She made a face. “Yuck, no. Something much tastier. You mentioned steak and asparagus and potatoes, but you didn’t promise dessert.” She fished a low, wide box out of the other bag. The picture showed a golden brown fruit pie, which the label proclaimed as “Razzleberry.”
“What kind of berry’s a razzleberry?” I asked. “Never heard of it.”
“Them,” she said. “Two kinds, raspberry and blackberry. Good on their own, fabulous together. The perfect couple, you might say. Much like us.” She faced me dead-on and raised her left eyebrow by what seemed to be an inch, while the right remained perfectly stationary.
I laughed. “How’d you do that?”
“What, this?” She did it again, this time with her right eyebrow.
“Yeah. That’s amazing. How’d you learn to do that?”
“Diligent practice. While the other med students were dissecting cadavers, I was perfecting facial gymnastics in the mirror. Honing indispensable skills like this.” One side of her mouth suddenly turned upward in a big smile; the other side drooped in an exaggerated, clownlike frown; it was as if invisible hands were tugging in opposite directions on either side of her face. I shook my head in astonishment. “It’s just muscle isolation,” she said. “Like belly-dancing, only higher-brow.” She did the eyebrow again to underscore the pun.
I tried to duplicate the maneuver. I felt my whole face contort with the effort. She grimaced in mock horror. I took another run at it; this time, I felt my scalp shifting and my ears twitching. “Ow. I think I just pulled a muscle I didn’t know I had.”
She shook her head and patted my arm. “There, there. We all have our special talents. I’m sure you’ll discover yours one of these days.”
“Hmph,” I said. “Now you’re patronizing me.”
“Everybody needs a patron,” she said.
I opened the cabinet and pulled out a tall glass, then filled it with ice cubes from the freezer and handed it to her. She set it on the counter and half filled it with vodka, which she topped off with cranberry juice.
“You don’t need to measure?”
“It’s not chemistry lab,” she said. “Plenty of margin for error.” She took a long pull and smiled happily. “Ah, just what the doctor ordered. You sure I can’t corrupt you?”
“Pretty sure,” I said. “I can barely keep up with you sober. I wouldn’t have a prayer if I were impaired.”
“You would if I were more impaired,” she said, taking another swig.
I took this as a sign that it was time to put the steaks on. I opened the fridge, took out the steaks, and unwrapped the white butcher paper. They were big, thick filets, nearly as tall as they were wide, wrapped in bacon. I’d picked them up at the Fresh Market, the grocery store on the edge of Sequoyah Hills. Sequoyah is Knoxville’s ritziest neighborhood, unless you count some of the suburbs to the west, in Farragut. Normally I shopped at Kroger-not the Fellini Kroger, but a far closer and far tamer one-but the Fresh Market’s meat was the best in town. It was actually worth paying Sequoyah Hills prices for.
My house was in Sequoyah Hills, but it was not of Sequoyah Hills, to borrow a prepositional distinction Jesus once made to his followers about their relationship to the world. I had an archetypally common ranch house-an extra-ordinary house, I sometimes called it-which shared a shady circle with a half dozen other ranchers. The only remarkable thing about them was the way they were surrounded by hundreds of mansions. Whenever things got dangerously ostentatious in the neighborhood-a fancy symphony party or political fund-raiser at the Versailles-like palace around the corner, attended by glittering people in formal wear-it comforted me to imagine our modest homes as pioneer wagons, circled for self-protection. If our protective circle were ever breached, it probably wouldn’t take long before every ranch house on the street got torn down and replaced with some stucco-slathered behemoth three or four times as big, crowding its property lines and its equally steroidal neighbors. Not that I was bitter or anything.
Plopping the steaks on a plate, I sprinkled both sides with salt and pepper, rubbing the seasonings in, then dashed some Worcestershire sauce on top to add a little zing.
Jess nodded approvingly. “You gonna put some sizzle in that steak?”
“Gonna try.”
“How you cooking them?”
“I’m a guy; on the grill, of course.”
“Gas or charcoal?”
“Be a waste of a good steak to cook it over gas,” I said.
“Indeed,” she said. “Gas is great for a crematorium, but a steak just cries out for the extra flavor of those charcoal carcinogens.”
“You do have an eye for the tarnished lining. Anybody ever tell you that?”
She looked down at her drink. “Ouch. Actually, I’ve been told that’s one of my special talents,” she said. She looked up again, and I could see hurt in her eyes.
“I was just joking,” I said. “Who said it that wasn’t joking? And why does it make you look so sad all of a sudden?”
“My ex-husband. My most recent ex-husband, to be clinically precise.”
“You introduced me to a lawyer husband a couple years ago; that the one?” She nodded. “How many other exes you got scattered around?”
“Just one other. If you’re only counting husbands.”
“And if I’m counting other significant others?”
She rolled her eyes. “It’d take me some thinking to tally them up. Four or five semiserious guys, and one experimental woman.”
The world had changed in the several de cades since I’d last dated, I decided. “A few months back, you told me you were happily lesbian. Was that the experiment?”
She laughed. “Naw, that was just to fend you off in case you were harboring any designs on me. You seemed so bogged down in your grief over Kathleen still, I knew you weren’t ready for anybody yet. Or maybe I just didn’t want to get tangled up in all that sadness.”
“And now?”
“Now you seem over it, or at least through the worst of it. Not exactly giddy with joie de vivre yet, but then again, that’d be a stretch for a guy in your line of work. You seem…solid now.”
“Did I seem solid a few months ago, when we had that near miss with a dinner date?”
“Solid enough,” she said, “at the center. A little gooey around the edges, maybe, but who isn’t sometimes?” As she said it, she cocked her head and shrugged slightly, and smiled not so slightly. I could have sworn I felt myself getting a little gooey around the edges but stirringly solid at my center. I took a step toward her and reached up a hand to touch her cheek. When I did, she nodded her head up and down, rubbing against my hand. I closed my eyes to concentrate on the feel of her skin. “So you didn’t mind that I invited myself to dinner to night?” My eyes still closed, I shook my head. “So why didn’t you ask me out again after I had to skip out all those months ago?”
The truth was, I’d gotten scared, but I wanted to appear more suave than that. “I was playing hard to get,” I said. As I said it, I heard my voice crack like that of a boy just hitting puberty. So much for suave. I laughed. “I’ve heard nothing interests a woman more than acting indifferent.”
I felt a palm smack my face, but it was a playful smack. I opened my eyes and saw Jess shaking her head, but she was grinning as she did it. “You are such a lying piece of shit,” she said. “You are a seriously bad liar. But a seriously good man.”
She moved closer to me and turned her face to mine. Maybe some things in the world hadn’t changed all that much, because I had no trouble interpreting an invitation to kiss her. With her boots on, her mouth was nearly at the level of mine. Just enough lower that it felt good to reach a hand around to the back of her neck, threading my fingers through her thick auburn hair.