Lightning (16 page)

When she returned to the mall parking lot, a cold drizzle was falling. She turned up her coat collar, but she had neither a hat nor an umbrella. By the time she got to her car, her hair was wet, and she was chilled. She shivered all the way from Costa Mesa to North Tustin.

She figured there was a good chance he would be at home. If he was a student, he would not be in class on Saturday. If he worked an ordinary nine-to-five job, he would probably not be at the office, either. And the weather ruled out many of the usual weekend pastimes for outdoor-oriented southern Californians.

His address was an apartment complex of two-story, Spanish-style buildings, eight of them, in a garden setting. For a few minutes she hurried from building to building on winding walkways under dripping palms and coral trees, looking for his apartment. By the time she found it—a first-floor, end unit in the building farthest from the street—her hair was soaked. Her chill had deepened. Discomfort dulled her fear and sharpened her anger, so she rang his bell without hesitation.

He evidently did not peek through the fisheye security lens, for when he opened the door and saw her, he looked stunned. He was maybe five years older than she, and he was a big man indeed, fully six feet five, two hundred and forty pounds, all muscle. He was wearing jeans and a pale-blue T-shirt smeared with grease and spotted with another oily substance; his well-developed arms were formidable. His face was shadowed by beard stubble and smudged with more grease, and his hands were black.

Carefully staying back from the door, beyond his reach, Laura simply said, “Why?”

“Because ...” He shifted from one foot to the other, almost too big for the doorway in which he stood. “Because ...”

“I’m waiting.”

He wiped one grease-covered hand through his close-cropped hair and seemed oblivious of the resultant mess. His eyes shifted away from her; he looked out at the rain-lashed courtyard as he spoke. “How... how’d you find out it was me?”

“That’s not important. What’s important is that I don’t know you, I’ve never seen you before, and yet I’ve got a toad menagerie that you’ve sent me, you come around in the middle of the night to leave them on my doorstep, you break into my car to leave them on the dashboard, and it’s been going on for weeks, so don’t you think it’s time I knew what this is all about?”

Still not looking at her, he flushed and said, “Well, sure, but I didn’t... wasn’t ready... didn’t think the time was right.”

“The time was right a week ago!”

“Ummmm.”

“So tell me.
Why
?”

Looking down at his greasy hands, he said quietly, “Well, see...”

“Yes?”

“I love you.”

She stared at him, incredulous. He finally looked at her. She said, “You love me? But you don’t even know me. How can you love a person you’ve never met?”

He looked away from her, rubbed his filthy hand through his hair again, and shrugged. “I don’t know, but there it is, and I ... uh ... well, ummmm, I have this feeling, see, this feeling that I’ve got to spend the rest of my life with you.”

With cold rainwater trickling from her wet hair down the nape of her neck and along the curve of her spine, with her day at the library shot—how could she concentrate on research after this insane scene?—and with more than a little disappointment that her secret admirer had turned out to be this dirty, sweaty, inarticulate lummox, Laura said, “Listen, Mr. Packard, I don’t want you sending me any more toads.”

“Well, see, I really want to send them.”

“But I don’t want to receive them. And tomorrow I’ll mail back the ones you’ve sent me. No, today. I’ll mail them back today.”

He met her eyes again, blinked in surprise, and said, “I thought you liked toads.”

With growing anger, she said, “I do like toads. I love toads. I think toads are the cutest things in creation. Right now I even wish I
were
a toad, but I don’t want
your
toads. Understand?”

“Ummmm.”

“Don’t harass me, Packard. Maybe some women surrender to your weird mix of heavy-handed romance and sweaty macho charm, but I’m not one of them, and I can protect myself, don’t think I can’t. I’m a lot tougher than I look, and I’ve dealt with worse than you.”

She turned away from him, walked out from under the veranda into the rain, returned to her car, and drove back to Irvine. She shook all the way home, not only because she was wet and chilled but because she was in the grip of anger. The nerve of him!

At her apartment she undressed, bundled up in a quilted robe, and brewed a pot of coffee with which to ward off the chills.

She had just taken her first sip of coffee when the phone rang. She answered it in the kitchen. It was Packard.

