Courting Trouble Read online

  Anne got up from her chair and walked barefoot down the hallway, toward the laughter. Its lighthearted sound was contagious, and her own smile grew unaccountably as she approached Mary’s office and leaned in the door. “What’s so funny, guys?” she asked.

  The laughter stopped so quickly it was as if somebody had flicked the off switch.

  “Oh, it was nothing,” answered Judy Carrier, sitting on Mary’s credenza. But her china-blue eyes were wet from giggling, and her unlipsticked lips still bore the trace of a smile.

  Mary DiNunzio frowned from behind her neat desk. “Sorry if we were loud. Did we disturb you?”

  “No, not at all.” Anne’s cheeks went hot. She should have known better. This law firm was worse than high school, and she felt like a D student crashing National Honor Society.

  “How was court?” Mary asked. If she’d heard about the naked guy, it didn’t show. Her expression was interested, if only politely. Her dark-blond hair had been swept back into a French twist, and she was wearing her trademark khaki suit from Brooks Brothers, in contrast to Judy, who flopped on the credenza in denim overalls, a white tank, and a red bandanna in her Dutch-boy haircut. These two were so different, Anne could never understand their close friendship, and had given up trying.

  “Uh, court was fine.” Anne’s smile morphed into a professional mask. Mary had been filling in on Chipster, and Anne always sensed that they could have been friends, if things had been different. Like if they both lived on Pluto, where women were nice to each other. “I won, which is good.”

  “Jeez! You won?” Mary smiled. “Congratulations! How’d you do that? It was a tough motion.”

  “Hoffmeier just agreed, I guess.” Anne didn’t even consider telling them the story. It had been a mistake to come here. By here she meant Philadelphia.

  Mary looked puzzled. “What’d he agree with? The cases weren’t any help.”

  “Who knows? He bought the argument. I have to go, I’m really late. I just thought I’d say good-bye.” Anne edged out of the office and faked a final smile. “Happy Fourth of July. Have a great weekend, guys.”

  “You probably have plans. Dates, right?” Mary asked, and Anne nodded.

  “Yep. See ya.”

  “Tonight, too? Because I—”

  “Yes. Big date tonight. Gotta go now.”

  “Okay, well, happy Fourth.”

  Judy nodded. “Have a good one.”

  But Anne was already out of the office and down the hall, padding quickly away. An hour later she was dressed in an oversized T-shirt, baggy shorts, and Reeboks, and standing in a practically empty gym, squaring off against a Life Fitness elliptical exerciser, a costly machine that simulates running for people who hate to run for free. select workout, ordered the display, and tiny red lights blinked a helpful arrow that pointed to the enter button.

  Anne hit the button, cycling through fat burn, cardio, and manual, until she got to random, which resonated. random would place huge hills in her path without warning. random would keep her on her toes. random equaled life.

  She hit the button, grabbed the handles, and started fake-running. The gym was deserted except for a muscleman on the leg-lift machine, watching himself in the mirror, Narcissus on Nautilus. It was so quiet she could hear the humpa-humpa of spinning music throbbing through the wall next to her. She had tried spinning once, but you had to do it with a class, which meant that somebody, male or female or maybe both, would hit on her. So Anne worked out alone in front of the row of mounted TVs, looking straight ahead and wearing earphones from a Sony Walkman. The Walkman’s batteries were long dead; it was just a way for nobody to bother her. She got her heart pounding, watching CNN on mute and trying not to hate exercise, CNN, or anything else about her life.

  She had won, after all.

  The thought made her smile. A baby hill rose ahead of her, and she fake-jogged up its simulated incline, her eyes on the TV. Across the bottom of the screen slid two stacks of stock quotes, with their mysterious acronyms and red and green arrows. There were lots of red arrows, pointing down. If Anne had money invested in the market she’d be worried, but she invested in shoes.

  “Hi, Anne,” said a voice beside her, and she looked over. It was a girl climbing on the exerciser next to her and selecting fat burn. The chick was too thin to need fat burn, but it was the only lie bigger than one-size-fits-all.

