Monster Page 2

The rest of the week was much the same for Nick. Mornings were spent in the police precincts or the office, afternoons driving to art galleries big and small. For the smallish size of the city, there were dozens of places trying to be art galleries. They were everywhere. He found them on the top floors of antique shops, in small boutiques on the first floors of downtown high-rises, carved out of living rooms in city neighborhood homes, obscured by awnings in strip malls. Everywhere.

  As Friday afternoon spun by on the wall clock at work and he fingered his collection of art dealers' business cards, the givers of such being mostly receptive to his pitch, he still hadn't heard from the police about the stolen paintings. He waited out the rest of the afternoon surfing the Web for information on art collections and art collecting.

  He leaned back in his chair and grimaced at the sharp pain that suddenly formed just above his right hip. He rubbed it for a moment and shifted his position in the chair. It dulled a bit, but persisted. He stood up and twisted his body to both sides to stretch the muscles and then massaged the area with his right hand.

  "I think you need a drink, Nick," Paul said from the desk nearby. Paul was staring up from his computer terminal with a quizzical look on his face. "Walking through all those art galleries pulled a muscle on you that only a beer can fix."

  Nick smiled. "I wish I could, but I've got dinner tonight with Sarah's parents. It's their substitute 30th anniversary dinner, since they'll be in the Bahamas when the real day comes around."

  "How long you been living with her, now?" Paul asked.

  "Almost two years. Why?"

  Paul shrugged. "I was just wondering about the dinner conversation to come." He smiled up at Nick and turned back to his computer.

  Nick and Sarah were waiting on a pair of stools in the bar area of La Mela, he with a martini, three olives, and she with a Manhattan, the cherry stem resting on the cocktail napkin and tied in a loose knot. Her ability to tie cherry stems had been one of the major incentives toward his asking her out three years earlier when he had stood next to her during a happy hour with a ten dollar bill, trying to flag down a bartender. As he had stood there, then, waiting for service he had looked down and seen three cherry stems tied tightly and lined up on a cocktail napkin next to her. She had just finished ignoring a business-suited older man's advances and resumed a conversation with a friend when Nick had said, purposely, "wow."

  That was the only conversation fragment he could remember from that night, and only because Sarah had, over the last three years, come up with nearly every conceivable way of saying "wow." For a while, during their initial dating months, she would work "wow" into conversations as an adjective, adverb, noun, and verb. He was glad he had not said something even more insipid and uninspired.

  "Don't forget that we're picking up the tab, tonight," Sarah said to him.

  "Oh, yeah. That's something I'm not likely to forget. Not for a long time," Nick said. "Do they know it's the beginning of hurricane season down there?"

  "Don't tell them. I'm sure they're aware of that, they've been going forever."

  Nick stood up from his padded bar stool and rubbed his right side. The pain from earlier in the day had stopped, but in its place was a low-level burning tightness. He couldn't feel any stiff muscles, he hadn't done anything to strain one, but something was definitely out of whack.

  "What's the matter?" Sarah asked.

  "Beats me. I've been sore here since the afternoon. It's weird."

  "Too much sitting incorrectly, maybe?" Sarah offered.

  Nick shrugged and then nodded his head to the door. "Look, there's your parents, now."

  Sarah smiled and stayed on her stool while Nick took a couple of steps away from the bar and gave her parents a little attention-getting wave. Sarah's father, a fiftyish man with salt-and-pepper hair, a square jaw and blue eyes put his left hand on his wife's bare shoulder and nodded quickly at Nick. While Sarah’s father had allowed what had been a muscular body to soften a bit at the edges, his wife had steadfastly refused to age gracefully. Her hair was dyed a light blonde, a shade or two, Sarah had said, lighter than it had been naturally, and she was thin in the muscular way of a woman who has traded in aerobics classes and Nautilus machines for a treadmill in the basement.

  Sarah's father strode up to Nick and shook his hand vigorously with two pumps. "Nick, good to see you again. How are you? Good, I'm sure."

  "Everything's good, Scott. How was your flight?"

  Sarah and her mother hugged each other hello.

