Читать книгу A Hundred Summers: The ultimate romantic escapist beach read - Beatriz Williams, Beatriz Williams - Страница 11

You think I’m crazy,” says Nick Greenwald. “Admit it.”

“Of course I don’t. It’s an awfully nice jacket. Here we are.”

He looks up at the neon-pink coffee cup blinking above our heads. Before I can intercept him, he makes an expert adjustment of his crutches and opens the door for me. “Nice place,” he says.

“Best pancakes around. Also, it’s open early on Sunday morning.”

I’m handling this like a cool cat, like a woman of the world, as if I accept seven a.m. dates to Sunday breakfast every weekend of my life. My body swings past his, into the welcome coffee-scented warmth of the vestibule. At least my familiarity with the diner is unfeigned. I nod at the waitress. “Hello, Dorothy.”

“Oh, hiya, Lily. What can I …” Dorothy’s words slow and fade. Her frizzing head cants back, traveling up Nick’s long length to land at his face. I can almost hear the pop of her eyes from her head.

Nick smiles down at her. “Breakfast for two, please, Dorothy. A quiet corner, if you’ve got one.”

Her throat works. “Booth all right for you?”

“Of course.”

In a daze, she takes two menus from the counter and leads us to a booth in the corner. The restaurant is nearly empty. One older couple, dressed for church, eats furtively near the door, and a policeman sits at the counter with toast and coffee. The air feels overwarm, overbright, after the foggy dankness of the outdoors. Behind me, Nick’s crutches make rhythmic clicks and thumps against the linoleum.

I slide into one side of the booth. Nick slides into the other and props the crutches next to him. Dorothy hands us our menus. “Can I get you some coffee?” she asks, scratchily.

“Yes, please,” I say.

“As much as you’ve got,” adds Nick.

Dorothy sticks her pencil behind her ear. “Right away,” she says, and turns back down the aisle, casting me a wide-eyed look.

Nick doesn’t notice. He’s gazing at me, smiling. His face is drawn and pale and softer than I remember. He sets down his menu. “I gave myself fifty-fifty odds you’d come downstairs.”

“Then why did you drive down here at all?”

“Well, for one thing, I left a hundred-dollar bill in the left pocket by mistake.” My eyes widen, and he laughs. “Not really. The thing is, I went right to sleep last night, I was bone-tired from the game and everything, but I only slept for two hours. I woke up around midnight and couldn’t go back. I kept thinking about dinner, thinking about you. At two o’clock I jumped in the car and started driving. I figured I wasn’t going to get any more sleep anyway.”

“But it’s only a three-hour drive.” My mouth is dry, my ears are ringing. I dig my fingers into the menu to keep them from shaking.

He shrugs. “I lay down on the seat for a bit when I got here.”

I picture him folded in his late-model Packard Speedster, huddled under his overcoat, trying to find a comfortable spot for his cast. “How did you know which dormitory was mine?” I ask.

“Woke up Pendleton and asked him before I came. I took a chance you were in the same house as Budgie.” He knits his hands together above the menu and leans forward. His eyes turn earnest. “Do you mind, Lily?”

Dorothy comes and pours our coffee. I wait until she moves away, and say: “I don’t mind, Nick. I’m glad you came.”

He blinks and looks down at the menu, and then he reaches forward and takes my hand, very gently. His thumb, broad and enormous, brushes against the base of mine. “Good, then.”

I glance down at my hand, which looks tiny inside his. “I didn’t sleep much, either,” I say, almost a whisper.

“I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear that.”

I look back up. “But why?”

Dorothy returns with her pad of paper and her composure. “Decided yet?” she asks, as friendly and careless as she’s ever been, except her face is a little flushed.

“Two eggs, scrambled,” I say, “and lots of toast.”

“Well, now.” Nick turns to her, keeping my hand firmly in his. “I’m hungry this morning. Four eggs, bacon, toast. How are your pancakes?”

“Best pancakes in the Berkshires,” she says. “Ask anyone.”

“I’ll have a tall stack, with butter and syrup.” He hands her the menu. “Thanks, Dorothy.”

“Thank you, sir.” She takes his menu and mine, and mouths something at me as she goes, something emphatic.

“Do you have that effect on all the girls?” I ask dryly.

“What effect?”

“I mean Dorothy would gladly change places with me right now.”

“I’m not a flirt, if that’s what you mean.”

I shrug my shoulder in the direction of Dorothy’s disappearance. “But you like to charm people.”

He laughs. “If only Pendleton could hear you now. He’s always telling me to be nicer, to come out of my corner and talk a little.”

“Then what was that all about?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’m just happy.”

My hand still sits in his. He gives it a little squeeze, and I feel a smile stretch across my face, because I am happy, too. “You haven’t answered my question,” I say.

