Treasure Box (4 page)

"So why don't
you
run for office?" asked Quentin.

She smiled. "Voters don't take pretty women seriously."

Quentin almost said, You're not
that
pretty.

She laughed as if she had heard him. "I'm telegenic. The camera loves me. You should see my driver's license. My yearbook picture. I swear I can't take a bad picture. It's a curse. I'm much less attractive in person."

Quentin laughed and felt something inside him relax for the first rime in twenty years. Something that he hadn't even known was clenched. "Well darn," he said. "I wish I'd seen your picture before I met you."

"No, it's better this way. You would have felt too intimidated."

"Now I've got to see your license, you know."

She shrugged, opened her little evening purse, and took out the plastic card. He looked at it, angling it to get moonlight on the picture. "Am I correct in thinking that you actually crossed your eyes for your driver's license picture?"

"I stuck out my tongue the first time but they made me take it over again. They were very angry."

"This may be the ugliest driver's license photo I've ever seen."

"Do you think so?" she said. "Have you seen a lot of them, or are you just saying that?"

"What did you do in your high school yearbook, put your finger in your nose?"

"I had friends on the yearbook staff. They managed to sneak in a picture of the back of my head. Just my hair in curlers and the back of my neck. They got in
so
much trouble till my parents finally believed me that it was all my idea."

Her name, according to the license, was Madeleine Cryer.

"Ms. Cryer," he said, meaning to ask if he could see her again.

"Call me Madeleine, please."

"Then you have to call me Quentin."

"Is that your name?"

"Yes."

"But how unbearable. That's a terrible name for someone when you're already going to be stuck with a weird last name. Didn't your parents love you? Didn't you get beaten up in school a lot?"

"Everybody called me Quen."

"Quentin. Isn't that a prison?"

"Somebody actually asked me recently if I was named after the guy who did
Pulp Fiction
. Even though I must be fifteen years older than he is."

"I have to call you something else. Tin. I have to call you Tin."

Lizzy's old nickname for him. It hit him so hard that he caught his breath.

"Don't be mad at me," she said. "I shouldn't have teased about your name."

"I'm not mad," he said. And then laughed. "Actually,
you're
Mad."

She got the pun at once and winced. "I guess if I can call you Tin, you can call me Mad." She raised an eyebrow. "I
can
call you Tin?"

"Only if you'll have dinner with me. Monday?"

"I was going to fly back home tomorrow."

"Where's home?" he asked.

"The old family manse is way up the Hudson. I usually fly to Newark. I've already sent home most of my stuff. Not that I had much. I travel light, I live light."

"Upriver on the Hudson. I don't know any good restaurants there. So you'll have to pick."

"Oh, don't be absurd. You wouldn't fly to New York just to have dinner with me."

"Oh, is that excessive?"

She studied his face for a moment, perhaps trying to find the irony in his words. "You're really sweet."

"My homeroom class voted me the most likely to be the guy your mom wishes you were dating."

"I think you might just be the one my mother would like me to date. My grandmother won't agree, of course, but who cares about her?"

"Let me meet your grandmother and I promise, I'll win her over."

She smiled vaguely and looked away. "Maybe I won't go yet."

"But if you've shipped all your things home..."

"As I said. I travel light. Where are you taking me to dinner?"

"I'm new around here. I've been living in Herndon. You tell me."

"What's your budget? Because you
are
paying, you know."

"I can eke out at least one good dinner at a really nice place."

"I don't even know what you do for a living."

"I'm between jobs, but I have a little saved up from my last one."

"If you're serious about a really nice place, there's a French restaurant near Herndon. Some-French-word Chez François. Close to the Potomac. I've never eaten there, but I hear it's good. The kind of place where they scrape the crumbs off your table between courses."

"Wow," said Quentin. "Is that class or what."

"Give me your number, I'll call you when I get the reservation."

"I can take care of that, you know," said Quentin, writing his local number on his business card.

"But I'm not going to give you
my
number, and then what would you do with the reservation?"

"Take your grandmother." He handed her the card.

"I don't have a phone number and I'm not sure which friend I'll crash with when I don't take my flight tomorrow. So I'm not being unfriendly. I
will
call."

"I've heard that line before."

"No you haven't," said Mad. "That's the guy's line, so I know you haven't heard it, and I don't think you've even said it."

