Lust and Mistrust Trilogy Read online

  A Taste For Life

  A man and a woman scurried about a small apartment picking up and packing away their entire lives: a portrait of a young woman, who, although somewhat yellowed with age, looked remarkably like the woman who carefully wrapped it in tissue paper and placed the picture in a box among other small mementos; a pocket watch that had been her father’s; a pair of engraved wine glasses her parents had drank from on their wedding night; an emerald brooch… Connor had put nothing into the box. A very pragmatic man, he did not believe in keeping things from mere sentimentality.

  “I’ve got you,” he had told her. “Why would I need a locket with your picture and your hair in it? That’s just weird.”

  Tara sighed. Connor took care of her - he paid the bills and remembered her birthday and anniversaries. But as often as not, he wasn’t there himself and had to send things. He was so rarely at the apartment she thought the neighbors must think her to be a widow or a spinster.

  “What’s up, babe?” Connor must have had heard his wife sigh. He looked up from the box he was packing, a process which looked suspiciously like someone playing Tetris - everything going in was arranged carefully to fit into each other to maximize space. Only Connor could turn packing kitchen utensils into an analytical problem.

  Tara smiled. “Nothing, I’m excited we’re moving but…it’s scary too. We’re leaving everything behind.” Or I’m leaving everything behind, Tara mentally corrected herself. Connor could be just as content if they were moving to the moon.

  Tara turned back to her work, packing up her box neatly, if not as efficiently as Connor’s box. After a few moments, though, she realized that Conner was still looking at her with a thoughtful expression on his face. “What?” she asked, feeling a little self-conscious.

  He grinned at her, “Oh, nothing. I was just thinking to myself that I’m a damn lucky guy to have such a beautiful wife, with such a lovely smi- wait. What’s this?” He leaned forward and squinted his eyes, like he had seen something terribly amiss with her appearance. “Babe, go like this,” Connor commanded. He curled his lips into a snarl, exposing his gums and teeth. Tara complied, although she was a little bit confused. Did she have something stuck in her teeth? “Wow. You have got some serious fangs!” Odd, that Connor would have only now noticed her teeth, after being married for 3 years. Tara poked the ivory in question. She had never really noticed anything unusual about them, but maybe she did have an unusual set of chompers.

  Giggling, Tara vamped it up and delivered her best Bela Lugosi impression: “I vant to suck your blood! Baahaha!” And she lunged at him, pretending to bite his neck.

  Connor rolled his eyes, but gave her brief hug and kiss. “Alright, Babe, that’s enough playing around. These boxes aren’t going to pack themselves!” And he turned back to his box - the original packaging for a juicer he’d gotten Tara for her birthday. That guy who swam the English channel towing a boat by his teeth smiled from the corrugated cardboard. Tara sighed again, but this time Connor didn’t notice.

  *****

  Hours later, Tara slapped the last piece of tape across the top of a box and stood up, stretching. “And…we’re finally done!” she exclaimed to the empty room. She looked around their studio apartment. Our former studio apartment she thought. Or our ex-studio apartment. “Sorry studio apartment, it’s not you - it’s me!” Tara sang. “We’ve just grown apart. I have different needs now!”

  She was startled by the front door swinging open. It was Connor, bearing an armload of Chinese takeout; it would be their last meal in the studio apartment they had shared since getting married. “Were you talking to yourself?” Connor asked.

  “Oh no!” Tara assured her husband. “I was just singing. I’m in such a good mood now that we’re finally leaving for Milford.”

  Connor began to set out their meal - grease-stained boxes of egg rolls, Styrofoam containers filled with egg drop soup, and her favorite, crispy skin duck. “I doubt you’ll be able to find xang su ya in Milford.” Connor said, pointing to the package containing the twice-fried fowl.

  “Then I’ll just have to make my own. Are there ducks in Milford, I wonder?”

  “I’m sure there’s something in Milford. It’s surrounded by 70,000 acres of hills and trees. I wonder if they even have the internet.” Connor had somewhat of a dim view regarding anywhere with a population fewer than half a million.