  “Hi,” Anne said, wracking her brain for the girl’s name. The girl started walking at a leisurely pace, with her eyes focused at some imaginary point in the wall, and Anne finally remembered it. Willa Hansen. Willa was a brooding artist-type and she’d dyed her hair again, this time a normal human-being color. It was even a red shade close to Anne’s.

  “I like your new haircolor, Willa,” Anne blurted out, after a minute. She gathered she was trying to strike up a conversation, but wasn’t sure why. Maybe to prove she remembered Willa’s name. Mental note: It is pointless to remember someone’s name and not get credit for it.

  “Thanks.”

  “How’d you get the blue out?” Anne asked, then wanted to kick herself. Somehow it sounded wrong. She’d always had a hard time talking to women. Men were so much easier; to talk to a man, all she had to do was listen, which they counted as the same thing.

  “The blue came out right away. It was Kool-Aid.”

  “Huh?” Anne tugged out her silent earphones. Maybe she hadn’t heard right. “You put Kool-Aid, the drink, on your hair?”

  “Sure.” Willa smiled. “Just add water.”

  Anne wasn’t sure what to say, so she fake-jogged for a moment in silence. There were things she would never understand about her generation, and her experiments with haircolor tended to the more conventional. When she started practice, she dyed her hair Professional Brown, but it had proved futile. She’d remained Unprofessional, only with really boring hair, so she’d gone back to her natural Lucille Ball Red. She took another conversational stab. “I didn’t know you could put Kool-Aid in your hair.”

  “Sure,” Willa answered, strolling along in her T-shirt and shorts. “I used to use Manic Panic, but Kool-Aid works just as well. The blue was Blueberry, and to get rid of it, I just put Cherry on top, and my hair turned black.”

  “Blackberry?”

  “I guess.” Willa didn’t get the joke. “Then I hennaed it, and it turned out kind of coppery.”

  Anne fake-scaled another hill and kept going. The lighted display on the treadmill told her she had fake-jogged for only 2:28, which meant she had approximately 3 years and 23 hours left. She let her glance slip sideways and checked Willa’s display. Willa didn’t have any hills ahead, which meant she lacked sufficient stress in her diet.

  “What are you doing for the Fourth, Anne?”

  “I have to hole up in my house and work all weekend. I have a big trial on Tuesday.”

  “Oh, that’s right, you’re a lawyer.”

  Anne felt the urge to tell Willa about her big victory in court today, naked man and all, but it would be pathetic. She didn’t know Willa very well and they’d talked only a few times about their respective personal lives, or lack thereof. Like Anne, Willa lived alone and wasn’t from Philly. Anne sensed that she had a trust fund, which was where the similarities between the two girls came to the proverbial screeching halt. “Do you have plans for the holiday?”

  “Not anymore. I was gonna dog-sit this weekend for this couple, but they broke up.”

  “The couple?”

  “The dogs.”

  Anne didn’t ask. She was fake-puffing too hard anyway. “I didn’t know you dog-sat.”

  “I do, sometimes, for fun. I love dogs. When I dog-sit, I use the time to sketch them.” Willa strolled along on her machine. “There’ll be a lot else to sketch this weekend, I guess. There’s something called the Party on the Parkway, and fireworks at the Art Museum on Monday night.”

  “Oh, no. I live right off the Parkway.” This would be Anne’s first Independence Day in Philly, and she hadn’t tho
ught of it. How would she get any work done? Damn. Kilimanjaro loomed on her Life Fitness display. Another example of random. “I have to work this weekend. How am I gonna do that?”

  “Don’t you have an office?”

  “Yeah, but—” Anne didn’t want to run into Mary and Judy. Or worse, Bennie. Work would be okay if it weren’t for coworkers.

  “Offices suck, right?”

  “Exactly.”

  “So why don’t you take off?” Willa’s saunter slowed to a crawl. Soon she would be going in reverse, and the gym would have to pay her.

  “Take off?”

  “Aren’t you single?”

  “Very.”

  “So go to the Jersey shore. I was on North Cape May once, and there’s a national park there. Very quiet and peaceful. I got a lot of sketching done.”

  “Down the shore?” It was code for the Jersey shore. Everybody in Philadelphia vacationed in South Jersey. Unlike L.A., Philly wasn’t a summer-in-Provence kind of town, thank God. “I suppose I could go.”

