An excerpt from Drawing Breath
When Daniel walked into the restaurant, he almost didn’t recognize Bess, sitting alone in a back booth. She’d done something extreme to her hair, very recently, he gathered, from the way she kept touching it. What last week was brown and salted with gray, friendly and comfortable, was now copper like a new penny. Instead of her usual severe bun, it was styled into a pre-Raphaelite cloud around her head, emphasizing a pretty, pointed chin and a low-cut blouse.
Something in Daniel’s gut told him to turn around and run.
He’d done it all wrong, as usual. The community center’s rules were more casual than other educational institutions, but they preferred that instructors not date students. Innocent fraternization, say, meeting for a cup of coffee here and there, seemed to pose no problem.
After meeting for cup of coffee here and there, Daniel’s motives were no longer innocent—it had been a long time since a woman had shown interest beyond his skill with a paintbrush—but he was starting to have reservations.
The wedding ring, for one. He hadn’t slept with enough married women to call it a pattern—hell, the average high school kid got more action than he did, married or otherwise—but the last two had belonged to other men, and that troubled him. Beyond the commandments he’d been breaking, he worried about the precedent. That since he had no business talking about a happily ever after with anyone, he was now consciously selecting women who had no happily ever after to give.
This can’t happen again, he thought.
Bess hadn’t seen him yet. It wasn’t too late to leave. The next time she came to the community center, he would apologize. Car trouble. Just couldn’t start it until a few minutes ago. The old rust bucket failed him about every other day anyway. Might as well use it to save everyone a lot of trouble.
But then she turned. Too late— she spied him coming her way and nibbled on the edge of a smile.
He swallowed hard, and slid into the booth. Quickly he conjugated what he was supposed to say. “Don’t tell me. You’ve lost weight, right?” He’d meant it to be funny, an icebreaker to calm his own nerves. Then he realized she might take it as an insult. “Not that you needed to, of course…”
She gave him a patient smile. “Try again.”
“It looks nice,” he said. No. It didn’t look “nice.” The new color electrified the flecks of green in her cat-like eyes and gave her a wildness of an exotic animal. Hair like that should not be allowed out in public without a leash. Hair like that should be grasped in handfuls as it trolled down a man’s bare chest. But you couldn’t say that to a married woman in the middle of a crowded restaurant.
“I was shooting for glamorous,” she said, pouting. “You know. Rita Hayworth…Nicole Kidman…”
“Oh. Well.” He told himself it was preposterous, the height of arrogance, to think she might have changed her color and style for him. Women got bored with their appearance all the time; the women in his life were always doing things to their hair. With Caitlin, it was a sort of evolutionary imperative that she experiments with her looks. A sixteen-year-old’s right. Denise did it to feel better about herself, and if anything, hoping to get a rise out of Pete, not other men. Plus, Bess was wearing her wedding ring. Would she have done this, or asked to meet him at a crowded restaurant in the mall if her intentions were more ambitious than picking the teacher’s brains outside of class? Or indulging herself in conversation with another adult who didn’t think the point of good art was to match the sofa?
He forced a smile. “Glamorous it is. I’m sure your husband will love it.”
Her smile fell a notch, and then recovered with the arrival of their menus. “Well. We should order. We don’t want to make the teacher late.”
Now that he wasn’t driving Caitlin to the community center, he’d been free to meet Bess before class. “Sorry. My lesson ran over.”
“The girl downstairs?”
“Caitlin, yes.”
“Is she improving?”
He thought about the portrait she’d sketched of Maureen. It showed great promise. Would he have gotten that out of her in a group class? “Hard to say after one. But I think just the idea of private instruction as an alternative is making a difference in her attitude about drawing. Still, I’d like to boost her confidence a little.”
“Poor thing,” Bess said. “She seems so sensitive. It must have been difficult for her to be in our class with all those adults.”
She shook out her napkin and spread it across her lap. A drift of perfume reached his nose. He didn’t remember perfume on her before. His chest tightened, setting off the coughing fit he’d been dreading.
“That doesn’t sound good.” Bess touched his forearm. The muscles flinched and she withdrew. If he had insulted her, she didn’t let it show.
“It’s nothing,” he said, and excused himself to the men’s room so he wouldn’t have to explain his inhaler, and the five different pills he needed to take with dinner. As he stood up, the woman at the next table turned from spoon-feeding her toddler and glared, like he’d come out in public with tuberculosis or the plague. And Denise wonders why I don’t date more.
When he returned, Bess pursed her lips fretfully, and said, “Daniel, you’ve had that cough for weeks. Perhaps it’s time to see a doctor.”
“I said it’s nothing.”
“That’s not ‘nothing.’ I raised two children. I’m sorry to say that sounds like a definite ‘something.’”
He avoided her eyes. He wasn’t ready to tell her about his disease. It wasn’t something easily shoehorned into the conversation. By the way, I have cystic fibrosis, and the way my lung capacity is dropping, I might not make it through next year. “I’ll be fine. I had bronchitis a while back and the cough is just…lingering. You know how that goes.”
Her gaze dropped to her place setting. Daniel watched the flutter of Bess’s soft, manicured fingers as she straightened her silverware.
“Anyway,” he said.
“Anyway.” She cleared her throat. “Yes. We were talking about your neighbor. I’m glad I’m not a teenager anymore. Every new situation was so…so nerve-wracking.”
“I don’t think she was nervous, exactly.” Grateful for a different topic, Daniel spoke with more confidence. “Maybe a little intimidated, because she doesn’t have the drawing experience of some of the other students…”
She smiled as if a decision had been made, and closed her menu. “Well. I’m sure she’ll do fine. I, personally, enjoy the group experience. Getting out, learning from everyone else. I’ve been feeling so…so closed up these days. It’s such a pleasure to come to your class and remember that I have a brain. That I’m not just some mousy drudge who does carpool and puts up dinner.”
“You are definitely not some mousy drudge,” he said, and then regretted it, or at least the enthusiasm in it.
The wattage from her eyes intensified. The skin on the back of Daniel’s neck prickled. “Really? Oh, you have no idea how much that means coming from a man who isn’t my husband.”
Me. She’s talking about me. A man who isn’t her husband. Christ. This is a really bad idea.
