SUNRISE.
Del awoke on his side, so he plopped onto his back, too exhausted to open his eyes until another moment passed. As he recalled his companion from the prior evening, he grinned and reached out this hand, running his palm across the other side of the bed.
He found the sheet cool to the touch.
Curious, he sat up and opened his eyes, then noticed the cover and blanket turned halfway down the bed. He cocked his ear in the direction of the bathroom but heard nothing. No water running through the faucet. No swishing of a toothbrush. Nothing.
She was gone.
And judging from the temperature of the sheet on her side of the bed, she had slipped out long ago.
Del swung his feet onto the floor. With a twist at the waist, he scanned the bedroom again. At the foot of the bed, he noticed Nora’s clothes scattered on the floor. Maybe she hadn’t left after all. A glance through the glass door to the balcony told him she wasn’t out there, either. Had she roamed his house?
Assuming Nora was in the vicinity, he headed to the bathroom to grab his favorite bathrobe but couldn’t find it. He was sure he’d left it there. Then again, he hadn’t worn it in a week, so his memory might have failed him. Instead, he pulled on a T-shirt and pajama bottoms, then wandered down the hallway, toward the staircase. When he reached the bottom of the stairs, the scent of freshly brewed coffee jolted him and swept the heaviness from his eyelids.
The aroma lured him to the kitchen, where he found Nora leaning her hip against his counter, sipping coffee as she stared at a decorative window near the kitchen table. Apparently, she’d searched the cupboard farthest from the sink—the one where he kept random items he rarely needed or sought—and had selected a mug he’d purchased at an airport in Zurich. German script flowed across a watercolor rendition of the Swiss Alps. With her face turned in the opposite direction, she didn’t see Del approach her.
A thick, royal-blue robe—his robe—swallowed her frame. Since Del was several inches taller than Nora, it covered the full length of her body and brushed against the floor. Her shoulder-length hair, half of which hung over the collar of the robe, appeared tousled in the perfect spots. Nora Jumelle possessed a sexuality understated yet undeniable. When she crossed one leg over the other, the lower half of her leg, that porcelain flesh of hers, peeked through the opening of the robe, her toes curling upon the floor. Her toenails were painted cherry red.
Del’s joint cracked behind his knee—many women had quipped that he couldn’t sneak up on them if he tried—and Nora turned. Most of her makeup had worn away; her lipstick was gone, and her eye shadow was a mere remnant of the prior evening’s incarnation.
“I made myself at home,” Nora remarked. “Hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all.” Del wondered if she noticed the way his pectoral muscles shaped the sleeves of his T-shirt, even at his age. He still visited the gym each week.
“Would you care for some coffee?” she asked.
She’d found his red, plastic tub of Folgers. Del hadn’t bought into the gourmet coffee fad, whose product tasted like mud to him. He retrieved a mug from his collection of rarities, filled it from the pot, and stirred in a splash of soy milk. When the coffee hit his taste buds, he tried not to wince. The scent was familiar; the taste was not. Nora must have recognized this wasn’t a fancy dark roast and tripled the dosage. He hoped this stuff didn’t set his bowels in motion and send him scurrying to the bathroom.
“Delicious,” he fibbed.
“Coffee’s my specialty,” she replied with a wink and lifted the mug to her lips with both hands. She’d painted her fingernails the same shade of red as her toes.
“Do you work today?” asked Del.
“I’m between projects. We don’t start shooting until April due to schedule conflicts. Do you work today?”
“I’m between projects myself.” Eager to deter her from digging into the details, he added, “You really are a fine actress.”
“Some would disagree.” Nora shot him a crafty glare. “I’m sure you’ve read what the critics say: ‘She’s box-office gold but not an artist.’”
“I don’t understand why they would write that. Your latest performance was brilliant. Whether the critics agreed or not, the public loved it.”
She shrugged.
Del marveled at her nonchalance. Not that she didn’t care; rather, she’d managed to maintain a semblance of naïveté. He remembered how it felt for his career to skyrocket and couldn’t help but be thrilled for Nora. If she played her cards right, he estimated, she had the talent to build a career that would last until she chose to retire—if she chose to retire. Del saw in Nora an enduring presence, the next Diane Keaton or Meryl Streep. She was the type of actress who could reinvent herself in each stage of her life.
“I hear a lot of Oscar buzz,” he said. “You appear to be the frontrunner.”
“Surprise, surprise,” she chuckled. “I’m not banking on that one.”
“They say it’s a virtual lock for you.”
“All the more reason not to get my hopes up. Life has a way of kissing you on the mouth and shitting on your feet.”
He fought to keep a straight face. “That’s one way to put it.”
