The Fly on the Rose

The Fly on the Rose

by

Elizabeth Petty Bentley

Published by Parables at Smashwords

© 2002 Elizabeth Petty Bentley

Cover art by SelfPubBookCovers.com/BeeJavier

ISBN: 9781310467875

Smashwords Edition, License Notes This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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for George

Part I

Temple couldn’t have told anyone the name of the restaurant, that Saturday night. She knew only that it was next on her alphabetical list. Murphy’s Corner was a jumble of tables and booths crowded into what used to be a two-story house. Mirrored walls made it look bigger than it was. The place had table service in three separate add-ons, as well as a busy takeout section and a counter with a huge samovar, presided over by a man everybody called Murph.

Temple first caught the big man on the stool looking at her by way of the bar mirror. His pinched eyes were such a pale blue, she thought at first he must be blind. Then he looked down at his half-empty soup bowl. The second time she caught him staring at her, he grimaced, and his weathered skin reddened.

His heavy, lowering brows, balanced by a jutting red beard, made his face seem crowded and caved-in. His mouth was so recessed, she wondered what it would be like to kiss him.

Hunched over on the stool, with his huge shoulders bunched up to his ears, he looked like a ruddy Sasquatch trying to camouflage himself in damp, stained plaid flannel. Tufts of curls showed at his throat, over a khaki T-shirt, and the stubble on the back of his thick neck ran down and disappeared under his collar.

Temple didn’t need to catch him staring a third time. She could feel his eyes on her. She turned sideways to her table, stretching her long legs from beneath her clingy black silk, letting her golden hair fall forward and sweep across the bulge of her breasts. She crossed her ankles and lightly tapped her black and gold platforms to the music vibrating in her bones.

Men always wanted what they couldn’t have.

Temple dipped a finger into her mug of cream soda and languidly sucked it clean, performing for the man, presenting herself like a specimen on a microscope’s stage. She could taste his rising passion, mingled with the fear of rejection—of humiliation—that kept him glued to his stool, furtively stealing glimpses.

He was right to be afraid. Temple never let her game go any farther than this.

But if he did manage to find the courage, she’d make an exception for him and try not to be cruel. She could imagine the first little girl who’d called him a vicious name—stupid, ugly, an animal. His massive calves bulged above the gouged leather of his mud-caked boots. He looked like a costumed bear.

Temple easily read his lips in the mirror as he ordered another drink. The man sitting to his right leaned over and made some remark but got no reaction, not even an angry look. Temple wondered whether the big man was deaf, like herself.

Tempting the taciturn bear from his hibernation, his fearful reserve, appealed somehow. Temple stood up, defining her profile for him, pretending to search her tiny purse for something, shifting her weight to let the light play off her draped curves.

Green and scarlet serpentine tattoos on his hairy forearms flashed beneath rolled-up sleeves each time he raised a disinterested spoon in his rhythmic feeding. But his eyes betrayed him.

Temple slipped her purse over her shoulder and drifted close behind him along the row of stools, trolling her scent, luring him with her gently undulating walk.

There were grease stains on the thighs of his jeans, and his rear pocket was white around the shape of his wallet. Below the dusty, matted hair on the back of his hand, his fingers were oddly hairless, his knuckles, scabbed and crusty. He wore no rings.

From across the room, she glanced back one last time and caught him full-face. He looked down and away, smoothing his beard with his flat-nailed fingers.

On the way to the bathroom, Temple smiled, savoring the heat of his wanting her.

Lots of men wanted her, more or less. She’d seen them huddled together in twos and threes, deciding who’d get to make the first pass. These were the confident ones, the self-assured, the self-absorbed. They wanted her, but once she rejected them, they didn’t usually try twice, let alone three times.

Three times was her benchmark. She didn’t respect anyone who hadn’t approached her at least three times.

Her mother had turned her father down eighteen times before their first date. He proposed every day after that for four years. He always told Temple Only two things are important: God and the Family—punctuating the sentence with his whole broad-chested body. He’d have put the words into heroic couplets if he could have. The sentiment wasn’t just a platitude with him. He almost died of grief when Temple’s mother abandoned him.

Somewhere, Temple thought, there’s a man who’ll love me enough to want to die.

But she’d rarely met anyone who was willing to suffer so much as her scorn. She freshened her makeup, checked her watch, waited another five minutes, then headed back out.

She glanced at the counter. He was gone.

Humph.

She didn’t often let vanity cloud her judgment of men. The intensity of her disappointment surprised her.

