Forty-Four
“What did you tell him?” Viggo asked as Josie sat next to him in the sand of Pismo Beach. As usual, he wasn’t wearing shoes, and his long, thin feet were buried in the sand in front of him.
She smiled mischievously over at him and for a second marveled at how mystical and god-like he looked by moonlight, something she hadn’t noticed in New York when the smog made it impossible to see any of the lights in the night-time sky. “I said that I was going to find a grocery store to pick up some necessaries.”
Viggo’s smile made it apparent that inside he was laughing. “Peter seemed like a fairly reasonable guy when I met him,” he observed, picking up a handful of sand and letting it fall through his loosened fist, “so I was a little confused when you said he might present a problem if you were going to meet me here tonight.”
“That’s the thing I was hoping I could talk to you about,” she said with a sigh. When he looked confused and somewhat hurt, she added, “I mean, I wanted to come hang out with you anyway, but you’ve just been so helpful with sorting out my problems that I thought maybe I could tell you about what’s been going on the last few days. To see what you thought and all. But that’s not the only reason I agreed to come see you.”
He studied her for a moment, making her feel as though he were looking straight through her. “I think I know what it is,” he finally said. “You and him have been...”
“Yeah,” she said, her face scrunching up to display her regret, “Nine times now.”
“And he’s married to Toby’s...”
“Right.”
Viggo sighed and let his eyes drift back towards the ocean, his gaze seeming to fall thousands of miles away. There was silence between them for quite some time, another one of those strangely comfortable silences like the one they had shared during their carriage ride through Central Park. After rubbing his hand in the sand surrounding him and building a very small barrier around his feet with it, he asked, “Do you ever think about how future generations will view those of us living in the early twenty-first century?”
A completely bewildered expression took over her face, and she stuttered out a confused, “What?”
“Take, for instance, our eating utensils. Have you ever looked at a fork? I mean, really looked at it and thought objectively about how crude an instrument it is?” Her confusion gave way to thoughtfulness and she eventually nodded before he continued, “We like to think of ourselves as invincible, technologically advanced, perfect beyond future improvements, just as people have since the dawn of man. When the first wheel was chiseled out of stone, do you think those men could have even conceived of their great invention being made by machines on assembly lines by the thousands every day? The first time a spark created fire, do you think that anyone alive then was so bold as to dream of electric or gasoline-fueled heat, ovens, microwaves?”
Her mind completely off her troubles, Josie found herself actually giving thought to Viggo’s rhetorical, scholarly questions. Just as she opened her mouth to give her thoughts on the subject, he turned to her and said, “Josie, time changes everything, even those perfect things that were new and brilliant and beyond change or improvement. It ends marriages, wrecks friendships, breeds hate, causes wars, and makes fire available in plastic casings for ninety-nine cents at any convenience store so simple to operate that special measures have to be taken to protect children from the possibility of getting burned. But nothing changes without a conscious choice to change it, and there is always a choice. Do you want to irreparably damage your friendship with Peter and possibly end his marriage even if right now it’s something that makes you happy, or do you want to take the high road despite the fact that it might leave you lonely for awhile?”
He pulled a lighter out of his pocket and rolled his thumb over the flint to create a flame. “Starting a fire to keep yourself warm is archaic, and dinner forks are crude instruments.”
She stared at him in complete awe for what could have been hours. There were a million things she wanted to say, but there was no way of phrasing her thoughts that wouldn’t have made them seem infantile when compared to his intellect and brilliance. He released the button to kill the flame before curling his fingers shut around the lighter and saying, “I’m leaving for Spain in three weeks. I’ll be there for a few months working on a film. I’m telling you this so that if you need me, you’ll have some idea of where to look.”
“Where in Spain?” she asked, not really stopping to think that it would be ludicrous to travel so far to visit a man she barely knew.
He smiled wickedly at her and said, “If you figure that out, I’ll have a very special gift waiting there for you.” She smiled back and leaned over to put her head on his shoulder. He rested his cheek on her hair and asked, “So, do I remember correctly that you mentioned something about seeing Toby on Tuesday?”
“Yeah,” she said, exhaling heavily in an attempt to alleviate the pain that had just formed in her chest, “he’s meeting Peter and I at his parents’ house in Atlanta to bring some of my stuff that I left at the house.”
“Do you remember what I told you in New York?”
She searched her memory before asking, “You mean about him needing a therapist more than he needs me?”
“And how somebody who’s as unstable as he is really isn’t something you need in your life right now because of all the stress your under,” he added.
“I’ll be able to handle it,” she said, sensing the hidden warning in his question. “I mean, yeah, it’ll be hard seeing him again after three weeks of no communication and a break-up I wasn’t even aware until recently had taken place, but if you knew how long and how vehemently I had resisted him before we actually started dating, you wouldn’t be worried about that at all.”
With his hand held in front of her, he opened his fingers to reveal the lighter in his palm. “You should probably get back if you were supposedly going to the grocery store,” he said, his eyes fixed on her as she took the lighter from his hand and clutched it protectively. He stood up and turned to help her to her feet. She stood on her tip-toes to wrap her arms around his neck, holding tight to him for awhile before finally letting go and stepping back. With a wink he said, “Don’t get burned, Josie,” before turning away and walking down the beach towards some unseen destination.
Josie spent the cab ride back to Beverley Hills trying to decide the best way to explain to Peter that their little tryst had to end. She considered herself lucky beyond reason when she entered the hotel room to find him sound asleep on the couch, and she counted her blessings that such an uncomfortable topic could be saved for another time. After changing into green silk pajamas, she lay alone in their huge bed, making the flame of Viggo's lighter repeatedly appear and burn out, focusing on that instead of the head-splitting problems swirling through her mind until she eventually fell asleep.