The Teaser Read online

  “How was the ride up?” she asked.

  “Slow. But not bad.”

  She took my arm and led me toward the hostess desk. We got a table by the window, looking out on the water.

  “So fill me in on all the gory details,” I said.

  Kate rolled her eyes, laughing softly.

  “There’s less to tell than you might think,” she said. “We started going out just after Thanksgiving the year before last. He lives in Boston, but his folks have a place here, so he comes down a few times a week. He proposed at Christmas. That’s really about it.”

  She had an air of bored sophistication about her now that she had lacked in college, more poised and jaded, you might say. Her hair was up in a short, snappy cut, and her nails were French-manicured. I wondered if her mother had been sending her off to the beauty salon for some polish in preparation for her married life.

  “What’s he like?”

  “He’s great . . . or at least he can be when he wants to. He’s one of those guys who seems to need everyone’s approval, you know? Got to be everyone’s best bud. Most of the time it’s funny. Sort of cute. But sometimes it can get annoying.”

  “I gather your parents like him?”

  She laughed.

  “They love him. He and my dad are always smoking cigars together, arms over each other’s shoulders, drinking Remy Martin XO on the back patio. And my mother would probably marry him herself if I wasn’t around and she wasn’t married already.”

  “What’s his family do?”

  “No more than he does. Or at least most of them don’t. Some of them still work. But they made their money in shipping. And his great-something-grandfather came over on the Mayflower.”

  “Blood so blue it’s almost black.”

  She laughed even harder.

  “Don’t let him hear you say that. He’d totally take it the wrong way, like you were saying he was black himself.”

  I laughed with her.

  “I guess that came out wrong.”

  “I know what you meant. He probably wouldn’t.”

  The waitress came back, and we ordered lunch. Kate told me some more about what she had been up to over the last year, and I filled her in on the life of a big-city litigator.

  “Are you seeing anyone now?” she asked at one point.

  “Not really. I was dating a woman I met through a guy I work with, but it never really went anywhere.”

  “We’ve got to get you hitched up. I’ve got some single friends I can introduce you to at the wedding. I can think of a few who’d love to meet a guy like you.”

  “I only date cute brunettes.”

  She smiled slyly, knowing what I really meant. We had played that game a lot during college, pretending things weren’t the way they really were.

  “Well, I’m thinking of one. One of my bridesmaids. She’s a doctor, though she’s still an intern.”

  “I doubt she has time for a social life then.”

  “She could make the time, I think, if she wanted to.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Melissa. She’s interning at a hospital in New York, so you guys could get together if something happens at the wedding.”

  I grinned.

  “We’ll see.”

  We ate slowly, talking more and more about our days at Yale, and how we had parted ways since then. Then, bit by bit, the conversation drifted back to her impending nuptials.

  “Preston is having a bachelor party in about a month. I could get you an invite if you want to go. They’re going down to Miami for the weekend.”

  “I don’t know. Those things sort of turn me off now. I think I left that nonsense behind in college.”

  Her forehead wrinkled ever so slightly, and her eyes fixed on mine.

  “I’d like you to get to know him, at least a little. Would you go? Please?”

  I tried to read what I was seeing in her face.

  “I guess so. If it means that much to you.”

  “Thanks. It’s not that it means that much, it’s just . . .”

  Her voice trailed off, and her eyes darted toward the window. I looked at her, my concern growing by the moment.

  Then I got it.

  “I’m spying for you, aren’t I? You want to hear what happens from someone who won’t be inclined to cover for him.”

  She forced a smile onto her face.

  “Is it that obvious?”

  I stared at her.

  “Kate, tell me something.”

  The smile became a bit more genuine.

  “Do I have to? I know what you’re going to ask me. I could never fool you before.”

  “Why are you marrying this guy?”

  She sighed and turned back to the sea. She didn’t say anything for several long seconds.

  “This is something you would understand better than I do, the legalities of it anyway. All of that stuff is just Greek to me, no matter how many times our lawyers try to explain it. Basically, there is a trust at stake here. A big one. A very, very big one. There’s something to it, the lawyers keep calling it a ‘contingent remainder,’ whatever that is, that means I get nothing if I don’t get married before I’m twenty-six. I’ve been getting the income, but I don’t get the whole thing unless I get married.”

  I did some quick arithmetic.

  “Your twenty-sixth birthday is in July.”

  She managed another weak smile.

  “Bingo.”

  I felt myself physically wilting as this sunk in. I had never realistically expected to be able to marry Kate—and frankly, I would not have just up and done it even now—but to lose her to something like this? That hurt.

  “And that’s what this is about?”

  She put her hand over mine and squeezed it lightly.

  “It’s not quite that cold-blooded. I do like Preston. And I like I said, he can be sweet when he wants to be. I think we’ll be happy together.”

  “But you don’t love him.”

  She made a small shrug of surrender.

  “As if that matters.”

  For a few seconds, the silence hung thickly in the air, like smog.

  “I understand,” I said finally. “As much as I can, I guess.”

  She squeezed my hand again.

  “Thanks.”

  IV.

