Second Chance Romance

Chapter 4

FOUR

When I pivot, Aiden’s father is standing there in a doorway, one shoulder resting against the frame. He’s wearing an untucked white linen shirt and faded blue jeans. His feet are bare, one crossed in front of the other, and his hands are stuffed in his pockets. Not bald, bespectacled Bob with the less than desirable facial structure. Far from it. This man is every bit the older version of his son – the same lean build, only with the slight fleshing out that comes with age, the same thick hair, his a little fairer and looking like it hasn’t seen a comb in days.

He’s attractive. Despite my new determination to loathe anyone with a penis, I register it like a hard clutch in my lower abdomen.

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Right.’

Green eyes unhurriedly appraise me from top to toe in a way that straddles the propriety line and does something to my central nervous system in the process. ‘I got it from a cool store in Venice Beach called House of Spoils,’ he says.

‘Did you?’ For a moment I forget what we’re even talking about.

He smiles. I think that’s what it is. There’s a small sardonic twitch of his lips. I’m trying to drum up something to add about the print, but the longer I don’t, the more conspicuous the silence becomes. He doesn’t exactly try to break it either. We are held there, the ocean crashing in the distance like a third pulse. And then Aiden says, ‘Hey Dad.’

Finally, he moves. ‘I’m Frank,’ he says, on passing, as he heads to the kitchen, like he’s grudgingly taking part in a roll call. No offer of a handshake.

‘Dad,’ Aiden says, like it’s a huge thing. ‘This is Harriet…’

I watch him glance at my daughter with the same cool indifference. ‘Yes, Harriet. Hello.’

Harriet and I send one another a look. Hmm…! Not exactly the welcome of the century. But before she can add anything, Frank says, ‘We need to get this food out. Don’t want cold eggs.’ He roots through random boxes, pulls out a doughnut, stuffs at least half of it into his mouth.

‘I’m Moira, by the way,’ I say. You know, just in case you were about to ask.

‘Yeah, I know,’ he answers with his mouth full, demolishing the doughnut in two seconds flat. ‘Great to meet you, Moira,’ he says, like he couldn’t give two flying shits. He rustles around in the other boxes, unearths a strip of bacon and snaps a chunk off between his teeth.

I stare at the denim puddled about his ankles, the tanned feet and the white between his skinny toes, and I have this overpowering desire to stand on them and make him howl.

We eat at the L-shaped breakfast bar, so that we can easily look at one another for the scintillating conversation that we don’t have. He has ordered a ridiculous amount of food: pancakes, Bennys, French toast, breakfast burritos, avocado toast, sides of everything. Over-the-top extravagance, like one of those scenes straight out of a movie where annoying rich people order everything off the menu just because they can. Thankfully, Harriet and Aiden keep the conversation flying. Aiden speaks of ‘us’ as though they’ve known one another for way longer than the average gap between my menstrual periods. Occasionally I see Frank’s big, tanned hand reach out and grab something from a plate. I even hear him stifle a belch.

‘So, I understand you’re a writer, Frank.’ I find it almost excruciating to make the first move, but somebody has to.

The hand going out for a muffin stops for a moment. ‘Do you?’ he says.

‘Dad’s a low-key guy,’ Aiden says. ‘He doesn’t like to talk about his success. Do you, Dad?’

Frank shrugs like none of this is worthy of a full sentence.

Low-key might be one word. I have some others.

‘Have you written anything I might have read?’ I reach for a muffin too, just to fake the illusion of ‘I cope with anti-social bastards like you every day and I am chill about it’, but I note the slight tremble of my hand.

‘Do you read?’ He glances my way, and I’m sure that was a smirk.

I stare at the side of his head, fix on the unfortunately pendulous earlobe. ‘Hang on… are you asking if I’m illiterate?’

Aiden hoots a laugh but then looks like he maybe shouldn’t have, right as Harriet says, ‘Mum!’

‘Not everyone reads books,’ Frank the wanker says as he proceeds to pick blueberries out of a muffin and pile them on the side of his plate, so I’m left staring at a small but rather gross collection of manhandled fruit covered in sticky cake fuzz. ‘And even if you do, I don’t know you, so how would I know what you might have read?’

