"You have a thing about your hands, but I've never noticed anything wrong with them."
"They're always a mess."
He said, "A new side of Lee Reston--self-conscious about her hands."
She said, "That's right."
And he didn't ask again.
The yard at Gustaf's was decorated with life-size wooden reindeer wearing willow wreaths around their necks, trailing red-and-greenplaid ribbons.
Inside, it smelled of mulberry. Lights twinkled everywhere.
Christmas carols tinkled forth in myriad tones: Swiss bells, carillons, jingle bells and chimes. Ceilings, walls and floors were Disneyesque with holiday trimmings for sale. Balls and bells, toy soldiers and tinsel, tree lights and yard ornaments and a room with so many miniature painted wooden trinkets it felt like walking into a shop in Oslo.
Dolls with porcelain faces sat in miniature rocking chairs. Santas of all descriptions beamed upon the colorful array with rosy cheeks and mischievous eyes. A clerk dressed like one of Santa's helpers smiled and said, "Merry Christmas."
"Merry Christmas," they replied in unison.
"Ask, if I can help with anything."
"We will."
They explored every magical room of the old house.
Christopher found a Santa beard and hooked it on behind his ears.
"Ho ho ho," he boomed in his best basso profundo. "Have you been a good little girl?"
"Not exactly," she replied, giving him a saucy glance. The words slipped out before she realized how flirtatious they were.
He took off the beard and put it back on the wall, and she knew he was going to touch her shoulder, say something intimate about what had passed between them the last time they were together. To forestall him, she slipped into another room. He came right behind her, hustling around the corner to find her facing the doorway wearing a white mobcap, holding a stuffed white teddy bear to her cheek, singing, "All I want for Chrith-muth ith my two front teeth."
Moments later she discovered him holding up a personalized stocking at least two feet long, pointing at it with his eyebrows raised. Across the top of it was printed CHRIS.
She found a pair of the ugliest earrings in the world, shaped like red electric Christmas lights, and held them up to her ears.
"Would you believe they actually light up?"
They laughed and she put them back where they belonged.
The next time she turned around he'd found some mistletoe and was holding it above his head, wearing a rowdy smile.
"Oh, no," she reprimanded. "Nothin' doing. Not in the middle of a public place."
"Oh--what?" he asked innocently, looking around. "You need a kitchen chair?"
"Christopher!" she scolded in a whisper.
He put the mistletoe back in a wooden sleigh and sauntered over to her, putting himself between her and any further progress through the shop.
"Touchy subject?" he inquired.
"Not exactly. Well, yes, sort of. I mean, I don't know. I'm just a little amazed at myself for what I did."
"Any regrets?" he asked.
She shook her head slowly, looking up at him at such close range it would have taken only the smallest movement for them to be kissing again right here in Gustafs World of Christmas.
They chose his tree decorations after that--multicolored miniature lights, gold tinsel garland, some oversized gilded jingle bells, and glass balls that appeared to have snow falling inside them when the light refracted off their transparent surface. They bought a tree stand and a fat red candle surrounded by holly, and a box of delicate ribbon candy, which he claimed he'd never seen before in his life and which totally fascinated him.
They hauled their booty to the truck and he asked, "Are you hungry?"
It was 1:30 in the afternoon.
"Ravenous."
He looked up and down the main street of Lindstrom, Minnesota, and said, "Let's take a walk . . . see what we can find."
They found the Rainbow Cafe, where coffee was served in thick white mugs, and napkins were stored in metal dispensers on the tables, and the locals were telling jokes over coffee at a long Formica bar.
She ordered a Denver sandwich and he opted for a hot beef, mounded with potatoes and gravy, of course.
Afterward, they found a tree lot next to a bank building and bought two fragrant green Norway pines, which they tied on the top of the Explorer before heading back to Anoka.
They rode without talking until well after the truck got warm and cozy.
