Sugar Time Read online

  “How about a little Risk?” he said after dinner.

  “Wasn’t that the plane trip?”

  “Not hardly,” he said. “I mean the game. There’s a Monopoly set here too, but somehow I think you’re more the take over the world type. Or we could watch a movie. Or maybe you’re tired and want to turn in.”

  “Risk is a great idea,” I said. “I haven’t played for years.”

  We set up the board, making ridiculous boasts and pooh-poohing each other’s moves. “This’ll wipe you off the map,” I said at one point; “You and whose army?” he snapped back, which sent us both into gales of laughter. Maybe you had to be there but trust me; it was more silly fun than I’d had in years, especially without being stoned.

  In between moves we talked about how much the world had changed in our lifetimes. “Everything seems a lot more fragile now, doesn’t it?” I said, telling him about the man who said he didn’t want to know how things turned out any longer, they could only get worse. “Have you ever felt that way?” I asked.

  He thought about that while he pondered his next move. “Maybe,” he said. “But not now.”

  “What changed?”

  “I met you,” he said simply, and then proceeded to march his army into Russia.

  “That was Hitler’s mistake, too,” I said, moving my own forces closer to the Chinese border.

  “Ah yes, but look—that makes you vulnerable over here, and here, too.”

  I was thinking about what he’d said just before that move into Russia, and in a few decisive thrusts he won the game. “My mother says you should never outshine men at anything—they don’t like it,” I said, and told him about the sixth grade softball game. “You’re saying you let me win?” he asked, amused.

  “Do I look like that kind of girl?” I teased.

  “I don’t know yet. But I didn’t come to lose.”

  After a couple more games, I was yawning. “I think I’m ready for that hot tub,” I said.

  “Want company?” he asked easily.

  “Not right away. Maybe after.”

  “Enjoy. I’ll be down here.”

  I soaked in the tub for a while—it was starlit and peaceful there, the only noise the wind sloughing through the trees. Then I rinsed off in the outdoor shower and slipped on a knee-length green silk nightshirt I’d purchased in the hotel boutique in the Four Seasons. Standing at the top of the stairs, I watched him for a couple of minutes—he was sprawled out on the couch, a book open on his chest, his eyes closed. But then he opened them, and looked up at me.

  “Everything okay?” he said. “Do you need anything?”

  “Yes,” I said simply. “As a matter of fact, I do.”

  One of the things I’ve noticed about getting older is that often the anticipation of getting your ambitions realized or your fantasies fulfilled is better than the payoff. Or maybe it was always that way. But having sex with someone isn’t like winning an Emmy or seeing the sun set over the Nile with Omar Shariff (back in the day, that is). It comes with its own set of anxieties, especially when you’re not, well, young anymore. Forget the vague worries in the back of your mind about whether your heart can stand it—obsess over your usual issues with your naked body, which is not what it once was; as Nora Ephron says, anything you didn’t like about your body at 35 you’ll be nostalgic for at 45. Or as Frances put it after my father died, “If I ever sleep with a man again, it would be good if he were blind.”

  Fortunately, Alex had his hands full of silk before he slipped the nightshirt over my head and we got into bed, and by then he was naked, too.

  I had forgotten how it felt to be in a man’s arms, skin to skin. He was a slow, tender lover—too much so, I thought at first, after more foreplay even than Jan, who always liked the first couple of acts more than the climax. I hoped Alex wasn’t having trouble getting it up and avoiding the issue; once they‘re past the stallion stage, a lot of men do. You always have to tell them it’s not their fault, you’re fine, it doesn’t matter, when you don’t mean anything of the kind—it is, you’re not, and it does. Toward the end of our affair, Jan had trouble that way—once a man has embarrassed himself sexually with a woman, usually he doesn’t want to risk it again.

