"Well, I could drive, but what would the point be? I"m not buying it."
"I"m not buying it either." She got behind the wheel. Car smelled new and leathery. "What"s the interior color? It"s a nice combo."
"Isn"t it, though? Color of the leather is caramel. The dashboard accents are burl."
"Burl? What the heck kind of color is burl?" She touched the smooth pebbly leopard-looking dashboard with her fingers.
"This color."
Gingerly Larissa drove out onto Main Street. She was going twenty miles an hour. "Drives nice in traffic," she said after a silence. "Stops at red lights. Makes lefts. Signals work. It shifts from park to drive almost as if it has an automatic transmission."
Kai blinked at her. "You"re making fun of my sales pitch that I haven"t had a chance to make yet?"
"I"m not making fun. It actually does do all these things. I"m not being ironic."
"Ironic, no. Mocking, yes."
"Mocking, no. Questioning, yes. As in, what"s here that"s worth somebody"s annual salary?"
"Four hundred and twenty horsepower. Tell you what. Make a left at the college and drive till you hit the open road. Glenside Avenue runs around the Watchung Reservation on the way to Deserted Village. Let"s go see what this baby can do."
"It brakes beautifully."
"All righty now."
"And the seatbelts work. No, it"s excellent. Your best, you say? Clearly a superior model."
"Didn"t you notice how everybody on Main Street was eyeballing you?"
"What, you think it"s the car?" Larissa chuckled. "You think they were impressed with the way a Jag sat five minutes at a red light?"
"Maybe they were just admiring the driver. Make a left here and go straight for a mile."
"Oh! It goes straight so well!" They drove in unruffled silence. She resisted the urge to glance at her eyes in the rearview mirror, to catch a glimpse of herself after he said people might be eyeballing her. Also resisted the urge to comment on how noticeably straight up he was sitting, with Buddha-like tranquility, his entire back flush and composed against the seat.
"This model has a supercharged 420 horsepower 4.2 liter engine. Do you have any idea what that means?"
"Uma"no?"
"You can"t imagine power like this. It"s like a rocket."
"You want me to demonstrate its rocket-like qualities on Glenside?"
"It"s an empty road. And clearly, until you do, you will not cease the snarky comments."
"Oh, no, those will continue." Glenside, which ran in a long straight line along the edge of the protected national wildlife reservation, was deserted. No main streets ran through it, no exits to shopping areas, no gas stations, no small towns. It had the forest on the right and forest on the left. The sun was shining.
"Not too far," Larissa said, stepping on the gas. The car soared forward.
"As far as you want."
They were gone forty minutes. Maybe forty-five.
"Soawhat do you think?" He was grinning at her after she slowed down to get on the Interstate. Slowed down to get on the Interstate.
"It"s nice," she said noncommittally.
"Don"t pretend. Car"s incredible," Kai said. "Handles beautifully. Has great power."
She revved up, smoking a Mercedes 550SL in the right lane. "Yes."
"The XKR goes from 0 to 60 in 4.9 seconds."
The snark had gone. Rockets couldn"t be as fast as this. He was right. It was unbelievable. Like nothing she"d ever driven.
"You might not need this much power," said Kai, as Larissa gripped the leather-clad wheel with her leather-clad hands. "It"s more money than the regular XK. Which is also a very fine car at 300 horsepower, and it may be all the power you need. Did I mention it"s less money?"
"Some salesman you are." Larissa sped to eighty. Then ninety.
"Slow down, this isn"t Glenside. You don"t want to get a ticket," Kai said. "I know. I"ve gotten two."
Reluctantly she slowed down. "How fast were you going?" she asked.
"Buck twenty. The cops weren"t happy. I just went to court for it. Ticket cost me a week"s pay."
She slowed down some more. "You"re probably right. I don"t need this much power."
"Right." He paused. "Though it"s great for getting on the highway. You never have to worry."
"That"s good, not having to worry," said Larissa. "I like to not worry. But I never go on the highway. Do I really need a supercharged Jag convertible to drive to Stop&Shop?"
"You tell me," said Kai.
When they were almost at the dealership parking lot, Larissa was surprised to discover it was after one.
"I have to run," she said. "But I like it. I like it very much."
"Yes," was all he said. "I thought you might."
She didn"t know what to say next. Does she call him? Does he call her? Does she fill out a sheet with her details on it? Does she shake his hand? Does she say how this is going to end, or say, I"ll talk to my husband, maybe call back in a couple of days. What does she do?
"I"m starved," he said. "Drive on to Stop&Shop. I"ll buy us some sushi."
"They sell sushi you can eat at Stop&Shop?" This surprised her.
"It"s not bad. It"s fresh. The sushi chef knows me. Makes me an excellent rainbow roll. You like sushi?"
Larissa didn"t want to say she"d never eaten sushi. She hesitated. "Come," he said. "We"ll get you a tuna roll. You like avocado and cuc.u.mber? You like spicy?"
"It"s the raw fish I have a problem with," she said to him. "Make it medium well, and I"ll eat it."
Kai laughed. "Regular stand-up today, aren"t we?"
She parked, and they walked in together through the automatic doors, she first. As it should be, she thought. Age before beauty. In the back of the store, she met Al, a friendly wide bald j.a.panese man with a thick accent and an even thicker goatee. She didn"t understand him at all, but he and Kai spoke a secret language. Kai asked him for something special, while Al nodded and smiled. "It really is surprisingly good here," Kai said while they waited. "Good enough for a Maui boy who ate sushi before he drank milk."