I’m about to say Wow, you just analysed the bejesus out of that one; must have used up all your brain cells, when Aiden says, ‘Harriet tells me you work in mental health.’

I refocus away from the annoying earlobe. ‘I was an occupational therapist at a London teaching hospital, yes.’ I respond in a tone that says, not that your dad would care, because perhaps that ’ s just a bit too much real world for him .

Aiden says, ‘Was?’

I don’t feel like getting into how, a month before we came to America, I had left my job because I’d felt unfulfilled for a long time, but mainly because I’d been passed over for a big promotion that should have been in the bag. I was feeling extremely bitter and sorry for myself, and Rupert said, ‘Look, we have enough savings. Leave. Work out what you really want to do, what’ll inspire you. Maybe find something among people who will really appreciate you and recognise your tremendous abilities. Instead of a place that gives a job you’d worked hard for to someone half your age who happens to have a PhD in I Have No Idea How to Function in The Working World. I Just Stayed in School Until I Started Sprouting Grey Pubes…’

Rupert, who loves hanging on to money, was very supportive about me giving up a good salary. I thought it was odd at the time. Now I’m thinking… Guilt?

‘Actually, I took a sort of… sabbatical… so I could come here to help Harriet settle into university,’ I say. I always knew that word would come in handy one day.

‘Ah. Cool,’ Aiden says, a little stiffly, and I wonder what he knows about our family, what Harriet has told him, and I hope not that. Surely she wouldn’t have aired our family’s dirty laundry to a virtual stranger.

‘Are you missing England?’ Aiden asks now. ‘Or have the palm trees and endless sunshine convinced you there’s a better way of living?’ It’s a benign question but someone might as well be hammering a stake between my shoulder blades.

‘Hmm…’ I try to take a discreet breath. ‘Believe it or not, I’m actually one of those rare people who doesn’t mind the rain. And we do get sunny days in England, you know. Just not all that many of them.’ I don’t add that the weather, as it turned out, was the least of my problems. But as Gandhi and my therapist friend, Nat, said, nobody can destroy me without my permission.

Aiden smiles. ‘I’d love to visit one day.’

I’m hoping we’re done now when he adds, ‘But you like it here? You must, I guess, given you’ve stayed on?’

My throat has closed. I have a hard time swallowing the bit of pineapple I just put in my mouth, so I take a drink of water. But when I speak, there’s an embarrassing gurgle in the back of my throat that I can’t seem to clear. ‘LA has been a little different for me to get used to, I admit. But that might be less to do with the place and more to do with…’

My F’d up life?

‘…other influences,’ I add, with a croak.

I am aware that Frank suddenly turns his big ear in the direction of this comment – just a fraction.

‘But I like it because I’m near Harriet, obviously. And I have found some things to love about Santa Monica.’ I shrug a little self-consciously. ‘Beach walks, cycling the boardwalk, sunsets. Americans are very friendly.’ All except one. ‘Besides, you definitely feel more cheerful when the sun shines, I will give you that.’ I am hot around the back of my neck. Please, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, let this be the end of the interrogation!

‘So do you think you’ll stay on until Harriet’s semester is finished?’ Aiden asks.

I unstick my lips and let out another sly breath, only I don’t think it’s that sly because I happen to catch Frank observing me with a certain lazy intrigue. ‘You know, right now I’m just trying to get used to the fact that I don’t really know what I’m going to do.’ I try to smile it off, but it comes out a little quick and defensive. ‘I’m just trying to go with… the flow.’ I sound like I can’t spell flow, much less go with it.

‘Cool,’ he says, again.

I’m relieved that’s over. But then Harriet says, ‘Mum’s got a lot of thinking to do. Some tough decisions to make.’

The ear turns towards me again.

‘Do I?’ I send her the stink-eye.

‘She’s a little cynical about love and relationships right now, and for good reason.’ She looks coy for a moment. The air becomes leaden, much like my veins. ‘But she forgets that she was actually around our age when she made an enormous decision with her life for a man.’

‘Sounds like it might have been the wrong decision though,’ Frank finally opens his mouth.