  But soft and slow wasn’t Alex’s problem, just his style. He took my hands in his, kissing my fingertips one at a time and sending delicious little shivers of anticipation up my spine. Then he lifted each breast, tonguing the nipples erect until they pulsated with an insistent rhythm—more, more, more. Nothing existed except my need to have him inside me, and when he finally entered me it was slowly, deliberately, and only part way. Then just as deliberately he pulled back and out, lifting himself away so the tip of his cock was just out of my reach. The only part of him that touched me was his tongue, which curled itself around mine and probed the tender membrane underneath, gently at first and then demandingly. We breathed each other’s air until it was hot and steamy inside the cavern we made of our mouths; mine was an entire erogenous zone with all feeling and sensation centered there until the first small, sweet release that rippled through me. Groaning in desperation I pulled him back inside me, coming a second later and then again and again.

  He was the kind of lover who takes as much satisfaction in a woman’s pleasure as his own. I don’t remember how many times he brought me to climax before he gave in to his, but later, as I drifted off to sleep, I thought, Sugar, this time you’ve not only been well and truly fucked, you are.

  I was sure of it when he brought me coffee and croissants in bed the next morning. I couldn’t help channeling Jane Austen—Reader, I married him—even while I reminded myself as I always did that if it looks too good to be true, it probably isn’t.

  But if Alex Carroll had a fatal flaw, it wasn’t evident that weekend. Saturday we went kayaking, which I really enjoyed; the sea was calm, and although we didn’t encounter any whales, we saw a baby dolphin with its mother and a couple of bald eagles flying overhead. I got on a bike for the first time in years, one of the old fashioned ones with fat tires and no gears, and we rode into town—“It’s only a few miles,” Alex said, “and it’s flat, we’re on an island.”

  “So was Krakatoa,” I replied, but he was right, it wasn’t hard, although I knew if I didn‘t swallow an Advil when we got back to the cabin I’d be sore the next day. You’ll be sore anyway, said my left brain to my right, after all that unaccustomed fucking.

  In the general store a woman with well-muscled arms and graying hair braided into a thick plait that reached halfway down her back greeted Alex warmly. “Hal caught a mess of salmon this morning,” she said, “I set a couple aside for you. And we’ve got that rosemary bread you like, it came in on the noon boat.” I bought a stuffed Orca whale for Rosie and we loaded the groceries into our bike baskets. On the way home we rode single file along a narrow road, and halfway there Alex stopped on a grassy verge.” What’s the matter?” I asked when I reached him. He was stretched out flat on the ground, his eyes closed.

  “Nothing.” He opened his eyes and pulled me down next to him. “I just realized I haven’t kissed you in three hours.” But when we got back on the bikes again he had me go first. When I looked over my shoulder, his seemed to be wobbling, and he dismounted just before we reached his driveway. “Tire must have a slow leak,” he said. “I’ll walk it the rest of the way.”

  “It looks fine to me.”

  “Until I put my weight on it. I’ll put some air in it later.”

  That night we grilled the salmon and played a few hands of gin rummy before we went upstairs—in fact, we didn’t even make it upstairs, not until later, after we’d made love on the leather couch. We took a long soak in the hot tub together—it had begun to rain, just a bit, and the clouds raced across the sky playing tag with the almost full moon. “So this is Northwest living,” I sighed happily, leaning my head back against the rim of the tub so the jets could get the back of my neck. “Salmon, sex and suds. I could get used to this.”

>   “That was the plan,” he said.

  “Well, it’s working.”

  There was a lot of that kind of thing during the weekend—enough to make me think past the end of it, wonder, What’s the catch? What’s wrong with this picture? When does he turn out to be a serial killer or a closet conservative or a garden-variety asshole with a wife he forgot to tell me about? Because in my experience, limited though it may be, there’s always something wrong with the picture.

  Otherwise, I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of that weekend. It was so far from my real life—or what I thought of as my real life—that everything else receded into the background, not just the octopus but work, the kids, Rosie, my friends, everything that anchored me in the world.

  We took a seaplane back to Seattle—Alex said he had a meeting at the cancer research center that morning, right next to the Lake Union Air dock, so it would be faster than flying his own plane and driving in from Boeing Field.