He turned the radio on softly and she sat low on her tailbone with one knee up on the dash. He looked over at her, relaxed, with her fingers linked over her stomach. Her nails were clipped short and the cuticles looked stained and ragged. It only made her more real to him.
"What time does Joey get home?"
She checked her watch and said, "Right about now."
He asked, "Do you have to go home?"
Her head was resting against the back of the seat. She rolled it to face him and they jiggled along the road in the tightly sprung vehicle for another five seconds. He noted that at some time since they'd finished their lunch she'd put on fresh lipstick.
She noted that his hair, much like hers, always seemed to look the same. After a whole day of being on the go, shaking snow offof Christmas trees, tying them onto the roof of the truck in the wind, his hair sprang up and away from his face as perfectly as ever. She absolutely loved his hair.
Did she have to go home?
"No," she answered.
She thought he'd never look back at the highway.
He took her to his apartment complex, pushed an activator for an automatic door and drove into an underground garage. The door rumbled shut behind them, they parked, and he said, "If you'll get the packages, I'll get the tree."
When he'd untied it from the roof of the truck she said, "It'll make a mess unless you put it in the stand down here."
"Oh," he said--a novice. "Right."
It took some tools, but he had them in the truck, and after ten minutes he had the tree in the stand and he carried it while she opened doors in front of him. At his own door he handed her the keys and said, "Both locks."
She opened them both, thinking how different she was from Christopher in this regard. She who left her garage door up night and day and often never locked her house, he the policeman--who recognized the value of a dead bolt.
Inside, he set the tree down and said, "Be right back. Take off your jacket and make yourself at home."
He went to the bathroom and came back out to find her talking to Joey on the kitchen telephone.
"Hi, lion, it's Mom."
"Oh, hey, Mom, I'm glad you called. Are there any of those meat roll-up things left that we had for supper the other night?"
"They're in the refrigerator in a square plastic container with a yellow cover."
" Oh, great! Jeer, I'm stalled. We had tripe for school lunch today.
Hey, what time are you coming home?"
She looked up and found Christopher standing in the living room , doorway, sucking a piece of ribbon candy, watching and listening. "I : should be there by eight." Their eyes met and held.
"Good, then I don't have to wait to eat, right?"
"Right. Go ahead and warm up the beef rolls. Zap a potato with it too, . if you want. There's sour cream in the fridge."
"Okay. Yeah, that sounds good."
"Well, I'll see you around eight then, okay?"
"Yeah, sure, unless I go over to Sandy's."
"Home by ten, mister, right?"
. She could imagine him rolling his eyes. He'd been creeping over the mark lately. "Yeah, right."
. "Okay then, bye."
When she'd hung up, Christopher asked, "Everything okay?"
"Fine. He had tripe for lunch, but it seems he sunived the ordeal."
Christopher chuckled and said, "Come and help me decide where to put this thing."
They lit lamps against the dusky afternoon, turned on the radio and studied his living room furniture.
"Where do you think?" he asked.
They cleared a spot in front of the sliding glass door and pushed the sofa into the exact center of the room facing it. It looked unorthodox, but the view of the tree was great, and with the stereo components on the wall behind the sofa, the sound came through beautifully, too.
Dumping their purchases from the packages, Christopher asked, "What goes on first?"
"Lights," she said, and while he began pulling the tree lights out of their boxes, she said, "Christopher, didn't you ever do this at home?"
"Nope," he said, tending to what he was doing.
She heard the brusque note of defensiveness and decided this was no time for unhappy memories. "Well, plug them in first so you can see what you're doing. I think it works best to start at the top and work your way down. How's the ribbon candy?"
"Spicy. Have a piece."
The tree was six feet tall, so he strung the top ones while she did the bottom, and they both sucked the hard candy. They got out the tinsel garland next, while Kenny Rogers came on the stereo with a sentimental song about a married couple playing Santa on Christmas Eve. Lee gave Christopher the end of the garland and said, "Start up at the top." He draped it from branch to branch while she did the same below, weaving back and forth, and somehow she got in his way. The gold-spangled garland caught on her mouth while she was dipping beneath his arm, and as she tried to swing free, it caught on the turtleneck of her shirt, pulled out of his hands and off the last branch he'd decorated.
