Trish’s silence on the other end of the telephone punctuated her adamant disagreement with that statement, but she sensed it was useless to argue. “I’ll see you tomorrow evening,” she said.
Chapter 8
* * *
The telephone calls had exhausted Leigh, but they had also kept her mind occupied. However, when she turned off the lights and closed her eyes, her imagination took over, tormenting her with the horrors that might have befallen Logan. She saw him tied up in a chair being tortured by some demented stalker. . . . She saw him frozen to death in his car . . . his lips blue, eyes glazed and staring.
Unable to endure the agony of those images, Leigh tried to draw strength and hope from memories of the past. She remembered their simple wedding in front of a bored justice of the peace. Leigh had worn her best dress and a flower in her hair. Logan had stood beside her, managing to look elegant, handsome, and self-assured, despite the fact that he was wearing a threadbare suit and their combined assets amounted to eight hundred dollars.
Leigh’s grandmother hadn’t been able to scrape together the cost of an airline ticket to attend the wedding, and Logan’s mother was so opposed to the marriage that they hadn’t told her about it until the day after. But despite all that—despite their virtual poverty, the absence of friends and family, and the uncertain future ahead of them, they’d been happy and infinitely optimistic that day. They believed in each other. They believed in the power of love. For the next several years, that was all they had—each other and a great deal of love.
Images of Logan flipped through Leigh’s mind like slides in a projector . . . Logan when they met, young, too thin, but dashing, worldly, and wise beyond his years. He’d taken her to the symphony on their first date. She’d never been to the symphony, and during a pause in the music, she’d clapped too soon, thinking the piece was over. The couple in front of them had turned and given her a disdainful look that doubled her mortification, but Logan hadn’t let the incident pass. At intermission, he leaned forward and spoke to the older couple. In that polished, disarming way of his, he said congenially, “Isn’t it wonderful when we’re first introduced to something we love? Remember how good that felt?”
The couple turned in their seats, and their frowns became smiles, which they directed at Leigh. “I didn’t like the symphony at first,” the man confided to her. “My parents had season tickets and they dragged me along. It took quite a while to grow on me.” The couple spent intermission with Leigh and Logan and insisted on buying them a glass of champagne to celebrate Leigh’s first symphony.
Leigh soon discovered that Logan had a particular way of dealing with snobby, standoffish, critical people, a way that disarmed them and converted them into friends and admirers. Logan’s mother often said that “there is no substitute for good breeding,” and Logan had it in abundance—a natural, unaffected kind of good breeding.
For their second date, Logan suggested Leigh choose how they spend the evening. She decided on a little known off-Broadway play by a new young playwright named Jason Solomon. Logan closed his eyes and dozed off during the third act.
Because Leigh was a drama student at New York University, she’d been able to get backstage passes. “What did you think of the play?” Jason Solomon asked them when Leigh finished the introductions.
“I loved it,” Leigh said, partly out of courtesy and partly out of her all-encompassing love of everything related to the theater. In truth, she thought most of the writing was excellent, but the acting was only fair, and the lighting and direction were poor.
Satisfied, Jason looked to Logan for more praise. “What did you think of it?”
“I don’t know much about theater,” Logan replied. “Leigh is the expert on that. She’s the leading drama student at NYU. If my mother had been here tonight, you could have asked her opinion. It would be more meaningful than mine.”
Instantly insulted by Logan’s lack of enthusiasm, Jason lifted his chin and eyed Logan scornfully down the length of his nose. “And you think your mother’s opinion would carry weight because she’s—what? A successful playwright? A theater critic?”
“No, because among her circle of friends there are several influential patrons of the arts.”
Leigh didn’t realize it at the time, but Logan was dangling the slim possibility of a financial backer under Jason’s nose. All Leigh knew was that the playwright became slightly ingratiating, but was still resentful. “Bring your mother to my play,” he said. “Let me know when you’re planning to come, and I’ll see that you have front row tickets.”
As they left, Leigh said, “Do you think your mother would enjoy his play?”
Grinning, Logan put his arm around her shoulders. It was the first time he had touched her in a personal way. “I don’t think my mother would set foot in this theater unless the city of New York was on fire and this was the only fireproof building.”
“Then why did you let Jason Solomon think she might?”
“Because you’re a gifted actress and he’s a playwright who is badly in need of people who can actually act. I thought you might want to drop in here next week, if the play doesn’t close before then, and volunteer your services.”
Warmed by his praise and distracted by his touch, Leigh nevertheless felt compelled to point out the truth: “You have no way of knowing whether I can actually act.”
“Yes, I do. Your roommate told me you’re ‘gifted.’ In fact, she said you’re some kind of prodigy and you’re the envy of the entire drama school.”
“Even if all of that were true—which it isn’t—Jason Solomon wouldn’t hire me. I don’t have any professional credentials.”
Logan chuckled. “From the looks of this place and the quality of the acting, he can’t afford to hire anybody with professional credentials. And, I said ‘volunteer’ your services—free of charge. After that, you’ll have credentials.”
It wasn’t that easy to break into the business; it didn’t work that way; but Leigh was already falling in love with Logan Manning, and so she didn’t want to debate with him about anything that night.
Outside the theater, he hailed a taxi, and when the driver was absorbed with midtown traffic, Logan put his arm around her shoulders again, drew her close, and kissed her for the first time. It was an amazing kiss, filled with all the deep infatuation Leigh was feeling herself, an expert kiss that left her feeling not only dazed and overheated, but also uneasily aware that in this, as in most everything else, Logan Manning was a lot more experienced and worldly than she was.
He walked her to the dingy apartment building on Great Jones Street, where she shared a one-bedroom apartment on the fifth floor. Outside her apartment, he kissed her again, longer and more thoroughly this time. By the time he let her go, Leigh felt so euphoric that she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep for hours. She waited just inside her apartment, listening to him bounding down the flights of stairs to the street level; then she opened the door and dreamily walked down the same stairs he’d descended.
Logan hadn’t taken her to get anything to eat after the play, which was an omission she would wonder about later, but at that moment all she knew for certain was that she was deliriously happy and ravenously hungry. The grocery market on the corner was only a few doors away, and it was open all night, so Leigh went there.
Angelini’s Market was narrow, but very deep, with creaking linoleum floors, terrible lighting, and the pervasive smell of kosher pickles and corned beef emanating from a deli counter that occupied the entire left wall. The right wall was crammed with shelves of canned and boxed goods from floor to ceiling. Wooden crates of fresh produce and cases of soft drinks were stacked in the center, leaving only a narrow aisle on either side to reach the refrigerators and freezers at the rear of the store. Despite the market’s unprepossessing appearance, the Italian pastas and meats in the deli section were wonderful and so were the small homemade frozen pizzas.
Leigh took the last shrimp pizza from the freezer a
nd put it into the store’s microwave; then she went to the crates of produce, looking for pears.
“Did you find your shrimp pizza?” Mrs. Angelini called from behind the cash register at the deli counter.
“Yes, I’m heating some of it right now. I got the last one in the freezer,” Leigh said as she located a wooden box of pears. “I always get the last one—I guess I’m just lucky,” she added, but she was thinking of Logan, not pizza.
“Not so lucky,” Mrs. Angelini replied. “I only make one shrimp pizza at a time. I make them for you. You’re the only one who asks for them.”
Leigh looked up, a pear in each hand. “You do? That’s very nice of you, Mrs. Angelini.”