Too Hot To Handle

“Oh, Jeremy,” Sarah said, genuinely remorseful. “I am so sorry.” First Ray, now Jeremy. Jeremy was her ace computer-art person; she couldn’t get along without him. She couldn’t get along without any member of her small staff. Business was picking up as advertising agencies, in-house publicity departments and independent print salespeople grew familiar with her name and her product, but it was still a struggle to meet the overhead and pay salaries that were well below market. One glitch, one late delivery on a contract, one angry client taking his work elsewhere and she’d be bankrupt. Friendship and loyalty were all that kept these people with her, and she was alienating them one by one.

She slid her fingers through the silky waves of her hair, realizing that even her scalp itched. She felt feverish. She ached all over. But aspirin wasn’t going to help. “I am not myself today.”

“Or yesterday,” Jeremy said. “Or three weeks ago Monday.”

Sarah straightened up and spoke briskly. “I’m having a few personal problems,” she said, “but it was both unkind and unprofessional of me to take it out on you. Please accept my apology.”

“What about the artwork for the Designer Discounts mailer?” He eyed her suspiciously.

She cleared her throat. “I would appreciate it if you’d make one more stab at capturing the magic of a new shipment of Italian designer clothing.”

“You mean the artwork stinks.”

“In a manner of speaking.”

He gave her a flashing smile. “Then why didn’t you just say so?” He picked up the artwork and turned to leave Sarah’s office. “Hey, Macon,” he said as the two of them met in her doorway.

Sarah saw the significant glance that passed between them as Jeremy exited.

Macon came in, shut the door and sat down. “Well, you sure haven’t gotten…”

“Don’t say it!”

“Okay,” Macon said, ever agreeable. “I’ll put it another way. Your date Saturday night wasn’t all you hoped and dreamed it would be.”

“To say the least.” Its hopes, disappointments and unexpected turns had left her hotter and more restless than ever.

“What happened?”

She fidgeted for a moment. “I couldn’t.”

“Couldn’t what? I mean, if I were talking to a guy I’d know what he meant, but…”

Irritation increased the prickly sensations in her skin. “Macon,” Sarah said. “When did you become my counselor? Who hired you? Who’s paying you?”

“It’s pro bono work,” Macon said. “I’m not charging you a dime.”

“Exactly what you’re worth.”

“Sarah, what happened?”

She couldn’t sit still another minute. She swirled up and went to the windows of her office. They were filthy. Nothing unusual about that. The building management company wouldn’t have them washed until a tenant threatened to write to the Housing Commission. From her eleventh-floor perch she could see through the grime a characteristically odd assortment of Chelsea rooftops. She saw water tanks and ventilation equipment surrounded by tarred surfaces already beginning to steam in the mild heat of spring. She saw elegant roof gardens, where trees and potted houseplants either flourished on their steady diet of toxic New York air or died, to be replaced at once by professional plant-maintenance crews. Nothing personal.

A Himalayan cat prowled among the expensive terracotta planters on one of the roofs, its long, pale hair fluffing up in the soft breeze. Maybe that was what she needed, a cat.

“What I need is a window-washer,” she murmured.

“What?”

Her self-appointed counselor waited. In the middle of a fleeting daydream—the window-washer blowing kisses at her as he worked, her teasingly opening the window and watching as he came into her office, leaving no doubt in her mind that he was already aroused and ready for her—Sarah suddenly realized there could be no better repository for her anguished thoughts than the compact mass of pure objective intelligence who was so generously offering her his ear.

“I met a really promising prospect,” she told him, “but when the moment of reckoning arrived, I couldn’t go through with it.”

“Tough scene to get through,” Macon said, shaking his head. “Frustrating for both of you.”

“Unfair,” she muttered, sinking back into her chair. “And the worst part was that he was so nice about it.” He’d said he understood. He’d handed her his card with an invitation to call anytime. Her life was filling up with business cards. They made damned poor lovers.

She could tell from his expression that Macon couldn’t see why that had been the worst part. “I felt so guilty,” she explained. “I really had led him on, with the worst of intentions, of course.”

“The question is why couldn’t you go through with it?”

A deep sigh rose all the way up from her tortured center. “Because earlier in the day I ran into the only man I ever actually fell in love with.”