  “I’ll leave it on the island and catch the ferry up Friday—the weather map looks socked in next weekend, anyway,” he said.

  He put me in a cab at the Kenmore Air terminal, where we said goodbye.

  “I had a wonderful time,” I told him.

  “The first of many,” he promised. Then he leaned through the window and kissed me. “She’s going to Sea-Tac,” he told the driver, and strode off to his meeting.

  He was right; I was, but not quite yet. First I had an appointment to keep with Dr. Kaplan.

  Post-production is when you discover your mistakes, everything that somehow escaped your notice when you were writing or shooting your movie. It’s when you realize that your mother was right—you should have gone to law school.

  When we wrapped three weeks later and delivered the finished product, I cleared out my office. I was ready to go back to New York, but first I had to get a health certificate for Tory so I could take her on the plane.

  “She’s really slowing down in her old age, isn’t she?” said the vet at the clinic in Westwood. I hadn’t noticed it, but the young woman who’d taken over Dr. Wolfe’s practice was right, she was. Not only that—she’d taken to peeing in the house occasionally, something she’d never done before, and she didn’t jump up on my bed as easily as she once had, either. “When you get back to New York, you should take her to your regular vet for a check-up,” she added.

  Even New York’s usual aggravations didn’t dilute my happiness at being back: Go ahead, lady, cut in line, I don’t care; No I don’t mind standing here with my purchases while you file your nails; Of course I don’t care if you seat me next to the kitchen, nobody wants to see a woman alone at one of the good tables, especially since everyone knows we’re lousy tippers; That’s fine, driver, just keep jabbering away on your cell phone while you barrel down Seventh Avenue at eighty miles an hour, isn’t that a pedestrian you just ran over?

  On a beautiful day in my favorite town in the best time of the year, when the trees on the block are in bloom and the kids from Omaha and Scranton in town for their graduation trips are taking pictures of each other in front of the memorial plaque at Strawberry Fields in Central Park, when the peonies come in at the Korean market on Amsterdam and soft shell crab at Empire Szechuan, I always think of that Irwin Shaw line about New York girls in pretty dresses, and am glad I’m alive.

  I didn’t even let the fact that the company that managed my building was going through its annual attempt to jack me out of my rent-stabilized lease dampen my spirits, although I had to go to landlord-tenant court, which is like the eighth circle of hell, to prove I still had a right to it, even though I owned property in another state. I won, but I knew if the show made it and I went back to California for more than a couple of weeks at a time the goniffs would try again, and might even succeed in forcing me out. (Lest you think that was a racial epithet and I am a self-hating Jew, I feel compelled to point out that the actual owners of the handful of rentals like mine and Mrs. B’s are a couple of Hasidic brothers who have recently been indicted for money-laundering for the Columbian cartel).

  Mrs. B. said it was my next-door neighbor who told the brothers I was hardly ever in residence. “I hear she wants your apartment,” she said. “In the “F” line they’re all one-bedrooms, very small, and she always has company, I see them coming and going at all hours.”

  While Mrs. B. knows a lot about what the tenants above the first floor read, she doesn’t know much else about them, except the soap opera actress in 10A and the famous romance novelist in 6D. I, on the other hand, know exactly why Irina Marakova, she of the improbably yellow hair and carefully plucked eyebrows, has so many visitors; for years she’s been running a totally unauthorized electrolysis practice out of her apartment, and paying off the super to keep quiet about it. So I retaliated by dropping a dime on her with the co-op board, which would likely earn me the eternal enmity of the super, but also meant I no longer had to hear the yelps of pain that came through my bedroom wall when Irina was depilating her clients, something I’d endured up to then in the spirit of good neighborliness and live and let live, as I told Alex when he came to my apartment for the first time.

  I hadn’t seen him in almost a month, which felt even longer now that I wasn’t occupied with the show. He came to the city to meet with the mergers and acquisition companies that wanted to handle the sale of his company; he was busy during the days, but we spent nights and weekends together. He was a big hit with the girls—Peggy said he was far and away the most wonderful man I’d ever shown off, Carrie said he was like Big without the neuroses, and Suzanne said I shouldn’t let myself get talked into a pre-nup.