Then she spotted him at her table, opposite her half-full glass. He’d taken off his hat, but he was as intent as ever on his drink. Well, she thought, for a man like him, that’s One.

She took his seat at the counter and ordered a piece of chocolate cheesecake. From there she could watch the bear man in the mirror, seeing him as he’d formerly viewed her.

His ugliness fascinated her. His bulbous cheeks gave his face a Santa Claus cheeriness at odds with his concentrated scowl. From beneath the ledge of bone that formed his Neanderthal forehead, his eyes flitted like those of a child, constantly checking to see if his mother is watching.

She arched her back. His gaze was almost tangible enough to rub herself against, like a cat.

A hot, foul breath rained onto Temple’s right ear. She turned toward it, and the man beside her bent closer. In the mirror, she’d noticed him talking, but she hadn’t bothered to watch what he said. He was so close now, she couldn’t see his mouth. He laid his hand heavily on her wrist, and she jerked away.

The man tumbled drunkenly off balance. He disgusted her. Temple slid onto the next stool, not deigning to look at him, even obliquely through the mirror.

Murph took a step in her direction and muttered something through tight lips. Temple couldn’t decipher the words, but the drunk backed off. She felt her heart beating. Gradually it slowed. She put some money on the counter, and the rush was over.

Temple took her dessert to a table from which she could see the hulking bear-man. He was no longer trying to hide his interest. What was he looking for? Some reaction in her to what had just happened? Was he concerned for her safety? If she’d needed to feel safe, she’d have stayed home.

But surprises made her angry. She seldom ran into drunks in restaurants that served only beer and wine. But the drunk reminded her of her limitations.

She hadn’t noticed his growing ardor. She’d been concentrating on the big man, whose eyes, as clear as ice, stared unabashedly now. When he blinked, it was as if the electricity had flickered.

Temple didn’t blink. She opened her mouth and enveloped her fork, drawing the creamy cheesecake off with her lips. His eyes followed the arc of her hand down to her plate, then slid slowly back to her face.

Without faltering, he picked up her soda, and drank it down in one gulp.

He looked into the glass, as if to be certain he’d downed it all, and the ghost of a triumphant smile crept onto his lips.

There was something violating and preemptive in his taking possession of what had once been hers. Something daring. Two, she thought. There won’t be a Three.

Hunting was always risky or it wouldn’t be sporting, but she liked to think she wasn’t foolhardy, that she knew her game’s predilections, that she knew when to take cover. She wasn’t looking for real danger, only thrills.

Temple rose without finishing her food, grabbed her bag, and strode resolutely past the man, toward the exit. As she swept by, he put his hands on the table and seemed to be trying to stand up, but she shot him an evaluating look, and he turned away before she had to change it to one of scathing disdain.

Once outside, Temple slowed, pulled her loose hair back from her face into a tight knot, breathed deeply of the drizzly autumn night, and, with a last sigh as Temple, morphed back into Mary Jane Bell.

§

Q Kauffmann looked straight ahead, his teeth clenched, his face bricked up, long after the golden woman was gone.

When would he ever learn that romance wasn’t for him?

Little children cried and hid in their mothers’ skirts. Women crossed the street when they saw him coming. Men avoided kidding him about his looks.

Q left Murph’s without speaking to anyone. Alone, inside his truck, he leaned his misshapen forehead on the steering wheel. It was a while before he could face going home alone.

§

Mary Jane didn’t want Sunday morning’s huge conference of the Church to end. Her pocket sagged, full of hard knots of wadded blue tissue. Her face felt tight, as if she’d just scrubbed it with soap. On the big screens hanging from the ceiling of Worcester’s Centrum, she thought she could see tears standing in President Hinckley’s eyes too, as he blessed the tri-regional gathering of the faithful. His words, repeated in sign below, made her throat ache and her heart swell.

The thrum of seven thousand voices raised together rumbled through her: The Spirit of God, Like a Fire Is Burning. Around her, a hundred pairs of hands signed the century-old lyrics that, like the national anthem, had everyone in the arena on their feet. A closing prayer petitioned Heavenly Father to grant the righteous desires of the Saints present.

It seemed Mary Jane’s righteous desires wouldn’t be granted today, but she was resigned, almost soothed. Before the meeting began, she’d ranged around the enormous enclosure, scanning faces in the crowd that had gathered from all over New England. She’d hoped for more than just a guarded, distant glimpse of her daughters.