She stared at him. Her gray eyes reminded Del of winters in Nebraska: bleak and impenetrable. As a child, after months of stale winter temperatures and an absence of sunshine, what he wouldn’t have given to open a window and inhale fresh, balmy air.
Nora ran her index finger along the rim of her coffee mug, studied its path, tapped the porcelain surface with her shiny, painted fingernail.
“Do you know where I was five years ago?” she murmured in a skeptical tone.
Del furrowed his brow. As far as he could recall, her breakthrough role had arrived only three years ago. “Can’t say I do.”
“I was working in the butcher section at a grocery store.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. I learned every cut of steak. Veal, pork, sausage—you name it, these hands touched it.” She wiggled her fingers with her free hand.
“I’d imagine that knowledge comes in handy…somehow.”
“I’m a vegetarian now. I learned I can’t stand the sight of blood.”
Why had she mentioned steak? Now Del craved a filet mignon.
“I’d moved to the City of Angels a few weeks earlier, had no job. This guy in the apartment downstairs got me a job at the store. They asked me if working with raw meat bothered me, and I figured, How bad could it be?” She shook her head and snickered. “I spent the first week feeling nauseous and the next three weeks feeling numb. Sometimes the money comes in handy and you think you can handle anything, but then you look around at the carnage and you say to yourself, What the hell am I doing here?” She tossed one hand on her hip. “Have you ever asked yourself that? What the hell am I doing here?”
Tell me about it. “How long did you keep that job?”
“Two months. I had to escape. After that, I went to work as your stereotypical cocktail waitress while I worked on indie film shorts. That breakthrough project, Faces, the one that got rave reviews? It was a full-length indie film that nobody should’ve noticed, but we gained a following at Cannes. Next thing you know, it opens on two hundred screens in the U.S. and sells out. They expand to a thousand screens and it cracks the top five at the box office that weekend. Suddenly, they’re dubbing me ‘Jennifer Lawrence 2.0’ or some nonsense like that. Is that how it was back in your day?”
The speed at which decades could roll along, each one faster than the last, astonished Del. People Nora’s age spoke of fifty and sixty years ago as if teenagers hand-jived to Beethoven on American Bandstand back then. Granted, he could remember Michael Jackson as a kid with an afro in a perfect sphere, but that didn’t make Del old. Nora didn’t seem to understand what golden career coins she held in her hands. To be able to pick her projects! These days, the only roles Del turned down were of the Hallmark or Lifetime channel variety. Not even the indie people called him. Not that he would have said yes to a project like that, but nonetheless…
“Options are a good thing,” Del noted. “Look at how it turned out for you: no more butchers or blood. And you have the option of turning down any roles that come your way.”
Nora poured herself another cup of coffee, stirring in plenty of soy milk and sugar.
“Sometimes I wonder why they would want me,” she said. “I’m not extraordinary. Is it fate? Luck of the draw? I mean, a girl I worked with, another waitress, tried to make it as an actress, too. We covered each other’s shifts whenever one of us had an audition. Why would they chase after me and not her? What makes me so special?
“Would you believe I was happier during that indie season?” Nora held his gaze a moment before shaking her head. “That must sound silly. Maybe I’m just not cut out for this.”
Del reached out and stroked her shoulder which, beneath the far-too-big robe, felt bulky to the touch. “Don’t worry, I went through the same thing. You chase after that elusive opportunity and can’t make it happen. Then, one day, you wake up and discover you’ve entered another world. That project you worked on—the one that felt like all the others, the one where you showed up and did your job like any other day—that project turns out to be a rocket that propels you into another stratosphere. Everything changes. You can never go back to the way you were.” He chuckled. “Trust me, you don’t want to return to the way you were, living paycheck to paycheck.”
Nora watched him as he spoke, lifting the coffee mug to her lips without appearing to realize it. When Del paused, she responded with a slow blink, a single flutter of her eyes, the speed of a dying butterfly giving its wings yet another flap as it lay helpless on the ground.
“I’m being ridiculous, aren’t I?” she said.
“Not ridiculous. You’ve entered a new world and you’re trying to find your place.”
At that, Nora drained her coffee, rinsed the mug, and placed it in the dishwasher. She turned to Del and bunched the edges of the robe closer together, concealing the milky porcelain of her chest. With a subdued smile, she rose on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek.
“I’d better get dressed. Thanks for the coffee.” She winked. “And the robe.”
“My pleasure,” Del replied, sipping his now-lukewarm coffee and peering out the window.
When Nora reached the entry threshold, she paused and turned. “Thank you for listening, Del.”
Del caught a glimpse of a smile at the corner of Nora’s lips, the wisp of an afterthought. And with a lingering glance, as if she were giving him a second consideration, she turned and left the kitchen, still wrapped in his robe.