Once in a Lifetime (3 page)

"Mrs. Fields's apartment?" It was extraordinary, she said to herself as she faced him. For four years she had read her books, and now she was standing in the lobby of her house, as though she knew her.

"Miss Fields is not in." She noticed then that he had an English accent. It was like something out of a movie, or a dream.

"I know. I'd like to speak to her husband." The doorman knit his brows.

"Miss Fields doesn't have a husband." He spoke with the voice of authority and she wanted to ask him if he was sure. Maybe he was new, maybe he didn't know Jeff. Or maybe Jeff was just her lover, but she had said "my husband." For an instant Liz felt confused.

"Is there someone else at home then?"

"No." He looked at her cautiously, and she decided to explain.

"Miss Fields had an accident last night." With a burst of inspiration she flashed open her coat then, revealing the white uniform and stockings, and she indicated the starched cap she always carried in a plastic bag. "I'm a nurse at Lenox Hill Hospital and we couldn't find a notation of next of kin. I thought that maybe ..."

"Is she all right?" The doorman looked genuinely concerned.

"We don't know. She's still on the critical list, and I thought that ... Does she live with anyone at all?" But he only shook his head.

"No one. There's a maid who comes in every day, but not on weekends. And her secretary, Barbara Jarvis, but she won't be back till next week." Barbara had told him that with a smile when she gave him Daphne's Christmas tip.

"Do you know how I might reach her?" He shook his head again with confusion, and then Liz remembered the photograph of the little boy. "What about her son?"

The doorman looked at her strangely then, almost as though he thought she was slightly mad. "She has no children, miss." Something defiant and protective came into his eyes, and for a split second Liz wondered if he was lying. And then he looked into Liz's eyes with an air of dignity and distance and said, "She'd a widow, you know." The words hit Liz Watkins almost like a physical blow, and a moment later, with nothing left to be said, she walked back out into the frigid Christmas morning and felt tears sting her eyes, not from the cold, but from her own sense of loss. It was as though she could feel her own husband's death in her bones again, as she had with such intense pain for that whole first year after he had died in the crash. So she had known ... they weren't just stories she dreamed up in her head. She knew. She had been through it too. It made Liz Watkins feel closer to her again as she walked slowly back to the subway, at Sixty-eighth and Lexington Avenue. Daphne was a widow, and she lived alone. And she had no one, except a secretary and a maid. And Liz Watkins found herself thinking that it was a lonely existence for a woman who wrote books so filled with wisdom and compassion and love. Maybe Daphne Fields was as lonely as Liz was herself. It seemed yet another bond between them, as she walked down the stairs into the bowels of the subway beneath the streets of New York.

Daphne lay drifting in her own private haze as a bright light seemed to pierce through the fog from very far away. If she tried very hard to concentrate on it, it would come closer for a time, and then the fog would envelop her again, almost as though she were sailing away from shore toward a distant place, losing sight of the last, barely visible landmarks, the lighthouse blinking faintly at her in the distance. And yet there was something familiar about the light, the sounds, there was a smell she could almost remember as she lay there. She didn't know where she was, and yet she sensed that she had been there before. There was something strangely familiar about it, and even in its distant, intangible familiarity, she knew that there was something terrifying about the sounds and smells. Something terribly, terribly wrong. And once, as she lay there, dreaming, she let out a small agonized sound as, in her mind, she saw a wall of impenetrable flames. But the nurse on duty came to her side quickly, and administered another shot. A moment later there were no memories, no flames, and there was no pain. She floated out again on a blanket of soft, fluffy clouds, the kind one sees looking out of the windows of airplanes, unreal, immaculate, enormous ... the kind of clouds one wants to dance on and bounce on ... she could hear herself laughing in the distance, and she turned in her dream to see Jeff standing beside her, as he had been so long ago....

"I'll race you to that dune in the distance, Daffodil." ... Daffodil ... Daffy Duck ... Daffy Queen ... Funny Face ... he had had a thousand nicknames for her, and there was always laughter in his eyes, laughter and something gentler still. Something that was there just for her. The race was as much a lark as all their other youthful endeavors. His endless, well-muscled legs racing her thin, graceful ones, and beside him she looked like a child, dancing in the wind, a summer flower on a hillside somewhere in France ... her big blue eyes in her tanned face, and golden hair flying in the wind.