I glance at him, but he’s focused on what’s on his plate. ‘Well,’ I reply, a little twitchy now that we seem to be tiptoeing around this topic of life-changing commitments, ‘firstly, I’m not exactly sure I did anything for a man . That’s a little too Tammy Wynette for my taste.’ I pick up the muffin again and start pulling the blueberries out, too, until I realise I’m mimicking him, so I put it down. ‘What happened was, I made a choice with my life, and no matter what results from the choices we make…’ I look at Frank again, who is watching me like he’s either going to roll his eyes or burst out laughing. ‘I really don’t believe in wrong decisions, as you put it, Frank.’

I see the hint of a smirk again. It makes me look away, down to my fingers and the purplish stain on the pads. ‘Besides,’ I try to say it breezily, ‘if I’d never taken this path there would be no Harriet.’

Aiden says a chirpy, ‘And we wouldn’t want that! A world without Harriet? Oh man! What a loss that would be.’ He reaches for her hand again. Not a conscious gesture of show, just an instinctive one. She gives him such an adoring little smile. I stare at them, at the hands, then I look at Frank who is noting me observe these details rather closely. In fact, so closely that I feel like some sort of curtain I was hiding behind just fell away, and I’m sitting here wearing no clothes.

A silence descends. Then Harriet says, ‘Speaking of reading… Mum developed a very successful bibliotherapy group in the psychiatric wing of her hospital, didn’t you, Mum? Because books can provide therapy to people with depression and other mental health disorders.’ She addresses it mainly to Frank, who now has that nonplussed look of a four-month-old. ‘Mum, you can tell it best.’

I love her for trying to big me up, and for her valiant attempt to compensate for the shitty manners of her boyfriend’s father, but I find myself saying, ‘Must I?’ Now that I’ve picked all the blueberries out of the muffin, I’ve half a mind to put them back.

Aiden says, ‘Please, Mrs Fitzgerald, we’d love to hear.’

I try to keep the sigh out of my voice and insist he calls me Moira. ‘It was a programme that harnesses storytelling and reading as a support therapy for anyone with mild to moderate symptoms of several mood conditions.’ I address a stack of pancakes, because even they probably have more interest in me than Aiden’s father. ‘And I didn’t develop it myself; I was part of a very dedicated team.’ Christ. I’m giving my Oscars acceptance speech now.

Frank reaches for his phone, idly scans it, like he’s making a show of not listening.

Aiden says, ‘That’s very cool, actually. A labour of love for an amazing cause.’

‘It always sounds way more boring when I try to explain it.’

‘You could never sound boring with that great English accent,’ Aiden says, then adds, ‘Eh, Dad?’

Frank, the scintillating conversationalist, replies, ‘That’s giving accents a little too much credit.’ And then he stands. ‘Wanna sit outside? It’s feeling a little tight in here.’ He heads onto the patio, coffee mug in hand. I watch him from behind. His broad shoulders and hair that could use a date with a pair of shears. The way he drags his bare feet – slap, slap, slap. The way arrogant people walk around their magnificent property when you’re a guest who has outstayed their welcome. If you were ever welcome in the first place.

Tight? I want to say. Like your bottom, perhaps?

‘Can you tell me where the toilet is, please?’ I say to Aiden. It comes out sounding like a plea. ‘I assume I don’t have to take the lift or catch a cab.’

Aiden laughs but I see Frank’s ear turn towards the jibe. ‘You can walk, yeah,’ Aiden says. ‘There’s about ten of them on this level so you can’t go wrong.’

‘Ten’s tremendous,’ I tell him. ‘But one tends to suffice.’

As I walk out, I feel a pair of eyes scorching my back.

