We take off, Alex gazing at me all the way. Once we are up in the air and the seatbelt sign is switched off, Arabella emerges from the other compartment.
“Dinner will be served,” she says brightly, handing me and Alex menus on an embossed cream cards. “Take your time to look through and I’ll be right back.”
I wonder if she’s expecting a huge tip at the end.
I peruse the menu. It’s one of those menus with five or six courses that will make you feel stuffed just reading it. I’m used to those menus, of course – from the other end of serving them.
For the main course, I apparently have a choice between:
Roast Lamb Provencale with julienned baby potatoes
Duck terrine with aubergines and baby carrots
Alaskan halibut in béarnaise sauce
I’m not really hungry. My stomach is in one of its spin cycles. Alex’s brilliant eyes are disconcerting, especially when he won’t stop looking at me.
“Do I have a smudge on my cheek?” I say, touching my right one.
“No.” He laughs. “I’m making you uncomfortable, aren’t I? It’s just that I can’t get over how good you look.”
“You mean I didn’t look good before?”
“No, you looked pretty damn good to me. It’s just that now you look – ” he waves a hand “ – different. Like you belong on the cover of some society magazine.”
Arabella comes in with the starters. Oh yeah, there are three starters in all. A soup served in a fashionable teacup. Lobster bisque of some sort, with a splotch of cream in it – done in the shape of a spade.
“And do you like girls like that?” I say, thinking of Tatiana.
“No. Hell, no.” He laughs. “I merely thought you would like dressing up as one for a change.”
“What makes you think that?”
“A hunch that you would like to try something different.”
He isn’t far off, though he is being presumptuous. But try as I may, I can’t be mad at Alex. He’s too good-looking, too intense, and he radiates an aura of authority in an ‘I know what you secretly like and I’m dishing it out to you whether you protest or not’ manner.
The soup is followed by smoked salmon fashioned to look like a flower. We fence and chat, finding out bits and pieces about each other. I already know a bit about him from what I read on the Internet. So he went to Eton in England, and then to Harvard.
“Why anthropology?” I ask.
Somehow, I can’t get myself to relax. My stomach is in knots, and I’m finding it difficult to digest the salmon in the soup that is already swirling around in my guts. The food is extremely delicious, of course, but the unknowable factor of this man – along with my surreal surroundings – makes me feel as if I’m tethered very close to a live electrical wire that is whipping back and forth.
“I like studying different peoples, especially when they as far away from my environment as they can possibly be.” He’s sitting back affably, sipping his vodka on ice. Me, I need a stiffer drink than the tomato juice I’m having.
He talks about the places he has been to – Papua New Guinea, India, Russia, the Andes. To hear him speak, it sounds like he has roughed it – sleeping on the floors of mud huts, trekking across the scorching desert, scaling cliffs with zip lines and carabiners. The places that he speaks about are so different from the luxurious environment that we are in that I wonder if he’s leading me on. But he sounds earnest and passionate as he describes the little mud-fortified straw houses on the savannah and the elongated necks of the Burmese tribal women – buoyed only by ringed necklaces – in the mountains.
“So how about you?” he asks me. “Where did you grow up?”
Me? I’m a little embarrassed to be talking about myself, especially when I don’t even have a patch on where Alex has been to. But he hangs onto my every word, as if I’m one of his anthropological subjects he has to write a dissertation on.
“So you grew up in South Texas, huh? And your Mom, she works in a bank?”
“Yes.”
“What happened to your Dad?”
“I never knew him,” I say, taking a spoonful of the palate-cleansing sorbet they serve between courses. “He went away after a fight with my Mom when I was ten. Never saw him since.”
Oh yes. I remember crouching underneath my bed in the room, trying to get the screaming and shouting out of my head. I hear a slap, the last of a long succession of blows and slaps over the years, and the slam of the door. That’s the last I ever saw of my Dad.
Somehow, Alex intuits this.
“He beat up your Mom?”
I’m surprised. “How did you know? I never mentioned it.”
“You flinched.”
“I flinched?”
“Yeah. It was when you said it.” He puts down his vodka and stares at my face. His intensity goes up a shade, if possible. He says softly, “Did he hit you?”
“N-no.”
This man is unnerving.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Because if anyone ever hits you, they’ll have me to answer to.” He says this with the dead seriousness of someone who knows he can hire assassins.
Inwardly, I shiver.
Our main course arrives. I have ordered the halibut, and Alex the lamb.
“You’re not enjoying your food much,” he observes, seeing me cut my fish into little pieces and taking a tentative bite out of one.
“I’m stuffed, that’s all.”
“Liar. You’re a bundle of nerves.”
How perceptive.
“Well, you do unnerve me. All this,” I wave my hand around, “unnerves me.”
There – my frank and honest declaration.
He’s solicitous again. “You don’t like it?”
“I do . . . it’s just that . . . I’m not used to it, that’s all.”
“You’d rather we go to Sal’s diner and have a greasy burger and fries?”
I laugh. “I’m more of a salad person.”
“I can tell. You have a great figure.” He raises one eyebrow and lowers it again. “Don’t worry. I can see the look on your face. I’m not going to jump you, Liz. Not tonight, I firmly promise. This is just a date. No strings attached.”
That’s good. He’s not going to jump me.
Why do I feel so disappointed?
He adds, “There are chaperones all around, as you can see. The pilot, Arabella, the rest of the stewardesses. Everyone’s around us to make sure I behave myself around you.”