If you went down the service stairs far enough, you got to a swinging wood door that led to the service hallway and what was still, after a hundred years and six renovations, the pantry. Nick pushed his way in there and looked around at the shelves. It was twelve o’clock and he was starving. He was also in no mood to sit down in the dining room again with all those women. Doing that yesterday it had given him a headache. It was incredible what some women could be like, when they wanted to be. There was the middle-aged one who had squeezed his thigh while they were waiting on line at the salad bar. There was the young one who had cornered him for an earnest conversation about the Problems of the Underclass and then been furious with him when she realized that he didn’t actually know anybody in the underclass. She’d had her hand on his knee until she had gotten angry with him. Then, before getting up and stalking away, she had dug the tips of her very long nails right into the vulnerable place under his kneecap.
There was a can of tuna fish on the shelf and a bag of onions in the top bin of a stack of plastic bins. The bins underneath the onions all seemed to be full of beans. Nick took a can of tuna and an onion and a loaf of four-grain bread and looked around for some mayonnaise. He found six different kinds of vegetable oil and sixteen different kinds of vinegar. The vinegar surprised him so much, he had to count the bottles twice. Then he decided that Fountain of Youth must be out of mayonnaise, because the only glass jars of anything like it he could find were filled with tofu paste. Nick took the tuna fish and the bread and the onion out of the pantry and into the kitchen. The kitchen was one of those big empty places, built to be used by several people at one time, where all the appliances were too far apart.
Nick put his food down on the long wood picnic table that sat next to a row of windows overlooking the back lawn and went to the refrigerator. There was a second kitchen, a little smaller but much more efficient, where the group meals were prepared for the women who were taking the classes upstairs. That kitchen would be full of frantic people at this time of day. This kitchen was a haven. Nick didn’t define to himself exactly a haven from what. He looked through the jars on the refrigerator shelves. More tofu paste. Eight different kinds of mustard. All-natural organic ketchup. The door to the hall swung open.
If Nick had been living at the house, he would have recognized her immediately. Since he was only there for the working day and she was not sociable, it took him a minute. His first reaction was simple surprise. She was so pretty, he almost dropped the jar he was holding. Tall. Thin. Blond. Perfect. The epitome of everything in the world of women that Nick Bannerman knew he should not want. He felt the stiffening in his pants and sidled hastily toward the refrigerator door, to make sure he was covered. God only knew, exercise clothes wouldn’t cover him much. He looked at the jar he was holding and wondered why he had picked it up. It contained something called anise pickles.
“Ah,” he said. “Hi. Well. Um. It’s Frannie, isn’t it?”
The blond woman had stopped dead as soon as she had seen him. She looked pale and frozen. When Nick spoke, she jumped a little. When he finished, she walked toward the middle of the room, slowly and deliberately, as if she were making herself do it.
“That’s right. Frannie Jay. I’m sorry I bothered you.”
“You didn’t bother me,” Nick told her. “I was looking for some mayonnaise.”
“I won’t bother you much longer,” Frannie Jay said. “I just want to get a bottle of mineral water. As soon as I get a bottle of mineral water, I’ll get right out of here.”
Anise pickles. Nick put them back on the shelf, next to a jar of 100 percent all-natural carob sauce. It said it like that, in big jokey letters, as if it were a can of SpaghettiOs. The healthy foods movement meets American mass marketing. The palms of Nick’s hands were wet with sweat. He wiped them off, as discreetly as he could, on the back of his T-shirt.
“You don’t have to get out of here,” he said. “Stick around and I’ll make you some lunch. That’s why I was looking for the mayonnaise. Tuna fish.”
“I don’t eat lunch,” Frannie Jay said.
Frannie Jay didn’t look like she ate much of anything at all. She wasn’t anorexic, exactly. She had good muscle tone and rounded, strong calves. Still you could see every bone in her rib cage. Nick felt his erection wilt and then stiffen again.
He closed the refrigerator door. “If you don’t want to spend the hour upstairs, you could stay here and keep me company,” he suggested. “I could use a little company. I spend all my time either bouncing around or commuting.”