Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [41]
With my right hand, I lifted my wineglass. With my left hand, I gripped the table so that he wouldn’t see me trembling. Don’t screw this up, I told myself. Don’t lose this one, too.
My normal dinner was broiled fish and steamed greens, but I knew that men liked to see women eat. So I’d allowed myself an ambrosial Parker House roll, soft as a cloud in my hand, with fresh, unsalted, locally sourced butter. I’d started with a salad, but one with lardons sprinkled over the lettuce and a poached egg on top, and I had that foie gras stuffed chicken, crisp-skinned and succulent, every juicy bite of it exploding in my mouth, the flavors and textures, salty, sweet, rich, dancing over my tongue.
“You’re very pretty,” said Marcus. I set my fork on my plate.
“You’re not so bad yourself.” He wore the uniform of a successful New York businessman, but his voice was midwestern, plangent and nasal, not Chicago, like I’d guessed, but Detroit. His father had owned a garage, and his mother did the books. Marcus had invented a way to heat car seats, a technology he’d patented, then sold to the automakers, becoming a millionaire by the time he was twenty-five.
“Confidentially,” he said, lowering his voice to suit the word, “that wasn’t my first business.”
“Oh?” I didn’t have to fake my interest or my smile. Marcus was easy to listen to and not bad-looking, for his age. While he was across the room, exchanging handshakes and backslaps with a tableful of businessmen, I’d slipped a handful of gougères into the empty zippered makeup case I kept in my purse. I was, I knew, long past the point where I had to steal bread from the basket, or crudités from the free spread at a bar, just to be sure I’d have something to eat the next day—I had money, plus a refrigerator full of fruit and Greek yogurt and a single emergency bar of dark chocolate studded with candied orange peel—but it was a habit I couldn’t break. Maybe when I was a lady who lunched, kept in the style to which I wanted to become accustomed, I could go into therapy and figure it all out.
“So what were you,” I asked, leaning forward to give him the tiniest glimpse of my candlelit cleavage, with the cheese puffs warm in my lap, “before you were a seat-heating mogul?”
He grinned, looking, with his broad, round face, like a little boy who’d gotten away with something, timing the punchline he’d clearly delivered more than once. “I sold pot.”
I widened my eyes and turned my mouth into a perfectly lipsticked O of amusement. “I’m shocked.” I wasn’t. I’d looked him up online beforehand. The pot anecdote was one he’d told before. But I knew my lines in this play.
He gave a little shrug, a charming smile. I could smell the starch of his suit, the juice from his filet on his china plate, his cologne, layered and complex. His big hands rested on the white tablecloth; his teeth gleamed in the candlelight. “It was the eighties,” said Marcus. “You wouldn’t remember.” I remembered the eighties just fine, but I didn’t say so. Instead, I bent my head over my folded napkin, soft hair brushing my cheeks. It was like a fencing match, parry and thrust, advance and retreat. Flash him a smile, then turn away, tracing a fingertip over the tines of my fork. Lick my lips, then let him hear my skirt rustle as I recrossed my legs; get him so bewitched that he wouldn’t even feel the blade slide in.
I smoothed the fabric of my dress, a three-thousand-dollar Jil Sander that I’d bought at Saks that afternoon and was wearing with the tags tucked against my skin. I’d take it off as soon as I got home, sponge off any deodorant residue, run a lint brush over it, zip it back into its garment bag, and return it the next day on my lunch