When I described which brooch I was looking for, the saleswoman escorted me over to the wrong side of the store, the high-rent district. I gulped. Then she went behind a glass case and took out the starfish and put it on a black velvet square and cooed over it.
“That’s it,” I said. I turned it over, pretending to look at the back but really trying to get a look at the price tag, and when I saw it, I gulped again. This was more than I’d spent on Kate’s diamond engagement ring. But I reminded myself that I’d just gotten a sizable salary increase, and I’d be getting a handsome bonus, so I put it on my Visa and asked her to gift-wrap it.
By the time I got home I was feeling pretty good about life. I’d just been promoted, and there was a tiny robin’s-egg blue Tiffany’s bag on the passenger seat next to me. Granted, the car was an Acura, and not a new one, but still. I was good, damn it, and I worked for a great company. I was a meat-eater.
Kate ran to meet me at the door. She was wearing a white T-shirt and jeans, looked and smelled great. She threw her arms around me, kissed me right on the lips, and I kissed her back, and kept going. I was immediately aroused.
When you’ve been married for a while, that kind of spontaneous combustion doesn’t happen all that often, but I felt this surge of testosterone. I felt like the conquering hero returning home for some nookie. I was Og, Cro-Magnon man, returning to his woman in the cave, having speared a woolly mammoth.
I dropped my briefcase and the blue Tiffany’s bag to the carpet and slipped my hands under the waistband of her jeans. I felt her silky-smooth warm skin and began kneading her butt.
She gave a throaty giggle, pulled back. “What’s the special occasion?” she said.
“Every day I’m married to you is a special occasion,” I said, and I went back to kissing her.
I moved us into the living room, pushed her back onto Grammy Spencer’s rock-hard, chintz-covered couch. The floor would have been more comfortable.
“Jase,” she said. “Wow.”
“We’re allowed to do this without a plastic specimen cup, you know,” I said as I started to peel off her T-shirt.
“Wait,” she said. “Wait.” She wriggled free, went over to close the drapes so the neighbors didn’t get a free show and their little children wouldn’t have therapy bills for decades.
When she came back, I finished taking off her T-shirt. I hadn’t looked closely at her breasts in such a long time that I got as excited as I’d been the first time we did it. “You’re a beautiful woman, anyone ever tell you that?” I said, and I unzipped her jeans. She was already aroused, I was surprised to see.
“Should-think we should move to the bedroom?” she said.
“Nope,” I said, stroking her down there.
Just then my BlackBerry buzzed-it was clipped to my belt, somewhere in the heap on the floor-but I ignored it. I got on top of her and, without any more foreplay, slid into her slipperiness with delicious ease.
“Jase,” she said. “Wow.”
“Stay there,” she said afterward.
She ran to the bathroom and peed, and then went into the kitchen, where I could hear the refrigerator being opened and glasses clinking, and a couple of minutes later she emerged with a tray. She carried it over to the couch, naked, and set it down on the coffee table. It was a bottle of Krug champagne and two champagne flutes and a mound of black caviar in a silver bowl with a couple of tortoiseshell caviar spoons and little round blini. Also, a flat rectangular package wrapped in fancy paper.
I hate caviar, but it’s not like we had it very often, and she must have forgotten.
I said, with all the excitement I could muster, “Caviar!”
“Could you do the honors?” She handed me the cold champagne bottle. I used to think that when you opened a bottle of champagne you wanted a loud festive pop and a big geyser. Kate taught me that that really wasn’t the way it was done. I stripped off the lead foil and twisted off the wire cage and eased the cork out expertly, turning the bottle as I did it. The cork came out with a quiet burp. No geyser. I poured it into the flutes slowly, let the bubbles settle, and poured in some more. Then I handed her a glass and we clinked.
“Wait,” she said as I put my flute to my lips. “A toast.”
“To the classics,” I said. “Champagne and caviar and sex.”
“No,” she said with a laugh. “To love and desire-the spirit’s wings to great deeds. Goethe.”
“I haven’t done any great deeds.”
“As Balzac said, ‘There’s no such thing as a great talent without great willpower.’”
I clinked her glass again, and said, “Behind every great man is a great woman.”
“Rolling her eyes,” Kate said. “And sticking out her tongue.” She smiled. “Honey, do you realize what you’ve accomplished? How you’ve turned your whole career around?”
I nodded, couldn’t look at her. My dad had a job. I have a career.
And if she only knew what kind of help I was getting.
“Vice president. I’m so proud of you.”
“Aw, shucks,” I said.
“You really kick ass when you put your mind to it.”
“Well, you’re the one who gave me the push. The jump start.”
“Sweetie.” She took the package from the tray and handed it to me. “Un petit cadeau.”
“Moi?” I said. “Hold on.” I got up and picked up the Tiffany’s bag from the floor where it had fallen. I handed it to her. “Swap.”
“Tiffany’s? Jason, you are so bad.”
“Go ahead. You first.”
“No, you. It’s just a little nothing.”
I tore off the wrapping paper as she said, “Something new to listen to on the way to work.”
It was a CD of a book called You’re the Boss Now-So Now What? A Ten Point Plan.
“Oh, nice,” I said. I made it sound convincing. “Thanks.” I wasn’t going to tell her I’d already moved on to harder drugs-the four-star general.
I knew that my world was alien to her, and basically boring, and she didn’t quite get it. But if she was going to be married to a Yanomami warrior, why not a chieftain? So she’d make sure I had my face paint on right, at least. She didn’t really get into what I did all day, but damn it, she was going to make sure my buzzard-feather headdress was on straight.
“Hit the ground running,” she said. “And something to carry it in.” She reached under the sofa and pulled out a much larger box.
“Wait, I know what it is,” I said.
“You do not.”
“I do. It’s one of those Yanomami blowguns. With the poison darts. Right?”
She gave me her great, sexy knowing smile. I loved that smile. It always melted me.
I unwrapped the box. It was a beautiful briefcase in chestnut leather with brass fittings. It had to cost a fortune. “Jesus,” I said. “Amazing.”
“It’s made by Swaine Adeney Briggs and Sons of St. James’s. London. Claudia helped me pick it out. She says it’s the Rolls-Royce of attaché cases.”
“And maybe someday a Rolls-Royce to put it in,” I said. “Babe, this is incredibly sweet of you.
“Your turn.”
Her eyes shone, wide with excitement, as she carefully undid the blue paper and then opened the box. Then I saw the light in her eyes go dim.
“What’s the matter?”
She turned the gold, jewel-encrusted starfish over suspiciously, as if searching for the price tag the way I did at the store. “I don’t believe it,” she said, tonelessly. “My God.”
“Don’t you recognize it?”
“Sure. It’s just that I-”
“Susie won’t mind if you have one, too.”
“No, I don’t imagine she’d-Jason, how much did this cost?”
“We can afford it.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” I said. “I just got my stripes.”