"Come on, Jeffrey...." She was laughing at him as she raced beside him in the sand. She was quick, but she was no match for him. And at twenty-two, she looked more like twelve.

"Yes, you can ... yes, you can!" But before they reached the dune in the distance, he swept her off her feet and spun her into his arms, his mouth crushing hers with the familiar passion that left her breathless each time he touched her, just as though it were the first time, which had happened when she was nineteen. They had met at a Bar Association meeting, which she was covering for the Daily Spectator at Columbia. She was a journalism major, and with overwhelming seriousness and intense devotion, she was doing a series of articles on successful young attorneys. Jeff had spotted her instantly, and somehow managed to get away from his cronies and invite her out to lunch.

"I don't know ... I ought to ..." Her hair had been wound into a tight figure-eight knot at the base of her neck, a pencil stuck into it, a notebook tightly clasped in her hand, and those huge blue eyes looking up into his with just a hint of laughter. She seemed to be teasing him without saying a word. "Shouldn't you be working too?"

"We'll both work. You can interview me over lunch." Afterward, months later, she had accused him of being conceited, but he wasn't. He just desperately wanted to spend some time with her. And they had. They had bought a bottle of white wine and a handful of apples and oranges, a loaf of French bread and some cheese. They had gone deep into Central Park and rented a boat, and they had drifted on the lake, talking about his work and her studies, about trips to Europe, and childhood summers spent in southern California and Tennessee and Maine. Her mother had been from Tennessee, and there was something about her that suggested the delicate southern belle, until one listened to her, and realized how powerful and direct she was. It wasn't the kind of style Jeff associated with a southern belle.

Her father had been from Boston and had died when she was twelve. They had moved back to the South then, and Daphne had hated it, enduring it until she left and came to college in New York. "What does your mother think of that?" He had been interested in everything about her. Whatever she told him, he wanted to know more.

"She's given up on me, I think." Daphne said it with a small smile of amusement, her eyes lighting up again in just the way that tore at something deep in Jeffrey's soul. There was something so damn alluring about her, at the same time so sexy and so sweet, and then at the very same time so outrageous and gutsy. "She's decided that in spite of her best efforts, I'm a damn Yankee after all. And not only that, I've done something unforgivable, I've got a brain."

"Your mother doesn't approve of brains?" Jeffrey was amused. He liked her. He liked her one hell of a lot in fact, he decided as he attempted not to stare at the slit in her pale blue linen skirt, and the shapely legs beneath.

"My mother doesn't approve of the overt use of brains. Southern women are very canny. Maybe wily is a better word. A lot of them are smart as hell, but they don't like to show it. They play.' " She said it with a southern drawl worthy of Scarlett O'Hara, and they both laughed in the summer sun. It had been a beautiful July morning, and the sun was hot on their bare heads at noon. "My mother has a master's in medieval history, but she'd never admit it. 'She's just a lazy southern belle, y'know ...' " The drawl was back again as she smiled at him with those cornflower-blue eyes. "I used to think I wanted to be a lawyer. What's it like?" She looked suddenly very young again as she asked, and with a sigh he leaned back comfortably in the little boat.

"A lot of work. But I like it." His specialty was publishing and that intrigued her most of all. "You thinking about law school?"

"Maybe." And then she shook her head. "No, not really. I did think about it. But I think maybe writing is more for me."

"What kind of writing?"

"I don't know. Short stories, articles." She blushed faintly in the summer sun, and lowered her eyes. She was embarrassed to admit to him what she really wanted to do. It might never happen. It was only now and then that she thought it would. "I'd like to write a book one day. A novel."

"Then why don't you?"

She laughed out loud as he passed her another glass of wine. "Simple as that, eh?"

"Why not? You can do anything you want to."