“Wow,” Macon said. “And he’s married, right? Or an ex-con. Or…Mafia!” His eyes lit up with interest, turning his thick glasses into twin flashlight beams.

She gritted her teeth. “No, he’s as perfect as ever.” Even more perfect, if that were possible. What a grim thought.

“So you chased him down and he snubbed you.” Macon looked properly outraged.

Sarah leapt up again and began to pace the confines of the small, rose-walled office. The tension had built up so high inside her she felt as if she were about to come out of her skin. She could have asked Alex to come in. He would have come. One touch and she’d have led him to her bed. “He saw me, actually, and followed me home.”

“Ha!” Macon said. “He’s a—”

She spun. “No, he’s not a stalker. He’s…”

She had to gather up her courage to go on. “We were teenagers. He was my first lover. It was an experience so exquisite—” she halted, frightened by the threat of tears, by the impact of the memories that controlled her life even now “—I knew I wanted only that, with that person, for the rest of my life.”

“And he didn’t?”

Dear Macon. He couldn’t believe a man she wanted would not want her. “I guess I wasn’t good enough for him. At least, I wasn’t good enough for his mother, the ever-so-famous movie star, and he didn’t have the courage to defy her.”

“You weren’t good enough? Or your Aunt Becki wasn’t the kind of…”

“Whatever,” Sarah snapped. Of course she’d told Macon about Aunt Becki. She told everyone about Aunt Becki. Tall and blond like Sarah, but more beautiful than Sarah could ever dream of being, she’d been the mistress of a film producer, Todd Haynes. Although he had loved her deeply, he couldn’t take the publicity of a divorce from his wife or the potential pain it would have caused his children.

Aunt Becki had loved him, too, so much that she’d been willing to accept what she could have of him. He’d provided her with a lovely little house in Beverly Hills, where he spent as much time as he could. And then, when Sarah’s parents died, this cutthroat industry type had welcomed Sarah into that house as generously as Aunt Becki had, accepting without protest his mistress’s need to shelter and comfort her sister’s child.

Becki’s and Todd’s was a beautiful love story. Why anyone couldn’t see how innately good Aunt Becki had been remained a mystery to Sarah, who’d been cared for with a kind of love Eleanor Asquith couldn’t begin to understand.

“Hello in there,” Macon said. “Where’d you go, Sarah?”

Sarah snapped to the present. “Alex and I were an item at Hollywood High. We made our plans. Pretty sensible plans, come to think of it, for a pair of kids drunk on love. He had to go to Cambridge—the Emerson men had been going to King’s College for generations. I had a scholarship to Stanford. But we’d stay together, even if we were apart.”

“This is so romantic it’s making my scalp prickle.”

“My scalp prickles, too, just thinking about it.” The hollow sound of her voice came straight from the hollow feeling in her heart. “One night he just didn’t show up, and I didn’t see him again until last Saturday.” She whirled on Macon again. “If you say, ‘And how did that make you feel?’ I’m going to shove you out the window.”

Macon arranged his arms in a diving position. “See Macon,” he said, “preparing to go gracefully.”

ALEX SAT in glum silence in his stately suite of offices. Located in a historic old building in downtown San Francisco, Emerson Associates was the venture capital firm he owned and had naively assumed he totally controlled. Apparently that assumption was incorrect. As far as he could tell, the offices were empty, which was odd, since it was Thursday. With a staff of five he managed hundreds of millions of dollars, which he then channeled into businesses that made the dollars thrive and multiply. He made sure those five people shared the success in salary increases, bonuses and stock shares. But in order for everyone to grow richer, those five people needed to show up at the office on a regular basis. Until today, they always had.

There was a fine, warm team spirit in the office. Especially when the team was in the damned office.

“Carol,” he yelled.

Silence, followed by footsteps whose slow pace reeked of reluctance. A moment later a middle-aged, red-haired woman in a navy suit became visible by increments—the tip of her nose followed by the rest of her head, then a substantial bosom and, at last, a pair of surprisingly elegant legs. The whole package came to a halt just inside the doorway to his enormous office. He could barely see her at this distance.

“You called?”

Or hear her. “Of course I called. Where is everybody? Where’s Mike with the Harbisher analysis? Where’s…”

“Hiding,” said Carol.

“What do you mean, hiding? Do we have a maniac loose in the office?”