"Am I so obviously naïve?"

She touched his cheek lightly. "I think you're sweet."

"But not powerful."

"I told you—power was my dream. You're real."

She turned and walked away from him.

"Can't I take you home? Take you wherever you're crashing tonight?"

But she kept walking as if she hadn't heard him. He took a few steps after her, then thought better of following her, then thought again and followed her anyway, only she had already made her way through the crowd and she wasn't anywhere in the house, top to bottom.

Of course she wasn't going to call, he knew that. But still, it had been a wonderful half hour there by the ancient unblooming cherry tree. She might not have looked like Lizzy, the way his hallucination did, but she bantered with him in the same easygoing playful way that Lizzy always had. It was the first time he had actually enjoyed the company of a woman as a woman. It was
possible
. That's what this evening meant. There was hope for him to find someone. There really were interesting women out there and there were even some who might find him interesting, not for his money, but for his conversation, his company. He refused to be disappointed that this particular encounter hadn't led anywhere. It was enough that Madeleine Cryer had opened a never-opened door.

And then the next day, Sunday afternoon, she did call. They had dinner that night. They met for lunch the next day, a picnic by the Great Falls of the Potomac. They broached the delicate subject of money and each confessed to having some. Her fortune was much older, his was much larger, but it wouldn't be a barrier between them. That afternoon he bought them both English racers and the next morning they rode the whole length of the W&OD bike trail from Purcellville to Mount Vernon and at the end, with rubbery legs and covered in sweat, he asked her to marry him and she said yes, as long as he promised never to make her ride a bike that far again.

Everything seemed to be going so well. Yes, he still had a vague worry in the back of his mind about how this all started—hallucinating a grown-up version of his dead sister—but with Madeleine in his life Quentin was beginning to realize how deeply unhappy he had been all these years. It took such small things, just her smile, her hand resting on his, and he would get this glow inside and he'd find himself wearing a goofy grin and nodding at everything she said and he'd realize: This is pretty good! This is what other people have known about all these years and tried to tell me! This is what kept my parents going even when their daughter died, even when their son became this weird wandering recluse, because they had
this
between them, this secret that you can't guess from outside, you have to be inside it, and then it's all so clear, it transforms the world like getting your first pair of glasses and suddenly you can read all the signs and recognize people from far off and pick out individual birds in the sky, that's how it felt and as far as Quentin was concerned, he wouldn't mind a bit if it kept going like this pretty much for the rest of his life.

Then he flew to San Francisco for meetings with some of his older partnerships. At the end of the trip he stopped in to see his lawyer, Wayne Read, to take care of the changes the marriage was going to require, like rewriting his will and changing the beneficiary on his insurance policies.

"Does she have a lawyer?" asked Wayne.

"I don't know."

"Does she have money? An estate?"

"I don't know."

"I need to know if I'm supposed to unilaterally write the prenup or negotiate it with another attorney, and if she has an estate that needs protecting or if it's just yours I need to worry about."

Quentin was annoyed. "I don't want my estate protected. When we're married it'll be
our
estate."

"You've known her what, a week and a half?"

"But I've been waiting for her all my life."

The lawyer just looked at him.

"That was humor," said Quentin.

"No, you meant it," said Wayne. "Listen, Quen, I've been your lawyer ever since you could afford one. I know that you've been miserably lonely that whole time. Now you've fallen in love and you don't want to believe anything bad can happen. But all these years you've been paying me to be the friend who will always tell you the truth. The friend who can give you bad news."

"The friend who charges me three hundred bucks an hour."

"The friend whose job is to know a lot more about how the world works than you do, and keep you from falling into heavy machinery."

"Metaphorically speaking."

"Sometimes people aren't what they seem."

"I know that, Wayne."

"No you don't, Quen. Because you
are
exactly what you seem, and so you always assume that other people are, too."

"I've had partners who cheated me."

"Who
tried
to cheat you. I draw up too good a contract for them to actually succeed."

"They got away with the money."

"Only because you let them. Only because you never let me sue or bring criminal charges."

"It was only money."

"No,
after
they embezzled it from you it was only money. When
you
had it, it was something more than money. It was fertile seed. It was the power of life. In your hands money makes things grow. In their hands it bought new cars and TV sets and some nice dinners out and then it had disappeared and nothing came of it."