  Whether or not it had any to do with wanting deflect my romantic pretensions toward her (I would never work up the guts to ask), Kate began our sophomore year at Yale by announcing that she was going to a) get me fixed up with someone serious, and b) solve my virginity problem. I had dated other girls the previous year, but as my heart was really set on Kate, I had never slept with any of them.

  She soon selected a girl named Mara, who was one of Kate’s sorority sisters and about as different from her as she could get. Where Kate was short, slim, brown-haired and at best sort of cute, this girl was blonde, curvy and one of those women who fall out of bed pretty. And where Kate had been born with sophistication running through her veins, Mara had come straight to Yale from a farm in rural Iowa.

  Kate set up everything, so on the appointed evening, I walked across campus to Mara’s residential college. There I saw a pretty blonde girl waiting on a bench outside the main entrance.

  Several things shot through my head when I saw Mara for the first time: Is that her? No, that can’t be her. Then, as she met my gaze: Oh God, please let that be her.

  She wore nothing but jeans and a Yale sweatshirt, and her blonde hair was loose and straight down her back. She smiled at me, glanced down shyly at the pavement, then back up to see if I was still looking at her. Then she stood up as I approached.

  “Hi. Are you Tom?”

  “Yeah. Are you Mara?”

  “I guess so.”

  That reply made both of us burst into nervous giggles.

  “I mean, yeah, I am,” she said. “So where are we going?”

  To heaven, I thought to myself. Honestly. The sparks were shooting that thick.<
br />
  “Just off campus. You know that little Italian place?”

  “Sure. That’s a great idea.”

  She fell in beside me as we began walking.

  “Kate said you’re from New York?”

  “Midtown. Have you ever been there?”

  “No. I’d love to go, though. It must be really exciting.”

  I shrugged in the way only a New Yorker can shrug about his hometown.

  “It’s okay. You’re from Iowa?”

  She glanced away from me briefly.

  “Yeah. I bet it would be really dull after New York.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve been to California, but nowhere in between.”

  “Where else have you been?”

  “I went to Europe a couple of times with my folks.”

  “Really? How was it?”

  “Pretty neat. How about you?”

  She colored a tiny bit in embarrassment.

  “I’ve never been anywhere, really. I’d love to go to Europe some time though.”

  Mara continued pumping me for details about the places I had been until we sat down at our table in the restaurant. Only then did I get a chance to learn much about her. Her father owned a farm in Iowa, and she had been valedictorian of a high school class of 53 kids. She had a vague Midwestern twang to her voice that came and went through the evening, which made me think she was trying to lose it.

  She was absolutely nothing like any of the girls I had known when I was growing up in New York, who were so jaded and full of themselves and so convinced they knew everything there was to know. Mara was just Mara. Likewise, I (and I knew this because she said so) was nothing like the boys she had dated in high school, who “dipped snuff and forgot to bathe everyday,” as she said in disgust. She had dated a few people at Yale, but “nobody interesting.”

  We stayed at the restaurant until it became clear the staff needed us out. We walked slowly back to campus. My hand bumped against hers halfway back, and the two slipped together slowly.

  I walked her up to the door to her room. I promised to call her. We kissed nervously, then more deliberately. When we finally pried ourselves apart, she had given me a definite hard-on.

  A week later, I was no longer a virgin.

  Despite our disparate backgrounds—or perhaps because of them—Mara and I became an item almost immediately, and we dated steadily for nearly two years. I remained close friends with Kate, of course, but not until the end of my relationship with Mara did that become an issue.

  The summer between our junior and senior years at Yale, I took Mara home to meet the rest of my family. My parents had met her a few times before during various visits to New Haven, but she had never spent more than an hour or two in their company. She had also never met the rest of my family, particularly my grandfather, nor had she ever been to New York City.

  When we arrived at my parents’ apartment that afternoon, having taken a cab from Grand Central, no one was home yet to meet us. Mara had spent the entire cab ride staring wide-eyed up at all the buildings, and when we walked in and set the bags down in the foyer, she went straight across the living room to stare out the main window. We had a partial view of the Park—nothing that should have been illegal, but it was nice nonetheless—and she leaned against the glass to take it all in.

  I came up behind her and hugged her.

  “Pretty nice, huh?”

  “Yeah. Wow. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. It almost looks like a bunch of toy houses around a garden.”

  “Want to take a walk over there?”

  “Could we?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay. Let me go to the bathroom first.”

  She went into the restroom off the hall while I carried our bags back to my room. I had just set them down beside my bed when I turned around to see Mara in the doorway with a confused look on her face.

  “What?”

  “This is going to sound stupid, but . . . why are there two toilets in there?”

  It took me a second or two to realize what was giving her problems.

  “There aren’t. One of them is a bidet.”

  Her forehead creased even further.

  “A what?”

  I tried to explain, and her face colored in embarrassment as I did. It was a look I had seen before.

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  She disappeared back into the hall before I could say anything else.

  When she returned, we descended to the street and walked a few blocks down East 70th Street before reaching Central Park. Mara continued looking around at everything, though she seemed a bit subdued now. It was a beautiful June day for New York, warm but not yet humid as it would get in July. We stopped by the Turtle Pond and lay back on the grass together looking up at the sky.