Speaking so rapidly that he ran his sentences together in long gushes, he said, “Please don’t hang up on me, you’re right, I’m stupid about these things, an idiot, but give me just one minute to explain myself, I was fixing the dishwasher when you came, that’s why I was such a mess, greasy and sweaty, had to pull it from under the counter myself, the landlord would have fixed it, but going through management takes a week, and I’m good with my hands, I can fix anything, it was a rainy day, nothing else to do, so why not fix it myself, I never figured you to show up. My name’s Daniel Packard, but you know that already, I’m twenty-eight, I was in the army until ‘73, graduated from the University of California at Irvine with a degree in business just three years ago, work as a stockbroker now, but I take a couple night courses at the university, which is how I came across your story about the toad in the campus literary magazine, it was terrific, I loved it, a great story, really, so I went to the library and searched through back issues to find everything else you’d written, and I read it all, and a
lot
of it was good, damned good, not all of it, but a lot. I fell in love with you somewhere along the way, with the person I knew from her writing, because the writing was so beautiful and so real. One evening I was sitting there in the library reading one of your stories—they won’t let anyone check out back issues of the literary magazine, they have them in binders, and you have to read them in the library—and this librarian was passing behind my chair, and she leaned over and asked if I liked the story, I said I did, and she said, ‘Well, the author’s right over there, if you want to tell her it’s good,’ and there you were just three tables away with a stack of books, doing research, scowling, making notes, and you were gorgeous. See, I knew you would be beautiful
inside
because your stories are beautiful, the sentiment in them is beautiful, but it never occurred to me that you’d be beautiful outside, too, and there was no way I could approach you because I’ve always been tongue-tied and stumble-footed around beautiful women, maybe because my mother was beautiful but cold and forbidding, so now maybe I think all beautiful women will reject me the way my mother did—a little half-baked analysis there—but it sure would’ve been a lot easier for me if you’d been ugly or at least plain looking. Because of your story I thought I’d use the toads, that whole secret admirer bit with the gifts, as a way to soften you up, and I planned to reveal myself after the third or fourth toad, I really did, but I kept delaying because I didn’t want to be rejected, I guess, and I knew it was getting crazy, toad after toad after toad, but I just couldn’t stop it and forget you, yet I wasn’t able to face you, either, and that’s it. I never meant you any harm, I sure didn’t mean to upset you, can you forgive me, I hope you can.”

He stopped at last, exhausted.

She said, “Well.”

He said, “So will you go out with me?”

Surprised by her own response, she said, “Yes.”

“Dinner and a movie?”

“All right.”

“Tonight? Pick you up at six?”

“Okay. ”

After she hung up she stood for a while, staring at the phone. Finally she said aloud, “Shane, are you nuts?” Then she said, “But he told me my writing was ‘so beautiful and so real.’”

She went into her bedroom and looked at the collection of toads on the nightstand. She said, “He’s inarticulate and silent one time, a babbler the next. He could be a psycho killer, Shane.” Then she said, “Yeah, he could be, but he’s also a great literary critic.”

Because he had suggested dinner and a movie, Laura dressed in a gray skirt, white blouse, and maroon sweater, but he showed up in a dark blue suit, white shirt with French cuffs, blue silk tie with tie chain, silk display handkerchief, and highly polished black wingtips, as if he were going to the season opener at the opera. He carried an umbrella and escorted her from her apartment to his car with one hand under her right arm, with such solemn concern that he seemed convinced that she would dissolve if touched by one drop of rain or shatter into a million pieces if she slipped and fell.

Considering the difference in their dress and the considerable difference in their size—at five-five, she was one foot shorter than he was; at a hundred fifteen pounds, she was less than half his weight—she felt almost as if she were going on a date with her father or an older brother. She was not a petite woman, but on his arm and under his umbrella she felt positively tiny.

He was uncommunicative again in the car, but he blamed it on the need to drive with special care in such rotten weather. They went to a small Italian restaurant in Costa Mesa, a place in which Laura had eaten a few good meals in the past. They sat down at their table and were given menus, but even before the waitress could ask if they would like a drink, Daniel said, “This is no good, this is all wrong, let’s find another place.”

