The Art of Saying Goodbye - Ellyn Bache [33]
An hour later she’s in a car with Doug Fenster, the man she may or may not love, heading for a restaurant where there may or may not be anything she wants to eat.
Does she love him? After three years, you’d think she’d know. Does he love her? When his paw of a hand reaches over to stroke her cheek, she wonders if this is a gesture of affection or an attempt to detect wrinkles. She knows that’s unfair, a thought born of her own insecurity and not his. Getting out of the shower earlier, stroking on mascara, Julianne had peered in the bathroom mirror and thought, Well, I certainly know a middle-aged face when I see one. Much as she loves having natural blond hair, she’s already paying the price of having the fair, early-to-age skin that goes with the pale locks. She looks older than most of her friends, her face beginning to line, her neck growing slack. No matter how much lotion she applies, she’s drying up in places both public and private, just as the books always said she would. Perimenopausal at the age of forty-four, who would have imagined? She knows as a sort of hard, unsentimental truth that in a few years she won’t even be pretty.
Maybe she doesn’t love Doug. Maybe she wants him because it won’t be long until she can’t attract a man at all.
“What do you think? Should we go to Caruso’s?” he asks.
“Sure.” When he first took her there, she thought from its unassuming exterior it was a cheap pizza place, which would have suited her fine. She was a bit disappointed to find that it served the best Italian cuisine in town.
Doug grins, reading her mind. “Or is the food there lost on you?”
“I can’t help it if I like spaghetti.” She’d eat spaghetti with marinara sauce every night if she could. But since Doug is a gourmet, a big man, not fat, who approaches a fine dinner with such gusto that Julianne feels awed when she watches him eat, she tries to adopt a more all-inclusive diet. It’s not easy for her. Doug likes sushi, but the thought of raw fish turns her stomach. Escargots? Snails are disgusting enough in the garden. Thai cuisine? She feels no guilt about shunning spices that could cauterize an entire digestive system. Most of the time she orders something simple and takes her pleasure from observing the way he studies a menu, savors his wine, samples a bite of fish. But she wishes, tonight, that instead of Caruso’s he’d suggested a place that serves plain American dishes.
Settling back against the plush upholstery of his car, Doug continues a story he started earlier about a financial transaction his office handled today. He’s a stockbroker. Excited, his voice rich with inflection, he launches into his tale with a passion for finance that’s almost a match for his zest for food. Ordinarily, Julianne enjoys this. For the past three years, he’s brought a whole new dimension of information to her life, about money markets, expensive brandies, exotic waters that yield the healthiest fish. Tonight, she can barely keep track of what he’s saying.
“You’re distracted,” he says.
“Tired.”
“Worried,” he corrects.
“I was at Paisley’s this afternoon. Her daughter came up to me when I was leaving, upset because her mother’s back hurts.”
“So?”
“It’s from the cancer. Pancreatic cancer can affect the nerves in your back.”
“You get backaches.”
“Only when I twist something from exercise. This is different. One of the big issues in pancreatic cancer is pain. It gets worse.”
Doug brakes for a light, then leans over to take her hand, engulf it in his palm. He squeezes,