16   Once again I woke up from a dream dominated by a female presence that combined Libby and Chris. But there was a difference from the first time. For one thing, Chris’s features were now firmly etched in my mind and not the blur of a drunken memory. And, rather than being a vague amalgam of the two, the presence seemed to fluctuate between one and the other. On awakening I knew that, in spite of my fantasy infatuation with Libby, in the real world I was definitely interested in Chris. Her puzzling ways now seemed more of a riddle to be solved than an annoyance to be overcome. I was glad that I had transcended whatever resistance I might have felt on Wednesday and called her to make the date, to which I was now eagerly looking forward, sex or no sex. When I got to the office I checked my e-mail. There was a message from a sender named PPLC – the initials seemed vaguely familiar – with URGENT in the subject line. On an impulse I opened it, and was informed that this day, 2005/09/09, was the deadline for registering for the legal conference – sponsored by the Pan Pacific Law Center – to be held in Kona, Hawaii, a week hence, bringing together family-law attorneys from the West Coast with their counterparts from Japan. The original notice had been sent a month before. Either I had inadvertently trashed it, or it had become enmeshed in my spam filter. I had until midnight to file my registration. I decided to wait until after my date with Chris. The case of the divorce client who had come in the preceding afternoon turned out not so simple after all. She was the second wife of a now-retired Stanford professor, and the calculation of how much of his pension she was entitled to as community property involved the determination of what part of his working years she had spent with him, compared to the time spent with his first wife. There were several factors that complicated the matter. The professor had come to California with his first wife from a non-community-property state. My client had lived with the professor for several years after his separation, but before his divorce, from the first wife, and I had to build the case for making those years count as being my client’s. For good measure, the first wife was only now, three years after her ex-husband’s retirement, suing for her share of the pension. Her attorney was Margo Dufresne, and I surmised that she had come out as a lesbian. I spent a good part of the morning, both before and after my cappuccino break, studying the relevant case law. Around eleven o’clock, when I was feeling that I had made some progress in my – or rather my client’s – favor, Libby called. She spoke in short sentences, as though out of breath, punctuated by pauses. “I spoke to Andy. He’s coming back tomorrow. I’m picking him up at the airport.” A very long pause. “I think I’m falling in love with him again.” “That’s wonderful,” I said, truly relieved that the last vestige of her illusory availability was gone. “Give him my best.” “That won’t be necessary,” she said, speaking fluently again. “He said he’s going to call you before he comes back. How’s our case going?” “Our case?” “I mean my case. I don’t know what I was thinking.” The disclaimer didn’t stop me from thinking. Did she mean her and me, in a business sense, as I had just thought about my new client? Or was she subconsciously including Andy with herself? But of course I didn’t voice my thoughts. “Nothing can be done,” I said, “until the court gets the responses from Peter’s brothers and his sister. But it shouldn’t be too long now.” “What if they don’t respond?” “They have up to thirty days. But my experience is that people in their class have lawyers at their bidding, and the lawyers have to justify their pay, so they take care of things promptly. So just hang in there.” “It’s not that. I’m just getting impatient to get it over with, whichever way it goes, so I can focus my mind on Andy.” “I understand.” “Thanks, Gary, I knew you would. Gotta go now!” “Bye!”   After lunch Rose called. “It’s amazing!” she said. “Missions in the bush in Namibia have satellite phones!” “Did you find out about Vicky?” “Yes,” she said, “but don’t you want to know how?” “Of course I do.” “Okay, first things first. Vicky died last December, just before Christmas. Andy has been sending Christmas cards with donations to the mission every year, so when they sent him thanks, they told him about Vicky. He probably found out about her in January. But there’s more.” “So how did you find out?” “I found the Archdiocese of Windhoek online and called them. When I described the location of the mission, as Thomas had described it to me, they said that it had to belong to the Vicariate of Rundu. A vicariate is like a diocese, but more primitive. So I called Rundu, and someone there knew about Vicky. The mission where she was is actually an outstation of the Rundu mission, which is run by Salesian priests and Benedictine sisters.” From the emphasis