“Oh,” she said, taken aback. Her head was against his chest, and the pungent smell of his sweat mixed with something sweeter. It had been nearly twenty years since she had last touched him. But his ropy arms felt familiar, her head resting against his chest.
They had first gotten together at the party she had thrown during her senior year of high school. Her father was out of town, a medical conference in Boston. She was supposed to be at Claudia’s, and Sarah at a friend’s, but Lizzie had taken advantage. This same living room had been dark and loud and roiling, with the sweat of bodies, the sweet smell of pot, the pulse of music, the clink of bottles being opened. Lizzie was floating among her many guests, feeling good, when Duncan finally appeared and, unbelievably, sought her out.
Lizzie was seventeen years old. She couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t had a crush on him. Duncan maintained a deadly combination of nonchalance and assurance that should have been patented; he did more looking than talking; he had the pale, elusive gaze of the misunderstood, a fragile, Byronic look that surely translated to depth. (Didn’t it?) The air, increasingly choked with smoke and sweat, tasted honeyed. He asked her if she wanted to go outside and her heart darted about like a quicksilvered fish. Out by her father’s pool, he plucked a tiny brass pipe from his pocket and they got high, dipping their bare feet in the heated water, the air cool, the sky a band of black. They kissed for the first time, messy, sloppy kisses that left Lizzie breathless and hungry for more. When they finally went back in, Duncan had stood up and offered her a hand, a courtly gesture she never would have expected from him.
She had led him down the stairs and into her bedroom. Even now, twenty years later, she could recall her amazement. He was so beautiful. Duncan Black, she yearned to say over and over again. She had wanted him for so long. It didn’t feel good. But she was prepared for so much worse. And it was this fact, coupled with the finality of it—her virginity, out the window, spirited away by Duncan Black—that allowed her to feel a certain elation, a pleasure that wasn’t at all sexual.
But that elation hadn’t lasted. Hours later, she awoke, and her world was never the same.
Now she was sniffling against Duncan’s thin T-shirt. This boy who had been her first was now a man, a married man at that. He was rocking her gently. It felt nice. It felt more than nice. She tried to ignore it but she felt a rising heat. She wanted to taste the sweat on his neck. She wanted to taste all of him. Never mind that he had a wife; never mind that that wife and daughter were only feet away. She could unhook Miller Perkins’s velvet rope and lead him downstairs. In the name of sympathy and mourning, she could.
After a moment, he pulled back. “Well,” he said. “I really am sorry.”
“Thank you.” She nodded, tried to affect a smile. Had he sensed what she’d been thinking? Was he slightly tempted too?
They exchanged numbers. Lizzie was saying she really would like to see him again, she hoped his father loved the bike, when he asked: “Whatever happened to those paintings? The ones that were stolen the night of the party. It was a Picasso and a Modigliani, right?”
“Soutine,” she said. She wished it surprised her that she had to correct him. She looked past him into her father’s living room that was emptying of his possessions by the minute. “A Soutine portrait and a Picasso drawing.”
“God, remember how the cops were all over everyone? I heard that Cori Carpenter started crying and confessed about the time she bought pot at a Tears for Fears concert. They never turned up, did they?”
Lizzie shook her head.
“Of all the things to steal. You can’t fence famous artwork. The paintings are too recognizable. Anyone who knows what they’re worth will know that they’ve been stolen. Well, you can only hope that the fucker who took them had the decency not to shred them.”
She was too flustered to speak. Maybe The Bellhop was rolled up in an airport locker somewhere, a bank vault in Grenada, hanging on the walls of a garish villa in Dakar or Patagonia. But destroyed?
Duncan, his easy talk of the paintings, her father’s empty house: it all felt wrong. For a brief moment, she imagined walking off, leaving Duncan without a word and climbing into her rental car, taking the turns of the hill that she knew so well.
But soon they were hugging again, awkwardly this time. (Why? As if bodily contact, twice in nearly twenty years, might prove to be their downfall?) Soon she was watching him hoist the bike onto his shoulder, press his way out the door.
And then the living room flooded with brightness. Lizzie shielded her eyes. For a second, she didn’t know what happened, so quick was the shift—but squinting, she saw that it was just the sun, fisted clouds finally loosening their grip, bathing the room in abundant California light.
She felt a pressure on her arm. A voice, Max’s voice, quiet. She hadn’t seen him approach, had forgotten he was there. “Let’s go. I’m taking you to lunch.”
They took his car. Down to Santa Monica, to a little Spanish café on Ocean Avenue a few blocks from his office. They didn’t talk much. She was glad to have him drive.
The hostess seated them outside on the terrace. The afternoon remained gorgeous, cool but not cold, the sky scrubbed free of clouds. As they looked over the menu, Max told her that a friend of a friend owned the café. He was full of suggestions: sangria, Manchego, the grilled calamari and mushrooms too. Soon he was pouring sangria; he was passing her tiny ceramic plates piled high.
Lizzie ate olive after olive as Max told her about the restaurant’s owner. He had been a bond trader, working fifteen-hour days, traveling half the month to meetings in Santiago and Dublin, rarely seeing his family. Then his youngest got sick with Hodgkin’s, and the man swore if his kid got better, he would change everything.
“So, the boy got better and the father opted out of the rat race.” Lizzie rolled an olive pit between her finger and thumb.
Max gave her a small smile. “His son went into remission, Marco opened the restaurant, and now he works as much as before—making one-tenth of the money.”
“That’s terrible,” she said, laughing, “and completely unsurprising.”
“Some habits are pretty deep-seated,” he agreed. “At least for Marco.”
“I don’t know; it’s not just him. I mean, who really changes?”