"YOU FIND THIS PLACE OKAY?" he called to Averyl.
Averyl, who was the smile across the parking lot. Averyl, who on weekends dressed Sixties. Averyl, who agreed to see him Saturdays.
That was how it began a quarter to nine, one Saturday morning in the noisy parking lot beside Vancouver Lake, where he saw instantly the Oregon plates of his car and Averyl's stood out like cowlicks from those of Washington cars whose occupants were removing neon Frisbees, plaid woolen blankets, and pop-filled Igloo coolers with obvious intent to picnic and play under a sun-bleached blue sky.
"Love your shirt," said Averyl, as he reached to draw her close. On his lunch hour last Wednesday, he'd bought it over at Wonderland Mall. He requested the Mammoth-size letters for a custom T-shirt that said JUST SATURDAYS. Sixteen dollars for this T-shirt with a weighty message that confirmed, yes, Averyl, excitement in large letters, was in his schedule.
Fifty years along, he took a deep breath because Averyl, half his age at twenty-five, had, in their walking side by side, now put her arm snugly around his waist. And her hair--big and frizzy--smelled clean.
Until he parked by the lake, however, he had hidden the shirt beneath the spare tire in the trunk of the car so, among others, his wife, Kate, would not try to puzzle out what this had to do with his plan to work Saturdays.
The three hours with Averyl shot by and vanished. And after he and Averyl said good-byes, he had nothing more to live on than their promise to meet again next Saturday and he went back to Portland to Conifer Logic, the software shop, to phone Kate and see how her day was going. No one answered.
About four, he bagged any idea of finishing the code module he'd been writing, jumped in the car, and wended his way crosstown through Saturday afternoon traffic to Irvington, an old neighborhood of big maples and the blue-shuttered Colonial Revival where Kate, aerobics-thin, Gap denim overalls, black hair in a purposeful geometric cut--looking anything but the picture of a middle-aged matron who worked out of the home--stood in the driveway. And the way she moved, her posture tuned by the Alexander Technique, was grace itself. She was pulling heavy brown bags of groceries from the open hatchback.
"Need help?" he asked.
"There, the other bag, thanks."
"Hmmm." He perused contents: A paper-sleeved baguette; Braeburns; firm bananas; Romaine lettuce, its leaves girdled by a wired paper twist-tie tagged 100% ORGANIC. "Fertile eggs from free-range chickens--you musta been to Whole Foods."
"Can't say Albertson's has everything."
"Especially this. Hey, what's don-key?" he asked, taking a shot at the foreign words on a small brown bottle of capsules.
"Dong quai, thank you. It's a Chinese herbal mix."
He scratched his temple. Okay, he made the connect. Kate's change o' life and all the hormonal chaos. "Kinda ironic, don't you think, this dong something."
"You're being silly." He knew that not-amused smile of hers had an implicit demand for him to think of her needs just once. "Listen, Babs tried it, said it might work."
"With the hot flashes?" He beamed. He could've also asked about their love life going in the incinerator, so to speak, these past months, but that was sorta off-issue.
"Yeah, I need something," Kate said, carcinogenic estrogen pills not being on her list, thank you.
The next Friday morning, he entered the side door at Conifer Logic. Everywhere, keyboards clicked like code-hungry termites.
"What's the verdict?" he said, leaning into a cubicle where Duncan hunched over a stack of greenbar paper from a code dump. "You figure out why I'm not getting a refresh on the screen?"
"You betcha. Your indirect addressing was off," Duncan said, pointing to a page marked with a yellow Post-it. "Gotta reinitialize this loop every time through."
"And?"
"And you were writing to non-existent memory. The sucker timed out on you."
"And no refresh?"
"Not till you reinitialize."
That Duncan was a genius, he marvelled, leaving for his cubicle. He hummed upon reaching his desk and tapped his space bar to light up the workstation screen. The mailbox icon had a raised flag. An e-mail, he'd bet, from Averyl. But first, some coffee: Speed up those processor elements between his ears. He had a spec review meeting at ten.
Maybe he and Averyl were like code. He looked out the window at the blue May sky. The same clear weather of the spring when he was twenty-five, back from 'Nam, and falling in love with Kate. Later they married.
If love at twenty-five was the key, the event that initialized his love loop, then the loop would time out here in the Nineties and his subconscious, his whatever, was ready for a refresh, the big replay.