Surprised, she said, “But why? This is fine. Their food’s very good here.”

“No, really, this is all wrong. No atmosphere, no style, I don’t want you to think, ummmm,” and now he was babbling as he’d done on the phone, blushing, “ummmm, well, anyway, this is no good, not right for our first date, I want this to be special,” and he got up, “ummmm, I think I know just the place, I’m sorry, Miss”—this to the startled young waitress—“I hope we haven’t inconvenienced you,” and he was pulling back Laura’s chair, helping her up, “I know just the place, you’ll like it, I’ve never eaten there but I’ve heard it’s really good, excellent.” Other customers were staring, so Laura stopped protesting. “It’s close, too, just a couple of blocks from here.”

They returned to his car, drove two blocks, and parked in front of an unpretentious-looking restaurant in a strip shopping center.

By now Laura knew him well enough to realize that his sense of courtliness required her to wait for him to come around and open her car door, but when he opened it she saw he was standing in a ten-inch-deep puddle. “Oh, your shoes!” she said.

“They’ll dry out. Here, you hold the umbrella over yourself, and I’ll lift you across the puddle.”

Nonplussed, she allowed herself to be plucked from the car and carried over the puddle as if she weighed no more than a feather pillow. He put her down on higher pavement and, without the umbrella, he sloshed back to the car to close the door.

The French restaurant had less atmosphere than the Italian place. They were shown to a corner table too near the kitchen, and Daniel’s saturated shoes squished and squeaked all the way across the room.

“You’ll catch pneumonia,” she worried when they were seated and had ordered two Dry Sacks on the rocks.

“Not me. I’ve got a good immune system. Never get sick. One time in Nam, during an action, I was cut off from my unit, spent a week on my own in the jungle, rained every minute, I was
shriveled
by the time I found my way back to friendly territory, but I never even got the sniffles.”

As they sipped their drinks and studied the menu and ordered, he was more relaxed than Laura had yet seen him, and he actually proved to be a coherent, pleasant, even amusing conversationalist. But when the appetizers were served—salmon in dill sauce for her, scallops in pastry for him—it swiftly became clear that the food was terrible, even though the prices were twice those at the Italian place that they had left, and course by course, as his embarrassment grew, his ability to sustain his end of the conversation declined drastically. Laura proclaimed everything delicious and choked down every bite, but it was no use; he was not fooled.

The kitchen staff and the waiter were also slow. By the time Daniel had paid the check and escorted her back to the car—lifting her across the puddle again as if she were a little girt—they were half an hour late for the movie they had intended to see.

“That’s all right,” she said, “we can go in late and stay to see the first half hour of the next showing.”

“No, no,” he said. “That’s a terrible way to see a movie. It’ll ruin it for you. I wanted this night to be perfect.”

“Relax,” she said. “I’m having fun.”

He looked at her with disbelief, and she smiled, and he smiled, too, but his smile was sick.

“If you don’t want to go to the movie now,” she said, “that’s all right, too. Wherever you want to go, I’m game.”

He nodded, started the car, and drove out to the street. They had gone a few miles before she realized that he was taking her home.

All the way from his car to her door, he apologized for what a lousy evening it had been, and she repeatedly assured him that she was not in the least disappointed with a moment of it. At her apartment, the instant she inserted her key in the door, he turned and fled down the stairs from the second-floor veranda, neither asking for a goodnight kiss nor giving her a chance to invite him in.

She stepped to the head of the stairs and watched him descend, and he was halfway down when a gust of wind turned his umbrella inside out. He fought with it the rest of the way, twice almost losing his balance. When he reached the walk below, he finally got the umbrella corrected—and the wind immediately turned it inside out again. In frustration he threw it into some nearby shrubbery, then looked up at Laura. He was soaked from head to toe by then, and in the pale light from a lamppost she could see that his suit hung on him shapelessly. He was a
huge
man, strong as two bulls, but he had been done in by little things—puddles, a gust of wind—and there was something quite funny about that. She knew she should not laugh,
dared
not laugh, but a laugh burst from her anyway.