Typical Friday night, the happy hour crowd at the bar growing happier as five o’clock turns into six, seven, finally ten. Annie’s been in the weeds most of her shift — three six-tops followed by a pair of fours and a deuce, all seated at the same time.
The chef eighty-sixes the special, veal saltimbocca, but the manager forgets to take it off the board, which disgruntles the Baron. The Baron likes his veal. He calls Giorgio over, berates him for false advertising.
Giorgio mutters to Annie that the Baron is a pain in the ass, but Annie likes the Von Freedmans. She’s nicknamed them the Von Friskies because even after thirty-four years of marriage they sit on the same side of the banquette, close to one another.
The Baron tells Annie they won’t order any dessert, his Silvia is all the sweetness he needs. He winks at Annie wolfishly. Silvia remains elegantly ladylike even as her husband’s arm snakes beneath the tablecloth for a grope of her thigh.
Annie turns away from the Von Friskies, spots a man standing near the bar at the other end of the dining room, thirty feet away. Something about his wavy dark hair and the cut of his jaw draws her. There’s his suntan, too, a rare sight in the middle of a Chicago February so raw and cold it’s breaking records.
The man raises his martini glass, toasts her.
That’s when she realizes — it’s Calvin. They have been seeing each other for six months, but he’s supposed to be in Florida at his best friend’s bachelor party. Funny how what she expects to see, or not, colors what’s in front of her.
He gives her a Cheshire grin. He’s pulled one over on her.
Calvin is tall. When he takes Annie in his arms, he picks her clear off her feet. He takes her in, head to toe, and smiles. She knows what his mouth feels like on her. His hands. They have that all figured out. Annie recalls the last time. It makes her eager for more.
“I know this uniform’s hot,” she teases. The polyester black pants, white shirt and green tie are anything but. The uniform reeks of olive oil.
He leans in close. “You smell like garlic toast. I might have to eat you.”
Her face burns at the innuendo. “What are you doing here?”
“I came home early. I had to see you.” He’s different somehow. As she takes another round of drinks to table twelve, she wonders what happened in Florida.
She flicks her eyes back toward the bar as she sets a scotch and water down on the table.
“I suppose we’re too old to hold your attention,” one of the men jokes. He’s middle-aged, puffy, with jowls. Pasty white, like the rest of Chicago. Except for Calvin.
Annie starts in dismay, explains that her boyfriend has come to surprise her. “He’s waiting at the bar.” It’s hard to keep her eyes off Calvin.
The four-top pays the bill good-naturedly, insisting they want no part of getting in the way of true love. Annie wonders, is that what Calvin’s early homecoming means?
They stop at Annie’s apartment just long enough for her to change. She slips into the red dress Calvin gave her for Christmas, the one that’s more negligee than gown. The kind of dress she wouldn’t dare buy herself, but she’d loved it as soon as she pulled it from the wrapping. She sweeps her hair up into a sexy knot, touches the perfume bottle behind her ears and to her wrists.
When she emerges from the bedroom Calvin deposits a treasure in her hand—a tiny whelk, all tight spirals from point to mouth, a perfect miniature. He’d poked a neat hole through the top end, strung it on a bit of translucent fishing wire so fine that when he fastens it around her neck the whelk seems suspended at the base of Annie’s throat. Calvin moves the shell aside, brushes the vulnerable hollow with his warm lips. Annie shivers, leans her head back, offers this tender part of herself up.
They head back out into the night, huddling together on the sidewalk as they wait for a cab. The cold is razor-sharp; every breath stings. Snow falls and swirls on the breeze, creating a snow globe around them, each flake intent on its own silent path through the dark night, until it melds with all the others gathering on the ground.
Faint music accompanies the falling snow, stringed instruments playing Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.” It’s coming from the mansion next door, which is awash in a warm glow as light spills from its myriad windows. Annie peeks through the front door, open to allow another stately couple inside. A crowd is gathered, men in tuxedos, women in ball gowns. One woman throws her head back, laughing. Annie recalls the soft press of Calvin’s lips meeting her pulse. A throaty moan escapes her lips at the memory as they slip into the taxi.
A quartet rains salsa notes down over the beautiful people dancing at Rhumba. Couples snuggle over tapas and sangria at tables flanking the large oval dance floor.
Annie spots Jorge out on the dance floor, earning his keep. Employed by the restaurant to get the patrons dancing, the eighty-year-old Spaniard dances with everyone—pretty girls, plump girls, girls whose sweethearts refuse to give them a twirl, girls who don’t know how not to lead. Jorge’s forehead shines from his effort but the grin on his face never fades, even as time dances on toward dawn.
The heat of the crowd, the pulse of the music and the surprise of Calvin’s early return — all of it is as heady as the mojito Annie sips. She leads Calvin onto the dance floor, her heels clicking. Calvin doesn’t know the samba from the tango, but she doesn’t care.
Despite the quick rhythm he holds her close, brings her body alive with the brush of his fingers on her bare back, the desire shining in his eyes.
