Mistress of the Runes Page 9

  I left him my number, then called my bank to transfer funds to cover the horse purchase, horse insurance, transport, tack, vet checks, and other miscellaneous items. Business was something I understood. The man would sell; I could hear it in his voice. Nick was the kind of guy who already knew what he was going to do with the money he’d just turned down. He was the kind of guy who always said no first—to give himself a chance to think—and he was thinking I might be a bigger client down the road if he did this deal for me.

  Jane poked her head in to say that “Hugh from legal” was back, and I grinned, thinking Jane’s announcements made her sound like a courtier.

  Hugh slouched down on my leather couch. “Okay, we didn’t get to finish. Stinett Stone, the Olympic whatever, managed to miss his plane and therefore his gig as guest speaker for the yacht conference in Barcelona, largest gathering of private yacht manufacturers in the world.” Hugh bent over the coffee table, foraging like a squirrel in my crystal candy dish. “Now in addition to being ugly, Stinett’s gonna get us sued.” Hugh dug for the Godivas at the bottom of the bowl.

  “Worse case, negotiate our picking up part of the tab in exchange for a release,” I said, not looking up from my e-mail, the possible solutions to this kind of problem not complex enough to require anyone’s full attention.

  “Why are we booking stars at yacht conferences?” Hugh spoke as he chewed.

  “He’s not a star. Does that answer your question?”

  “Getting us out of this could cost a million bucks. Does that come out of your budget?”

  “Are you trying to irritate me, because it’s working,” I asked. “Does our E&O insurance cover no-shows?”

  “Checking.”

  “At the bottom of the candy bowl?” I gouged Hugh. “Alternative is to sue Stinett, but believe it or not, he’s landed a supporting role in a rather large motion picture being directed by another of our clients, so that gets sticky.” I finally glanced up at him.

  “I never liked the guy,” he muttered.

  Having packed his cheeks with chocolate, he exited. Jack arrived on his heels, replacing him on my couch.

  “You’re out of the raspberry ones,” Jack said, slopping candy out of the bowl. “You read the contract yet?”

  “All eighty pages front to back three times,” I said. “In fact, my office is so quiet I’m thinking of turning it into a Christian Science Reading Room.”

  “Good, because I’ve had two hours of Anselm chewin’ my cheeks over this damned deal so I got to get it signed. You enjoy your vacation?”

  “I loved it. Horse farms. God, it was beautiful.”

  “You’ll probably own a horse farm one day.” He stretched out on the couch. “You could strap a little mini-laptop up there on the saddle horn, ride around and do your e-mail all at the same time.”

  “But then I’d miss these enlightening conversations with you.”

  “Oh, I’d come live with you. I’d muck out the stalls…get all the horseshit out.”

  “Much as we try to do in our current line of work.” I smiled fondly at him and he schlumped out.

  I buzzed Jane, who dutifully appeared in my doorway.

  “Take the candy dish out of here, will you?” I said, and Jane scrunched her face up in disapproval. “Keep the nuts at your desk.”

  *

  The following afternoon, I was sitting at my desk having Liz withdrawal. She’d e-mailed me a note, but other than that—nothing. I envisioned her back in her TV personality mode: client lunching, shopping with friends, having a life that didn’t include me. My cell phone rang and I grabbed it, hoping it was Liz wanting to go to dinner. It was Nick Furtillo calling me twenty-four hours sooner than I’d expected. He would sell the horses provided I paid the shipping and signed a medical hold-harmless, meaning if anything happened to the horses en route or they arrived sick, their care was on my nickel, not his, and if they dropped dead I should forget phoning him. He agreed to a pre-ship vet check and I agreed to the rest.

  “By the way, what’s the mare’s name?” I asked.

  “Rune.”

  I Googled an Icelandic dictionary for the word “Rune” and read that it was a Viking symbol. The original word had most likely meant “secrets”—Runic symbols, drawn ten thousand years ago and found on the walls of the Trois Freres cave in France. The Runic alphabet was called the Futhark, which had contained sixteen letters in Viking times. Each rune had a name, a numerical value, and a magical use.

