Jan Burke - Eighteen

At one of these turnouts, she kicked off her shoes and rolled down a window, resting her bare feet on the sill. She drove barefooted the rest of the night.

She asked him questions. He talked more that night than he had ever talked in his life. About his writing, his family, his childhood, his love of Woolrich stories and Hitchcock films and chocolate and on and on, even describing the furniture in his apartment.

“And you?” he asked. “Where do you live?”

“Somewhere in these hills. Perhaps I’ll take you there someday.”

As many questions as she asked, and as few as she answered, somehow she still managed to make him feel that he was of vital interest to her, not in the way some questioners might-as scientist studying an insect-but as if she cared about him from before the time she had met him. He was wondering at the trust he had placed in this stranger just as the sun was coming up over the hills. She had parked the car on a ridge. Harry was snoring softly.

“I’ll take you home,” she said.

“I’m not sure I want to go home,” Bill answered, then quickly added, “Sorry, I don’t mean to be pushy. You’ve been a great listener. You’re probably tired and-”

She reached over then, and laid a finger to his lips. She shook her head, and he stopped talking, unsure of what she was saying ‘no’ to.

She took him back to his apartment, leaving Harry asleep in the car.

“Do you want to come in?” he asked on his doorstep.

She shook her head, an impish smile on her lips. “I know exactly what it looks like-I’m sure you’ve described it perfectly. Besides, you’re very busy. You’ve got to get a little sleep, and then you’ll wake up and write your book. It’s going to be terrific, but no one will ever find that out until you write it.”

She turned and skipped back to the car.

“Will I see you again?” he called out.

“Stop worrying,” she called back. “Write!”

And he had. He slept about three hours, woke up feeling as if he had slept ten, and wondering if he had dreamed the woman in the Rolls-Royce. But dream or no dream, he suddenly knew how to get around that problem in his story, and went to work.

Harry appeared a few hours later, a picnic basket in hand. “Miss Eleanor sends her regards, and provisions so that you need not interrupt your work.”

“You can talk!” Bill exclaimed.

“When necessary,” Harry said, and left.

Bill searched through the basket, and found an assortment of small sandwiches, a salad, a slice of chocolate cake and several choices of beverages. He also found an old-fashioned calling card:

On the back she had inscribed her phone number. “Delicious,” Bill said, holding it carefully, as if it might skip away, disappear as quickly as she had.

And so he went back to writing. Bill saw little of Ellie during the first few weeks which followed their ride through the hills, but he called her often. If he found himself staring uselessly at the place where the wall behind his computer screen met the ceiling, unsure of how to proceed, a brief chat with Ellie inspired him. They played a game with Hitchcock films and Woolrich stories.

“A jaguar,” he would say.

“Black Alibi,” she would answer. “A name scrawled on a window.”

“Easy-The Lady Vanishes.”

And his writer’s block would vanish as well.

When Bill completed his manuscript, Harry brought him and the manuscript to her home for the first time. Bill, trying (and failing) not to be overawed by the elegance which surrounded him, handed her the box of pages. She caressed the corners of the box, looking for a moment as if she might cry. But she said nothing, and set it gently aside without opening it. She held out her hand, and he took it. She led him upstairs.

Later, waking in the big bed, he found her watching him. “Did you read it?”

“No,” she said, tracing a finger along his collarbone. “I don’t want there to be any mistake about why you’re here. It’s not because of what’s in that manuscript box.”

He savored the implications of that for a moment before insecurities besieged him. “Maybe you’d hate it anyway.”

“I couldn’t.”

It was the last time they talked about the manuscript for three days. At the end of those three days, he mailed it to an agent, called his father to say he’d found other work, packed up his belongings and moved in with Ellie.

The agent called back, took him on as a client, and sold the book within a week. Bill was already at work on his second novel. The first one was a critically acclaimed but modest success. The second spent twenty-five weeks on the bestseller list. When Bill got his first royalty check, he asked Ellie to marry him.

She gently but firmly refused. She also refused after books three, four and five-all bestsellers.

Today, as he finished the chapter he was working on, he wondered if she would ever tell him why. Ellie could be very obstinate, he knew. If she didn’t want to give him a straight answer, she would make up something so bizarre and absurd that he would know to stop asking.

“There was a clause in my parent’s will,” she said once. “If I marry before my fiftieth birthday, the house must be turned into an ostrich farm.”

“And the courts accepted this?” he played along.

“Absolutely. The trust funds would go to ostriches and Mir would be very unhappy with you for putting an end to her healthy allowance.”

“Your parents would have left Miriam a pauper?”

“She thinks she’s a pauper on what I give her now.”

“A pauper? On ten thousand dollars a month?”

“Pin money for Mir. We grew up rich, remember?”

“Hard to forget. Why not give it all to Miriam and live on my money instead?”

She frowned. “I’d be dependent on you.”

“So what? I was dependent on you when I first lived here.”

“For about four months. And you had your own money, you just didn’t need any of it. Do you want to be married for more than four months?”

“Of course.”

“So now you see why we can’t be married at all.”

He didn’t, but he resigned himself to the situation. She probably would never tell him why she wouldn’t marry him, or why she allowed Miriam, who often upset her, to come to the house on a regular basis to plead for more money.

“Where’s Harry?” Miriam demanded when Bill answered the doorbell.

“On the phone,” Bill explained as he took her coat. “He’s placing ads for a cook and housekeeper.”

“Not again,” Miriam said.

“The last ones managed to stay on for about six weeks,” Bill said easily.

Miriam turned her most charming smile upon him. She was gorgeous, Bill thought, not for the first time. A redhead with china blue eyes and a figure that didn’t need all that custom tailoring to show it off. What was she, he wondered? A walking ice sculpture, perhaps? But he discarded that image. After all, sooner or later, ice melted.

“I don’t know why you stay with her, Bill,” Miriam purred, misreading his attention.

Bill heard a door open in a hallway above them.

“If you’re here for a favor,” he said in a low voice, “you’re not being very kind to your benefactor.”

Miriam stood frowning, waiting until she heard the door close again. Still, she whispered when she said, “Even you must admit that she drives the entire household to distraction.”

“Yes,” he said, thinking back to the night he met Ellie. “But distraction isn’t always such a bad place to go.”

“She’s crazy,” Miriam said scornfully. “And a liar!”

“She’s neither. What brings you by this afternoon?” They were halfway up the stairs now, and although Bill thought Ellie was probably past being injured by Miriam’s remarks, he didn’t know how much longer his own patience would last.