Tessa waves at me from the second row and shrugs; I signal that I perfectly understand that she was powerless against the two middle-aged women sitting next to her. The bar tables holding cheese, crackers and white wine in coolers are as popular as the chairs, and one back of a curly head looks very familiar.
“‘Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker,’” I whisper into his ear.
“Jesus, Anna!” Tim gasps. “Hey—glad you could make it. Will you stand at the back with me and be bitchy?”
“I came here with no other object in mind. Actually, that’s not true. Can you reach one of those clean glasses? I need a drink.”
“Wassup, lady?”
“I’ll tell you later. Who’s on first?”
I get a very straight look from the baby blues over the rim of a wine glass.
“No, I mean—” I have to giggle “—is Giles on first?”
“Naturally,” Tim says. “Oh, no—assholes incoming.”
Dolph Bergstrom and Steve Howell, both in orange football jerseys, are edging their way into the store. They seem to be scanning the small crowd, whispering to each other, and I look away a second too late. Steve sees me, nudges Dolph, and both quietly start sniffing. Scrunch up their noses. Sniff again. Inflate their nostrils. Steve gets out a hanky, fluffs it up in a theatrical manner, and pretends to blow his nose.
“What the fuck are they doing?” Tim frowns.
I turn my back to them, because I am actually close to tears for a moment.
“Adding insult to injury. God, they really are assholes!”
“Why, what—”
“Shh. I’ll tell you later.”
The manager of the book store comes on and introduces Giles, whose legs are very long and awkward as he steps onto the stage, and who looks so English in his light gray suit, blue shirt, and burgundy-and-blue-striped tie that the cold hand crushing my heart now digs its fingernails into it.
Tim bends closer to my ear, and I can hear his glee through the whisper.
“The tie…”
Everyone is wearing white and orange and sporting little plovers everywhere, and Giles-sodding-Cleveland comes in his Cambridge college insignia?
Gotta love the man or hate him.
The audience loves him. He keeps his talk about the book short and humorous, belittles the prize he won for it by pointing out that it is awarded by a small group of Scottish academics who otherwise occupy themselves eating unspeakably horrible food, being insufferably arrogant about the English education system, and doing unmentionable things to their sheep. He stresses the good account to which professors put their sabbaticals but advises university provosts to conduct themselves more in the manner of Renaissance monarchs.
“King James I got the first volume of a History of the World; several treatises on politics, warfare, trade and economics; and piles of poetry out of Raleigh by the simple expedient of locking him into the Tower of London for a dozen years. And with that thought…”
Amid the laughter, a second chair is placed on stage for Loren Bonner, host of the ABC Shaftsboro morning show, and the cameraman crouches next to the stage to get a better view.
“Can’t she see that she’s making him cringe?” I speak through clenched teeth, unable to avert my gaze from the spectacle of Giles crossing his arms and legs into knots of discomfiture as Loren sets to work on him.
“She’s enjoying it,” Tim murmurs back. “He has brought out the praying mantis in many a female. My grasp of heterosexual coupling behavior is tenuous, but I think they sense something in him that needs a strong woman.”
“Not all strong women are dominating bitches.”
“Granted, but he attracts the bitches. And they snap at his soft tissue till he yelps.”
With a tiny jerk of his chin he points at Loren, who is leaning in and has wrapped the ringed fingers of one hand around Giles’s wrist. Her long fingers disappear in the gap between his naked wrist and the cotton of the shirt; the claws of her rings must be pressing into the skin of his chest.
If this were a scene in Ally McBeal, I would be Lucy Liu, spewing fire. I am the dragon, Giles is the virgin, and I’m saving him from the clutches of the Wicked Witch.
Giles has rid himself of the transgressing fingers by gesturing with one hand while keeping the other wrapped firmly around his waist, hugging himself. Because he is so articulate, speaking in beautiful, well-turned sentences, and because he holds his long limbs in that blue cotton and gray wool so very still, apart from that expressive hand, he does