  Rune is a secret. Maybe this horse will communicate with me and tell me why we’re both here, I mused, and smiled to myself. At that moment a warm wind swirled around my neck and shoulders and rippled down my arms, sending a chill across my back and fluttering the papers stacked on my desk, causing me to glance up at the door to see if someone had opened it suddenly or if any air was coming from one of the overhead vents, but nothing seemed amiss. For a moment, I felt as if someone were present, an almost sensual feeling without a source, at least none I could identify.

  Shaking off the feeling in favor of more practical endeavors, I called my bank and left word to wire Furtillo the money the following morning, then personally ordered a dozen orange roses and had them delivered to Liz Chase at the station just before the six o’clock news with a note that read Had to take a short trip to New York, but I’m coming back to live with you in two weeks. Better find me a stall. Love, Hlatur. PS. Bringing my girlfriend Rune with me.

  Liz called at 5:45 p.m. and squealed into the phone, so excited she could barely contain herself. Her excitement fueled me; I was happy she was happy.

  “How did you do it?” she demanded.

  “No one can resist me when I negotiate,” I said playfully, with intentional arrogance.

  “You are very good,” she said sweetly.

  “I am, actually,” I said, aware I was speaking to her in a tone I reserved for someone with whom I’d been very intimate.

  “What do I owe you?”

  “We’ll settle up later.” I was feeling rather proud of myself. Cool, confident, even cocky. I had the horses and Liz Chase was impressed. “Would you like to have a late dinner?”

  “Tonight? Oh, I, uh…have dinner plans,” and just the sound of her voice told me it was a personal dinner with someone.

  “No problem. We’ll…talk soon,” I said, deflated and disappointed. I hung up and turned on the TV, tuning in to watch Liz on the six o’clock news. She was so poised. What if someone saw her and offered her a network job in New York or a cable job in Atlanta? And who was she having dinner with? If I were Anselm, I’d just hire her to work for me so I could be around her all the time. Morality was hell, and I wasn’t sure it had much upside. When the station went to commercial break, I phoned Madge to see if she’d have dinner with me.

  *

  “Let me try to work through this with you,” Madge said as we ate Chinese food at a ratty little neighborhood restaurant and I sulked. “She wants you. You want her but won’t go through with it because it could end in four years. She goes out with someone else and you’re heartbroken.”

  “Hardly heartbroken,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant.

  “So you could just quit seeing her altogether, or you could just say what the hell, it’ll be a great four years, or you could get psychiatric help.”

  “Oh, please!”

  “Face it. You’ve got your gears jammed in neutral. You need a tune-up. Personally, I’d get my pipes blown out by the blonde, but for two hundred and fifty dollars an hour you can have some old broad tie your four-year fear back to the way you were breast-fed—”

  “I thought you said I should stay away from Liz Chase!” I interrupted what I feared was about to become a tirade.

  “That was plan A and you failed. So now we’re on plan B, which is just go have sex with her and be done with it, so we can all quit hearing about it.”

  “Shut up and eat, will you,” I said morosely.

  “Dinner with you every night would be no dam
ned picnic. I should tell her that.”

  *

  The following afternoon, I walked into my office to find a dozen people standing around my conference table, a cake in the center and baby shower gifts around it. I was certain I was in the wrong room. “Surprise!” they yelled in concert, and Jane giggled with glee at having stunned me. “It’s a baby shower for your horse!”

  I could not have come up with an event I would have disliked more than my own personal horse baby shower, unless it was a root canal without anesthesia. Baby showers were insipid enough, but baby showers for horses were completely ridiculous, and from the look on Jack’s face he could not have agreed more. I swiftly went into gear, overpowering my aversion to the event and seeking to find something I could effervesce about. The cake had horses on it, the wrapping paper had horses, albeit a three-year-old’s rocking horse, and the gifts were items like tiny horse blankets and tiny bowls and candy treats.

