Just Friends (30 page)

Freya struggled to decode this. Had she somehow offended him? Did he feel snubbed by Jack? Was he put off by the activities next door? Didn’t he
like
sex?

“You’re not gay, are you?”

“No!” His chin came up. “And I’m not a boy-toy either.”

“What?”

“I mean, you were the one who decided where to go tonight, like you’re in charge or something. You talk about stuff I don’t know about and pat me on the head like I’m six years old, and now you want—” He broke off, shifting his shoulders in embarrassment.

Freya stared at him, aghast. She could decode this, all right. He was telling her she was too
old
. She became aware of a rhythmic banging from Jack’s room, as if someone were hammering a nail into the wall.

“Right.” She stood up in one swift, smooth gesture and looked Brett in the eye. “That’s pretty clear.”

“Wait.” He put a hand on her arm. “What I mean to say is, I like you. I like talking to you. And you’re very attractive. But maybe we can be, you know, just friends.”

“Sure.” Freya managed a shrug. “I’m going on holiday next week anyway. I might give you a call when I get back.”

“Great.”

She opened the door of her room and led the way across the living room to the hall, where Brett had left his bike. She could read his hurry and his relief in the way he unslung his helmet from the handlebar and laid his hands on his beloved machine. She prickled and stung and smarted with humiliation. Unlocking the front door, she held it open for him.

“Well, good-bye,” he said awkwardly, as he pushed the bike past her. She could see him wondering if he should give her a peck on the cheek. This was excruciating.

“Wait. Don’t forget your baseball cap.” She fetched it from the bedroom, plonked it on his head—the right way—and gave the peak a playful downward tug, like she was someone’s really fun aunt. Then she folded her arms across her chest and stood back.

“See you, Brettski.”

“Bye.” He scooted down the path and disappeared into the night.

For several moments Freya stood on the threshold, breathing hard through her nose. She wanted to shout after him, “It’s only sex, you know. I wasn’t planning on
marrying
you.”

But she burned with shame and self-disgust. How could she have put herself through such indignities? She stomped around the front yard, torturing herself with the scenes of her humiliation. Even sprawled across the bed in the semidarkness with her skirt rucked up, she had not been desirable. Even though Brett was drunk and tired, he had preferred to go home. Then there was that telltale
but
.
You’re terrific BUT ... I really like you BUT ... You’re very attractive BUT ...
It had been exactly the same with Michael. Why did men always want to be “just friends” with her? She gave the rubbish bin a kick. Even her friends didn’t want to be friends with her anymore! Look at Cat, who had fobbed her off with the feeblest excuse in history and wasn’t returning her phone calls. As for Jack...

A drunk was cursing his way down the street toward her. It was time to go back inside. Freya closed the front door quietly and stood in the living room, listening. All was quiet. She pictured Jack and Candace drifting off into satisfied sleep, and stamped her foot. She felt scorned, rejected, crushed, and—
dammit!
—frustrated. But worse than everything would be Jack’s triumph when he discovered that Brett had fled. How he would swagger. How he would chortle with Candace, sexpot of the universe.

Unless ... Freya prowled around the living room, trying to psyche herself up. “Mmm,” she began tentatively. “Aah ... ooh ...” She leaped onto the couch and padded squashily up and down. “Oh, Brett,” she projected throatily in the direction of Jack’s bedroom. “That’s so
gooood
.”

She located a broken spring in the couch, which twanged in a deeply satisfying manner. Freya began to bounce up and down on it, flinging her arms about for good measure. “Ah ... ah ... aaah!” She teetered across the couch’s fat arms and along its back, occasionally hurling herself onto the seat with an uninhibited cry. “Oh
yes
! ... oh, Brett ... oh—”

A shadow moved at the periphery of her vision. She froze. It was a person, carrying a glass of water in one hand.

“Having a good time?” inquired Jack.

CHAPTER 20

Jack’s father had always been a stickler for the outward forms of social behavior. A true Southern gentleman, he liked to claim, was invariably punctual, courteous to the ladies, and mindful of “dressing nice”—by which he meant a jacket, tie, and real leather shoes with laces. (Slip-ons were for women, foreigners, and Yankees.) It was therefore a well-judged twenty minutes late, wearing an open-necked shirt and sneakers, with Candace scurrying disregarded behind him, that Jack timed his appearance in the King Cole Bar of the St. Regis Hotel.

Because it was a Sunday, and still early in the evening, the paneled room was sparsely populated. Even if it had been packed to bursting, Jack could have located his father simply by searching for the figure of a waiter deferentially bowed over one of the tables. At every establishment he patronized, Jack’s father quickly appropriated a crony among the staff, whom he would introduce as “my old friend Alphonse” or “Eddie, best barman this side of the Mason-Dixon line,” before dispatching them to perform some extracurricular service. Sure enough, there in the far corner, his father was comfortably ensconced at the best table in the place, shooting the breeze with some butler-type in white gloves. Jack could guess with near-certainty the topic of their one-sided conversation: either “Bourbons I Have Known” or “New York: Hell-hole of the Universe.”

Candace grabbed his arm. “Is that him?” she whispered.

“Yep.” All day she’d been pestering him for details, until he’d finally snapped, “He’s just my dad. You’ll see.”

Now she gave an approving murmur. “Isn’t he handsome? He looks just like you.”

“Well, he’s not.”

As he approached the table Jack experienced a confusion of filial emotions—defiance, resentment, guilt, and a kind of familiarity that approximated to affection, though he told himself it was probably no more than a crude genetic tug. Right now defiance was uppermost. He was
not
returning home to work in the family business, even if his father begged. He
was
going to ask for an increase in his paltry allowance—nothing excessive, just a reasonable increase in line with his age and lifestyle.