"My point is that I don't care enough about money to need a prenuptial agreement. If Madeleine turns out to be a fake or even if the marriage just turns sour or something, don't you think
that
will be much more devastating than losing a few million bucks in a lousy divorce settlement? If I lose the woman I love, who cares about the money?"

"Quentin, you only say that because you've never lost either. Broken hearts heal. But when a fortune is gone, it stays gone forever."

"I'm still employable."

"No you're not, Quen. They're programming Pentiums and PowerPC chips and they're doing it in C. You don't know anything about that."

"She's not going to divorce me and she's not after my money. Can we get to the business I came here for?"

They got down to business and it didn't take long. On the day the marriage became valid, the new will would take effect, and Madeleine would become cobeneficiary of his insurance policies, along with his parents.

Wayne rose from behind his desk. "I'm very happy for you, Quentin. True love is rare."

Quentin stood up and shook his hand. "I hope I'm not being billed for
that
bit of counsel."

Wayne laughed dryly. "Since you're not listening to me anyway, I'll go ahead and ask the really lousy question: Have you got her HIV test results?"

Quentin took back his hand. "Wayne, you deal with my papers, not my sex life."

"Forget the HIV test, then, but at least tell me you've been using protection."

"Wayne, you're way over the line here."

The lawyer offered no hint of apology, just regarded him, waiting for an answer.

"But to ease your mind," Quentin finally said, "Mad and I haven't slept together."

Wayne looked genuinely stunned. "Are you living in a time warp?"

"The sixties never got to my house, and that means the nineties have nothing to scare me with."

"You've never even
tried
to sleep with her?"

"Wayne, you can shut up any time now." Quentin was still smiling, but it was getting thin.

"She's probably wondering by now if you're gay."

Quentin stopped in the doorway and said, "Wayne, you may think of yourself as a paid friend, but I think of you as my lawyer. Everything that happens with my business is your business. But what happens with my pants is between me and my dry cleaner."

"Marriage is a contract, Quentin. And my business is to warn you when you're walking drunk along the edge of a cliff. Congrats on the wedding, though. I'm sure you'll be very happy."

Quentin let the door make just the tiniest slam as he left.

But Wayne had said what he said, and now Quentin couldn't get it out of his mind. These
were
the nineties, after all. He wasn't so disconnected from the world around him that he didn't know how things had changed since he was in high school and the guys he knew had to work themselves up just to hold hands with a girl, let alone kiss her. The whole sexual revolution and then herpes and AIDS, he knew about them. They simply hadn't touched his life because he was one of the good kids who didn't play around. What about Madeleine, though? Somebody like her, it was impossible to think that in the nineties she hadn't had plenty of guys make moves on her. Had she moved back? Somebody on NPR about five years before had said something about how when you slept with somebody, you were also sleeping with everybody they had ever slept with. How many guys had Madeleine slept with? Up till he talked with Wayne Read, he had assumed that Madeleine was a virgin just like he was. When he thought about it, he realized that he had pretty much assumed that all nice women were virgins.

Wayne was right. He
was
in a time warp.

This was absurd. Wasn't the double standard supposed to work the other way? A guy who was all worried about whether his fiancée was a virgin was supposed to be a hypocrite with plenty of notches on his own belt.

And it wasn't just a question of past partners and sexually transmitted disease. Quentin was hopelessly naïve. There were magazine articles at every grocery checkstand talking about techniques for satisfying a woman every time, but Quentin hadn't read any of them. Was Mad expecting him to know all these techniques? Did they even work? Was it hard to learn them? How romantic would it be on their wedding night if he had to keep stopping to check with a manual?

He had a couple of hours to kill before his flight. Instead of turning in his rental car he kept going down Bayshore and got off the freeway at the Hillsdale Mall, planning to pick up a book on how to be a good lover—he knew that no self-respecting American bookstore would be without a few of those. But to his chagrin Hillsdale was apparently the one mall in America without a single bookstore.

He ended up at the airport newsstand, which had an issue of
Cosmopolitan
that offered to explain how a woman could satisfy a man; but that wasn't really the subject matter he was looking for. On the flight east he tried to watch the movie, gave up and tried to sleep, and finally ended up trying to imagine what it was that he remembered from high school locker room talk and from being at Berkeley in the early seventies and from movies and television shows. Touching breasts was a big deal, he knew that. But was it a big deal for the guy or for the girl or both?