He sipped at the hot coffee, ready to log in and read e-mail. He was simply executing his code like any other man fifty years old, coming off the mat for another round. He almost chuckled at the thought, Kate was best then, and this time around, maybe it was Averyl.
He clicked on the mailbox icon. Message three was from Averyl at Viatronix:
Subject: Saturday
New plan. A friend asked me to house-sit her
apartment tomorrow while she's over in Bend. Try
calling at 12:30.
--Kid Blast.
He pushed the DELETE key with a glacial slowness. A mangled key sequence might trigger the upstairs printer for an unclaimed message sure to get some close readings.
That night, he slept only because imagining what was next from this retro-Sixties flower child was too much for him to bring up on his screen. Whatever, it would all be okay because Averyl had yet to relinquish her idealism, those years at U of O that let her effortlessly look past a detail like his marriage as an outmoded convention. He savored the hours with this natural woman that were almost upon him and finally switched off, exhausted, into sleep mode.
When he awoke the next morning, Kate slept beside him, head snug in the pillow dent, eyes closed, mouth open. Already past eight, he had to get out, get coffee, get moving to Averyl's. He rubbed Kate's freckled, smooth shoulder near the camisole strap. She yielded a groan of consciousness.
"I'm leaving. Off to work," he said.
"Huh." Her eyes opened, dreamily unfocussed. "What day's this? Isn't it Saturday?" She pulled the pillow tight against her ruddy cheek like she wasn't about to give up sleeping in.
"Yeah, I told you I've gotta put in the extra time, this Saturday, next Saturday, probably the next--"
"Till when?"
"I don't know. Q3?"
"You're always saying Q-this, Q-that."
"Big boss says we don't ship end of Q3, he's toast." He caressed her shoulder again.
"We don't do anything anymore on Saturdays together."
"I know. I miss that."
"You be long?"
"I don't know, depends."
After reshaping the pillow, Kate pulled the camisole strap over her exposed shoulder and he left.
He was on-time--as invariably he was--and he took it as a good omen that a blaze of sun topped the crown of an old maple across the street to catch his eye. Then he went inside the brick apartment building and rushed straight up two flights of stairs to 312.
The white door, overcoated with enamel paint, opened. She was barefoot and a vision, wearing a shift of translucent batik cotton. Her upturned palm led him in and he liked how ringlets of her hair slipped off the nape of her neck when she looked down to hide her Cheshire cat grin.
A jazz station rattled away on the stereo. His senses turned keen at the prompt of Averyl's perfume. And this was no ersatz apartment: French doors led to a dining room with a chandelier above a table, and each of the table legs was carved to a claw clutching a ball.
He pushed hair off Averyl's shoulder. "I didn't know if I was going to ever make it here."
"Same here. I almost called you at home," Averyl said with the mock emphasis he liked to hear. "I've been planning our little get-together." She grabbed his elbow, trying to steer him to the dining room, but he used his free arm to catch her for a single long kiss, ripe with a week's worth of anticipation.
"Over here. Over here." She tugged at his shirt sleeve.
He stepped into the dining room with her. He gave the table a quick look, a look he swept to Averyl, then to the table again. He was confused.
"Certainly don't serve coffee at this table," he said softly. His thumb and fingers clamped the thick, dark mahogany table edge.
Averyl had set out a magnum of Dom Perignon on ice, two empty champagne glasses, small boxes of wooden matches, two homemade cigarettes with ends twisted shut, and four unfamiliar capsules.
"Do you want me to explain," Averyl said with cheer, "the exact order, or do you prefer the surprise route?"
"A glass of champagne would be okay," he said, wracking his brain for a way to patch the situation.
"What?" Averyl leaned closer in disbelief.
"Why don't we each just have a glass of this champagne," he said somewhat louder. He cringed at the idea Averyl's free and natural spirit was most likely half drug-induced.
"No. No. Don't you see that you have to take these in the right order?" She spun the champagne on its bed of ice.
"Averyl, what are you getting at?"
She clasped the wet magnum and began untwisting its wire catch. "We have to take these in the right order, at the right time, to get the best effect." Averyl's eyes cut to him, quick with the challenge.
Talk about sex objects, being used. And he knew a nasty thing or two, didn't he, about drugs? Not to mention, he also had, eventually, to drive home.