His father rose from his chair, as tall and as broad as Jack, looking pleased to see them. His mustache had been newly clipped; his thick white hair was scrupulously parted and combed: a handsome man, indeed, though he had turned sixty-five last birthday.

“Jack, my boy. Good to see you.” He clasped Jack’s hand warmly, raising his other arm to clap Jack on the shoulder in a gesture that was part whack, part manly hug.

“And you.” Just in time, Jack bit back the
sir
that had been drummed into him from an early age. “This is Candace,” he said, presenting her like a trophy—or a shield.

His father’s face intensified with interest. Dad liked women, and they liked him. Jack had protested that there was no need for Candace to get all dressed up just to meet his father, for godsakes, but he couldn’t help feeling gratified by her glossy appearance in the subtly sexy black dress.

There was the bustle of seating themselves and deciding what to drink. Jack’s father suggested a glass of pink champagne to Candace; both became positively rapturous about the fact that she’d never tasted it before—how thrilled she would be to try it, how honored he was to give her the opportunity, blah blah. Just to be annoying Jack ordered a beer. In the course of this farcical rigmarole he and Candace were introduced to “my good friend, George,” the still-hovering waiter.

“Any time you’all want to drop by here, George will take real good care of you. Won’t you, George?”

“It would be my pleasure, Mr. Madison.”

“Why, thank you, George.” Suddenly Candace was acting like the Queen of England. “Isn’t that nice, Jack?”

Jack shrugged. “I don’t get uptown much.”

He knew that he sounded graceless, but couldn’t help it. There had been a time, in his teens, when he’d reveled in his position as “the Madison boy.” Everywhere he went there had been a special golf caddy, a favored barber, even a friendly police officer to smooth his path or turn a blind eye. His father had taken pleasure in initiating him into the rites of manhood—more specifically, into being a Madison. Ever since Jack had been returned by his mother to his father, like a reclaimed parcel, there had been ritual visits to the paper mills that were the foundation of the family fortune. Jack remembered feeling excited yet overwhelmed by the towering skips full of old rags, the great rolling machinery leaking oil into factory rooms cavernous as cathedrals, the heat and the noise and the foul stench, like a dead beast rotting, that flowed out across the countryside and made Minnie the housekeeper insist, when he got home, that he take off his clothes right this minute so they could be laundered. If his father had never uttered the exact words, “One day, son, all this will be yours,” they were implicit in the pride he expressed when Jack made the football team or dated the prom queen or caught his first fish—even when he got drunk on hooch and threw up all over the front porch. He was “Little Jack,” who would one day grow up to be “Big Jack,” just as his father had stepped into the shoes of “Big Daddy Jack.” Except that he wasn’t, and he didn’t, and he wouldn’t.

His father was telling Candace about the hotel, how it had been built for John Jacob Astor at the turn of the century, with crystal from Waterford and marble from France, in response to his demand for the finest hotel in the world. “And in my opinion, it still is,” he said, “even with all the new gadgets they put in during the renovation. I’ll get George to show you around in a little bit, while Jack and I have a private talk. Would you like that?”

Candace wriggled her shoulders and said that she would love it. “And is Mrs. Madison here with you?” she inquired.

Jack’s father looked surprised; then his eyes crinkled into laughter, and he went through an absurd pantomime of patting his pockets. “Nope. Don’t believe I’ve got one with me today.” He winked at Candace and smoothed his mustache. “Already got four wives scattered across the country—and that’s four too many. Cost more’n a decent fishing boat these days.”

Candace gave him a look Jack could only describe as saucy. “You’re not telling me you prefer fish to women, are you, Mr. Madison?”

He patted her knee delightedly. “Well, now. That depends on how much of a fight they put up.”

Jack twisted his glass around and around, his face stony. He was long used to his father’s high-flown gallantries, but that Candace should flirt back seemed a betrayal. He wondered exactly why he persisted with Candace—apart from the obvious. In the South there was a clear distinction between “nice” girls and “trashy” girls, though nice girls could be very trashy indeed, and trashy girls nice—but you never married them. Which was Candace, he wondered?

He listened to her prattle on about her life, glowing under the attention.

“I don’t know how you all survive up here,” marveled his father, “with the noise and the dirt, living in those little bitty cells you call apartments.”

“I know what you mean.” Candace sighed wistfully, as if her true spiritual home were a country mansion patrolled by servants.

“Everybody looks so tired and frazzled—except you, my dear. Work, work, work, that’s all these Yankees seem to think about, even on a Sunday.” He gestured across the room at a huddle of men in suits poring over conference folders.

“Dad, those are Japanese businessmen.”

“So you say. Seems to me anyone can be a Yankee these days. You don’t even have speak English.”

“I’d love to visit the South one day.” Candace leaned forward confidingly. “You have so much history—and all those beautiful trees!”

“You’ll have to get Jack to bring you down for a visit.”

“Oh, would you, Jack?” Candace turned to him in a swirl of perfume. “It sounds like such a beautiful state.”

Jack took another sip of his beer. “We’ll see.”

North Carolina
was
a beautiful state. The place was in his blood, and he loved it, but he couldn’t live there. Even now, when he visited, he chafed at the seductive pull of history, the oppressive weight of family. To live in a town where everyone knew you, where your last name was a passport to privilege or a brand against you, where you were never free of the danger of running into someone who had dandled you on their knee, or danced with your mother at a cotillion, or who knew your crazy Aunt Milly who heard voices, or whose great-great-granddaddy had fought with your great-great-granddaddy at the Battle of Wherever-it-was: for Jack, once he grew up, it was like living in a very luxurious padded cell, with a straitjacket on his imagination. He didn’t feel
real
.