  Not that that ever came up. The subject of marriage, I mean. Mostly we just enjoyed being together and didn’t talk about the future. I was content with what was happening between us—a gradual realization that we were very good together, that we were grateful and lucky to have found each other, and that I was happier than I ever remembered being.

  “I think I’ve officially moved from pre-love formation to the real thing,” I told Carrie.

  “Has he?”

  “It sure seems that way.”

  I felt better than I had since the first visit from the octopus, especially since if we got picked up for even a short season, I knew I had a long slog ahead of me.

  “That sounds like just what you don’t need,” Dr. Kaplan had said when I saw him after my weekend in the San Juans with Alex. “In terms of your health, you’re not doing any better than when you left the hospital—against my advice, if you recall. Your numbers haven’t improved at all—you’re still only around 50 percent.”

  “That’s normal, though, right?”

  “Just barely. In all honesty, I don’t see how you can keep on doing what you’re doing without drastically increasing your chances of having another event. It might not be the takotsuba the next time—it might be a major heart attack.”

  “How about a love affair? Wouldn’t that be good for my heart?”

  “That would depend on how stressful it is,” he replied. “Studies show that the older people get, the more important emotional intimacy is for their overall well-being; there was an article about it in JAMA a few months ago.”

  “What about sexual intimacy?”

  He smiled. “That’s not bad for it, either. Once again, it depends—”

  “I know, on how stressful it is,” I interrupted him.

  “Yes. Well, I’d like to keep monitoring you for another three months, but since you don’t live here, I’ll give you a referral in Los Angeles.”

  “One in New York would be helpful, too,” I said. “And I may be coming back here—my life is sort of in flux now.”

  He wrote a couple of names on a prescription pad for me, made a slight change in my medication, and gave me the medical equivalent of fair warning: “You could be feeling fine one minute and dead the next,” he said.

  “Isn’t that always the case? I mean, even if there’s nothing wrong with you?”

 
He shrugged. “All I’m saying is, you’re taking your life in your hands by continuing to work this hard.” He was probably right, but if I couldn’t work, I might as well be dead. It wasn’t just the money—what really mattered was not being put out to pasture like a horse that can’t race any longer. Television wasn’t particularly significant or ennobling, but it was a world where I had a place—not at the top of the food chain, maybe, but a place nonetheless.

  “Right,” said Jessie when I said as much to her. “And they’ll roll your name on the awards shows with all the others in the business who die during the year. Rosie and Zach and I will be sure to watch.”

  The networks wouldn’t announce until the end of the month, so Alex and I decided to take a vacation. I lobbied for Paris—I’d never been there with a lover, and it stirred up all my romantic fantasies. But Alex wanted to go to the Caribbean. “We’ll always have Paris,” he said, doing a passable imitation of Humphrey Bogart.

  “Yes, but Rick and Ilse already had it,” I said.

  “And so will we. But you’ll love this place, I promise.”

  It was hard not to. It was one of those ultra luxe private hideaways developed by some Richard Branson wannabe that catered to the very rich and the very famous. I would drop some names if I could, but we hardly saw anyone when we were there except for Diane Sawyer and Mike Nichols, who nodded when they passed us on the beach, and a small family of the four most beautiful people in the world who looked like they’d stepped out of a Ralph Lauren “Home” ad. The service was of the appear-at-your-elbow-a-second-after-you-formulate-a-wish variety, and the food, the gardens, and the beach were spectacular.

  The hotel had a little fleet of Lancers like the ones I’d learned to sail at summer camp, and when Alex insisted on racing me, I gave him a run for his money. We played tennis a few times although I was never very good at it and hadn’t improved any with age. “We JAPS don’t like sports where small projectiles fly at our faces at high speeds, especially if we’ve had our noses fixed,” I told him.