Finding the toilet is no easy task. I wander down a long, whitewashed hallway that has huge, white barn doors leading to room after room. Every time I open a door – nope, no toilet there either. There are bedrooms, all with windows that give onto the ocean, all sparsely furnished with queen-sized beds, white bedding, a chest, a comfy chair, and a wall-mounted TV. Rooms that look like they’re waiting for the family that never arrived. There’s a small corner one with big windows and no furniture except for a stool and a telescope. I stare at this for a while. Must be the room where Frank goes to masturbate because he has a home this amazing, and he gets to stare at Venus, Saturn and Mars. Then I’m into another slightly larger, windowless one that has an enormous sectional sofa upholstered in lumberjack red and white checks, and a giant red and white wall light like a stick of candy cane; the media room, judging by the enormous TV, and the ceiling-to-floor stack of CDs. There’s a leather ottoman with a remote control on it, and an orange wooden chair that seems to have white paint splotches all over it – the kind you might find in a charity shop, that you intend to refinish, but is probably designer and cost thousands. But the best part is the old-fashioned record player and the utterly astonishing collection of vinyl! There must be over a thousand records here. And on the only wall that isn’t taken up by records and CDs, there’s a giant poster of Bob Seger with a guitar slung over his shoulder, as he stands on train tracks and smokes a cigarette. I’m like a kid in a candy store. I can already see so many of the albums and artists are of my generation. I’m dying to reach out and pluck one from its sleeve, and place it on the turntable, like I might have done when I was fourteen. But I stop myself by remembering I’m actually trespassing, and, who knows, there might even be hidden cameras. Just in case there are, I raise my middle finger to the ceiling. Bob Seger’s eyes seem to be looking right at me and smiling through the haze of his cigarette.

Then I am into another room. This one all windows and all view, with a walk-out deck. His room, obviously, judging by the unmade, four-poster California king. Clearly, he sleeps alone, because two pillows are stacked in the centre, bearing the impression of only one head. Opposite the bed, a sofa and armchair sporting blue and white lumberjack checks are arranged around a wood-burning fire, beside which is another telescope with a guy’s cardigan hung off it. My eye disappears down a short hallway off the bedroom, at the end of which I spot an inviting giant soaker bath, and… well, hello!

A toilet.

I go in there and stare at my flushed face in the mirror. My dark, ash-brown hair that I colour myself, but recently had chopped, at vast expense, into a trendy ‘undone’ bob, to mark the new me. Slightly longer than chin-length. Flat-ironed into beach waves, though I can never master those, and end up with these weird iron marks that never come out. My red lipstick that’s worn off except for an unattractive line along my top lip. My neck; not quite as firm any more. Green eyes gazing back at me; a few deep crow’s feet that I swear Rupert recently put there.

While I’m sitting there peeing and staring at a couple of fluffy white towels left strewn on the floor, and a beautiful framed black and white close-up of Marilyn Monroe as she coyly glances back over her shoulder, I take out my phone, punch Frank Lewis writer into Google. The first thing that pops up is a Wikipedia page: Frank Lewis, American Author. And a string of pictures from an era ago. Frank, the young man. Handsome, I grudgingly admit. One of him leaning towards a microphone, lips parted, as though the photographer caught him in the act of speaking. A full-length one of him sitting artfully on what looks like a wooden box in a bare room. A few of him in various stages of contemplation – touching his chin or pressing an index finger to his lips. Then one where he’s wearing a striped scarf, with his hair flying away, against a backdrop of what looks to be Central Park. He seems very happy in this one, like the guy who may have nothing, or everything, but he has all that he needs.

And a description:

Frank Lewis is an American author and screenwriter best known for writing the bestselling novel Love for Lara, and the hit motion picture of the same name.

What?

I think I must say it out loud.

I read it again. Nope. It’s still there. If I wasn’t sitting, I’d fall. Love for Lara ? The most iconic love story of all time? The gut-wrenching tale of a WASPy trust-fund kid, and a poor, Jewish American drama student who marry despite his father’s disapproval, and then she dies? The movie that cemented whatever hopelessly romantic tendencies I had in me for a lifetime? The movie that actually changed me? I can still see me and my friends queuing in a huge line outside the cinema, still taste that moment of walking out, ninety minutes later, feeling… How can I put it? Gutted, but oddly uplifted. I didn’t know men could love that way, could show their vulnerable side and their feelings like that. I didn’t know they even had feelings and vulnerable sides. As I sit here with my knickers around my ankles it all comes rushing back. The enigmatic look on his face when he first walked past a room and heard her rehearsing her lines as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire . The soundtrack that just punched you in the solar plexus. And that ending. Who could ever forget the most heart-breaking final scene in movie history? This can’t be real.

