“I have no idea. She’s always announcing who is having affairs with who, particularly among their friends, or movie stars she’s never met. She thinks she’s psychic, and once in a million times she’s right. I told her we weren’t.” He was afraid Blaise would be offended by what she said.
“Did you tell her your virginity is safe with me? I’m too old to go after you,” Blaise said, smiling at him. “I’d get arrested for child molestation,” she teased.
“Don’t be stupid,” he said, looking annoyed. “You’re only about ten years older than I am.”
“Fifteen,” she corrected him, not that she wanted to add more years, but it was the truth. He was thirty-two and she was forty-seven, which they were both aware of.
“That’s not a big difference. My father is twenty-two years older than she is. And he married her when she was eighteen and he was forty.”
“Men can get away with that. Women can’t.”
“I don’t agree with you. It may cause more comment when the woman is older, but it’s no different. And who cares? You look younger than I do, and you have more energy than anyone I know. You don’t look your age,” he emphasized again.
“Neither does your mother. She looks fabulous.”
“Why couldn’t I have been born to a deaf-mute? Then she could insult everybody in sign language and most people wouldn’t know what she was saying. Thank you for being such a good sport. I feel like a complete idiot for inviting them. I know better. I just wanted them to meet you and Salima, and I guess insanely, I wanted you to meet them. I’m very proud of my father, and mortified by my mother, and always have been, with good reason.”
“Part of being an adult, someone told me once, is accepting your parents as they are, with all their failings.” She was trying to calm him down, to no avail. He looked totally shaken.
“That’s a tall order in my mother’s case. I don’t think I’m capable of it.”
They walked into the kitchen then, and Blaise took out a bottle of wine. She opened it, poured him a glass, and handed it to him. He needed it. And he looked at her with grateful eyes as he took a sip.
“Thank you, for your patience and understanding, and the wine. Do you have a Valium to go with it? I think I need one.”
“She was fine,” Blaise reassured him again, and as she did, he looked at her with a strange expression. Their eyes met and held as they had before, and suddenly for the first time, she wondered if his mother was right. Maybe she was psychic. All she wanted to do now was put her arms around Simon and comfort him. Maybe she was in love with him. And what if she was? How disastrous would that be? His parents would be horrified, and the world would laugh at them, or her at least. She never took her eyes from his as she thought about it, and then rejected the idea. She poured herself a glass of wine then, and tried to think of something else. But suddenly, all she could think of was him. He pulled her into his arms then, and put his arms around her. And as he stood holding her, neither of them moved or said a word.
Chapter 9
IT TOOK SIMON a whole day to calm down after his parents’ visit, which was what his mother always did to him. And Blaise kept telling him that it was fine. She said his mother wasn’t a vicious woman, just an outspoken one, and there had been no harm done.
But he made a superb dinner that night to thank her, chateaubriand and asparagus with hollandaise. And after Salima went to her room, he talked about his mother again.
“She actually asked me if I was gay when I was in college, because I’d never introduced her to a girlfriend, but she’s so outrageous, I was afraid to,” he said, sipping the wine he had bought to go with the dinner, to atone for his mother’s sins. He had been apologizing for her all his life, and should have been used to it by then, but he wasn’t. He still looked embarrassed and contrite.
“What convinced her otherwise?” Blaise asked with a look of amusement.
“I slept with the daughters of all her friends to reassure her,” he said, and Blaise laughed.
“I guess that would do it,” she said, with no need to be convinced.
“I was thinking about what my mother said today, about our having an affair.”
“She would kill you if we did.” Blaise was clear on that concept also. And his mother had made it clear the night before. She thought Blaise was too old for him, and Blaise thought so too.