Erica Orloff - Spanish Disco

“No, I can’t.”

“Michael, we’re already an ocean apart.”

“Precisely why I am so upset with you, Cassie Hayes.”

“I don’t quite see where we’re going with this. You live in London. I live in Florida. We’ve worked together for five years. What’s another three hundred miles’ difference?”

“Cassie, some author calls Lou in the middle of the night, and you’re running off to live in this man’s house for a month, when you’ve never even agreed to come to London.”

“Well, you’ve never come to Florida.”

“I have. You were in L. A., remember?”

“A poorly timed trip, Michael.”

“Why won’t you even tell me who this chap is?”

“I can’t. I really can’t. He’s very famous but very protective about his privacy. Lou would kill me. I just can’t.”

As we talked, I threw the entire contents of my closet on my bed and started picking through my clothes and placing them in pack/don’t pack but keep/Goodwill piles.

“You could bloody fall in love with this man. A month! A month in the tropics.”

“Michael…” I spoke soothingly, as one might speak to a man about to jump from London Bridge. “I live in the tropics all the time. The warm, balmy breezes are not going to make me take leave of my senses.”

“A month in his home, Cassie.”

“Trust me on this one. I am not going to fall in love with him. Michael, this is ludicrous. And if I did fall in love with him, which I won’t because he’s too old for me anyway—it’s not like I’d ever stop working or stop being your editor. I’m not exactly the stay-at-home wifey type. Believe me. So this entire conversation is predicated on a fear that will never happen.”

“I could care less if you stopped being my editor. I want you to come to London.”

“Why? So you can feel like you’re just as important to me as this author? You know you are.”

“No.”

A long silence followed.

“Michael? Are you still there? Or have you been drinking, because you are acting totally off the wall.”

“For such a brilliant girl, Cassie, you can be impossibly thick as a plank.”

More silence.

“Are you so bloody stubborn that you are going to make me say it?”

“Say what?”

“That I am hopelessly besotted with you.”

My breath left me. I sat down on the Goodwill pile, and a belt dug into my ass. I moved over to the keep-but-don’t-pack pile. More silence.

“So I want you to promise me you won’t go doing anything stupid like falling in love with this decrepit old author you’re racing off to see—if he really is as old as you say he is.”

“I promise,” I whispered.

“And I want you to come to London when you return. Even if it’s just for a few days. A weekend.”

“Michael, what time is it there?”

“Seven o’clock.”

“You have been drinking. You’re slurring your speech.”

“Not a drop.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Yes, you do.”

“But…but we have a perfectly good working relationship. I’ll grant you that we have phone sex that, well, quite frankly, is more of a relationship than I have with anyone else. But why would we ruin this all by meeting?”

“Because you can’t love someone over the phone and over your bloody e-mail. I want to meet you. This has been the longest pre-coital relationship in history.”

“I don’t know about that. I think one of the Brontë sisters corresponded with her future husband for seventeen years or something drawn out and Victorian like that.”

“You’re not a Brontë.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“Promise me you’ll think about it.”

“I promise. But you think about it, too. We have the perfect relationship.”

“Long distance?”

“Yes. You know how grumpy I am. How I don’t rise before noon. How I need my coffee and have horrible eating habits. I have a two-bedroom condo and live alone, and I need a weekly housekeeper just to keep the place decent. I laugh too loudly. I drink too much. I play my music at decibels designed to rupture the human eardrum. I really am horrible at relationships. ‘We,’ whatever ‘we’ are, are perfect.”

“I’d rather have imperfection, Cassie. Think about it.”

“I will.”

“Call me.”

“I will.”

“Write me.”

“I will.”

“And no falling in love.”

“Okay.”

“Talk to you soon.”

“Sure.”

“I do adore you.”

“Michael…”

“Ciao.”

I held the phone, listening to dead transatlantic air until the operator informed me it was time to make a call. What had just happened? A perfectly good editor-author relationship had gone up in flames. How could he love me? We’d never met, as he so stubbornly kept pointing out.

In the past, I’d stared at his cover photos feeling mildly like a jellyfish and woozy inside. He was sexy. But he was there, and I was here. It was perfect. No morning chit-chat. No fighting over toilet seat lid etiquette. No one badgering me about my weird hours, my caffeine addiction, my overindulgence in tequila sunrises. No one yelling at me when my gut screamed out over my combined poor habits and I was writhing on the bathroom floor—no “I wish you’d see someone about that.” Michael was my ideal non-lover. And if he thought about it long enough, he’d realize it, too. I’d just let it all sink in to him. Maybe he was having a post-writer’s block orgasm from our most recent phone call.

I turned my attention to the serious pile of Goodwill clothes amassing on my bed. I hated to shop but realized I didn’t have a month’s worth of clothes to take. Time to hit the mall, then visit my father.

In a place where pink palaces reign, the malls are enough to make a practical woman don a burlap sack. Overpriced is a mantra, and over-the-top is a Boca staple. I pulled up to Bloomingdale’s and forced myself to go through the doors. I am seriously mall-phobic. I think it’s those faintly Night of the Living Dead-like makeup counter women. I’m fond of my slightly flawed face the way it is—crooked smile, full lips, and freckled nose included. I even like the tiny scar by my right eyebrow where Billy Monroe stabbed me with a pencil during a second-grade fight. Billy ended up with a black eye. I called it even.

My shopping technique is simple. I head to Ann Taylor and find a shirt I like. Then I buy it in seven colors. Next I find pants I like. I buy three of the exact same pair in the same size, eight. I do the same with shorts. I toss a scarf and a new purse on the pile. Buy two pairs of size-nine shoes that look comfortable. I don’t try anything on. I have them ring it all up. I am out the door in less than fifteen minutes. The Ann Taylor girls see me coming from three stores away and sound some sort of “Bitch alarm.” They steer clear of me ever since I told the manager, “Look, I am about to spend seven or eight hundred dollars. I don’t want any help. I don’t want anyone to talk to me. If you stay out of my way, then I will return several times a year to spend roughly the same amount of money. Deal?” She had nodded, and I’ve been shopping there for four years.

After damaging my credit card, I left the mall and drove to Stratford Oaks Assisted Living Facility.

“Mornin’, Charlie.” I smiled at the security guard in the fern-filled lobby.

“Mornin’, Ms. Hayes.”

I had hoped to be able to really talk to my father, but today wasn’t going to be one of those days.

“Sophie!” He smiled broadly at me and called me by my mother’s name. I hate that I look like her.

“Jack.” I smiled warmly, approaching him, this half-stranger who no longer knew me by my real name most of the time. He looked thinner by the day. They told me he resisted all foods but pie. Why pie? They used to go to some place down in Greenwich Village and order pieces of it after the theater.