The barefoot, burping, bad-mannered person whose toilet I’m sitting on? He wrote Love for Lara ?

I scan the rest of the Wikipedia entry. It had been a novel first; I had no idea. It says he wrote it when he was twenty-three. It spent forty-five weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, was translated into twenty-five languages, and sold over thirty million copies. And he didn’t just write this one, either. There are four others, and a link to a New York Times article entitled: ‘Junior teacher pens the greatest romance of our time’ .

Good heavens! I break off a piece of toilet paper and blow my nose so loudly I can probably be heard across the highway.

There are lots of search results for his books: interviews in major newspapers and magazines, reviews, blog posts, banners of his book cover, posters of the movie, pictures of the cast – two of the biggest stars of the day, possibly the world’s most famous ‘on screen’ love match – lines of dialogue that were so timeless and true. I can’t look away. In fact, I’m feeling quite comfortable; there’s very little reason to leave.

They are still on the patio when I eventually go back out. As I walk over to join them, a very strange thing happens to my legs as I stare at the back of Frank Lewis’s head. Since I’ve been away it seems like he’s undergone a personality transplant because Harriet is having a good laugh at something he’s just said. And then she sees me approach. ‘Mum!’ Frank slightly turns his head in my direction, which makes my legs wobble all the more.

Harriet says, ‘I was just telling Aiden and his dad that crazy story about how when we landed in LA and walked out of the airport, some guy took your photo because he thought you were famous. And then everybody was hanging around taking your picture and still to this day we have no idea who everybody thought you were!’ She chuckles. I’d rather not remember that day for reasons that have nothing to do with mistaken identity, so I can barely crack a smile. Aiden starts speculating about who I look like, naming some cute young actresses, which is charming, bordering on irritating.

‘How lovely,’ I say. I walk over to the firepit and stand there, awkwardly, like I’ve taken root. Frank’s head is down again, his attention back on his phone. I perch on the end of the seat and there’s a moment where I’m dying to say something about the film, about him . But then he looks up like he’s only just noting my arrival and says, ‘We thought you died in there. Hope it’s nothing you ate.’

The tiny flicker of whatever embarrassing raptures were about to burst forth from my lips is abruptly extinguished. I could not be more let down. He wrote Love for Lara for God’s sake; he owes it to womenkind to sit right up there on his giant pedestal until someone commands, ‘At ease.’

‘Harriet,’ I say, trying to keep the completely unwarranted, abject disappointment out of my tone. ‘This has been lovely, but I think it’s time to leave.’

‘Leave?’ She sends me the death stare.

‘We have places to go, and people to see.’

‘Well, we’re very sorry you have to go so soon.’ Aiden springs to his feet a little too keenly, so Harriet reluctantly follows suit. We’re all standing now, except for Frank who continues to be fascinated by his phone. I stare down at the top of his head, almost wishing I’d never read what I just read. There’s some discussion between Harriet and Aiden about her staying or coming with me, and them possibly getting together later to play tennis. It seems to go on forever and I continue to stand there, so invisible that I almost don’t need to squirm.

Eventually, I walk back into the house. The instant I do, Frank gets up and follows; I hear the characteristic slap of his feet. To think he had guests arriving and he couldn’t even put on a pair of slippers. The talentless philistine! When I reach the breakfast bar that looks like forty farm animals ate at it, I reluctantly turn because I’m going to have to say goodbye to him, so best just get it over with. We come face to face. He neither speaks nor emotes, he just looks at me.

‘Would you get me my jacket please?’ I ask. I can hardly bring myself to maintain eye contact.

‘Did you bring one?’ His green eyes cast around my face.

‘Hmm. Actually… No.’

There’s a twitch of his lips which makes me focus a second longer than I want to on his mouth, which is quite a nice mouth, one your eyes would have a hard time not wandering to – if it belonged on a nicer person. Then he says, ‘Well, this was a real blast. We must do it again some time.’

It feels like the most attention he’s paid me in two hours. I search for an insulting comeback, but none immediately springs to mind.

‘Enjoy your leftovers,’ I say.

He probably has fallen arches and hard, leathery calluses.

Screw him.