“Yes.”

“Carol,” Alex said, forcing a tight smile, “come closer.”

“Why?”

“Because I asked you! Nicely!”

She grabbed the door and closed it silently, his shout echoing against it.

“So much for nicely,” he muttered. His single objection to his staff was that they didn’t always treat him with the respect he, as owner of the firm, properly deserved. They treated him more like family. A younger member of the family, to add to the insult. So what if he was thirty years old, younger than anybody, except the office manager? Didn’t matter. This was his castle and he should be king.

Of course, they were Americans. They took a dim view of kings. That might explain it.

For a few minutes he remained at his desk, fuming. Then, being a man of action, he got up and went in search of his people.

He found them huddled together in Mike’s office. Mike Semple was his financial analyst. Carol, his executive assistant, was just sitting down at Mike’s conference table with Suzi, the office manager, Les, his management analyst and Tricia, negotiator and director of communications.

“Good of you to join us, Alex,” Mike said. “We were just starting a staff meeting.”

“Without me?” Alex felt startled and oddly unbalanced.

“About you.”

“Oh.” Alex nudged Suzi to the left and Les to the right in order to plunk himself down in a side chair, avoiding his usual spot at the head of the table. “Good thing I showed up. What is it about me we’re discussing?”

“We’re wondering what’s up,” Les said. “Are we going broke?”

“No.”

“Did we underbid for Palmer Pipe Company?”

“No. Look, I know I haven’t been in the best mood the last couple of days.” To his annoyance, his team answered him not with reassurance, but with, to be precise, two nervous giggles and three derisive snorts. “It’s a personal matter,” he said, hoping that those sacred words would end this ridiculous cross-examination as it would in any civilized sort of setting. Americans, however, were not yet completely civilized, as he had learned from numerous painful experiences. They talked too openly about matters they should keep to themselves, and in return, wanted the most outrageously intimate details from others. You’d think, with more than two hundred years of practice, they’d learn to stop asking how much you made in a year. And whom you were sleeping with. At least one of the two.

“I didn’t know you had any personal matters,” Suzi said.

Of course, Suzi was still very young.

“I didn’t know you had any personal anything,” Les seconded her. “Except your toothbrush.”

Now Les should have known better than to mention something as personal as a toothbrush.

“Put the problem on the table,” Mike suggested. “We’ll discuss it just like we discuss business problems.”

As his senior person, Mike should be hanged for what he’d just said. This was not fine, warm team spirit. This was insubordination of the most outrageous, most insupportable nature. He wouldn’t put up with it. He’d fire the lot of them. Let them find somebody else to work for, somebody who could increase their net worths by eighty percent annually instead of a mere seventy.

He suddenly heard himself, his irritability, his childishness. He had plenty of faults, but childishness wasn’t one of them. He hadn’t been childish even when he was a child. His mother hadn’t allowed it. So why was it suddenly showing up now?

It must have been the distraction of his own thoughts that made him blurt out the one thing he most wanted to keep to himself. Either that, or he’d lived in the United States too long. “I ran into an old girlfriend in New York last weekend.”

That was as far as he got before a collective sigh drowned him out, followed by, “No kidding?” and “Great!” and “Uh-oh, it’s a woman problem.”

“I told you it had to be something important,” Suzi said. “Tell us all about her.”

Cornered by his own stupidity, Alex said, “No, no, it’s not like that. She’s just a girl I dated in high school. Hollywood High. When my mother did those three movies—” He made a gesture with his hand. He didn’t need to embellish. Eleanor Asquith was a household name, in cultured households, at least. “She pulled me out of boarding school and brought me with her. She wanted me to see what real Americans were like.”

“Real Americans at Hollywood High? I don’t think so,” Les said.

“Sarah was there.”

The silence told him he’d shocked them. It was a frightening thought, that he might have said more than one of them would have in the same circumstances. What was it that made him babble on? “We fell for each other, but this and that happened, you know how it is with kids, and we broke up. I lost track of her. Last Saturday I found her again.”

“Something about this reunion did not make you happy.” Mike folded his hands over an incipient paunch and waited.

Alex had opened the doors himself. There was no going back. “I thought it would be the polite thing to ask her out this weekend. She turned me down flat. I gave her my card and asked her to call if her plans changed.”

