Now I don’t have to worry about her and I can clean up after this little tryst so it won’t be facing me in the morning. Because this IS a tryst from what I can tell, and I DON’T want to be busting in on anything like I did that last time.
In a way it’s better that this tete-a-tete is being held later, because it took Mr. M and I the better part of the morning to find the items that this ‘Sarah’ is coming to pick up. From what little I can tell, ‘Sarah’ was someone near and dear to Mr. M, but something went wrong somewhere and she no longer shares this house with him. Some things make sense to me now, such as the female attire in his closet and the out of character paraphernalia that was scattered around the house, like the Buddha statues and such. They must have belonged to Sarah, because Mr. M hasn’t missed them since I put those things and others in the newly appointed ‘storage’ space.
So perhaps he’s attempting a reconciliation or something of that nature. I don’t know and I don’t ask, but it is in the back of my mind. And having it in mind, I’ve taken a lot of care with the house today. I’ve set the table in the dining room with a cloth and candles and flowers, some of those outrageous birds-of-paradise in splashes of orange and purple. I’ve made sure that the dinner service is spotless, that there are glasses for whatever they’re going to drink. I know that there’s no alcohol involved, which is a pity, this chicken screams for a dry Riesling, but so be it, they can have sparking water or soda, or any number of juices, too.
I’ve set another large vase of flowers in the bedroom, too. You never can tell how these reconciliations will go, and if it doesn’t end up there, well, Mr. M can enjoy the addition to the room.
The chickens are roasting slowly. I’ve got baby vegetables cleaned and ready to sauté, there’s a simple salad of bitter greens with a balsamic and honey dressing, and some deep fried sweet potato ‘chips’, that I made earlier and I can reheat quickly. If Sarah doesn’t like the chicken, she can gorge on the vegetables. Mr. M never specified anything about a dessert, so I’ve got plain strawberries soaked in sugar and a touch of lemon juice. They’re first of the season berries, and a little tart on their own, but if they need to tone them down, I have fresh cream to pour over them.
At the moment I have time to breathe. Everything that I can do has been done. Mr. M has been out for the better part of the afternoon, so I’m waiting on him. I’ve eaten my supper hours ago, and I’ve picked on the berries, so I’m content. I take one last look at the dining room, and it reminds me, once again, of the statuary and odd bits I’ve put aside. I wonder if Sarah is expecting to retrieve those items, too.
It’s nothing to take a box from the laundry room that I’ve saved and load it with some of the statues. There are quite a few of them, some of them very heavy. I’m not going to take them out of here, just make it easy to get them if she wants them. There’s a particularly heavy bronze one that takes up a lot of room in the box. It’s not unattractive, and I pick it up and bring it back to the dining room, setting it on the side board so it can overlook the meal. Maybe it will bring them a little luck. I can be superstitious that way.
As I’m placing the statue, I hear the front door.
“I’m runnin’ late,” Mr. M says, walking quickly through the living room. He takes it all in, though, I can see his eyes darting from corner to corner. “Man, you didn’t have to do all this,” he tells me.
“Just maintaining my standards,” I tell him. He nods, but doesn’t look at me.
“I gotta grab a shower, get the door if she comes.” And he’s gone up the stairs and over to his bedroom before I can say anything.
Better that I say nothing. My mental response was, ‘oh, I thought I’d leave her standing outside until you came back’, delivered with just the right amount of ‘you are an idiot’ inflection. Sarcasm. It isn’t pretty.
There’s something about the way Mr. M is treating this evening that I find odd. It’s almost as if he doesn’t want this ‘Sarah’ to be here. Now, considering that there was another woman in the house earlier in the week, I can understand that. Perhaps I’m reading too much into this meeting and Mr. M isn’t looking for a rekindling of whatever romance there was between himself and this ‘Sarah’. Maybe she’s just going to have some dinner with him, take her stuff, and go. Maybe he’s just pulling a ‘for old times sake’ here, and the meal is his way of saying ‘the end’.
I don’t know and I can’t tell. He just seems very edgy. More than usual. I’ve been reading the details in this. Like the way he packed her clothes. He didn’t ball them up and cram them in a bag, he took a rather expensive piece of leather luggage and folded them into it. I was shocked that he knew how to fold something, AND that he did it rather well. He took a lot of care with doing that, making sure he found everything. Then he added a few items that had been at the back of his bathroom under-sink cabinets: perfume, body creams, nail polishes. All of them new, unopened.
So it wasn’t as if he’d taken her things and threw them out. It looked more to me as if she might have made a hasty exit and he kept these things carefully. Closely. Not wanting to let them go.
Perhaps I’m wrong about that, though, because his attitude is one of reluctance. I think that he would much rather not be having supper with this woman. I get none of the feeling from him that I got when that other woman was here. Then he had a kind of school boy shyness about him, as if I’d caught him with his hand in the cookie jar. And I suppose I had, in a manner of thinking, but he wasn’t embarrassed about the woman, he was embarrassed about the situation. This seems different.
I check the chickens. They’re almost done. They can sit in the oven now, at a low heat, until I serve them.
For once, I hear his feet on the steps, because he’s coming down the stairs rather quickly. And then I hear the door. Not the bell, I hear a key in the lock, and the door opening. After that I hear a murmured voice, and then I hear nothing at all.
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I’m not impressed. Not one little bit.
From the moment this woman, this 'Sarah', has set foot in the house, the tension level has gone through the roof. Not that it matters to me, I’m just here to do my job, to cook the food and serve it, and to clean up afterwards. It’s coming from Mr. M.