“I haven’t, have I? All right, Lily. Miss Lily Dane of Smith College, Massachusetts, and … and where else?”

“New York.”

“Of Massachusetts and New York. The Upper East Side, I’m reckoning.”

“And Seaview, Rhode Island,” I add, smiling.

He rolls his eyes. “And Rhode lousy Island, where your family has probably summered for generations, hasn’t it? Turn your head. No, the other way. Out the window.”

I turn to the steamed-over plate glass, the shadowed buildings across the street. “What, like this?”

“Now move your eyes and look at me. Just your eyes. Tilting up a bit. Yes.” He breathes out. “Just like that. That, Miss Lily Dane, of only the best sorts of places, that is why I couldn’t go back to sleep last night.”

I turn to face him, laughing. He’s leaning against the back of the booth, smiling, watching me benevolently. “That?” I ask.

“You flashed that look at me about halfway through dinner. I was talking about, oh, what was it? The hospital, I guess. And you looked at me sideways, with those funny dark blue eyes of yours, and I couldn’t remember my own name. I stopped short. You must have noticed.”

“I think so.” In fact, I remember perfectly. He’d been talking about the brand-new X-ray machine, and about radiation exposure. I’d thought, at the time, he’d stopped only because he was afraid the subject was too technical for ladies. I had sat there in my elegant chair at the Hanover Inn, overflowing with frustration and longing to tell him that I did care, that I wanted to hear everything he had to say.

I reach for my coffee cup. The heat curls around my nose and mouth, while the white ceramic bowl covers—I hope—my flushed cheeks.

He stretches out his arm for his own cup and lifts it, left-handed, because his right hand still holds mine. He drinks deeply and sets it down in the saucer without even looking. “So there I sat, like a complete idiot, my train of thought snapped in half. I said to myself, Greenwald, this girl leaves in an hour. You had better figure out how you’re going to find her again. Why are you shaking your head?”

“I don’t know. Because you’re like a scene from the movies. My love affairs are usually so unsuccessful.”

“Usually?” He lifts his eyebrows. They are strong eyebrows, like the rest of him: straight and dark, thick without bushiness. “And which ones weren’t?”

“Well, there was Jimmy, the son of one of the fishing boat captains in Seaview Harbor. But he was ten that summer, and I was only eight.”

“Older man, eh? And since then?”

Nothing. Some dates, some holiday flirtations, petering off into indifference. No boys to meet at Miss Porter’s School, no boys here at Smith. During summers at Seaview, only a few, too familiar and too conventional to be interesting. “Oh, I don’t know,” I say, drinking my coffee. “The usual.”

The food arrives on piping-hot plates. Dorothy arranges it all in lightning strokes of her arms, toast plates and butter, a pot of strawberry jam. She refills our coffee. The syrup rolls down the sides of Nick’s pancake stack in lazy threads. He lets go of my hand at last and closes his fingers around his knife and fork.

“Everything all right?” asks Dorothy.

“Perfect. Thank you.”

Nick’s eyes have left me faithlessly, to fix in all-consuming hunger on the breakfast before him. “Thanks,” he says to Dorothy, and hesitates, politely, with a glance back at me.

“Eat!” I tell him.

For a moment or two, we are silent, devouring breakfast. I would say Nick shovels the food in his mouth, but he’s a little more elegant than that—not much, but then he must be famished. Efficient, perhaps, is a better word. The pancakes disappear in seconds; the eggs are obliterated. I watch him in astonished awe, hardly noticing the taste of my own food.

“I beg your pardon,” he says, wiping his mouth. “That wasn’t very civilized, was it?”

“I was about to charge admission.”

He laughs. I like his laugh, easy and quiet. “Sorry. I was just about gone with hunger, with all that business yesterday and then being up most of the night.”

I look at his broad shoulders, his solid torso, his rangy body disappearing under the table. He’s like an engine, idling in neutral, consuming vast amounts of energy even at rest. “Don’t apologize.”

“The food’s good, too,” he says. “You come here often, I take it?”

“I like to study here. They don’t mind if I stay for hours and spread out all my papers. Dorothy refills my coffee, brings me pie. You should try the pie.”

“I’d like to, sometime.” He reaches for his coffee cup. “Now it’s your turn.”

“My turn?”

“Tell me why you’re here. Why you came downstairs, instead of having me kicked out by the housemother.” His eyes are bright and well fed. I love their color, all warm and caramelized, almost molten, hints of green streaking around the brown. I’m just happy, he said earlier, and he looks it.

Should I tell him the truth?

Budgie would say no. Budgie would tell me to hold my cards close to my chest, to make him work for it. I should be cagey, mercurial. I should leave him in doubt of himself.