“I didn’t know you were going to New York this weekend,” Carol said, looking worried. “You loaned the plane to Tucker Associates, remember? You don’t have transportation or a hotel suite, and you don’t have any appointments.”

“Well, obviously,” Alex began, then, realizing he sounded sarcastic, backed up and started over. “I wasn’t going to New York unless she called.”

“But she didn’t call,” Suzi said.

“Not yet.”

“It’s only…well, I guess it is Thursday,” Mike said. “Looks like maybe she’s not going to call.” He winced under the glare Alex sent in his direction.

“She calls or she doesn’t,” Alex said. “It doesn’t matter. I’m annoyed by her bad manners, that’s all.”

“If you did something to make her so mad that she’s still mad after all these years,” Suzi said, “it may take her more than five days to get over it.”

“Or maybe you need to push her a little bit,” Carol suggested. “If this was a business deal you wouldn’t let it go with a single, ‘Let’s take a meeting,’ and then just sit around on your tush waiting for the other guy to call.”

“If this was a business deal,” Suzi said, echoing Carol, “you’d put together a package for the guy, an annual report, a prospectus, your card, maybe an Emerson Associates paperweight.”

A lightbulb went off in Alex’s head. A business deal. Of course. It was a road toward Sarah, and it was a way out of the untenable social predicament he’d gotten himself into with his staff. “In fact, it was a business deal I had in mind,” he said smoothly. He let his fingers stray casually toward the most recent prospectus he’d sent to a group of potential investors. It was shiny, glossy, colorful, printed on heavy, expensive paper, filled with photographs, the essential charts and graphs cleverly disguised by their Disneylike style. “This—” he brandished it at them “—didn’t really send the message, did it?”

He looked up when silence seemed to be the only response he was going to get.

“I was thinking we should tell the ad agency to look for a new graphics design firm. Somebody with a fresh, quirky approach might make the difference, tip the scale.”

Meaningful glances sizzled around the table. “Can we infer,” Mike said in his most pompous tone, “that the lady works for a graphics design firm?”

“Owns it,” Alex informed them, and couldn’t keep the tinge of pride out of his voice.

With nothing more than graphics design and New York to go on, he’d found her on the Internet earlier in the week. At least he’d found the person who had to be Sarah. She’d been Sarah Langley way back then; when her aunt adopted her after her parents’ death, she’d taken Aunt Becki’s last name. Now she was Sarah Nevins, her father’s name, and the sole owner of Great Graphics! in Chelsea. Five employees. Undercapitalized, barely making it, but getting good feedback on their work.

The search had made him feel like a cyberstalker, and he didn’t intend to share anything but the firm’s name, even with these people.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Suzi said, interrupting his thoughts. “I meant send flowers.”

She so obviously wanted to add “You turkey,” that in spite of his annoyance that she still wasn’t listening, Alex couldn’t help but admire her restraint. “Flowers wouldn’t be appropriate,” he argued. “A contract to do our brochures and stuff, now that’s an offer she couldn’t refuse.”

Thinking of Sarah not refusing him was enough to make him shift discreetly in his chair. He could hardly say her name without getting hard, and picturing her lying soft, sweet and naked in his bed, saying, “Yes, oh, yes…”

“Oh, yes,” he said firmly, “a big contract will make an impression on her.”

More silence. “Could we try it my way first?” Suzi pleaded with him.

“I’d vote for that,” Mike said. “Or candy.”

“How many times do I have to tell you. This is a business…” Alex said.

“Candy’s risky,” Les said. “Give my wife candy, she says, ‘You want me fat so you can run off with some skinny bimbo?”’

“What would she say to a fat contract?” Alex inquired.

Their sympathetic, patronizing expressions spoke volumes. “Who’s our florist of choice these days, Suzi?” Carol said succinctly.

“THIS ISN’T COMPANY BUSINESS,” Sarah snapped. “You don’t get to address my personal life in a staff meeting.”

Each of her loyal colleagues handed her a sheet of paper. She glanced down at the first, which was from Ray. A letter of resignation. Her hands began to tremble as she leafed through one sheet after the other.

“You’re all resigning?”

“Or,” Macon said, “we’re going to discuss your personal life in this staff meeting.”

“Blackmail.”

“Right.”

“What precipitated this…mutiny?”