"Oops, look what I've done. Sorry."
"Hey, there's more on you than on the tree."
She looked up and he saw a single golden filament caught on her lipstick, glistening there like a fragment of a fallen star.
"Hold still," he said, and reached out to remove it with a fingertip.
It stuck to her glossy lipstick and he had to use a fingernail to free it, while she stood as still as an hour hand, holding her lips open, looking up at him.
They'd delayed it all day. They'd been responsible, clear-thinking, non-libidinal adults while they were out in public. They had refrained from ardent gazes, touches, intimate exchanges and all the tens of things in which two healthy, red-blooded, attracted people might well have indulged. But her lips were open . . . and he'd touched them with one finger . . .
and the kisses they'd shared two weeks ago had remained in their thoughts ever since . . . and around them a gravelly voice was singing about the greatest gift of all.
He dipped his head and put his mouth on hers so tenderly not a hair on her head moved. The golden garland, still in his hand, draped onto the floor where it pooled and glistened like the dropped belts of angels.
They remained just so, lips scarcely joined, each tipping slightly toward the other until she teetered a bit and touched his chest to regain her balance. He opened his eyes, caught her hand with his and carried it to his mouth to kiss its roughened knuckles.
Into her eyes, he said softly, "Let's finish this first."
They finished festooning the tree, never touching, politely handing one another ornaments, realizing full well it was only six o'clock.
When the ornaments were hung and the floor was littered with Christmas scree, she knelt to pick up loose pine needles and cardboard boxes and cellophane. He turned off the lamps and went to stand behind and above her, touching the top of her head. "I'll do that tomorrow. Come here." At her delay in rising, he doubled forward, running a hand down her arm to make her drop the cardboard box full of pine needles. "Come here," he whispered again, and pulled her to her feet, then led her to the sofa.
There, he stretched out on his side and drew her down beside him.
The cushion gave and she rolled lightly against him. He put a hand on her waist, tipped his head and gave them both the only Christmas gift they wanted at the moment. He wet her lips and abraded her tongue with his own and wiped out all the pent-up longing of that day, and the days before it, and the nights they'd lain awake in their separate beds wondering when this would happen again. They took the sweetest of time, exchanging a candy-flavored kiss that stretched on . . . and on . . . and on .
. .
When they opened their eyes they saw red, green, blue and gold lights pieing the walls, the furniture, their clothing and hair.
"Can we talk about it now?" he asked, still with his hand on her waist. "Talk about what?" she whispered.
"About what we've been feeling since that night. What we've been feeling all day today. What made you resist getting up from your knees and coming over here a minute ago."
A beat passed before she confessed, "Guilt."
"About what?"
"What I did on that kitchen chair."
"You didn't do anything wrong."
"Didn't I?"
"I shouldn't have teased you about it today. I'm sorry. I didn't know it was bothering you so much."
"I've thought about how others would see it--my mother, my daughter, my sister. I think they'd call it seduction."
"It went both ways."
"But I'm fifteen years older than you."
"So you're not allowed to express your emotions?"
"I shocked myself."
"You shocked me, too, but I loved it."
"It's been a very long time, you see, and kissing you was suddenly so irresistible This is irresistible . . . lying here this way. You were right, it's unnatural to go without . . . without this kind of physical affection for so long. It's been two weeks since we kissed on that kitchen chair, and I haven't been able to think of anything else since."
"And so you feel guilty?"
"Of course, don't you?"
"No. You're female. I'm male. What's there to feel guilty about?"
"Our ages, for one thing."
"I figured that was coming."
"And my long drought, for another. I imagine women can do some pretty dumb things when a younger man pays them some attention after years of none at all."
"Is that all I am to you . . . a younger man paying you some attention?"
"No, you know you're not."
"So what's your big problem with us? All we're doing is kissing."