Two weeks before, she’d flouted the odious restraining order yet again, driving two hours from Springfield, Massachusetts, to the girls’ school in Nashua, New Hampshire, where she left a message for Isolde and Gwyneth, under a loosened brick just outside the school fence.

In the note, she told Izzy the conference would be announced in The Boston Globe. Izzy should innocently show the paper to her father and plead to go. It might be as much as another decade before a prophet visited again.

If Charles wouldn’t bring them himself, the girls could arrange for a ride with members by calling their bishop. His number was in the phone book. Sit in the fourth section from the front, on the left as you face the stand, Mary Jane instructed, but only if you can manage it without causing suspicion.

The following week, when Mary Jane checked what they called their mailbox, she found notes from both girls.

I love you, Mommy. Signed, GWYNETH BELL, as if Mary Jane might not recognize her daughter from just her first name. The signature letters were huge and uneven. Isolde had obviously guided her sister’s hand for only the first four words. Mary Jane imagined her younger daughter pulling away. I can do it. I can do it. Gwyn was only in kindergarten, but Izzy, now in fourth grade, reported that a year of preschool had made Gwyn fiercely independent.

Izzy wrote, I’ll try to get to conference, but Dad’s still touchy about the Church.

It had been two years since the messy civil divorce, but until the Church issued a cancellation of sealing, Mary Jane was still married for time and all eternity to Charles and they’d be a family forever, in spite of the court’s restraining order. Since then, however, Charles had done everything possible to shut Mary Jane out of her children’s lives. He refused even to acknowledge her except through his lawyer. He ridiculed her offer of child support, calling it a pitiful ruse to get access. Dismissing Izzy’s embarrassed protests that she was too old for a baby-sitter, he still insisted his new wife walk the girls to school and back, in case Mary Jane tried to intercept them or even see them from a distance. He was doing his best to poison them against her and against the Church, but his efforts seemed to have the opposite effect—making Mary Jane and the Church all the more attractive to them—a sort of forbidden-fruit reaction.

Charles would expect Mary Jane to be at the conference, but she had to keep trying. He might relent. Evidently this wasn’t that time. Probably because of what Temple had done the night before. The thoughts she’d entertained. The vain desires.

Every Sunday morning Mary Jane promised herself she’d never do that again. By Tuesday she couldn’t see what was so awful about just going to a restaurant. She didn’t drink, after all. There wasn’t even any secondhand smoke to inhale. She dressed modestly, almost bundled—not even anything sleeveless. It wasn’t her fault men lusted after her. By Friday she’d convinced herself that after working hard all week, she deserved a break from her lonely routine, from her isolation, from the inadequate meals she cooked for herself.

By Saturday she saw no reason why she shouldn’t try to meet new friends.

She was an adult, and she was legally divorced. She might even stumble onto a missionary opportunity. But she always ranged far enough away from home that she wasn’t likely to run into people who knew her from church.

A crowd had pooled around the prophet and his dark-suited cadre—two apostles, the area representative, an assortment of stake presidents, bishops, patriarchs, mission presidents, and what appeared to be a handful of security.

Parents pushed their small children forward to be touched, to have their hands shaken, to hear a memorable word spoken to them by a prophet.

Mary Jane remembered seeing President Kimball in Largo, Maryland, when she was only eight years old, a week after she was baptized. He told her she should always make her father as happy with her as he was that day.

Her father literally beamed, as if to illustrate the prophet’s advice. Mary Jane thought her father hadn’t looked that happy since her mother left them.

It was her mother, though, that Mary Jane most wanted to make happy that day—make her happy enough that she’d want to come back from wherever she’d gone. The trouble was, her mother didn’t care.

Mary Jane, however, cared about everything her children did.

Unfortunately they didn’t seem to have the same craving for her approval as she had for her absent mother’s. They didn’t tell her nearly enough, and she was constantly surprised and terrified when she belatedly heard about their exploits.

Izzy’s notes sometimes seemed like telegrams from an explorer at the stationary center of the galaxy, where a perverse relativity made them age at twice or three times the rate she expected. She worried she wouldn’t recognize them when she saw them again . . . if she saw them again.

She was still methodically scanning faces, but with fading hope. The people at both ends of Mary Jane’s row had moved out into the aisles as the crowd milling past them thinned.

Mary Jane turned at the touch of a hand on her arm and was immediately fused in an exuberant hug.