He’s as dressed as I’ve ever seen him, in a sort of California chic I’ve begun to notice. Loose, airy shirt over baggy trousers and sandals. He’s got a necklace on that I wouldn’t mind owning myself, a band of moonstones on a string with a heavy, drop pendant of the same stones, topped with something purplish. His outfit is a lot more relaxed than he is. His fingers are making knots of his shirttails and he’s stuttering when he speaks.
I’m trying very hard not to listen, but it’s hard.
I was introduced and had to shake this 'Sarah’s' hand. Not a pleasant experience. It isn’t because she has sweaty palms, or a limp handshake, or anything like that, it’s what’s emanating from her eyes when she does it. Coolness, and a sense of ‘self’, of who she is. She has an irritating cock to her head, as if it’s attached on a tilt, and a smile that looks as fake as I think it is and a voice that oozes Hollywood sweetness. Saccharine. I get no warmth from her, in fact I feel that my presence offends her in some way. She asks me for a glass of juice and I’m more than happy to get it for her because it means I don’t have to stand there and be assessed. I get the juice for her, and a water for Mr. M, and excuse myself to the kitchen.
~~**~~**~~***~~**~~**~~
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“Who’s she?”
Not ‘hello’, not ‘how are you’. ‘Who’s she’.
“Siobhan, the new housekeeper,” I say. I think I said her name right, but I’m not sure.
“Really?”
“Yeah, didn’t Juliette say something?”
“No, she didn’t.” Sarah sits on the sofa, drinking her juice. She looks different. Not as together as she used to look, but that’s probably because she’s been workin’. She’s got a pair of low riders on that I remember well. I bought them for her because I liked the way they tied up the sides, the way I used to be able to take them off her. She’s not wearin’ anything under them, either, I know because I know you CAN’T wear anything under them, they’re too low and too tight. Panty lines, can’t have ‘em. And a G-string would show, I know that too, because sometimes she’d wear one just so it would show. And she has this tiny top on, and her boobs are about bustin’ out of it and I’m thinkin’ that she got herself up in all of this to one, drive me crazy, or two, drive me crazy thinkin’ that she’s wearin’ it to work to drive other guys crazy.
“Do you have my stuff?” she asks.
“Yeah, in that bag by the door. I think I found everything.”
“That’s it?” She frowns and her eyes get small.
“That’s the clothes and the stuff from the bathroom, yeah.”
The frown stays there. Hell, that was all that was left of what she didn’t take. Shi and I went through the closets, I went through the bathroom, and that was all of it. She took everything else. I watch her eyes as they look around the room.
“You changed things around.”
“Yeah, Siobhan did it. Gives the place a little more room.”
“I liked it better the way it was.” It’s not the words, it’s the tone. Sure she liked it better the way it was, it was all the way she wanted it. Her picks. Her stuff. I didn’t care, honestly, at the time I didn’t give a shit, I don’t give a shit that much about furniture and rugs and things like that. Last house, Amanda did that one up while I was on tour. Looked okay. Had everything we needed. I DID get that nice lady to do the murals on the walls, what was her name? Dottie. She did so many rooms in my mother’s house and I thought it looked cool, so she did some in mine. But that was it. The rest of it, what did I care? Same here. Didn’t care. I was just happy to be here with Sarah. And she was happy to be here with me. Now, neither of us are happy, well, I’m not happy. I don’t know about Sarah.
“Everything okay?” I ask her.
“Everything’s great. I’m doing a showcase in a couple of weeks. I think I’m finally getting that deal.”
“Great, when is it?”
“No definite date yet.” She’s lying. I know when she’s lying and she’s lying to me right now.
“Well, where’s it gonna be?”
“Not sure about it, they’re trying to set it up for me to open for someone.”
“They?”
“The label who’s hosting the showcase.”
She’s beatin’ around the bush, she doesn’t want me to know what’s goin’ on.
“Well, lemme know and I’ll pop in.”
“I don’t want you to do that,” she says, and she looks away. Not that she really’d been lookin’ at me, but she was kinda lookin’ at me.
“It’s not a problem,” I say, pressing.
“I know it’s not a problem, I don’t want you there.” Now she looks at me and I wish she’d look somewhere else. “I want to do this on my own.”
“Right.” Slipped out, with all the sarcasm I was feeling. I wish I could bite my tongue off. But her, doin’ it on her own... RIGHT. Sarcasm was the first thing that came to me. I WISH she’d done all this on her own. Or let me help her outright. Either way, but not the way it went down, with me back doorin’ it all over town for her, and her lippin’ off wherever she could about how this was all HER.
The anger follows behind the sarcasm.
Same goes for all the new, independent woman routine. She’s not. I know it, she knows it, almost everyone we know, knows it. I don’t have a problem with smoothing things with her financially. I DON’T. I have the money. I have more than enough. She knows I pay for her apartment, her car, whatever. We both do, I sign the checks and she never sees a bill. She knows that just about every stitch of clothes she owns was from me. All of it. I don’t care, I didn’t care, but don’t make me feel like any more of an asshole with the ‘doin’ it on my own’ routine. Fuck that. For as much as she’s doin’ it on her own, she coulda stayed here and we coulda worked on what we needed to work on. Goddamnit, she pisses me off.
“Look, I have to go,” she says.
“Hunh?” Go? Where does she have to go? “I thought you were stayin’ for dinner?”
“I have a rehearsal.”
“Bullshit.” Slipped again, damn my mouth.
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© 2003 Chandrah, Inc.
© 2003 (*> Baby Bird Productions, Inc.
