But listening was not the word. Or maybe it was: a word usually used passively, suggesting a kind of muted receptiveness, the acceptance of the sound that comes from another person, I hear you, whereas what he was doing now with her felt shockingly muscular and intimate: listening with force, the way animals listen to survive in the woods.
“Well…” She took a breath. “My dad had one of those regional sales jobs where they kept moving us around. Four years here, two years there. Michigan, Massachusetts, Washington State, Wisconsin. It was just the three of us. Then he kind of … kept on moving—I don’t know where he went. Someplace without us. My mom and I lived in Wisconsin until I was out of college and then she moved to New Jersey until she died.” It still felt strange to say it; she tried to look away from his intent eyes, but it was impossible. “Anyway, then I moved to New York, because most people there don’t belong anywhere, either. So I have no particular allegiance to any place. I’m from nowhere. Isn’t that funny?”
She shrugged. The words had bubbled up from inside of her. She hadn’t really meant to say them.
“It sounds pretty fucking lonely,” he said, still frowning, and the word was like a tiny toothpick pricking that soft part of her she hadn’t meant to show. “Don’t you have family somewhere?”
“Well, there’s an aunt in Hawaii, but—” What was she doing? Why was she saying this to him? She stopped talking, appalled. She shook her head. “I don’t do this. I’m sorry.”
“But we haven’t done anything,” he said. There was no mistaking the wolfish shadow that crossed his face. A line from Shakespeare came to her, something her mother used to whisper to Janie when they passed teenage boys at the mall: “Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look.” Her mother was always saying things like that.
“I mean,” Janie stammered, “I don’t talk like this. I don’t know why I’m telling you this now. It must be the rum.”
“Why shouldn’t you tell me?”
She glanced at him. She couldn’t believe she had opened herself up to him—that she was falling under the admittedly considerable charms of this businessman from Houston who wore a wedding ring.
“Well, you’re a—”
“A what?”
A stranger. But that sounded too childlike. She grabbed the first word she could think of: “A Republican?” She laughed lightly, trying to make a joke out of it. She didn’t even know if it was true.
Irritation spread like brushfire across his face.
“And that makes me what? Some kind of philistine?”
“What? No. Not at all.”
“You think that, though. I can see it plain as day on your face.” He was sitting up straight now. “You think we don’t feel the same things you do?” His brown eyes, which had been so admiring, bore into her with a kind of wounded fury.
“Can we go back to talking about the curry?”
“You think we don’t get our hearts broken, or break down crying when our children are born, or wonder about our place in the grand scheme of things?”
“Okay, okay. I get it. You bleed when pricked.” He was still staring at her. “‘If you prick us, do we not bleed?’ It’s from the Merchant of—”
“Do you get it, Shylock? Do you, really? ’Cause I’m not so sure you do.”
“Watch who you’re calling Shylock.”
“Okay. Shylock.”
“Hey.”
“Whatever you say, Shylock.”
“Hey!” They were grinning at each other now.
“So.” She glanced at him sideways. “Children, huh?”
He waved away the question with one large, pink hand.
“Anyway,” she added, “what’s it matter what I think about anything?”
“Of course, it matters.”
“Does it? Why?”
“Because you’re smart, and you’re a human being, and you’re here right now at this moment and we’re having this conversation,” he said, leaning toward her earnestly and touching her lightly on the knee in a way that should have been slimy by any rights but wasn’t. She felt a tremor pass through her quickly, outrunning her will to squelch it.
She looked down at her ravaged plate.
He probably lived in a McMansion and had three kids and a wife who played tennis, she thought.
She’d known men like this, of course, but she’d never flirted with one before—a country club man, a man who had a gift for sales. And women. At the same time she could feel that there was something else in him that drew her—it was in the quickness of his glance and the volatility of his emotions and the sense she had that there were thoughts blowing through him at a million miles a minute.
“Listen. I’m going to check out the Asa Wright Nature Centre tomorrow,” he said. “Want to come along?”
“What’s that?”
He jiggled his leg impatiently. “It’s a nature center.”
“Is it far?”
He shrugged. “I’m renting a motorcycle.”
“I don’t know.”
“Suit yourself.” He signaled for the check. She felt his energy swiftly changing course, pulling away; she wanted it back.
“All right,” she said. “Why not?”