He would be assertive: clear off the table with glass breaking everywhere and then take Averyl in one big hug. But his desire was dead.
No, it was Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind: The exit was less complicated if first you got them mad. "Why? Do I look like a guy who needs this for a little hardbody interaction?"
Averyl held up one of the capsules. "Worried what a little amyl nitrite will do for your old ticker, aren't you?"
He looked at the ceiling and then, after a deep breath, her. "Averyl, I think your attitude's gone nonlinear. Why don't we do each other a favor, wait until this emotional stackup's outta the way." His eyes widened at the finality of it all.
Averyl picked up a homemade cigarette. "I won't hold my breath about it. At least not until after you've gone and I've lit this joint."
He gave her the peace sign he remembered from the Sixties, when he protested the draft before going off to serve anyway, and then he left the building, drove for a couple of hours and went home.
After some killer food that night--Kate was, he had to admit, a wondrous cook--asparagus, shrimp over pasta, he was of a mind to relax from the trials of the day. So he grabbed the last Shiner Bock he'd brought back from the Texas trip and set himself up at the rolltop desk in the den. He slipped open the shell of his laptop and rollerballed to his sign-on macro. Some mindless Web surfing could only help the beer's effect in untangling this business about Averyl.
He sipped the heady beer, shirt-sleeved his lips dry. What was he thinking to get involved with her? God! And if she was perverse enough, no, burning-hemp stoned enough, she could just tell Kate what her husband had been up to.
He went to the GO line, typed "airwire.com/~averyl." That's the last thing he needed: Kate after him about more than the amount of fiber in his diet.
He stared in disbelief. WELCOME TO AVERYL'S HOME PAGE. Ms. Wrong. Yep, Ms. Wrong. He clicked on the PERSONAL INTERESTS button. Hiking, classical music, reading? Where was the truth in advertising there? Why not drugs, drug-crazed sex, followed by more recreational drugs?
Another swallow of bubbly beer to settle the growing nausea about this smiley bitch blazing forth on his SVGA screen.
He kept navigating. He checked it all out. Clicked open the thumbnail shots, nothing special really, just pics of the fun girl next door so ready to take in some new unsuspecting fool. Not him. He'd learned. His feedback loop worked fine. Though now, having snuck around behind Kate's back, he felt like he'd been off Dumpster diving in ripe garbage and the problem was more than just coming up empty. Lose-lose.
His beer done, he needed another.
Last on one page was an option button: SEND E-MAIL TO AVERYL. He clicked, had no idea where to begin, and backed out.
Face it, this toothsome Ms. Big Hair was not good for him. Say, hypothetical, he'd given in to those bedroom eyes. Once funtime in LEGO-land was over, what was next? Nada. Minus zero.
Namely, what did they talk about last Saturday, the two of them walking the sandy beach of Lake Vancouver, dodging shrieking kids in wet bathing suits? It was mostly Averyl's big tease, big come-on.
"I wouldn't have any problem our relationship got intimate real soon," she said, a hand toying insouciantly with her hair.
"Oh, you're catching me unprepared." The image of a bare-assed tumble in the nearby woods left his mind in a dither.
"Don't worry, I'm a good Boy Scout, always prepared." Averyl unzipped her beltpack and was wiggling a strip of aluminum-encased Trojans. His smile broadened: Maybe he liked the idea of a younger woman taking the initiative.
"How long those last you?"
"Now, don't be getting the wrong idea. I'm not that sorta woman. I'm choosy." Averyl took his hand, swinging it. "A longtime married man, faithful, you gotta be close to zero risk, considering all that's out there."
"Zero risk, huh?"
"Hey, I like you for other reasons too." Averyl let go his hand and lightly punched his shoulder.
He should have known. She'd come right out and said it. Said he wasn't much more than a no-risk sex object that worked for her. How could today turn out differently? She wanted to use him like nothing more than a new Kleenex. God, he needed another beer.
He pushed out of the squawking desk chair and turning, his eyes refocussed with silent, wordless shock: Kate.
Her leaning against the doorframe, as if she'd been there for minutes. Her eyes on him--or--past him? The knowing smirk at her lips. His racing heart. Thump. Thump.
He fought the urge to look away. Didn't dare look back. He smiled wanly.
"You looked entranced," Kate said, her gaze micro-shifting back to the home-page harpy.