"I wish I were that sure. And what would I live on while I wrote my book?" She had used the last of the money her father had left her to go to school, and with one more year to go, she was already worrying that the meager funds might not hold out. Her mother couldn't help her. She was working in a dress shop in Atlanta, an elegant one, but nonetheless there was barely enough for Camilla Beaumont to feed herself.

"You could marry a rich man." Jeffrey was smiling at her, but Daphne didn't look amused.

"You sound like my mother."

"Is that what she'd like?"

"Of course."

"And what do you have in mind when you finish school?"

"A decent job, on a magazine, maybe a newspaper."

"In New York?" She nodded, and he wasn't sure why, but he felt suddenly relieved. And then he looked at her with interest, his head tilted to one side. "Aren't you going home this summer, Daphne?"

"No, I go to school in the summer too. That way I'll finish early." There wasn't enough money for her to take her time.

"How old are you?" It was more like he was interviewing her than she him. She hadn't asked him a single question about the Bar Association meeting or his work as an attorney, they had only talked of themselves since they had shoved off from the dock in the little rented boat.

"I'm nineteen." She said it with a sudden spark of defiance, as though she were used to being told that she was too young. "And in September I'll be twenty and a senior."

"I'm impressed." His eyes were gentle as he smiled, and she blushed. "I mean it. Columbia's a tough school, you must have worked damn hard." She could tell by his tone of voice that he meant it and suddenly she was pleased. She liked him. Almost too much. Or maybe it was just the sunshine and the wine, but she knew as she looked at him that it was more than that. It was the curve of his mouth, the gentleness in his eyes, the graceful strength of his hands as he pulled lazily at the oars from time to time ... and the way he watched her, with intelligence and interest ... the sensitivity of the things he said.

"Thank you. ..." Her voice drifted off and sounded very soft.

"What's the rest of your life like?"

She looked confused at the question. "What do you mean?"

"What do you do with your spare time? I mean other than pretend to interview slightly drunk attorneys in Central Park."

She laughed at him then and the sound echoed as they passed beneath a little bridge. "Are you drunk? It must be the sun as much as the wine."

"No." He shook his head slowly as they came out into the light again. "I think it's you." He leaned over then and kissed her, and they had both played hooky for the rest of the afternoon. "They'll never know the difference," he assured her as they wandered south toward the zoo. They laughed at the hippopotamus, threw peanuts to the elephant, and ran all the way through the monkey house holding their noses and laughing. He wanted to put her on the pony ride as though she were a little girl, and laughing at him again, she refused. Instead they took a hansom cab ride through the park, and at last they strolled up Fifth Avenue beneath the trees, until they reached Ninety-fourth Street where she lived.

"Do you want to come up for a minute?" She smiled innocently at him, holding the red balloon he had bought her at the zoo.

"I'd love to. But would your mother approve?" He was twenty-seven years old, and in the three years since he had graduated from Harvard Law he hadn't once thought of anyone's mother or whether or not they would approve. It was a good thing too, since no one's mother would. He had been on an orgy of dating and free sex since he had left school.

Daphne laughed at him as she stood on tiptoe and put her hands on his shoulders. "No, Mr. Jeffrey Fields, my mother would not approve."

"Why not?" He pretended to look hurt as a couple returning from work looked at them and smiled. They looked young and beautiful and perfectly matched, his hair a deeper gold than hers, his eyes a dazzling gray-green, his features as handsomely sculpted as her own, and his youthful strength in sharp contrast to her delicate size as he circled her with his arms. "Because I'm a Yankee?"

"No ..." She tilted her head to one side and he felt his insides melt as his hands touched the tiny waist. "Because you're too old, and too good-looking...." She grinned and gently pulled free from his grasp. "And because you've probably kissed half the girls in town"--she laughed again--"including me.

"You're right. My mother would be shocked too."

"Well, then come on upstairs for a cup of tea, and I won't tell your mother, if you don't tell mine." Her roommate was gone for the summer, and the apartment was tiny and respectable; shabby but not ugly. She made him iced tea, which she served with mint and wonderful delicate lemon cookies. He sat beside her on the couch, and it was suddenly eight o'clock at night and he wasn't tired or bored. He couldn't take his eyes off of her, and he knew that he had finally met the woman of his dreams.