  “What have you named your baby horse?” the young director of human resources, whose name escaped me and, therefore, whom I merely called HR, asked me.

  “Well, my horse is five years old so she has a name—Rune.”

  “Ruined? Like spoiled?” HR wrinkled up her nose in displeasure.

  “R-U-N-E.” Jane jumped in. “But it means ruined,” she said in a Shakespearian aside, the kind of sidebar that made me want to skewer her.

  Guilty over that thought, I plastered a large smile on my face and tried not to say anything I hadn’t edited in advance. Hugh and Jack escaped the moment a piece of cake was slung onto a napkin for them, and the rest of the crowd stayed only a polite minute more. I was relieved when it was over and Jane headed back to her desk in a euphoric state, having surprised and pleased her boss.

  I sank into my chair as e-mail pinged onto my desktop. “Did you survive it?” was the only line from Liz. I dialed her on my cell phone.

  “You knew in advance? Rotten of you not to warn me. Did you have a good dinner last night?”

  “It was okay,” she said, not offering to tell me with whom she went, or where. “I’m excited about our horses coming,” she said, changing the subject. “I went to the tack store on Beauville Road today and got a few things for Hlatur. You should stop over there.” I was annoyed that she’d gone without me, and she must have sensed that. “I would have bought Rune something, but I didn’t know what you want for her.”

  “World peace,” I said, and we both laughed, even though I felt like anything but laughing. Liz was separating from me. That’s an interesting thought, I told myself, since we’ve never been together.

  Chapter Ten

  It had taken me only a few days to move into an airy new town house, spurred on by shared domesticity with Madge, whose demeanor after forty-eight hours was crocodilian. This morning I awoke to my brand-new abode, stretched out in the clean white sheets, smiled up at the big beams overhead, and luxuriated in the ceiling fan’s slow breeze on my naked body like a soft summer wind, making me wonder how Liz Chase felt.

  I picked up the PDA at my bedside and clicked the photo file, staring at the picture taken of Liz Chase, not asking myself why I kept her photo by my bed or why I continually looked at it, dissolving into those eyes and wondering was she deliciously soft, did she have muscle tone, or no tone, could she kiss? She advertised that she could kiss. Kissing was so critical. I couldn’t remember how long it had been since I’d been met at the door with kisses. Maybe seven years ago, before Clare, with the crazy redhead who carved good-bye notes in my furniture.

  The redhead’s name was Rosalind. Roz, I thought in spite of myself. Good-looking, persistent, passionate, available. Very similar situation, I thought. And where had all those erotic moments led? To a threatened palimony suit, phone calls to my previous employer making me appear to be insanely gay, and to her carving her name into the bottom of all my dining-room chairs. And Liz Chase has more chutzpah than Roz. An unhappy Liz Chase might well carve her name in my chest! I hopped out of bed to tackle the day, delighted to have snapped myself back into reality.

  I was going to get the laundry done, make phone calls, and wax my face—the latter inarguably the modern woman’s most barbaric practice. Either God should have given women full facial hair, or no facial hair at all; the occasional stiff dark hair was truly a cosmic slap in the face. As much as I dreaded it, I was about to rip those hairs off in one overwhelmingly quick and painful act.

  I heated the wax, hating this particular ablution, but aware every time a salon did it for me, my face broke out, convincing me bacteria lurked in their creams and waxes. Determined to be my own torturer, I sucked in my breath and wielded the spatula, spreading the thick, shiny liquid across my upper lip, down across my cheeks, and under my chin. As a drop of wax splashed into the sink basin, congealing instantly into an orange solid, I glanced up into the mirror and blinked, unbelieving. My hair, short and rumpled from bed, no makeup, sunken and tired green eyes, and now a short red beard easing up around my cheeks and over my lip revealed me unintentionally transformed. I stood transfixed, a shiver electrifying my spine as I tried not to move an inch, afraid I might break the spell. The man in my dreams, the man with the red beard—I could pass for that man!