He wanted to ask, How long you been standing here, sneaking up on me? But he knew that remark would only get a scorched earth conflict going. He couldn't think--too much bus contention across his synapses. "Woman at work," he managed to say.
Kate squinted, said nothing.
Another wan smile. "Woman at work. Duncan helped Averyl put up that Web page. I wanted to see what they did." He sighed with instant relief at fabricating this cogent, rational explanation.
"How come you never mentioned--is it Averyl?--before?" Kate's face didn't quite have the relaxed look of acceptance, but it was getting there.
"She just joined us a few weeks ago," he said, amazed at his new-found gift of swapping truth for fiction, on the fly yet. "Excuse me, I was headed out for another beer." His thumb lifted her chin, he brushed her lips with a kiss, and he slipped past, refrigerator his destination.
Later that night, he was in bed with Kate, about to doze off, his back turned away from her and her insomnia. It was the same, night after night. She would not fall asleep and eventually, she said, she'd give up and leave bed to watch late-night TV.
"I'm afraid," she said, surprising him.
He rolled over. She had pulled the blanket to her chin, as if to keep some fear at bay. "I feel like something awful's gonna happen."
The words went through him. Was Kate going to let loose the accusations she really had on her mind when she caught him with his laptop full of Averyl?
Whatever, he kept quiet, not volunteering anything.
Kate, with wide, dread-filled eyes courtesy of Edvard Munch, seemed about to say something more.
He pulled her head closer.
"You might have to take me to the hospital," she said.
His arm went slack--it wasn't Averyl. But what was wrong with Kate?
Any first aid he knew, he left in Vietnam. Silent images of buddies, long past, streamed through his mind's eye and they had the same horror in their faces that Kate now showed.
Yeah, he'd seen it in 'Nam, especially one time Lindsley in camp was cleaning his M-16 right after a bout of gunplay with Charlie while on recon. Lindsley handled that M-16 like it was a live snake and broke down in an anxious funk. Shell shock.
Like then, he took Kate's wrist, checked for vitals. On cue, the training came back. Her pulse was hammering away like the Sixties drummer Ginger Baker in Cream.
"You got a fast pulse," he said, not wanting to alarm her. "Why don't we go downstairs, sit in the parlor, it's cooler. I'll get you some water."
Minutes later, Kate, thin blanket about her shoulders, sat with him on one side of the couch, a single streetlight, a few houses away, giving forth the only light to intrude upon the darkness of the parlor.
"I felt fragile, like I was doomed," she said, holding the water glass to her lips with a slight tremor.
She was so vulnerable, a victim, he guessed, of hormones run amok. He was ready to sit with her the whole night if that's what she needed.
"Oh, it's happening again. I feel awful."
His thumb searched her wrist for a pulse. Sure enough, her heart raced like that drummer cut loose again. "Just take one deep breath for me. Try." Kate's head pushed back on her shoulders and she did her best with a fitful intake of air. "There. Deep breath in. Deep breath out."
The pulse seemed to slow once more. "That bad feeling, it comes in waves, until it plays itself out," he said, remembering how he, too, had some anxiety rushes in 'Nam, especially the last months of his tour.
Sure enough, she seemed calmer, less agitated by the anxiety demons. He felt not talking was best at that particular moment, for Kate was looking pensively at her lap, reflecting, perhaps, on the pure fear her body was offering up on its own.
He let go of her wrist, startled by the wash of street light that now fell tentatively across her face. His hand reached to caress her forehead where her bangs stopped in a precise line, the only line visible in that faint light. For in the meager light there were no wrinkles in Kate's face, no inklings of crow's-feet at the corners of her eyes. No, nothing more than the contours of this smooth skin that he knew was a face returned from those days so many years ago, which now seemed like yesterday, when he first knew her.
His fingers thrilled to the touch of her forehead and bangs for he knew this was the same woman, ageless, he'd fallen in love with those twenty-five years ago. And he knew that in that moment, as her head rose and fell with a deep breath and the light changed its play slightly over her wondrous facial shape, that he was fully capable of falling in love with her again. Maybe Averyl was only a misdirection of his best impulse.
He brought her closer to him and to his amazement, he could not see better, nor see less perfection, for the light and darkness together removed all lines of age from Kate's face.
"I'm keeping you up all night," she said, the suffering absent from her voice.
Then he bent close to her lips.
"Oh, here's another one," she said alarmed.
He kissed her anyway.