A Place of Hiding

Nothing else had rung. That was the problem. Upon waking, she’d made that automatic three-hour leap in time to ten-a.m.-in-Manhattan-so-why-hasn’t-he-called, and while the hours passed till the one at which she had to leave for her appointment in Montecito, she’d mostly watched the phone and stewed, something that was easy enough to do since it was nearly eighty degrees by nine A.M.

She’d tried to occupy herself. She’d watered the entire front yard by hand and she’d done the same to the back, right down to the grass. She’d talked over the fence to Anita Garcia—Hey, girl, is this weather killing you? Man oh man, it’s destroying me—and sympathised with her neighbour’s degree of water retention in this last month of her pregnancy. She’d washed the Plymouth and dried it as she went, managing to stay one step ahead of the dust that wanted to adhere to it and turn into mud. And she leaped inside the house twice when the phone rang, only to find those unctuous, obnoxious telephone solicitors on the line, the kind who always wanted to know what kind of day you were having before they launched into their spiels about changing your long-distance telephone company which would, of course, also change your life.

Finally, she’d had to leave for Montecito. But not before she picked up the phone one last time to make sure she had a dial tone and not before she double-checked her answering machine to make sure it would take a message. All the time she hated herself for not being able just to dismiss him. But that had been the problem for years. Thirteen of them. God. How she hated love.

Her cell phone was the phone that finally did the ringing towards the end of her drive home to the beach. Not five minutes away from the uneven lump of sidewalk that marked the concrete path to her own front door, it chimed on the passenger seat and China grabbed it up to hear Matt’s voice.

“Hey, good-looking.” He sounded cheerful.

“Hey yourself.” She hated the instant relief she felt, like she’d been uncorked of carbonated anxiety. She said nothing else. He read that easily. “Pissed?”

Nothing from her end. Let him hang, she thought.

“I guess I’ve blown my wad with this one.”

“Where’ve you been?” she demanded. “I thought you were calling this morning. I waited at the house. I hate it when you do that, Matt. Why don’t you get it? If you’re not going to call, just say that in the first place and I can deal with it, okay? Why didn’t you call?”

“Sorry. I meant to. I kept reminding myself all day.”

“And...?”

“It’s not going to sound good, China.”

“Try me.”

“Okay. A real bitch of a cold front moved in last night. I had to spend half the morning trying to find a decent coat.”

“You couldn’t call from your cell while you were out?”

“Forgot to take it. I’m sorry. Like I said.”

She could hear the ubiquitous background noises of Manhattan, the same noises she heard whenever he called from New York. The blare of horns reverberating through architectural canyons, jack hammers firing like heavy armaments against cement. But if he’d left his cell phone in the hotel, what was he doing on the street with it now?

“On my way to dinner,” he told her. “Last meeting. Of the day, that is.”

She’d pulled to the sidewalk at a vacant spot about thirty yards down the street from her house. She hated stopping because the air conditioning in her car was too weak to make much of a dent in the stifling interior so she was desperate to get out, but Matt’s last remark made the heat suddenly less important and certainly far less noticeable. All her attention shifted to his meaning.

If nothing else, she’d learned to keep her mouth shut when he dropped one of his small verbal incendiary bombs. There’d been a time when she’d jump all over him at a remark like “Of the day, that is,” to weed specifics out of his implications. But the years had taught her that silence served just as well as demands or accusations. It also gave her the upper hand once he finally admitted what he was trying to avoid saying. It came in a rush. “Here’s the situation. I’ve got to stay here another week. I’ve got a chance to talk to some people about a grant, and I need to see them.”

“Matt. Come on.”

“Wait, babe. Listen. These guys dumped a fortune on a filmmaker from NYU last year. They’re looking for a project. Hear that? They’re actually looking. ”

“How do you know?”

“That’s what I was told.”

“By who?”

“So I called them and I managed to get an appointment. But not till next Thursday. So I’ve got to stay.”

“Goodbye Cambria, then.”

“No, we’ll do it. We just can’t next week.”

“Sure. Then when?”

“That’s just it.” The street sounds on the other end of the cell phone seemed to grow louder for a moment, as if he were throwing himself into the midst of them, forced off the sidewalk by the congestion of the city at the end of a workday.