Hollywood Hills

Chapter Twelve

Three days after their drive to San Luis Obispo, she took Eli out to dinner to introduce him to friends and to show him a bit of Los Angeles. That was ten days ago. It was the night Kate decided she couldn't see him again.

***

The restaurant where they'd met Ellen and Thorne Saenz was one of the more stylish in that part of town, the kind of place at which Kate—rather, at which Alice had dined a thousand or more times over the years. But this time she'd been nervous and uncomfortable from the start. She'd introduced Eli as a 'friend from high school'—it was an accurate enough description—but hadn't anticipated anything that followed.

Ellen was one of the few people left in the city Alice could still name as friend, and she and her husband Thorne had loved Eli from the get-go. But what wasn't to love? He was gorgeous (clearly the best-looking man in the place that night), charming, had a bottomless well of stories, tales, jokes, and anecdotes, and had spent much of his life in distant and exciting lands. If truth be told, Kate had hoped to show off Eli a little in public, but had worried her two friends might find him simple and unrefined. Far from it. In no time at all, he had them eating from the palm of his hand.

Still, something had kept scratching at her, gnawing at her through to the bone. It wasn't that Eli had neglected her during the evening. Had he been any more attentive, it would have been embarrassing. It was something else, and that notion, whatever it was, had worried away at her throughout the evening, until immediately after dinner as Thorne slowly was working on a raspberry tart and she and Eli sipped coffee. Ellen had slipped away to chat with a few potential clients on the terrace when Thorne, a moderately successful writer, began querying Eli about how a man might best tell when a woman finds him attractive.

As was usual with the effusive writer, he did most of the talking, pitching thoughts and ideas to Eli and to Alice, responding to their comments with various clucks and coos, and even taking the occasional note on the tiny pad he kept about him for such occasions.

"There are a lot of ways you can tell someone finds you attractive," Eli finally interrupted. If either Thorne or the subject matter annoyed him, he'd done a good job hiding it. "I only know of one fool-proof indicator. Matchmaking."

Thorne, suddenly alert, responded with a sound that was midway betwixt cluck and coo.

"Never in my life have I had a woman try to set me up with a friend that I didn't eventually hook up with the matchmaker instead," Eli continued.

"Never?" Thorne asked.

"Not once," Eli replied with total confidence. "Come on, it makes sense. What greater seal of approval is there for a woman than saying a man is good enough for one of her friends?"

"And this has never failed you?" she asked. Alice had to admit, even days later, that the idea was funny.

"Not once," he repeated with a shy smile and a wink in her direction.

The timing was comic, even bordering on the burlesque, when Ellen returned moments later.

"Alice," the woman said straightaway upon sitting, "you know who'd love Eli? Molly. We should set the two of them ...."

Poor Ellen was at a loss as to why the table suddenly was beset by gales of laughter. For the first time that night, Alice was in stitches, and it was the closest she'd ever seen Eli come to blushing. His only rejoinder was a solemn, "sorry about that, brother," to Thorne between the gusts.

She didn't Ellen for the comment. There was nothing in what Alice told her that suggested Eli was anything other than a former schoolmate in town on business. There certainly was nothing in the way she and Eli behaved at dinner that would have suggested anything different.

But all of Alice's friends were from Hollywood, or at least from along its fringes, so all had at least a little kink in them. She'd never known Ellen to chase after other men, but the couple never made a secret that it excited Thorne to bring the occasional male companion to join them in their marital bed. From that point, Thorne and Ellen's flirtations and amatory allusions toward Eli grew increasingly bawdy. Such verbal nuisances didn't seem to bother Eli, who'd deflected them mildly with politeness and charm, but within half an hour, Eli glanced at her, made their excuses, and, after snatching up the check, walked her to his truck for the drive home.

It was obvious that his hasty departure was because of some discomfort he'd sensed in her, which made her ride home all the more awkward. And there was that unnamed notion, that inexplicable something that had grown increasingly unpleasant over the course of the evening, hidden only by Alice's pretend smiles and occasional trickles of laughter. By the time they left the restaurant, she had grown so ill from the weight of it that she thought she might retch.

But what was it? On reflection, there never was any doubt her friends would like Eli. The idea that they might not seemed silly to her in hindsight. Nor, to her surprise, had she been shocked or offended that Ellen and Thorne had taken a stab at enticing him into their clutches. That had been her initial self-diagnosis. No, her neuroses were never so prosaic.

Only on the drive home did she slowly unravel her thoughts, until hint after hint led her to her anxiety's provenance. Her terrible pain and unease throughout that evening was nothing but her silly and jumbled reaction to the wonderful way that being around Eli made her feel and the thrill she felt at showing him off to others. There it was, the heart of all the lies and half-truths she'd been telling herself about him these last weeks. There it was, the Gordian knot of conflicted, coiled, twined, and twisted feelings that appeared to be the new normal for her.

Alice was afraid.

She'd spent sixteen years in Otto's shadow and, for all her later regret, had been happy for it. Like so many others, including sundry who'd been aware of his dodgy business practices, she had reveled in her late husband's company—he'd been an extraordinary presence at parties and social gatherings, even in his later years. It was part of what'd seduced her to him.

Eli was as different from Otto as night was from day, but even if he were solid, dependable, and open in ways Otto had never been, Eli cast that same enormous shade under which she could oh-so easily lose herself.

In the end, it wasn't Otto, and it wasn't Eli. It was her, and the fears she had of what? ... clinginess? reliance? complacency? She didn't know, but whatever it was, she felt its pull, so sweet, intoxicating, and comforting. She couldn't do this, not again. It was too much. Just too much.

She realized on that night ten days ago, as Eli dropped her at home with another affectionate peck on the cheek, that she couldn't spend another sixteen years as someone else's plus-one. The heavens had given her no hint or intimation of what her future might hold, but she had to make that future on her own.

The irony of her situation at that precise moment had suddenly become clear and reached out to punch her in the nose. It was only as she winked, smiled, and walked away from him toward the house that she'd realized what had been going on between them for the last few weeks wasn't just a casual friendship, at least not for her.

You can't see him again, she'd admonished herself with a heavy heart and a trembling lip.