  Willa resumed her slow walk, and Anne fell instantly in love with the idea of a weekend getaway. What a way to celebrate her big win! She didn’t own a car, but she always rented the same convertible, mainly to go food-shopping on the weekends. The manager at the Hertz in town usually saved it for her; it was a fire-engine red Mustang that would embarrass most pimps. She planned to buy it as soon as she got out of credit-card debt and hell froze over.

  “Why not?” Anne said. “I could go away for the weekend!”

  “Sure you could. Get crazy. Dye your hair purple.”

  “Or not.” Anne giggled, her mood lifting. “But I could call a realtor. I’m lucky, maybe I’ll get a cancellation.”

  “From some lawyer who had to stay in the hot city.” Willa laughed, and so did Anne.

  “Sucker.”

  “Totally.”

  Then Anne remembered Mel. “But I have a cat. I can’t leave him.”

  “I guess I could sit for a cat. I like cats. I could sketch a cat.”

  Anne hesitated at the thought of letting a stranger into her house, since what had happened with Kevin. But Willa was a woman, and she seemed honest and, most importantly, not a psycho. Anne, who had never given a thought to going down the shore, now could hardly wait to get there. She could work like crazy, and she’d never seen the Atlantic Ocean. She was pretty sure she could find it. “Please, would you cat-sit for me this weekend, Willa?” she asked.

  “Okay, I’ll sketch the cat, and maybe even the fireworks. If you’re near the Parkway, your place’ll have a great view.” Willa’s walk slowed to a standstill. “You want to go now and beat the traffic? I’ll finish my run on the way to your house. I can clean up at your place.”

  “Great!” Anne pressed the clear button. “To hell with this! I’ll run tomorrow morning on the beach, in the fresh ocean breeze! Or maybe I won’t! Ha!”

  Anne had scored both Mustang and seashore rental by the time she made it home, hurrying in gym clothes to her Fairmount neighborhood, which lay just outside of Philly’s business district. It was a gentrified section of the city, characterized by art museums, the Free Library, and the family court, interspersed with blocks of colonial town houses with repointed brick facades and freshly painted shutters. Bennie Rosato owned a house in the area, and Fairmount was a quiet, safe neighborhood, which was all Anne cared about after her move east. Parking she could live without.

  The house she rented stood three-stories high but was downright anorexic; only one-room wide, it was a cozy, two-bedroom trinity, which was what Philadelphians called houses with one room on each floor. Anne hit her front door running, ignoring the bills and catalogs spilling through the mail slot and onto the rug in the tiny entrance hall. She locked and latched the door, dropped her briefcase and purse on the living room floor, and tore upstairs with her gym bag.

  “Mel! Mel! We won our motion!” Anne called to the cat, which confirmed for her she’d been living alone too long. She bounded into her bedroom and dropped the gym bag on the floor, startling into wakefulness the chubby brown tabby curled at the foot of her unmade bed. Mel flattened his ears in Attack Cat until he realized it was only her, then relaxed, blinking his large, green eyes slowly. Anne went to the bed, cupped his furry face in her palms, and kissed the hard, spongy pink of his nose.

  “We won, handsome!” she said again, but Mel only yawned, his teeth bright white spikes. When he closed his mouth, the tips stayed on the outside, and he morphed into Halloween Cat. Mel was acting very scary today, and Anne wondered if he had his holidays mixed up.

  “Mel, the good news is that we won. The bad news is that I’m going away, but you’re going to be fine. You’ll meet a very nice girl who wants to draw your picture, okay?” Anne gave him another quick kiss, but he didn’t purr, which told her he was worried about being left alone with a total stranger who dyed her hair blue. Mental note: People project all sorts of emotions onto their cats, and cats like it that way.

  Anne gave Mel a final kiss, hurried to her messy bureau, and pulled out clean undies, two T-shirts, a denim skirt, and an extra pair of shorts. She plucked her leopard-print mules from the bottom of the closet, because they always made her feel festive and she was celebrating.

  “Did I mention that we won our motion, Mel?” Anne asked, stuffing the clothes into her gym bag. She’d shower at her new apartment at the beach, though she hurried into the bathroom, fetched her Kiehl’s shampoo, conditioner, and grapefruit body lotion, as well as her makeup in its I Love Lucy tin, which bore a colorized scene of the road trip to California. She couldn’t leave without Lucy or grapefruit moisturizer. That would be camping.