Tina! You’re back! she squealed when they finally broke apart. Mary Jane had introduced Tina to the Church during a frenzied burst of activity, designed to numb Mary Jane’s mind after the divorce. They’d written to one another often during the first semester Tina spent at BYU. But as Tina’s social life expanded, her letters came less frequently, filled with apologies for neglecting her beloved mentor, until, inevitably, they stopped.

I leave in January, Tina said, surprising Mary Jane by signing at the same time. Tina hadn’t been able to sign the last time they’d seen one another.

Mary Jane recognized the gleeful smile. A mission call?

Tina nodded. A signing mission. Guess where.

Mary Jane had no idea. Did they have signing missions outside the U.S.? Russia?

Tina laughed. Close. Georgia. Atlanta.

I’m thrilled for you. She hadn’t thought of Tina in months. You look so happy.

You’ll never believe who I ran into.

Mary Jane’s stomach tightened automatically. Charles?

Close. Tina moved to let someone pass down the aisle. His mother.

Florence?

Tina nodded. She showed me pictures of the girls. They look just like—Just beautiful.

Florence used to post pictures of her twenty-three grandchildren on a home page that Mary Jane could access at the library. Then suddenly Izzy’s and Gwyn’s pictures disappeared. Charles’s doing, no doubt. What did she tell you about them?

Mary Jane saw her friend’s face sober in an instant. Just that they were five and eight-going-on-nine now. There was an awkward lull. I should have asked her more.

Mary Jane shrugged. Where did you see her?

At the temple. Tina didn’t sign the words—the equivalent of mumbling, as if hoping Mary Jane would misunderstand. It would have been Tina’s first time going to the temple, to receive her own endowment.

Who went with you? Mary Jane hoped the catch in her throat wasn’t audible.

My mother’s sister. The joy turned back on in Tina’s eyes, as if a circuit breaker had been restored. Didn’t I tell you? She joined while I was at school. The three of us should go together as soon as I get back. By that time the Boston Temple should be built.

Mary Jane only smiled. Tina hadn’t thought to invite her to D.C., and she evidently didn’t feel the need to apologize. They’d grown worlds apart. They wouldn’t write while she was gone, and the next time they accidentally met Tina would probably have a husband and three children. Mary Jane had lost hundreds of friends since she went deaf the year after Izzy was born. Some people simply didn’t know how to deal with the tragedy. For others, it was just too awkward to phone her, and nobody wrote letters anymore. E-mail was the thing now, she heard, but she wasn’t plugged in to that.

Mary Jane glanced over Tina’s shoulder. For an instant, she thought her heart had stopped.

Tina turned to look.

I thought— Mary Jane said, putting her hands in her pockets. I was wrong. It wasn’t Izzy and Gwyn—just a sister on the floor below them. And two girls with her.

A shadow passed over Tina’s features, and Mary Jane immediately regretted making yet another oblique reference to her lost children. It wasn’t a loss people knew how to deal with. There were no comfortable Hallmark sentiments for such occasions.

Well, Tina said. My ride’s waiting. Good to see you. Another hug, and Tina was gone—leaving Mary Jane to wonder how such a strong friendship could have slipped, how no one seemed to stick with her anymore. Not Charles. Not Izzy and Gwyn.

Mary Jane watched in silence, as the hall slowly cleared out. She had virtually no hope left of finding her girls, but the fellowship she’d shared with the Saints was some comfort. Other people were worse off, she told herself. Everyone had private wounds and dreariness, hidden lives beyond closed doors. Secret selves. Secret Temples.

A pacifier lay on the floor. Someone would cry all the way home over that.

A program covered with purple crayon scrawls was left behind and spoiled by a shoe print.

A long-legged boy strode up the ranks of seats, high-stepping over the backs, racing his sister who stumbled up the shallow concrete stairs.

§

Q tapped a brick with the butt of his trowel and checked it with his plumb rule again. Now the line was out the other way. Q sighed. He’d been working all day, but he might as well have stayed at home for all the good he’d done, muttering and growling to himself.

Sly was on the roof singing love songs. Full-throated, he usually sang all day. Blues, country-western, rock, gospel—it was all music to him. Pounding work songs for when the sun got hot. Opera—but only with people who’d known him forever. And often, late in the day, he’d indulge in these dreamy, sensuous, yearning love songs.

If Q had a wife like Philomena at home, he might have something to sing about too. If anybody’d ever looked twice at him, Q might be the one working himself up every night for a little homecoming celebration and spending all the money Q paid him on silk teddies and parochial schools for six little ones.