that Rose placed on the names of the orders it seemed that this information was, as she had already hinted in her report, important to her. I wondered if this had anything to do with Rose’s Catholic schooling. “It turns out that – hold on to your hat – Vicky’s marriage to Andy was annulled, and Vicky became a Benedictine sister.” “What!” “You heard me. You see, Vicky was Catholic, and when the priest married them Andy said that he was too, so they took his word for it, and didn’t bother with a dispensation. Then she decided that she wanted to become a nun, so they decided that Andy had lied about being Catholic – they called it a pious fraud – and the annulment was pretty much automatic. So, for the last few years of her life Vicky was Sister Victoria, ministering to the sick, until she herself became too sick, and she was brought back to Rundu a couple of months before she died. I got all this from Sister Louise, who was Vicky’s friend and who was there when she got her last sacraments.” “Did Andy know about the annulment?” “I don’t think so. As I said, he was sending them donations, and they sent him routine thank-you notes, except that in the last one they wrote that ‘our Sister Victoria’ had joined the angels.” “Sister Victoria?” “He could have simply read it as our sister, meaning that they loved her.” “That’s true. Wow!” “Some movie, huh?” “Yes. I’d like to ask you for another favor. Could you ask Sister Louise to send us a picture of Sister Victoria?” “That shouldn’t be a problem. They have pictures of some of the sisters on their website, so that they probably have it their archive. I’ll e-mail them and ask to send it as an attachment.” “Of course. I was still thinking of send as put a print into an envelope, put stamps on the envelope and hope that it gets there. I’m so twentieth century!” Rose laughed. “You have my permission to stay that way. Leave the tech stuff to people like me, who really need it for our work.” I went back to work on the case of the professor’s soon-to-be ex-wife number two. But Libby was on my mind. The sense that her reunion with Andy would mitigate my obsession with her was dissipating, and along with it the excitement that I had felt in the morning about seeing Chris. I now imagined Libby with Andy together, and tried to picture what it would be like to be young and handsome and charismatic like him. Or perhaps not so young – like Jerry Brucker, for example – but still able to attract women at will. I am not unattractive, I know that. Chris is attracted to me, and Chris is a desirable woman. What was wrong, then? Could be that Chris was not someone whom I had spotted and for whom I had felt an instant flash of desire, but someone who had been thrust upon me by Ann and Jeff? Someone who, in a sense, was not my choice? Of course the notion that a man chooses the woman that he pursues is an illusion – many jokes attest to that, and it’s the subject of Man and Superman – but it’s one that’s deeply embedded in the male psyche. I tried to envision a hypothetical setting where I would meet Chris for the first time. Perhaps not so hypothetical – I evidently met her at the party, and ended up dancing with her, so that I must have exercised some choice. Too bad I couldn’t remember it. No, it was something else, I decided. It was the way Chris was treating me. Even if she was attracted to me, she was not abandoning herself to the attraction, not jumping headlong into its waters, but cautiously getting her feet wet. I felt myself resenting her caution, complimentary though it might be, as Jeff had suggested. I would never have wanted to be the kind of man who inspired reckless passion – too much responsibility for a conscientious guy like me – but I could not help envying that kind of man. All afternoon these thoughts meandered through my mind, taking it over for brief intervals between spurts of work. When I got home and started to get ready for the date, my feelings were no clearer.   When I arrived in front of the duplex that bore the address that Chris had given me, I was surprised to find her waiting for me at the garage entrance, waving at me to stop as though hailing a cab. It was about five to six, and I had allowed the additional time in order to make the acquaintance, however briefly, of Julio and Livia. But Chris seemed ready to go out. She was, once again, wearing high heels and an open jacket over a revealing sundress, but in a different color scheme: the jacket was black, and the dress was white with black polka dots. A white purse was slung over her shoulder. She evidently liked black-and-white combinations – I thought of the contrast with the vivid colors that Libby favored – and they looked good on her, with her long black hair a part of the scheme. She opened the passenger door and got in beside me. “Hi. Parking is tight around here, so I thought I would spare you the trouble,” she said. “I thought this would my chance to meet your kids.” “They’re not