  Tara frowned at him. “You should be more positive! Think of all the things we’re going to get to do - fishing, hiking, kayaking…”

  Connor interrupted, “Christ, you sound like a travel brochure for the damn place. You know you’ve never done a single one of those things. What happens when we get down there and you hate it?”

  With her trademark Rudegar stubbornness, Tara argued, “I will love it! I spent that weekend with that lovely couple at the bed and breakfast when I went to see our new house and everything there is perfect! Think of it: fresh air, actual stars over our head, space for the dogs to run around…”

  “The dogs?” Connor interrupted again. Pets were strictly forbidden in their apartment complex.

  “Well, with you gone away in Singapore for the next month I’ll need somebody to keep me company,” Tara answered. “If you don’t want me to get a dog I can always just find some nice, rugged local lumberjack to keep me warm at night.”

  Knowing when he had no chance against his wife, Connor gave in and said “Fine, fine, get a dog. I repeat: a dog. Not dogs plural!”

  Satisfied she had won the argument, Tara returned to her egg drop soup, noisily slurping the cloudy broth. She knew Connor hated it, but he said nothing.

  She stood up and looked around the empty apartment; everything boxed up had already been sent ahead with the moving company, and now it was just as empty as when they first moved in. Tara always heard that rooms looked much bigger when they were empty, but even now, deprived of all the pieces of furniture she had carefully picked out every weekend at the Ole 99 flea market, the rooms seemed tiny.

  Wood floors creaked beneath her bare feet. The new house had wood floors too, as it had been built nearly a century earlier…making it the new old house? However, there was a difference of about 2000 square feet between her new home and the one Tara was now leaving. That and about 5 million people. The population of Milford, spread over the rolling hills of Pennsylvania about 70 miles away, could probably fit into a square mile of the city. She would have neighbors, but nothing like the ever-present drama of thin-walled apartments and loud neighbors living above, beneath, and all around you.

  She wandered to the window, where she had often looked out onto their little corner of New York, always moving, always busy. Even now at three in the morning, the streets were filled with yellow taxi cabs blinking their brake lights in constant surprise at the stop ahead, and bicyclists zipping to and fro, weaving in and out of traffic. Feeling sleepy, Tara let her eyes unfocus and took in all the gleaming orbs, the lights that speckled the skyline as thickly as stars - stars you never saw for all the light pollution. Not like Milford, where she would be looking up each evening at a clear sky, as thick with stars as the corner bakery’s scones were with raisins.

  Raisins…Tara fell into bed beside Connor, dreaming of dancing, singing raisins, the ones from the commercials she watched as a little girl. Tara smiled her way into sleep, hoping Milford had a good bakery.

  *****

  “Honey, let’s go!” Tara jerked up from bed at her husband’s yell. Ugh. Her mouth was not filled with sweet memories of her dried fruit dreams, but instead seemed to be covered with a film of fuzzy grease, laid there by the Chinese food and grown thicker by aging overnight. She shook her head a bit, hoping that brains were like TV’s, and that
by giving it a good smack the fuzziness would clear.

  “Alright, alright, let me take a shower and get decent. Or at least halfway decent.” She started the hot water in the shower, its old pipes groaning. Tara let it go for a minute or two before checking the water, which was lukewarm. “Connor! Can you tell Stevie our hot water still isn’t working?”

  Connor never answered, but it suddenly dawned on Tara she wouldn’t need to tell the landlord about the cold water in the shower or the mouse she spotted in the hall one day and feared every night when she shuffled into the kitchen for a glass of water or a midnight snack. Just like breaking up with an ex, all those little things that irked so much could now be laughed at for their triviality. Hell, now that she was leaving the apartment all its little foibles seemed almost charming. “But I set fire, to the rain…,” Tara sang happily to herself as she showered for the last time in New York City, even appreciating that the cold water seemed to wake her up.

  A pounding at the bathroom door interrupted the reverie. Tara must have gone over her allotted 10 minutes of shower time. Connor was very exact about such things to the point that he actually used the stopwatch function on his phone to keep track of the exact amount of time things took. Once he had demanded a free meal because their waiter had told them that a steak would be ready in 15 minutes, and it actually took 17 minutes, 30 seconds. God help the poor pizza boy responsible for delivering in 30 minutes or less.