“It was just before you broke your leg,” I say. “You were standing there with Graham, staring into the crowd. You looked like … I don’t know … fierce and piratical. Different from everyone else, filled with fire. You leaped out at me.”

He is pleased. His smile grows across his face, and I think again how it softens the rather blunt arrangement of his bones, the uncompromising set of his jaw and chin and cheekbones. A few curls dip sweetly into his forehead, and I want to twirl them in my fingers. “Piratical, eh?” he says. “Is that what the girls like these days? Pirates?”

“That was the wrong word. Intent, I should say.”

“You said piratical. That was your first word, the honest one.” He is twinkling at me, not fiery or piratical at all.

I shift direction. “What were you thinking about, looking up like that?”

“Oh, I don’t know. The next play, probably. You get in a fog during a game. The fog of battle, the joy of it. The rest of the world sort of fades into the mist.” He shrugs dismissively.

“But you’re so good at it.”

He shrugs again. “Practice.”

“That forward pass, the touchdown, right before you were hurt. I don’t know a thing about football, but …”

“A lucky toss. The receiver did all the work.” He looks down at his plate and swipes up a trace of yolk with his toast.

“Are you upset about your leg?” I ask, softly.

“Well, yes. My last season. Stupid luck. Or rather stupidity, because I should have known … But that’s the game, you know.” He looks up. “Touchdown one moment, almost crippled the next. Anyway, I mind a lot less right now than I did yesterday.”

We finish our breakfast. Nick insists on paying the check. He leaves, I notice, a large tip for Dorothy. We walk back out into the chill damp air, and I pull my collar tight against my neck. The street is busier now, filling with Sunday traffic. I look up at Nick, tall and impervious in a dark wool overcoat. He turns to me, and his face is serious again, almost hesitant. “What now?” he asks.

“When do you have to be back?”

He looks at his watch. “Half an hour ago. Team meeting. But I don’t think they were expecting me. Anyway, Pendleton will cover for me. Say I was too doped-up or something.” He taps the tip of his crutch against his cast.

“Still, you should get back. You must be exhausted.”

“Do you want me to go back?” His breath hangs in the cold air.

“No. But you should, all the same.”

He holds out his arm for me, remembers his crutches, tucks them ruefully under his shoulders. “Then I’ll drive you back to your dormitory.”

We drive in silence, the way we drove into town, unable to put the sensations between us into words. But it’s an easier silence this time, and when we stop briefly at a signal, Nick picks up my hand and gives it a squeeze.

He pulls to the curb with my dormitory just in view ahead. Like me, he doesn’t want the eyes of a hundred girls pressed against the windows, watching us.

“Does it hurt?” I ask, nodding at his leg.

“It’s all right. I took some aspirin.”

“How do you move the clutch?”

He shakes his injured leg. “Very carefully. Don’t tell the doctor on me.”

“You were crazy to come. I hope it heals all right.”

“It’s fine.”

Again the silence between us, the car rumbling under our legs. Nick fingers the keys in the ignition, as if weighing whether to cut the motor. “I hate this,” he says, staring through the windshield. “There’s too much to say. I want to hear everything. I want to know all about you.”

“And I you.” My voice is fragile.

“Do you, Lily?” He turns and looks at me. “Do you really? You’re not just playing along, humoring me?”

“No, I’m not. I …” My heart is beating too fast; I can’t keep up with myself. I shake my head. “I can’t believe you’re here. I was hoping I’d get the chance to see you Saturday. Budgie said I could return your jacket then, that it would be my excuse for coming up.”

“Budgie.” He shakes his head and takes both my hands. “Why are you friends, anyway? You couldn’t be further apart.”

“Our families summer together. I’ve known her all my life.”

“That’s it, I guess. Don’t listen to her, do you hear me, Lily? Be yourself, be your own sweet self.”

“All right.”

He lets go of one hand to brush at the hair on my temple. “Lily, I want to see you again. May I see you again?”

“Yes, please.”

“When?”

I laugh. “Tomorrow?”

“Done,” he says swiftly.

I laugh again. The coffee is racing in my veins, making me giddy, or maybe it’s just this, the sight of Nick, handsomer by the second, gazing at me so earnestly. How could I ever have thought that Graham Pendleton’s face was more beautiful than his? “Don’t be ridiculous. How are you going to be an architect if you don’t go to your classes?”

“I’m not going to be an architect.”

“Yes, you are. You must. Promise me that, Nick.”

He brushes my hair again and cups my cheek. “My God, Lily. Yes, I promise. I promise you anything.”

We sit there, looking at each other, breathing each other in. I lean my cheek against the back of the seat; against Nick’s jacket, slung across it.