here. They’re spending the weekend with Gus and their little sister.” This was an altogether unexpected development. I wondered if it was something she had arranged to allow for the possibility of my spending the night. “You didn’t tell me,” I said as I began to drive away. “It just happened, like, today. I didn’t think it would matter.” I said nothing. “There’s something you didn’t tell me. Where are we going to eat?” “I didn’t think it would matter,” I said, hoping to make her laugh, but without success. “I’m kidding,” I said. “We’re going to Fina Estampa. Is that okay?” “Wonderful!” she burst out, displaying some enthusiasm for the first time since the preceding Friday. “It’s my favorite place! You mean the one on Van Ness, don’t you? The one on Mission is closed.” “Yes, of course. It’s right near the theater.” “And it’s near where I work too. It won’t take us very long to get there.” “I thought we might need some time to find parking.” “No, after six parking on Van Ness is easy. What time did you make reservations for?” “Six-thirty.” “It doesn’t matter if we’re early. They won’t be that crowded yet. Anyway, they know me there. Would you mind letting me order? We could have tapas, like last time, but Spanish and Peruvian ones.” “I’d love it if you did the ordering.” It was good to see Chris’s animated self again. “How do you say ‘order’ in Peruvian Spanish? Ordenar or pedir?” “Hmm… I’m not sure. I think it can be either one. I think my mom says ordenar and my dad says pedir.” Chris laughed at last. I had missed her laughter. I wanted to hear more of it, so I made a crude joke. “As long as they don’t compromise and say pedar.” She laughed. “You’re funny, Gary,” she said, putting her left hand on my right and quickly withdrawing it. I was driving on Franklin, past the Symphony Hall and the Opera House. My intention was to find a parking space as close to our goal as possible, in order to save her the trouble of walking too much on her high heels. It has long been my impression that wearing high-heeled shoes is more of an effort for short women like Chris than for tall women like Libby. But when I finally parked, with no difficulty in finding a space – just as Chris had indicated – I found, as we were walking to the restaurant, that she handled herself quite comfortably. She had also been right in predicting that the place would not be too busy at that time, and while I told the hostess that I had a reservation, it did not seem necessary. The hostess was quite young and did not seem to know Chris, but then a waitress who was about Chris’s age came over, and the two greeted each other as old friends. They began conversing sotto voce in Spanglish, with the Spanish including some Peruvian slang that I didn’t understand. After a few minutes Chris suddenly remembered me. “This is my friend Gary,” she said, “y él habla español.” “Mucho gusto,” the waitress said. “Igualmente,” I said. “Yo soy Dolores,” she then said, “and I will be your waitress tonight.” She whispered a few more words to Chris, placed the menus on our table, and said, “I’ll be back to take your orders” before walking away. “There’s someone here that I need to talk to for a moment,” Chris said to me. “Do you mind?” “Of course not.” She got up and walked, very gracefully and sinuously, to a table at the far end of the restaurant, where three men were sitting. She shook hands will all of them before sitting down at their table and, leaning over it, exchanged friendly kisses on the cheek with them. The first two were brief, but the one with the man on her right lingered for a while. I saw her turning her head in my direction and I quickly turned mine away from them, pretending to open the menu. Out of a corner of my eye I now saw that she was talking with the man on her right in a way that looked intimate. There was laughter, in which the other two men participated, but otherwise the conversation seemed to be only between the two of them. I decided to ignore them and began to read the menu for real while listening to the background music, which at the moment was an instrumental version of the beautiful Peruvian waltz, La flor de la canela. There was a page each for Peruvian food, Spanish food, and tapas. The tapas page had well over a dozen items, and they all seemed appetizing. Though Chris and I had agreed that she would do the ordering, I found myself mentally selecting the ones that I would like: marinated mussels, stuffed avocado, octopus salad… I was just becoming aware of hunger pangs when I heard the nearby clacking of Chris’s heels. “I’m sorry,” she said as she sat down. “It’s an old friend.” I said nothing and looked at her with a smile. I don’t know what it conveyed to her, but she blushed and corrected herself. “An old boyfriend,” she said sheepishly. I maintained the smile, feeling it somehow empowering me. “Was it a relationship,” I asked, “or just sex?” She seemed nonplussed. “It was both, I guess,” she said uncertainly. “I told