  After Connor finished his 5-minute-on-the-dot shower and the ensuing hygiene rituals (2 minutes exactly for brushing teeth, brush at a 45-degree angle, and in regular circular motion), he and Tara put the few remaining toiletries they had needed for the night into their bags and locked the little studio for the last time.

  In the elevator, an instrumental version of the B-52 song “Love Shack” played, and Tara hummed along as they plummeted down the core of the building. Seventh floor, sixth, fifth…every detail of this morning seemed momentously important, as though her life were about to change much more than just a simple change of abode.

  Tara waited in the lobby as Connor deposited their two apartment keys with the landlord. With her knock-off Louis Vuitton bag slung back on her shoulder (only 50 dollars from a mustachioed man on 9th Street!), Tara played a finger along the rows of mailboxes, stopping over 9b. The tag advertised the Macmillan’s, but not for long. Tomorrow, that name would be removed, and soon some other young family would put their name on the little box. Tomorrow, Tara would retrieve her mail after a nice walk down a short gravel road, and not the stale hallway which brewed a malodorous cocktail from the individual scents of a dozen different residents.

  “Ready?’ Connor asked.

  Tara nodded, and followed him to the waiting car, a black BMW. They might have to rethink their choice of automobile once they arrived in Milford. Tara could not recall seeing very many German luxury vehicles in the small town. Or valets, she thought, when Connor handed a folded twenty dollar bill to the teenager who ferried their car to and from a nearby parking garage.

  “Thanks,” the kid muttered, slipping the bill in his pocket. As they drove away in the yawning twilight, Tara watched the floating cherry of a cigarette recede in the distance behind them.

  “Let’s get some road-trip music goin’!” Tara told her husband, punching him lightly in the arm. Apparently, the change of scenery imparted Tara with a good deal more energy than Connor, for he could only grunt before slurping coffee from his ever-present travel mug.

  Tara tuned the car stereo to her favorite station, 90’s on 9, or “90’s all the time!” as the radio DJ constantly reminded listeners. And on they drove, leaving the city to a medley of grunge and sappy pop music, only two hours away from a new life, or, at least, a newer one.

  “You want to play a game?” Tara asked.

  “Like what?” The black sludge Connor called coffee had evidently waken him up enough to answer in real words, if only single syllable responses. It beat the animal grunts, anyway.

  “How about ‘I Spy’?”

  “What are you going to spy around here?” Connor gestured beyond the tinted windows. “I spy a wino urinating on a street corner?” And indeed, there was a homeless man waiting at the corner, even if he was not as crude as Connor imagined.

  Are there homeless people in Milford? Tara made a mental note to add yet another one of her curiosities to a growing list, comparing the differences between New York City and Milford. Perhaps the town council could use it to produce a travel brochure that was a bit more informative. Tara decided that could be her first new project as a Milfordite- no, Milfordian sounded better. As a freelance writer, she usually submitted style and fashion pieces to online editorials, but as of late her own blog had been neglected. A series of posts about her discoveries in Milford might be just the project she needed to get it going again.

  For the rest of the drive, Tara thought about different topic ideas she might use. Lost in her thoughts, Tara did not notice the gradually changing scenery until Connor brought it to her attention. “Look, Tara,” Connor commanded, breaking her reverie. “Moo cows.”

  Tara was astonished by the open fields on either side of the road. It was all so…green! And there were cows too, hundreds of them, standing placidly amidst all that grass. She thought it was crazy that in a city known for the sheer variety and number of its inhabitants she could still be so sheltered. “We should get a cow!” Tara exclaimed.

  Connor seemed amused by this. “So, first we get a pack of dogs, and then a cow? Do you have any other additions you would like to make to this menagerie?”

  Tara pretended to consider his statement. “A duck!”

  Connor snorted, “If we got a duck, you’d only cook it and eat it.”

  Tara protested, “I would not! Especially if I named him. I’ll call him Donald and I would never think of cooking him.”

  “Donald the Duck, that’s very original.”

  “Oh shut it. I just happen to think the classics last for a reason.”