  “This is pretty,” she said a few minutes later.

  “It is.”

  “It doesn’t feel like we’re in New York.”

  “That’s why it’s so crowded. It’s about the only place to get away from all that.”

  She rolled over, laying her head on my chest. I ran my fingers through her hair. Blonde like corn silk, I thought, like the corn her family farmed on 500 acres in northwestern Iowa. A place I had never seen and frankly had no desire to ever visit, even though Mara had never let me meet her parents.

  “I love you,” she said softly.

  I hugged her.

  “I love you, too.”

  ---

  When we returned to the apartment, my mother was home from work and getting dinner together for that evening, as my grandparents were coming over to see us. She greeted us warmly and inquired briefly about our trip south.

  “Can I help with dinner?” Mara asked.

  “Sure,” she said. “In fact, could you get me the shiitake mushrooms out of the bottom drawer of the refrigerator?”

  I saw a familiar look of embarrassed confusion shoot through Mara’s eyes and went to help her out. I found the mushrooms and gave them to her.

  “Thanks,” she whispered.

  Mara chopped up the mushrooms and some other vegetables for the recipe my mother was making while we discussed school and our plans for next year. My father returned home about twenty minutes later, and shortly after that, my grandparents buzzed up from the building foyer. I could see Mara getting progressively more nervous, and I went over and squeezed her hand.

  “Relax. I’m sure it will be fine.”

  I answered the door when they arrived. My grandfather shook my hand vigorously.

  “Tom, good to see you. How have you been?”

  “Good. School is going well.”

  I kissed my grandmother on the cheek and then introduced them to Mara.

  “It’s nice to meet you, ma’am,” she said.

  “And you too, dear,” my grandmother said. “Tom tells me you’re from Iowa.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Where in Iowa?”

  “Granite. It’s a little town near Sioux Falls, South Dakota. My family has a farm there.”

  My grandmother gave me an unctuous smile.

  “Well, you’ve certainly come a long way.”

  We made idle chit-chat for another fifteen minutes until my mother announced that dinner was ready. Mara helped her serve it, and we all sat down in the dining room.

  “Tom, you’ll be applying to the Law School this fall, won’t you?” my grandfather asked.

  “Yeah. I’m taking the LSAT in a few weeks.”

  “How are your grades going?”

  “Good enough, I hope. I just need to do well on the test.”

  “Well, you’ve always tested well,” my father said. “We’ve all got our fingers crossed.”

  “What are you studying, dear?” my grandmother asked Mara.

  “Economics.”

  “What do you think you’ll do with it?”

  “I’m not really sure yet. I want to go to graduate school, so I’ll probably go on and get an MBA or MPA. I might work
for a year or two first, though.”

  “Are you going to stay on the East Coast or move back to Iowa?” my father asked.

  Mara glanced briefly at me.

  “I don’t know yet. I guess I’ll decide when I graduate.”

  The conversation drifted back to my father’s job and the general aspects of lawyering, and nothing unusual happened the rest of the evening. My grandparents went home and my parents retired to their room. Mara insisted on doing the dishes, and I stayed in the kitchen to help her.

  “How did I do?” she asked.

  “You did fine. They’re always like that.”

  “I don’t think your grandmother liked me.”

  I leaned over to kiss her on the cheek.

  “Give her time. And what matters is that I like you.”

  She giggled, nuzzling my head.

  “I can’t believe your parents are letting me stay in your room.”

  “They’re pretty cool about stuff like that.”

  “My folks would never let us do that in a million years. I mean, not unless we were m—”

  She cut herself off, then began to blush. I kissed her again.

  “Right.”

  We finished with the dishes and went back to my room to watch television. Mara changed into her nightshirt and flopped onto the bed. She lay on her stomach and propped her chin up in her hands to watch the TV. I was leaning against the headboard, and when she settled into place beside me, I reached up to caress her thighs. She giggled but stayed put, even when I lifted up the hem of her nightshirt to see if she was wearing panties. She wasn’t. I reached up further to cup a firm buttock in my hand.

  “What are you doing?” she asked softly.

  “You’ll see.”

  I slid my hand downward, finding the warm nest between her thighs. I tickled her gently, and she began rolling her hips against my fingers. I kept it up until she started to lubricate, and then I slowly slipped my middle finger inside her. She gasped, legs tensing, but let me.

  Using my thumb and middle finger, I masturbated her gently for a few minutes, and her hips were soon moving with me. She lay down flat on the end of the mattress, head on her arm, biting at her fist. I watched her rising toward orgasm, thinking that my grandmother had been right about how far Mara had come, though not in the way she meant. Mara had not been a virgin when we met, but she might as well have been when it came to understanding her own needs and reactions. Sex in Granite, Iowa, she would tell me later, was just something girls did for their boyfriends. When I went down on her the first time we slept together, it was the first time she had ever reached orgasm in her life, whether alone or with someone else. She had never even masturbated, for God’s sake. She had lost her virginity at fifteen, while I had never made it beyond second base before that night, but somehow I felt as if I were the one with the experience.