  "Eh, flying. You know. It's all just sitting," Scott said.

  Nick nodded and turned around.

  "Marjorie, nice to see you again," Nick said, accepting the quick hug Sarah's mother gave him. "I hope you saved your appetite and didn't eat the airline food."

  Marjorie smiled. "Just a couple of gin and tonics to ease the landing. Which reminds me, dear," she said and turned to her husband, "I could use another about now."

  Sarah's father moved toward the bar while Nick stared into his drink. Marjorie and Sarah began the quick chatter of catch-up, a type of conversation possible only by women, with Sarah mostly asking quick questions about the current status of her two brothers and her mother providing short answers. Both of her brothers, the older New York City stock broker brother, Steve, and the younger Baltimore computer consultant brother, Simon, were married. The older one had two kids, an apartment on the Upper West Side, a summer home in the Hamptons and the typical rich New Yorker lifestyle stories that nauseated Nick to hear during the holidays. Simon was easier on the ears, knowing that Nick could care less about the intricacies of computer networks, Web sites, and e-commerce, although Simon’s predilection to talk classical music releases with Sarah's father often drained the life from a room as quickly as an assessment of the stock market's most recent performance.

  Dinner had gone by easily enough, with the small talk confined to the banalities of daily life at Nick’s paper, when it was Nick's turn in the conversation, and the ordinariness of Sarah's parent's early-retirement lifestyle of golf, bridge and cocktail parties. That was, until the after dinner drinks arrived.

  "So, we didn't tell you and we told Simon not to tell, either, but guess what?" Marjorie asked as she sniffed her sambuca and swirled the coffee beans around the bottom of the glass.

  "What?" asked Sarah in a rushed hush of excitement.

  Nick groaned inwardly and turned his attention to Sarah's mother.

  "Jill is pregnant," Marjorie said, smiling broadly and looking at her husband. "Three months, now."

  "No, way, when did you find out?" Sarah asked.

  "Last week. Isn't it exciting?"

  Nick smiled. The conversation would turn, soon.

  "Oh, my God, that's great," Sarah said.

  Scott lifted his glass. "Even though they're not here, let's toast some congratulations."

  The four of them clinked their glasses over the center of the table and Nick took a sip of his grappa. The vapors burned his nose.

  "One day it'll be you, honey," Marjorie said.

  Sarah smiled and, though Nick didn't look, he could tell Sarah's father's eyes were looking at him from some undeterminable perspective known only by men who were fathers of daughters.

  "That'll be a great day," Scott said as Nick kept his smile on. Nick looked over at Sarah as she reached across the table and grabbed his hand, pumping softly once and smiling. He put his glass back up to his lips and sucked some of the liquor onto his tongue. It burned.

  "You know, if you asked me to marry you, my parents wouldn't put the screws to you like that," Sarah said as she pulled her blouse off and tossed it into the wicker hamper. "Dad only does that because he thinks you should have married me by now."

  Nick unfastened his tie as he listened to her.

  “He’s said so?”

  Sarah gave a small shrug with a half-nod. "After all, we've been living together for almost two years."

  There was a zip as she undid her skirt followed b
y a soft rustle as it slid down her legs to the floor. He looked in the mirror on the chest of drawers and saw her standing on the other side of the bedroom wearing only a bra and underwear, both black. Her blond hair washed over the back of her shoulders.

  "Two years? Already?" Nick said, feigning sudden realization.

  "And you’re a year older than me," Sarah said, turning around so that Nick could see her frontal reflection in the mirror.

  Nick pulled his tie off and dropped it on the floor. "Well, the man should be at least a little older than the woman he’s involved with."

  Sarah smiled. "And, you're about to turn thirty," she smiled wider, seeing him watching her in the mirror. "Maybe your biological clock is the one ticking."

  Nick turned around and looked at a print of Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" that was hanging over the bed's headboard. "I don't hear any ticking. Actually, I think it's stopped."

  "You sure about that?" Sarah said, unfastening her bra and walking around the bed. "I know a way I can jump-start it ... if I want."

  Nick smiled and took her in his arms.

  THREE