  The conversation regarding Tara’s petting zoo halted when a sign informing them they’d reached the Milford town limits appeared. “Oh, oh! Here we are!” Tara exclaimed excitedly.

  “Yes, thank you, I can read.” Connor answered. As usual, he had to be a smart ass. But not even his customary curtness could dampen her enthusiasm. The first few dwellings began to appear as they came closer and closer to the town proper. Mostly built in a Victorian style, each building spoke of age - of a century spent nestled among trees taller than any she had ever seen.

  Tara and Connor passed slowly through town, taking in their new home. Not quite a one stoplight town, Milford was still quite a bit smaller than the city left behind, and the slow tour down Broad Street gave a fairly thorough impression of the town. Tara was particularly taken by a large white building, the Hotel Fauchere. “Why don’t we try a drink there, later?” Tara suggested.

  “If we have time after unpacking.” Connor did not fully commit. “I have to be sure the movers didn’t fuck anything up.”

  Not more than a few minutes later, the center of town was behind them and the emigrating couple found themselves at the just-purchased home, just over a mile away from town limits. “Oh my God! Is this really ours?” Even though Tara had seen pictures of the house and even come to see it in person she was still overwhelmed by the notion of all that space! The bed and sofa and few furnishings sent ahead from the studio apartment would hardly fill one of the rooms in their new home. Tara was going to have to buy furniture, and lots of it.

  A large porch with painted blue rails wrapped around the two-story Victorian. To complete the dollhouse image, a steeple loomed in the front. The house was too old to have an attached garage, and since they had conditionally planned to return to town that evening, Connor pulled the BMW to the front of the house. Tara stepped out, getting a good whiff of the country air for the first time. Imagine that! No smoke, no smog! No honking or 100-decibel cursing either. Only a few distant birds chirping and th
e soothing sound of wind whispering through tree branches.

  Tara sneezed. Uh-oh, better not be allergic to anything out here. She moved to the trunk to retrieve her bags, but Connor stopped her. “First things first!” he grinned and swept Tara off her feet. Cliché, yes, but literal. An easy task for Connor too, as Tara stood only 5’ tall and was quite petite. Connor carried Tara up the three steps leading to their front door. “Hold on,” he said and set her down. Pulling a key from his pocket, he unlocked the oak wood door and picked Tara up again.

  He carried her across into threshold before announcing, “Welcome to your new home, Lady Macmillan.” Well, Tara certainly did not expect such a romantic gesture from the usually unromantic Connor Macmillan, but this was a nice touch.

  “You can put me down, now,” Tara gently reminded her husband, who stood holding her aloft in the foyer.

  “Oh, right.” Connor placed his wife back down onto her own two feet so that they both could go back to the car and retrieve their luggage. “This gravel is going to be hell on the BMW.” Connor indicated the gravel pathway they’d driven on to get to the house. Gray dust had clouded up and stained the lower quarter of the car.

  “Well…maybe we should think about getting something else, something that fits in a little better. An SUV would be perfect up here! And if we finally have kids, I could really use the extra space.”

  Connor was taken by surprise. “Whoa, now, kids? First dogs, then cows, then ducks, and now kids?”

  “I didn’t say now, dummy,” Tara told him. “But you know I want some eventually.”

  “Eventually.” The way Connor said the word sounded unsure. Tara followed him into the house.

  Connor poked around the rooms to make sure the movers had placed everything as they had been instructed while Tara headed up the stairs to freshen up. After washing her face, she poked around the upper floor, which was empty except for their bedroom suite. On this top floor there were three bedrooms. Tara surveyed the other two, wondering what to put in the bare rooms. One would become a guest bedroom she decided, while the other…Tara glanced around the small bedroom with its window facing out to the yard. A tire swing hung by some previous tenant remained suspended from a tree out there on the front lawn. In the soft September breeze, the rubber circlet spun lazily. “This could be the nursery.” Tara blinked in surprise at herself. She hadn’t meant to say that out loud. Maybe in her giddiness, she had not gotten enough sleep. Ever since she and Connor had arrived here at the house, she’d felt different, a little off. Chalk it up to homesickness.