“I don’t know what to say,” says Nick. “I don’t want to go.”

“I don’t want you to go.”

“I feel like Columbus, catching sight of land at last, and having to turn right back home to Spain.”

“Columbus was Italian.”

He pinches me. “Oh, that’s how it is with you?”

“And New Hampshire’s much closer than Spain. And you have a lovely fast car instead of a leaky old caravel.”

“Well, that’s the last time I say something sentimental to you, college girl.”

“No, don’t say that.” I reach up and graze my fingers against his cheekbone, smooth the hair above his ear, dizzy with the freedom of touching him. “I’m sorry. If I don’t laugh right now, I might cry instead.”

“I don’t mind. I’d like to know what you look like when you’re crying. Not that I want to see you crying,” he adds hastily, “or sad in any way. Just … you know what I mean. Don’t you?”

I smile. “I look horrible. All puffed up and blotchy. Just so you know.”

“Then I’ll do whatever it takes to keep your tears away.”

The look in his eyes, when he says this, is so massive with meaning that I feel myself crack open, right down the center of me, in a long and uneven line. “It’s grotesque. Budgie, now, Budgie’s an elegant crier. A few tears trickling down her cheeks, like Garbo …”

“Enough about her. I’ll be whimpering like a baby myself, in a moment. From sheer exhaustion, if nothing else.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It was worth it.” He turns his head and touches his lips against my fingertips. The slight contact passes through me like a charge of electricity.

“I’ll drive up on Saturday with Budgie,” I say.

“Yes. Do. I’ll be down on the bench with my rotten crutches, but I’ll look for you. We’ll have dinner afterward, like yesterday.”

“We’ll still have Budgie and Graham with us.”

“So I’ll drive down by myself Sunday morning, after the team meeting. I can spend the day here, if you like. And I’ll write.” He smiles. “Lay out my prospects for you.”

“Your prospects look pretty good so far.”

“You must write back. Tell me all about yourself. I want to know what you’re reading, whether you play tennis.” He laughs. “What am I saying? Of course you play tennis. I want the history of your life. I want to know why this hair of yours curls around your ear, just like that, and not the other way.” His head tilts closer. “I want to …”

“To what?” I breathe.

“Nothing.” He straightens again. “All in good time. We have plenty of time now, don’t we? I was in such a panic, driving down. I have to remind myself that the emergency is over.”

The idling engine coughs, catches itself, resumes again. Like a chaperone, warning us discreetly.

“I’ll walk you in,” Nick says, with a last caress to the side of my face.

We move slowly down the pavement, using Nick’s crutches as an excuse to stretch out the last remaining minutes. “This is awful, leaving you,” he says, “and yet I’ve never felt better. Don’t you feel it?”

“Yes. Like being a child, when Christm— When the summer holidays were coming up.”

“You were going to say Christmas.”

“Yes, I …” I pause in confusion.

He chuckles and nudges my arm with his elbow. We are nearing the walkway up to the dormitory door. “My mother keeps a tree every year. We go to services together.”

“Oh. Well, Christmas, then. Or summer. Both rolled into one.”

We turn up the walkway and stop under the spreading branches of a hundred-year-old oak, still thick with the glossy burnt orange of turning leaves. Nick glances up at the obscured rows of windows looming above.

My blood turns to air. I’ve been kissed before, but never a real kiss, never one that meant something.

Nick bends downward, and the brim of his woolen cap bumps against my forehead. He laughs, removes the cap, and bends down again.

His lips are soft. He presses them against mine for a second or two, just long enough so I can taste his maple-syrup breath, and pulls back, mindful of the windows above us.

“Drive carefully,” I say, or rather whisper, because my throat refuses to move.

He replaces the cap. “I will. I’ll write tonight.”

“And get some sleep.”

“Like a baby.” He picks up my hand, kisses it swiftly, and props himself back on his crutches. “Until Saturday, then.”

“Until Saturday.”

We stand, staring at each other.

“You go first,” says Nick.

I turn and walk up the steps into the warmth of the common room. Outside, Nick is hobbling back down the sidewalk, back to his dashing Packard, back to New Hampshire. His large hands will wrap around the steering wheel, his plaster-cast leg will work the clutch awkwardly, his warm caramel-hazel eyes will follow the road ahead. I hope three cups of coffee are enough to keep them open.

Nick Greenwald. Nicholson Greenwald.

Nick.

I cross the lounge and climb the worn wooden steps to my small single room on the second floor. The door is ajar. I push it open, and behold Budgie Byrne, still in her nightgown, with her cashmere robe belted about her tiny waist. She’s draped across my narrow bed, next to the window.

“Well, well,” she says, smiling, swinging her slippered foot. “Who’s been a naughty girl?”