Folly Beach - Dorothea Benton Frank [59]
Anyway, it was pretty heady stuff, I’ll tell you, and some pretty big egos and ideas floated in and out of the rooms every hour of the day and night. So why would someone who was obviously as talented and as sensitive as DuBose want to leave a creative paradise to go home and sell car insurance? It made perfect sense to me that he should at least try to give it a go. So, after we became engaged, I promised him I would take care of him. I think those were words he had been waiting to hear all his life. I might not have been as imposing a character as his mother, Janie, and I might have been an orphan, but I was not without certain resources.
Anyway, knowing the sexist and tawdry nature of a theatrical life as well as I did, and I was always dead-set on having a theatrical career, what were the odds that someone as genteel as DuBose would come into my life? I could go anywhere on his arm.
Fade to Darkness
Chapter Fourteen
About Dorothy
Look, here’s the terrible and wonderful truth. When I opened the front door and he stepped inside the Porgy House, John Risley smelled like something so good I wanted to get that smell onto my skin and spend a serious amount of time inhaling it. Giving his neck a basset hound slurp also crossed my mind. Even in my state of sudden onset of a feral giddiness, I knew there was no way to do that without him noticing. But! The mental image of lunging with a flailing tongue twisted my facial muscles to hold back a burst of nervous laughter. I was in deep merde and nearly unable to handle the sudden and overwhelming urges to behave like a demonic whore.
I am also fully aware how completely juvenile, inappropriate, and ridiculous this all sounds but that’s exactly how it was. Haven’t you ever smelled something that gave you a jolt, made you stop to think of some childhood memory of wild honeysuckle or a kind of candy or the sweet rubber of a favorite toy? Weren’t you immediately time-traveling back to the schoolyard or the playground or the Christmas morning and weren’t you almost knocked off your feet from how fast and how total the distraction was? Your body is in the present but your nose and mind are decades away. They say smell is the most powerful of all our senses and I was just reminded again that it must be so by whatever it was that John Risley had slapped on his face after he shaved. The scent didn’t remind me of anything from my childhood, yet it was just that striking and familiar. I could barely concentrate on anything else.
And all the while I struggled to get a grip on what remained of my composure he was nonchalantly going about doing the normal things a gentleman of the South does when squiring a lady around for the evening. He had opened my car door, adjusted the seat so I’d be at the safest distance from the dashboard, invited me to take my place, smiled at me like the old cat that swallowed the canary while I situated myself, and then he closed the door. It was impossible to tell if he was even moderately rattled by my cologne or shampoo or the combination but he did seem inexplicably amused. That gave me comfort and hope.
The whole way out to the body shop we made small talk and smiled and smiled and smiled. Man, pheromones are some powerful juju. Very powerful. It wasn’t like I even had a choice in the matter. I was attracted to him like tiny vulnerable iron filings are drawn to a big old macho magnet.
Fate was on my side. My car still wasn’t ready.
“Gosh! That’s too bad,” I said to the mechanic, trying to sound sincere, but Risley was not fooled.
Whatever part they were waiting for still had not arrived. That was okay, because it meant Mr. Fabulous and I could use the delay as an excuse to see each other again. At least that was what I hoped John was thinking, because I was thanking the good Lord for granting me some extra time. I surely