“It keeps me busy. In fact, too busy at times.”
“Too busy?”
“Yes—when my wife was alive, anyway. Pauline and I didn’t have the time together we should have. I was gone a lot.” Phillip’s words fell away, as if he realized he was saying too much, revealing more about himself than he intended. He drained his coffee cup When the waitress walked by, he signaled her for a refill.
“Do you have children?” asked Victoria, knowing immediately it was a subject she shouldn’t be broaching. What if he turned the question back to her?
Phillip grimaced. For a moment he said nothing. Finally he looked away, a glint of pain evident in his sable brown eyes. “No, we never had children,” he replied somberly. “To tell you the truth, it’s the greatest regret of my life.”
Victoria looked away, discomfited by the man’s unexpected confession. “Well, there’s more to life than children,” she murmured without conviction, her words unnaturally stiff and precise. She quelled the impulse to admit to Phillip that she, too, knew how it felt to regret something deeply, to live daily with a raw emotional wound that ruptured at the slightest inadvertent prick. But exposing her own pain would serve no purpose. She and Phillip were, after all, virtual strangers.
“Well, now that I’ve bored you with my life story, I think it’s time for me to pick up the check,” said Phillip offhandedly.
“Thank you, but I really wasn’t bored,” she assured him with a heartfelt smile. Suddenly, illogically, she didn’t want their conversation to end, but she could think of no legitimate reason to linger, so she said dutifully, “I guess it is time to get back to my car.”
Phillip nodded, reached for the check and tossed a crisp one-dollar bill on the table. A contemplative silence settled over them as he drove Victoria back to her stalled automobile.
That evening Victoria couldn’t get Phillip Anders out of her mind. His presence lingered like an afterglow, baffling, disconcerting and yet undeniably pleasant. As she rattled around her small, modern condo, sorting her mail, putting away dishes and browsing through her latest educational journal, his image was never far from her thoughts. She turned on the late-night news, but the newscaster’s voice sounded so disturbingly similar to Phillip’s, she quickly snapped off the set.
Even as she drifted into a restless slumber shortly before midnight, she saw his face in her mind, his classic features as solidly chiseled as a Michelangelo sculpture—and those eyes, so expressive and compelling, seemingly reading her very heart. And his voice—surely it wasn’t the television now. In the hazy, rainbow reveries of her dreams she could hear the richness of his deep baritone and the mirthful ripple of his infectious laughter.
When she awoke the next morning, the image of Phillip Anders still occupied her mind, like some rare, esteemed object her consciousness had instinctively decided to accommodate. As she bathed and dressed and ran a brush through her cascading curls, fragments of her dream lingered. As she sipped her coffee and nibbled a slice of whole-wheat toast, she wondered where he was and what he was doing at this very moment. Even as she sat at her kitchen table grading test papers, her thoughts strayed inevitably to him.
She found herself absently tracing Phillip’s features in her mind—his long, distinctive nose, his generous mouth and that sturdy cleft chin. In her imagination she could picture his riveting, darkly lashed eyes, his sardonic smile and the thick umber brown hair that just touched his collar. The images appeared unbidden and left her feeling disconcerted, perplexed
She wanted to see him again, but she knew she didn’t dare.
What’s wrong with me? she wondered. Had she taken leave of her senses, allowing this stranger to monopolize her thoughts? Surely it was a temporary aberration, perhaps even a predictable corollary of the grief process After all, for the first time in her life she was utterly alone, perhaps her mind was simply filling the void with the first person who happened by.
“And if I believe that, I’m sure someone has a bridge somewhere they’d love to sell me,” she mused dryly.
No, there was something about Phillip Anders that set him apart from everyone else she had ever known—a mysterious quality that attracted her and disarmed her at the same time She wanted to see him again and learn more about him
But she hadn’t thought to ask for his business card, nor did she have the slightest idea where he lived. Surely he would be in the phone book, but she had no logical reason to call him He might think her forward, even brazen. But, in fact, women did phone men these days and no one considered it unseemly.
But the thought of phoning him, of pursuing Phillip Anders in any manner, left Victoria with a knot of panic in her chest and a sudden dryness in her mouth What made her think he would even want to see her again? They had nothing in common. Surely he had demonstrated no interest in her as a woman And he was, after all, still grieving for the wife he loved so deeply and to whom he was obviously unswervingly devoted.
But there was more to her hesitation. Much more. And before her fantasies whisked her into the tempting arms of Phillip Anders, it was time to acknowledge the real reason for her reluctance to face him. Yes, already she could feel that old barrier resurrecting itself in her mind—the nameless, inscrutable panic that welled in her chest at the prospect of a man becoming close—any man.
There had been no man in Victoria’s life since Rick Lancer seven years ago. In fact, there had been no man before or after Rick. And even now, because of Rick, there would probably never be anyone for Victoria.
Now, on this quiet Saturday just a few weeks before the end of the school term, Victoria allowed herself to think about Rick and about those days that still moldered in the deepest recesses of her emotions. She was standing before the bathroom mirror about to apply a hint of blush and a dab of mascara. Her long, natural red curls were pulled back from her forehead and spilled down the back of her neck. Her large green eyes were framed by thick, dusky red lashes. Her teeth were even and perfectly white Her flawless ivory skin was marred only by a spattering of freckles that dotted her nose and cheeks. She didn’t wear much makeup; she preferred the natural, clean-scrubbed look, the look her father had loved. It was that sweet, guileless naiveté of face and spirit that had prompted him to call her “Daddy’s good-as-gold little girl.”
She paused, the mascara wand in hand, and gazed critically at her unadorned face It was no longer the face her father had loved, childlike and innocent, but the face another man had praised. Rick Lancer had called it a beautiful face, but he could have been lying even about that. Still, Victoria had been told, with a note of approval by an occasional student and an air of condescension by a fellow faculty member, that her natural good looks made her appear much younger than her twenty-six years.
But Victoria didn’t feel younger. Sometimes she felt incredibly old. She wasn’t sure she had ever felt young or attractive, except perhaps when Rick Lancer had called her beautiful. For a time he had made her feel beautiful. But not for long. Even now, when she thought of him, she felt ugly inside, damaged. She still wondered how Rick could have prompted such intense, contradictory emotions—love and hate, joy and despair, a sense of beauty.and degradation.
Thinking of Rick sent her spiraling into one of those dark moods that compelled her to reach for her thick, well-worn journal She sat down at her desk and, in handwriting marked by quick, gracefully scrolled letters, she wrote:
Saturday, May 2
I keep going back to the past, reliving it, as if I’ve been sentenced to play it over and over again in my mind like a broken record, the sound always shrill and discordant.
I keep asking, How could I have been so foolish?
I