But nobody’d ever looked twice at Q. At least, not in that way. He’d made a blame fool of himself the night before, thinking that was what the golden woman had done.

He whacked a chunk off a brick and laid the remaining piece. Too small.

He wanted to quit, but Sly had shown up with the Tromblay boy. Q pried the brick end loose from the mortar with a sucking sound, stabbed his trowel into the mud pan, and took his smoldering misery for a walk.

The sky was a roiling, plush pink as the sun went down. It was time to think about turning on the spotlights. Instead, Q climbed the ladder. Maybe he could keep Sly from singing by making him talk.

Hey. He sat down on the roof.

Getting dark, Sly responded. Morris promised we’d have power to the spots tonight.

Hmm, Q said. He could hear the new electrician still rattling around in the cavernous house below. Q had resisted telling the man not to bore such big holes in the struts, but it hadn’t been easy. A state license didn’t guarantee he was any good, but Sly said the man knew his business.

Then we can get rid of that tone-deaf generator. Sly’s hammer punctuated his talk the way it accompanied his songs. D’ja hear? There’s a cold front coming down from Canada.

Q nodded. They watched the weather every day, racing to get the outside work done before winter set in. Q toed a roof tile. He’d wanted slate, with copper flashing. But this was his first house. He was spread pretty thin—both in money and time. He was working too fast. And he worried he wasn’t doing his absolute best, especially after ten hours a day on a road crew. It hadn’t been so hard when daylight lasted longer. Q let his eyes wander over the rapidly coloring trees that nearly hid the house from the washboard dirt road at the foot of the still unpaved driveway.

Q loved heights. He’d had his eye on this ridge plot ever since high school. He’d grown more ambitious and more sophisticated with his dream floor plan over the years, but he’d yet to find a better site. In the back of his mind he kept thinking he’d buy the house back one day—his first house, like the family homestead—so he resented every compromise he had to make, especially the roof. He refused to work on it himself.

Ya gonna sit there till the stars come out, big guy? Sly prodded.

Q levered himself up. Okay, boss, he quipped back as he swung onto the ladder. Down below, the Tromblay boy sat chugging a soda by the truck’s tailgate.

Sly looked down too. You’re the one paying him, not me.

Q winced. Since before they were half grown, they’d planned to build this house together. But then Sly let his mother talk him into taking chemistry at MIT, while Q took carpentry with Uncle Ralph, masonry with his dad, and drywall and interiors with Sly’s father. Sly finally came back to earth and joined his father’s business after only a year of lab work for some New Jersey outfit. Couldn’t sing there, was all he said in explanation. Then he found Mina and that was the end of any spare cash.

Sing that Fun-ick-u-lee song, will ya? Q said as he descended to the ground. If Sly wouldn’t stop singing, at least Q wouldn’t have to understand the words.

What am I, a request line? Sly laughed, throwing his head back. His black eyes flashed, then he went back to work, bellowing the words in time with his hammer, "Fenicule, fenicula!" He segued into an Italian aria.

Q turned on the generator and the lights. He pounded some nails out of a dusty cement form and tossed the boards on a heap. The clatter accompanied a glance that sent the Tromblay boy shambling back to work without a word having to be spoken.

The boy was related to Q in some convoluted way their mothers had explained and Q hadn’t followed and wasn’t about to ask to have repeated.

It was enough recommendation that the boy had learned under Uncle Ralph, who’d been taught by Q’s grandfather. Q often found his grandfather’s initials scrawled on the beams of old houses, when he pulled out the lath-and-plaster construction on a winter remodeling job.

Q hunched back over his work, carefully pointing up the brick with a grapevine jointer. He’d had to settle for a silvered black- and gray-flashed, red brick, not the medium gray with white accents he’d visualized catching the hilltop sunlight. He tried not to think about it. He laid the next line of brick more easily, mulling over his family’s long tradition of building solid homes in these hills. His own initials would be found one day by his grand . . . nephews.

Q sighed.

She was beautiful, that golden woman. He kept thinking he should recognize her from the movies. He wasn’t the only one in Murph’s staring at her. He thought some of the other guys might have been working up the courage to ask for an autograph. Then he caught her looking at him in the mirror. Not that horrified look that made him turn away. Nor the frank curiosity of a child, which he tolerated the way a mother tolerates a toddler’s pokes and pinches.

No. Her look was something like what his own must be, gauging and cataloging other people’s reactions to what they were seeing. But, of course, she should be flattered by the appreciative glances Q saw directed her way.