She hurried off to buy some sirloin for dinner.
Kai paid for the sushi, they walked out, and got inside the Jaguar, where he turned up the heat and the radio. "I can"t believe you"ve never had sushi," he said, opening up her plastic container. "Do you like wasabi?"
"I might if I knew what it was."
"What about soy sauce? Do you know what that is?"
"Oh, who"s the comedian now?" She watched him skeptically as he used chopsticks to spread a little green paste over one of the sushi b.a.l.l.s or rolls or whatever the heck it was, then deftly pick it up with the chopsticks anda Well, it wasn"t like the sushi was on a fork. He couldn"t hand her the chopsticks. Once embarked on a course of action, they had no choice but to see it through; it was a good thing he was so unselfconscious. He brought the chopsticks with the sushi to her, she leaned forward, and put the whole roll in her mouth.
"Well?" He was excited. "What do you think?"
Her eyes teared up from the spice. "What is that? It"s going right to my nose."
He laughed. "That"s the wasabi. It"s j.a.panese horseradish. Good?"
"Well, sure." She swallowed. "If you think eating Vicks VapoRub is good, then yeah, absolutely."
He handed her the plastic tray, and she put her own wasabi on the sushi, just a drop, not a teaspoon. It was marginally better. She couldn"t believe she was eating raw fish. Forty years and never once. Now suddenly in a Jag, with chopsticks.
"In Maui," Kai said, eating happily, drinking his c.o.ke, "there was a place near our apartment where the guy caught the tuna in the morning and made the sushi for me two hours later. It was most outrageous. I lived on tuna morning, noon, and night. Then one day, Charlie, the guy who owned the joint, asked me to go fishing with him, and I got all excited, until we went out in his boat at dawn and I saw the size of the tuna. Mamma mia! I thought tuna were tiny little fish, you know, big enough to fit into a 6-oz can." He laughed. "But they were like whales! Three times the size of our boat. I said to him, Charlie, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d, you tricked me. He was laughing so hard he peed himself. I couldn"t catch a thing, they scared the s.h.i.t out of me, excuse my French."
"If you"re expecting plankton and you get whale, yeah, I can see how that might have an impact."
"But good, right?"
"It"s not bad."
"There"s a place nearby in Madison, they make really good special roll. Crab, salmon, tuna, avocado, cuc.u.mber, and a spicy sauce. Pretty awesome."
"I bet." She was busy trying to gingerly carry the large roll between two wooden sticks to her mouth before it fell.
"If you buy the car, I"ll take you there for lunch as a thank you. You"ll love it."
"Well, you"re very kind. But no thanks will be necessary."
They sat facing the gravestones and had their sushi out of plastic containers with the car running and the cla.s.sical jazz station playing Nina Simone singing, "If He Changed my Name."
"I hope you don"t have ice cream in the back," he said when they were done eating.
"No ice cream today. Just meat." d.a.m.n, they"d had steak last night. She pulled out of the parking lot. They were a minute away from the dealership. She had to jet. It was after two, and Michelangelo was getting out in a half-hour.
"So you love the car?"
She pulled into the Jag lot, to the front, put the car in park, idled.
"I love it. But I have to go."
"Come back tomorrow," Kai said. "I"m here in the morning. I can show you two other models. The flagship of our line, the XJR."
"Is the flagship a convertible?"
"No, a sedan."
Larissa pursed her lips. Sedans were so middle-age.
He smiled. "Okay. Only quad tailpipes with polished chrome for you."
Quad tailpipes? What would Jared think of that? "The heated leather seats might come in handy."
"Oh, for sure. And the leather is hand-selected."
"What other kind would I ever want, Mr. Pa.s.sani?"
"Exactly." He grabbed the brown paper bag of empty sushi boxes. "But that"s not why you buy a Jag, Miss Stark."
"No," she said, "you buy it for the body-colored spoiler and the four tailpipes with bright finishes. And it"s Mrs."
His smile was wide. "So you"re going to stop by tomorrow?"
For some reason he wasn"t getting out of the car.
"Kai, I really have to run. I"ve got to pick up my son from school."
Still not moving.
She looked at him. He looked at her. "Um, car"s not yet yours, Mrs. Stark," he said, keeping the teasing grin away. "Would you like me to walk you to your own vehicle?"
"Oh G.o.d!" Larissa flipped off the ignition. "Sorry." Idiot.
"Feels like yours, though, doesn"t it?" They both got out. He did walk her to the Escalade, even shook her hand gently. "Almost like you already own it."
Larissa came back the next morning. When he saw her, Kai Cheshire-grinned. She couldn"t help it. She smiled back.
"I don"t want to see another car," she said. "I want you to show me what colors you have on the one I drove. Besides burl."
Kai got her a coffee and they sat and talked at his desk, in full view of the rest of the dealership, chatted for an hour about luxury packages and sound options, about the convertible cover, wheel coverings, rich high-gloss burl walnut. She noticed he had a battered paperback on his desk: The Sorrows of Young Werther.
Of all the books! "You"re reading that?"
He nodded. "Rereading it. Werther is so wretched and self-pitying, I love it."
"Well, he is pining. That"s what happens to pining people."