, she would at least have enjoyed an evening of intelligent conversation.

Here was the restaurant. Freya pushed the door open and stepped inside its chic, minimalist gloom. While the manager consulted his book to check whether Professor Parkenrider had arrived, she paused by the fish tank, trying not to catch the protuberant eyes of the clawed and whiskered creatures inside. Japanese food was not her favorite, but so long as she was not required to eat anything raw she should be fine.

“This way, please. The gentleman is waiting.”

They passed the sushi bar, where a man in white was slashing vegetables to ribbons one-handed, and headed for the sleek ebony tables beyond. From one of them, a lone figure rose to greet her—tall, slightly stooped, and grinning as if he could hardly believe his eyes.

“Bernard?” Freya put out her hand.

Instead of shaking it, he clasped her hand in his and raised it to his lips with a galumphing gallantry that Freya told herself was charming. “Ah, Freya. We meet at last.”

“Yes . . . Hello.” Freya reclaimed her hand. “Shall we sit down?”

As she settled herself at the table, a quick glance confirmed her first impression. Bernard’s looks were not immediately prepossessing. He had pale, pouched eyes and straggly hair, brown with a reddish cast, that curled behind his ears. Over a white nylon shirt stretched across his sloping chest, he wore a vivid tie and—yes—a chocolate-brown corduroy jacket lightly sprinkled with dandruff. If he was thirty-nine, then she was Pollyanna: fifty was more like it. Still, she must not be judgmental. Looks weren’t everything. Wit and brains were equally important. Think of Cyrano de Bergerac. Or Quasimodo.

Bernard picked up a jug and poured sake into the small cup in front of Freya. “Come, let the festivities begin!”

Freya took a sip, resisting his efforts to clink cups. She remembered all those magazine articles about dating that she’d read at the hairdresser’s: be interested, be interesting, go to
give
a good time, not just
get
a good time.

“So tell me, Bernard.” She kept her voice light and brisk. “Where exactly do you teach?”

Bernard cleared his throat with some thoroughness while he formulated his answer. “At this present time,” he began, “I am attached to a small but elite junior college in southern New Jersey. In point of fact, my duties are more of a bibliographic nature, involving the cataloging, purchasing, issuing, and recalling of diverse printed materials.”

“You mean, you work in a library?”

“To be sure.” Bernard nodded ponderously. “At all events, that is my
job
. My
work
involves lucubrations of a quite different order.”

“Lucu-what?” Freya gave a perky laugh, trying to lighten the atmosphere. Bernard seemed very serious.

“From the Latin
lucubro
,
lucubrare
,
lucubravi
,
lucubratum
, meaning to labor by lamplight. I refer, in short, to the work of Shakespearean scholarship on which I am embarked. A small thing, but mine own.”

“Shakespeare! How fascinating. You must tell me all about it.”

After half an hour, Freya had to admit that she had condemned herself to dine with a Grade One, twenty-four-carat, bona fide bore. The seaweed and shrimps had come and gone with agonizing slowness: when Bernard opened his mouth, it was not to eat but to pontificate. Now a platter of raw fish dotted with rice mounds sat between them. (Bernard had chosen a Japanese place, he told her, because he knew that “you girls” had to watch their weight in case they turned into fat pigs.) As Freya listened to his interminable catalog of Shakespeare’s use of phallic imagery, she feared that by the time the platter was empty she would have died of boredom. She glanced enviously at the lively groups around her. Even the flashy exec at the next table, accompanied only by his briefcase and mobile phone, looked a more interesting companion.

“. . . And here’s another example. ‘When
icicles
hang by the wall, and
Dick
the shepherd
blows
his
nail
, and Tom bears
logs
into the
hall
. . .’ ” At each key word, Bernard paused to shoot Freya a glance loaded with innuendo. “ ‘Tu-whit, tu-who—a merry note, While
greasy
Joan doth
keel the pot
.’ That’s
Love’s Labours Lost
, of course.”

Freya suppressed a yawn.

“I’m considering entitling my book
The Merchant of Venus: Freudian Analogues and Dialectics in the Works of William Shakespeare
.”

“Very impressive.”

“Alternatively, though I fear this might go over the heads of the groundlings”—Bernard’s smug chuckle signaled another witticism on its way—“I am sorely tempted to call it
In the Canon’s Mouth
. You see, that’s—”

“A pun. Yes. How clever.” Freya stabbed her chopsticks into the rice.

“As I was saying, that’s a play on two words in the English language which are phonetically similar but orthographically and, to be sure, connotatively different. Firstly,
canon
with one
n
, signifying an author’s complete works; second and subsequently,
cannon
with two
n
s, meaning—”

“Bang! Bang! You’re dead!” Freya burst out, with a trill of hysterical laughter. The exec looked up, startled, from his conversation about plane arrival times. Freya tried to compose herself. Every nerve in her body twitched with suppressed energy. She wanted to whirl her arms in the air and run around the room screaming.

“Furthermore, and not inappropriately, as you will no doubt perceive, ‘in the cannon’s mouth’ is a direct quotation from the Swan of Avon himself:
As You Like It,
Act Two, Scene Six . . . Or is it Seven?” Bernard dabbed reflectively at a mole on his cheek. Freya saw that the nail of his little finger was almost an inch long, carefully shaped and filed for a purpose she dared not imagine.

She stood up abruptly. “Excuse me a moment.”

In the ladies’ loo, fortunately empty, she pulled faces at herself in the mirror until she felt almost normal, then she crept out and hovered in the passageway until one of the waiters passed by.

“Psssst!”

He came over, polite but dubious. “I need a taxi,” Freya told him, pressing a ten-dollar note into his hand. “Urgently. In fact,
now
.”

Then she fluffed out her hair, assumed an innocent smile, and returned to the table under Bernard’s unnerving, gloating gaze.

“Wonderful shoes,” he commented as she sat down. “Are they as painful as they look?”

“Not really.” Freya shrugged. “I like wearing heels.”

“I mean, painful for anyone you stepped on.”

Freya stared at him. His mouth hung open in a slack, suggestive smile. She hoped he didn’t mean what his words seemed to imply. “Why would I want to step on people?”

Bernard gave her a sly wink.

“And stop winking at me!” she hissed.

“Okay, okay. Mercy, mistress.” Bernard threw up his hands in mock surrender. “I like this game.” He licked his lips.

Freya drummed her fingers on the table. How could she have picked such a sicko? No wonder his wife had left him. “You’re divorced, aren’t you?” she said, filling the silence.

Bernard sighed. “ ‘Tis true, ‘tis pity; and pity ‘tis, ‘tis true.”

“So, what happened? In plain language.”

“In plain language, Lucretia was a bitch. I was glad to get rid of her. She was my research assistant, you know. I taught her everything—let her do all my typing and library work. Then she started saying she was too busy to help me. I discovered she was working on a Ph.D. behind my back—on Shakespeare, mark you,
my
subject. The betrayal was shattering.”