you, I’ve made mistakes. Do we have to talk about this now?” “We don’t have to,” I said, smiling no more. “Would you like to order now? There are some things here that look good. Choros a la criolla, palta rellena…” “Wait a minute, Gary. What’s the matter with you?” “What do you mean?” “You’re acting like you’re angry.” “Angry? No. Maybe a little annoyed. The way you were whispering with Dolores, flirting with your old flame…” “Flirting?” she said in a suddenly raised voice. “He’s an old friend, we were just talking, and what we did two years ago is neither here nor there.” “Just talking? Is that like just sex?” “Stop it. I’m just going to ignore you. I’m hungry, and I’d like to order now. Dolores, ¡ven acá por favor!” Dolores seemed to be waiting for Chris’s call, and was over in a flash. Chris quickly ordered, in Spanish, six tapas, including all the ones that I was interested in. Dolores was about to walk away when I said, “And a bottle of chardonnay, please.” Chris and I were silent for the three minutes that elapsed until the young hostess brought the wine, which was Chilean. She poured the usual taste for me, I drank it, nodded approvingly, and she poured Chris’s glass, and then mine, full. Chris started sipping her wine without waiting for a toast, and I followed her example. The evening was not going well, and I thought about how to rectify it. I had a nagging feeling deep down that some perverse part of me was sabotaging it, but I was at a loss about what to do about it. “Would you like to talk about what just happened between us?” I finally asked. “Between us? Nothing happened between us. You just started acting weird.” “Weird? Look, Chris, I’m just trying to get to know you. You put out some conditions on our potential relationship…” “And I thought that you understood. I’m just trying to protect myself.” “Why do you need protection any more than I do?” She looked at me uncomprehendingly, as though I had uttered something outlandish. “You’re a man,” she said at last. “And men don’t have feelings?” “Do they? I thought that maybe you did, but you’re like all the others.” “Is that wrong, being like all the others?” Dolores came to the table with a tray bearing the first three tapas, the cold ones. Chris was silent until after her friend had left. “It’s not wrong,” she said in a soft voice, “but I thought that maybe you were different. Or, rather, it’s wrong for what I need now.” “For what you need,” I said, with the same smile that I had at the beginning of the conversation. She looked at me, seemingly in disgust. She put on a brief half-smile of here own and said, “It’s useless. Let’s just eat.” She took a big gulp of wine and cut each tapa in half, putting a portion on her plate, and began eating without looking at me. All I could do was follow suit. For the rest of the meal I limited my comments to the food and wine, and she responded to my comments politely but indifferently. After Dolores brought the check and I took it from her with a gesture intended to forestall splitting it, Chris said, “Thank you for dinner, Gary. I don’t want to see the movie. I’d like to go home.” She got up and began to walk away from the table. “Wait,” I said. “I haven’t paid yet.” “Take your time. I’m going to take a taxi.” She walked toward the door and as she opened it she turned to me and said, “Please don’t call me again.” “Ever?” I asked, but by then she had already walked out of the restaurant and, probably, out of my life. I briefly debated whether to go to the movie by myself. I decided against it. When I got home I immediately turned on my computer and registered for the conference, which was to take place the following Saturday and Sunday. I then began to book my flight and hotel for Kona. When I clicked Friday’s date I saw advertised a seven-day special of the flight and a choice of hotels, including the one that would host the conference at a better rate than the conference weekend rate. I chose a morning nonstop outbound and without thinking it over I began to book my return flight for the following Friday. It turned out that I had to choose between afternoon flights that would get me to San Francisco in the evening and overnight flights that would arrive at dawn. I chose one of the former, and added a rental car to the package, since I wanted to do some exploring of the Big Island. It was only then that I began to reflect: a week’s vacation in Hawaii would be good for me, nay, ideal at that moment. I sent an e-mail message to Diane – a precaution against forgetting to ask her on Monday – informing her of my plan and asking her to clear my schedule for the week after the conference. I put the Afro-Latin Party disk in my computer’s CD drive and listened to the music while I surfed the Web for information about the island of Hawaii, where I had not been before. I tried to imagine myself dancing to the music with Chris, but I could not – or would not – prevent her image from metamorphosing into Libby’s.