He was in a cold sweat, there in the airplane seat, just as if he had woken from that dream of being on a stage, expected to say lines in a play, only he didn't know what the play was and he'd never been to a single rehearsal. Sweating and trembling because he was going to have to take off his clothes and get into bed with a woman who had high expectations of him and he wasn't going to be able to deliver. He was going to botch everything. He remembered a couple of movies in which some teenage kid had his first chance at sex and got so excited he finished before the girl had even started, and this was apparently the most degrading, humiliating thing that could happen to a man. The woman's contempt would destroy him on the spot. At the time he had assumed this was all comic exaggeration and that such things either never happened at all or if they did, it was no big deal. But now he knew that it would happen to him and it would be a huge problem and she would despise him.

It might have been OK when he was young, being sexually inert in a culture—his parents' culture—that valued chastity. But it was certainly doing him no favors now.

And then there was the last thing Wayne had said. That Madeleine might be wondering if he was gay. He had kissed Mad a few times, and it had felt very good, and every one of those times he had a pretty good indication that he was oriented toward heterosexuality. But
she
wouldn't know about that. Would she? Do women look for that kind of thing? The man sitting next to him came back from the airplane lavatory and looked at how Quentin was gripping the arms of his seat. "Yeah, I used to be a white-knuckle flier, too." Quentin smiled wanly and looked away. He didn't bother explaining to a stranger that the plane crashing sounded like a pretty good idea, compared to his terror of having sex with the woman he was going to marry. Thirty-four years old.

He had to resolve the question before the actual marriage. Not have sex with her—you don't jump off the cliff the first time you go rappelling. He just had to try something. Make a move.

From Dulles Airport he drove down the toll road to the Reston Parkway and found a plentiful selection of books about sex in the self-help section of the Little Professor Bookstore just before it closed. He went home and was already reading, trying to imagine himself and Madeleine doing these things, when she called.

"Weren't you going to phone me?" she asked.

"I meant to," he said. "I'm just wiped out. I didn't think you wanted to talk to somebody as stupid as I am right now."

"Does this mean you don't want me to come over?"

That was how things went—she always came over to his apartment because she was moving around from place to place, camping on couches in friends' tiny apartments. Her phone was a cellular so the number was the same wherever she was staying. He had offered to put her up at a hotel but she laughed at him. "I don't want you spending money on something as stupid as that when I can stay with my friends for free. They all owe me, so don't worry about it." He never met any of the friends. Was she ashamed of him? Or of them? No matter—it was her he wanted, not her friends.

So if they were to get together, it meant she would come to his place.

"It's after ten," he said lamely.

"I have two tubs of Ben and Jerry's chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream."

"I have dishes and spoons."

"Then we belong together. See you in a minute, Tin."

Not even during exam weeks in college had he ever read so fervently and rapidly and intensely as he did during the twenty minutes he waited for her to arrive.

By the time she got there he had already decided against most of the things the books suggested. Maybe people who had been married for ten years might be comfortable enough to do stuff like that with another person, but no way could he imagine trying it with Mad. All he wanted to do was see if he could, as the books suggested, give her any kind of pleasure during mild foreplay; and, of course, by so doing assure her that he was in fact straight, if inept.

And maybe he was also hoping to see if she, in turn, was at all interested in
him
as a sexual partner. That would be, all in all, a great deal of very useful information for them to gain from what would be quite a minor event, taken in its proper perspective. Besides, skimming the books, however rapidly and urgently, had left him in a state of dazed arousal. Or, to use the more technical term, rampant horniness.

They talked, they ate ice cream, they laughed, they sat down to watch the news and then maybe catch Letterman before she went home, and there on the couch with the weatherman occluding his fronts and alofting his lows, Quentin touched her cheek and turned her face toward him and kissed her and realized for the first time how chaste all their kisses had been, and so he tried the thing where you slide the tip of your tongue along your partner's lip during the kiss and—

And that was the end of the kiss. She looked rather startled and laughed nervously and put her arms around him and hugged him with her face against his shoulder.

Did he do it wrong? Even pimply teenagers used their tongues when they kissed, for heaven's sake—couldn't he manage even
that
much?

No, no, it just startled her, that's all.