Flattered even by the jealous peeks of the women.

Had she noticed that girl in the corner, talking too loud, too insistently, trying to position herself between her date and the golden woman? Q sympathized with the girl’s desperation all the more because he understood her date’s lewd longing. Q’s own longing, however, was not lewd. He wanted to marry the golden woman.

Far from undressing her with his eyes, he clothed her in white satin. She might hate his idealizing her as much as the other men’s debasing, but for Q there was no in-between, no equality, no casual flirting, no possibility of mutual desire. Women were utterly unattainable.

He sometimes wondered how much of an effort it was for his own mother to love him.

But if the golden woman could just see his house. He’d shaped it first in his mind. Then he saved the money—one dollar after another—until he had the land. All alone, he reverently turned the first shovelful of dirt. Brick by brick, board by board, he was transforming a heap of hardware and a hole in the ground into a luxury mansion.

If she only knew what he could create, she’d have to respect him. She could be happy living in that house. Their children could be happy.

The night before, at Murph’s, he’d imagined their conversations, fantasized his proposal, their marriage, their eldest son’s wedding, a month-long vacation on a sunny cruise ship. Then that disgusting drunk next to him at the counter ruined everything with his coarse remark, loud enough for everyone in the room to hear. Q wanted to shove the filthy-minded old lecher off his stool, but the lady was watching, and her calm said she was above such insults. With a gut-wrenching effort, he tried to ignore the abuse for her sake. He continued to eat, refused to react, even though his insides churned with indignation for her. She was totally serene. Amazed at her poise, her control and assurance, he thought how alike they were in having to bear with indignities and affronts. He wished he could always act like her and ignore sneering people who judged only the surface, not caring to know the heart.

A woman like her would never lie awake nights replaying the day’s humiliations, plotting impossible revenge, and cursing fate.

She acted as if she hadn’t heard. She simply checked her purse and strolled out of the room, as unhurried as a summer breeze. When she turned and caught Q staring after her across the room, he looked away. She must have thought he was no better than the other oglers, as he self-consciously stroked his beard in a futile effort to hide his misshapen face. When he looked again she was gone. He guessed she must have slipped out the back way. He felt her loss like the end of a beautiful song he’d never hear sung again. He wanted somehow to linger in her resonance. He moved to sit opposite where her scent still lingered, imagining himself waiting there for her to rejoin him.

Then she froze him by her magical reappearance. He scowled. He blanched. He couldn’t find a resting-place for his eyes. They were drawn compulsively to her. But she didn’t flinch. For a panicky moment he thought she was going to sit back down there. She’d look straight at him. He’d have to say something.

But then she passed him by and he could breathe again.

He was stunned, though, when she sat at the counter, right next to that drunken pig. She was a cool one. How could she ignore what the man had said about her before?

Then the imbecile touched her, and she cringed.

Q’s enormous hands crashed palm down onto the table. He was half out of his seat. He felt everyone in the room turn expectantly toward him at the sound. But she simply whorled away from the drunk in a fluid, dancelike motion that left the man off balance, foolishly clutching at the air. Murph called out Q’s name, warning him not to interfere, and Q reluctantly sat back down. At the same time Murph took a protective step between the woman and the drunk, and said, with a forced chuckle, When you fall off your stool, Jerry, it’s time to go home.

The drunk let out a stream of unimaginative expletives under his breath, but he staggered off, and the incident was over.

In a moment, the golden woman was once more as unperturbed as the Buddha. She glided with her cheesecake to a nearby table and seductively parted her shimmering lips.

Q was mesmerized by her compelling gaze, her silky movements, her perfect composure. His pulse pounded in his forehead, and he was painfully conscious of every contorted feature in his hideous face, yet she didn’t turn away in disgust. He knew it was irrational, but he was convinced that if he quit staring for an instant, the vision would disappear again.

Murph’s place suddenly felt overheated. Q imagined her flawless cheek, fresh under his fingertips. A bead of sweat rolled down his neck. Her fork glittered, as did the fiery opal on her right hand, her incandescent hair, her mahogany eyes.

He tossed down his drink. It tasted strange. Cream soda. Her drink.

He couldn’t suppress a sheepish half-smile. He felt the heat rising to his face. She’d think he was a fool.

She opened her mouth as if about to speak.

Then she reached for her purse.

Q looked away. He couldn’t force himself to look at her again, not even when she paused as she squeezed past him. He pulled his feet under his chair, hunched into