They all spoke at once.

“The last grain of sand…” Macon began.

“The straw that broke the camel’s back…” Rachel said.

“The lowest blow…” Ray said.

“The final blow…” Annie said, sounding teary, “was when you told me my Citibank brochure would make great confetti for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.”

“It was…vivid,” Sarah said. “It was hard to imagine bank customers relating Mardi Gras to estate planning.” She had to establish control over this situation. “But I apologize for my choice of words.”

“Your vocabulary has blossomed over the last few days,” Jeremy said. “We think it’s time to deadhead it.”

“That was very good, Jeremy,” Sarah said, “that connection between blossoming and deadheading.”

“What’s deadheading?” said Rachel, whose idea of country life was to visit the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. “It sounds more sadistic than I, personally, feel at the moment.”

“It was a metaphor,” Macon said impatiently. “Jeremy was drawing a nice little metaphor, which surprised Sarah because he’s the artist and Ray’s the writer and…”

“You’re killing it with analysis,” Annie interrupted him.

“Thank you, Annie,” Macon said. “The point, Sarah,” he went on, “is that you’re obviously unhappy, and if you won’t do something about it, we’re moving on.”

“Like wagons at dawn,” Sarah said, gazing at them sorrowfully, “leaving the sick and wounded behind.”

“You got it,” Ray said. “Now on the other hand, if you would lend a receptive ear, we might suggest a cure.”

If Ray offered to solve her problem as Macon had, she’d scream. It was unlikely, given that Ray and Jeremy were a couple. “My, my, the rhetoric is just flowing this afternoon,” Sarah said. “If only we could put this same creative effort into our copywriting, Ray, we might…”

“You’re doing it again,” Jeremy warned her.

Sarah waved both hands in the air, noticing sadly that they flinched. “I’m turning down your resignations. Okay, what do you think I should do?”

“Call him,” Annie said.

They didn’t understand. “I can’t, Annie, I just can’t. What he did to me…”

“About a million years ago,” Jeremy interjected.

“I take it Macon has given you the gist of the story.”

“It was the only way he could talk us out of e-mailing our resignations and sneaking back in the dark of night to clear out our desks,” Rachel said.

“Oh. Then I suppose I should say thank you,” Sarah said, turning to Macon.

“It would be a change.”

Her grudging smile segued at once into a glower. “Okay, okay, it was twelve years ago, I admit, and I was dealing with it just fine until I saw him again. Well, I was,” she retorted, reacting to the expressions on their faces.

“But now that you have seen him again,” Rachel argued, “you’re going to have to resolve your feelings about him.”

“Or you’ll resign,” Sarah said, feeling sulky.

“Or you’ll explode,” Jeremy said.

“Or implode,” Ray said.

“I wouldn’t mind if she’d implode,” Jeremy said. “It’s the exploding that’s making me think that job with Hall & Lindstrom wouldn’t be such a bad idea.”

“Jeremy, you wouldn’t!”

“Sarah,” he mimicked her, “I would and will if you don’t…”

“…call him,” her five devoted employees chorused while Sarah glared at them.

SHE WOULDN’T. She couldn’t. They didn’t understand.

That summer, the summer after she and Alex graduated, they were more desperate for each other than ever, knowing that soon they’d be going away to college. They would be apart in body, but not in spirit. They would work it out. What they had was too perfect to let go.

No one could imagine how she felt the night she waited for him, hot and tremulous, already wet and ready for him just knowing she would see him in a few minutes. It was agony to act normal in front of Aunt Becki. But this time Alex simply didn’t arrive. No letter, no phone call, no Alex. Not ever again.

Her knees buckled as she went up the steps to her building. Gritting her teeth against the pain she’d managed to keep in a separate compartment of her soul for so many years, Sarah turned the key in the lock, heard the reassuring click and pushed at the main door, surprised when very little happened. She shoved a little harder.

“Don’t knock over the flowers!” It was her first-floor neighbor Maude who shouted at her from her apartment window. While Sarah hesitated, a door slammed, indicating that Maude had come out into the narrow entrance hall. A series of mutters followed, alternating with oofs and grunts. “You think I have nothing better to do than sign for your deliveries, collect your menus from Chinese restaurants? Where’s my big Christmas tip, that’s what I’d like to know.”