The mojito has stripped her inhibitions. She wants him to know how happy she is that he’s come home early. She backs up against a broad wooden beam, her eyes locked on Calvin’s as her arms rise high above her, grasping the beam. She shimmies down, up, down again, her backside kissing the timber’s smooth finish. Her hips grind deep to the beat, her breasts crest at the lip of her dress. The tiny shell bounces between them.
By the time the number is over, he is as hard as the beam. “Let’s go.” His voice is thick with passion.
Annie nods. Her mouth curls into a pleased smile, tight and perfect as the whelk.
Calvin holds her close on the cab ride back to her apartment. More than once Annie catches him watching her in the rearview mirror. It’s a searching look.
“What?” she asks softly.
Calvin shakes his head, looking deeper into her as if she is a well he might fall into. She taps one slender heel in time to the rhythm still beating in her head.
Annie unlocks the front door. Calvin takes her wrap, hangs it over a chair. He reaches for her but she rests her hand on his chest, holding him off. “I’ll just have a shower, get the sweat off.”
She crosses the master bedroom toward the bathroom, disrobing on her way without turning on the lights. She removes everything but the shell necklace. Standing in the dark, she appreciates the warm spray as it pulls the chill from her bones.
A tiny gasp bubbles from her throat when Calvin slips in alongside her. He is full of surprises tonight. He takes the shampoo bottle from her hands, squeezes some into his palms, runs the shampoo through Annie’s hair. Then he lathers her skin from head to toe. Annie moans, presses hard against him.
Their bodies are slippery as fish, water cascading over them. Desire crests, breaks, crests again. The sharp, crisp scent of eucalyptus rises from the shampoo. Annie’s tongue slips eel-like into Calvin’s ear. Fine sand grits in her teeth. He’d walked off the beach to come home to her. A siren’s song rings through Annie to the rhythm of the samba, be careful, be careful, be careful, as she abandons herself to his urgency, his belief that he needs her.
Calvin leads her without words to the bed, doesn’t bother to pull back the duvet. When Annie pauses and strikes a match to light the candle on the nightstand, he pinches the flame with dampened fingers. It flickers and goes out. She sees a flash of something in his expression—the same calculating look he wore in the restaurant earlier, and on the cab ride home. He is weighing something, she thinks, the balance tilting on an imaginary scale in his mind. The two of them together on one side. On the other, the freedom of not cherishing anyone, she decides later.
Calvin reaches into the glass of water on the nightstand. He runs a crescent ice cube between Annie’s breasts. The droplets shimmer on her skin. He leans over her, darts his tongue into the drops.
“I don’t ever want to go anywhere without you again,” he says, as if this explains everything. His words are husky with the kind of longing Annie has dreamt of. Only in his confession she can’t help but hear anguish too.
His mouth reaches the cleft between her thighs. He pulls her out to sea, drowning her in pleasure again and again. It is the best night of their short history of coupling.
When it is over and he lies sleeping in her bed she gets up, goes to the window. In the dawn light she sees the Baron and Sylvia walking up the street. Their small white Pekingese Snowball prances ahead of the couple, dipping her paws into the snow banked along the curb and then scurrying back to the couple, barking with delight. Annie tries to imagine her and Calvin thirty years from now, sitting on some idyllic beach, Calvin’s arm slung over her shoulders in that proprietary way the Baron’s surrounds Silvia. The picture won’t come. She lifts the channeled whelk, places its mouth to one ear, and listens for harbingers of their future.
A week later, the mansion next door is demolished. Annie winces as she passes the empty lot, strewn rubble the only reminder of the curved mahogany staircase, the cut crystal chandelier she had glimpsed through the inviting doorway. She recalls the woman who had thrown her head back in laughter, and her throat tightens. The empty lot gapes ugly as a missing tooth, like the space in Annie’s heart where Calvin lived.
“Why did they tear it down?” Annie asks her doorman.
“Structurally unsound,” Tony replies. He shrugs as if he’s not surprised. “Impressive facade but the contractor cut corners. Building had to come down before it fell down.”
Upstairs, Annie looks out her apartment window down at the hole where the brownstone used to be. She swears she can see cracks in the foundation twelve stories below, fissures that over time would have grown steadily bigger under a ton of bricks and mortar.
She tells herself the same thing would have happened to her and Calvin. He’d left the morning after he’d surprised her, and never called again. Perhaps that was better than the two of them slowly crumbling to pieces over the years. She goes to the small lacquered box on her dresser, pulls out the whelk.
She walks down Lake Michigan, stands before the endless waters rolling as far to the east as she can see. For a moment she lays the whelk against her heart, recalling the terrible fervor of Calvin’s desire, the way it pushed him back to her then pulled him away again. She crushes the whelk in her hand, welcomes the sharp cut of the shards in her palm. When she throws the pieces of shell out onto the waves it takes only a moment or two for them to be drawn out into the depths of the great and mighty lake.
Bridget Boland is the author of The Doula, their debut novel, and holds an MFA in creative writing from the School of the Art Institute. Their work has appeared in The New Guard, Conde Nast Women’s Fitness, and other publications.
Photo courtesy Stocksnap