  “Move the troops around to the west wall.” The phrase startled me, seeming to come from nowhere, apropos of nothing, spoken to the man in the mirror. It was completely believable. I would have followed me. I was aware I’d be ripping my skin off with the hair if I didn’t get the wax off soon and put my hand to my face to strip away the image of the man in the mirror. The transition was seamless.

  One minute I was in my bathroom mirror and the next…

  I am standing over an earthen basin, rubbing my face and splashing ice-cold water on it. I am tired. My men are mopping up, tending to the wounded; the remaining women are building contained fires and cooking food. An old crone scatters her divining rocks on the stone floor and scurries across it, a pack of black wild dogs at her heels. She points her crooked index finger at the sky, shouting and cursing everyone around her and excoriating the heavens.

  “Who is she?” I ask my devoted young aide.

  “King’s oracle,” the sandy-haired boy replies. “She’s cursing us for killing the king and herself for not saving him.”

  “I think Herlugh caused his death.” I smile, thinking of the fine young man who had delivered the most damage to the dying king. I must remember to promote him.

  “Thank you for saving my life today.” The young aide throws the words at me quickly, obviously embarrassed that he had needed saving.

  “One day perhaps you will return the favor, saving me.” I grin, doubting this eager boy will ever be in such a position. “Fetch the crone. Maybe she can tell us what the gods have in store for us.”

  At that moment a collective sucking of air takes place, a communal gasp. I turn in time to see the crone throw herself off a parapet to her death, her cries echoing throughout the castle, her remorse at the death of her king evidently too great for her to bear. The black dogs’ cries pierce the air as they pace up and down at the spot where she had leapt.

  Shaken by the bad omen of the king’s oracle taking her own life, I rip the beard from my face with a sharp blade.

  The stinging sensation brings me back to the present.

  Peeling away the remaining wax, I saw my own reflection. For a moment, something deeply buried in my DNA had surfaced and connected me with myself in a way I still did not fully comprehend, the light of who I might have been illuminating who I was and projecting that image into the mirror.

  *

  “Maybe I do need to see a therapist,” I said to Madge as I lounged on her couch, this time giving up and drinking the damned tea.

  “You’re feminine. You just have a large head and a strong jawline, no makeup, and of course a flare for the dramatic.”

  “If I had told you to take a battalion of troops over the hill looking the way I did in that mirror, you would have followed me to your death.�
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  “Darling, I’d follow you looking just the way you do right now.” Madge winked at me in her never-can-tell-who-turns-me-on kind of way. Madge was a mystery when it came to sex. She claimed to be the oldest living virgin in the country, a title most people would pay money not to hold, but for Madge it was a badge of honor. She said sex was in the head, not in the bed, and she could have head-sex while she was driving and get other things done. Bed-sex just weighed her down. “You have yet to give me a blow-by-blow of your trip with her.” She raised an eyebrow.

  “Nothing happened. We saw great countryside, we slept in separate beds, and we bought horses,” I said, enjoying seeing her eyes fly open wide.

  “You bought horses! We had dinner together and you didn’t tell me that?”

  “I wasn’t myself.”

  “What kind of horses?” she demanded.

  “The kind with four legs.”

  Madge pulled her neck back like a turtle retreating into its shell and stared at me. “What does your horse look like?”

  “Don’t know yet.”

  Madge snorted and I grinned enigmatically. For once I had rendered Madge Mahoney speechless. “Better buy some land, then.” She finally found her voice. “Stop being nomadic. Despite the fact that you’ve made wealthy women of all your exes, you have enough money to buy a house, for God’s sake, but you won’t! That’s irresponsible—it’s un-American! You’ll be boarding your horse with someone just as you’ve boarded with someone! Four someones! You won’t even commit to an address of your own!”