  “I’m outta here, Mel!” she sang out as she hustled back to the bedroom, but Mel had fallen asleep and didn’t wake up when she stuffed the toiletries into the bag and zipped it closed, or even when the doorbell rang. It had to be Willa, and Anne slung the bag over her shoulder and scooped up the slumbering cat, who draped his stripy front legs on either side of her forearms and permitted himself to be carted downstairs. Sedan Chair Cat.

  “Coming!” Anne called out when she reached the first floor and went to the peephole, just to be sure. The action was automatic at this point, even though Kevin was in jail a zillion miles away. She dreaded the day he got out, but that was two years from now. Standing on the front stoop was Willa Hansen, huffing and puffing in her workout clothes.

  “Come on in!” Anne unlatched and opened the door, and Willa cooed the moment she saw Mel.

  “Oooooh! Isn’t he just so pretty!”

  And Anne and Mel knew everything was going to be just fine.

  Cars, minivans, and pickup trucks stretched in three lanes as far as the eye could see, with brake lights that formed dotted red lines. It was just another example of random, and Anne resigned herself to not getting to the shore until way after dark. She put the Mustang convertible in park and leaned her head against the black headrest. The night air blew cool and blessedly free of humidity. The sky was deepening to a rich sapphire, the stars brightening slowly, diamonds in relief.

  A blue Voyager minivan next to her had two kid’s bicycles strapped to a rack on the back, their spokes laced with red, white, and blue crepe paper, and the rear compartment of the van had been packed with Acme grocery bags, folded sheets, and a Big Bird doll, his beak smashed against the smoked glass. Anne could barely make out the family inside, but here was evidence of them—kids bouncing on the seats, and a mother and a father in front.

  She looked away and flicked on the radio, suddenly restless. She scanned but there was nothing on but oldies older than her and sports scores, which reminded her of exercise. She turned it off. The night fell silent except for the idling of three thousand minivans bearing happy families to the shore, undoubtedly poisoning the air of women refusing to be lonely in their Mustang convertibles. Anne plucked a can of Diet Coke from the cupholder and raised it in a toast. “To carbon monoxide, and to me,” she said. She took a sip of warm, fla
t soda, then got an idea:

  She had won, and there was one person she could tell. She didn’t stop to wonder why—for once didn’t pause to observe herself observing herself—or to make even a single mental note. She was just going to do it. Just do it!

  She set down the soda can and rummaged in her purse for her cell phone and little red address book, and opened both. She had to hold the address book up in the headlights of the car behind her to read it, and she thumbed to the M listings and found the phone number. There were five old numbers before it, all crossed out, and she didn’t know if the most recent number would work. It hadn’t for a few months, but it was all she had.

  She pushed in the area code for L.A., then the phone number. It would be dinnertime there. The tinny rings started, one, two, three rings, with faint crackling on the signal. She waited for the call to be picked up, and despite the fact that she just had a slug of soda, her throat went suddenly dry. After a moment, the rings stopped and a mechanical voice came on:

  “The number you have dialed is no longer in service. Please check your records . . .”

  Anne felt her heart sink, a reaction she hated as soon as she had it, and gritted her teeth. She was determined not to be a victim, a wimp, or a total loser. So she let the mechanical voice drone away in a continuous loop and delivered her message anyway:

  “Hi, how are you? I thought you might like to know that I won a very important motion today in court. I thought it up by myself, and it was a little crazy, but it worked. Other than that, I’m fine, really, and don’t worry about me.” She paused. “I love you, too, Mom.”

  Then she pressed End and flipped the cell phone closed.

  3

  Seagulls squawked over a greasy brown bag in a trash can, and dappled pigeons waddled along the weathered boardwalk, their scaly pink-red feet churning like so many wind-up toys. Saturday morning had dawned clear, hot, and sunny at the Jersey shore, and Anne had learned that the Atlantic Ocean looked exactly like the Pacific. Wet, big, blue, and moving a lot. Her idea of natural beauty remained the King of Prussia Mall.