Nick cringed as all the old arguments resonated between them. This was not the point of her telling him her news.
“Paula, honey, let’s not fight.”
“Don’t you honey me. And fighting is the only thing we do well anymore.”
“Not everything,” he reminded her gently.
“O-o-oh! It’s just like you to think a quick romp in the shower is the answer to everything. Wham-bam, and I’m the cream in your coffee again. You are so predictable.”
He flinched at her uncharacteristic crudeness. Nick hated it when she used street talk. He always wanted her to be up on this impossible nice-girls-don’t pedestal.
“Give me another chance. We can work things out.”
“Nick, don’t do this,” she cried. “You and I have talked till we’re blue in the face. It’s over. Dammit, it’s over.” Her voice cracked with the last words.
Nick’s face flushed with angry resolve. He wasn’t a man who accepted defeat easily. “Over? Never! I’ve made mistakes, but—”
“Nick, stop it. Stop it right now.”
“Paula, I love you . . .”
She started to cry.
“. . . and I think you love me, too . . .”
She hiccupped.
“. . . let me just hold you, sweetheart . . .”
She blew her nose.
“. . . and maybe we can discover what your . . . ah, problem is . . . what you really want.”
She could tell by the stunned look on his face that he immediately regretted his poor choice of words.
“My problem?” she shrieked, her mood changing like quicksilver. “You think I have a problem?”
“That’s not what I meant, honey.”
“Let me tell you something, Nick—you’re right. I do have a problem. I crave things you will apparently never understand. And that’s what this divorce is all about. How can a guy who’s so smart be so dumb? I’ll see you in court in one week, you turkey. Be there!”
Seconds later, standing out in the hall with the door shut behind him, Nick shook his head. He felt like he’d been blindsided with a sucker punch.
Women!
He didn’t need a crystal ball or a psycho psychic, like the one jabbering away on The Woman’s Edge, to realize he’d screwed up again. But he didn’t exactly understand where he’d gone wrong, either.
One week. Seven lousy days.
Maybe he needed some outside help.
Chapter Two
Day One
All he needed was a little advice. Or a lot . . .
“CRAZY . . . out-of-this-world crazy . . . that’s what I must be.”
Nick continued to mutter as he stepped gingerly up the rickety staircase of the faded yellow structure, wondering whether the rotting planks would hold his 210 pounds. Hell, it would serve him right if he fell and cracked his thick skull. It would be just payment for the stupidest damn thing he’d ever considered doing in all his thirty-five years.
Nick looked furtively back over his shoulder at the busy highway, hoping no one would recognize him entering such an establishment. He’d never live it down. Never.
Grimacing with self-disgust, Nick knocked on the door before he lost his nerve. Tapping his foot impatiently, he studied the hand-lettered sign in the grimy window: MADAME NADINE: FORTUNE TELLING, LOVE POTIONS, MIRACLES. And in smaller letters at the bottom: HAIR WAXING AND TATTOOS, BY APPOINTMENT.
He should turn around and go home.
But the prospect of another night alone turned his blood cold. Besides, he had only seven days left until . . . until . . . oh, God!
Nick took a deep, painful breath. He felt like a vise was squeezing his heart.
This time he rapped harder, and the door was jerked open.
“C’mon in, honey. I been expectin’ you.”
Nick’s mouth dropped open incredulously, but not at the words of invitation.
The woman standing before him—only a few inches shorter than his six-foot-one—had stuffed her big-boned, overweight body into a tight purple dress covered with huge yellow sunflowers. Lots of sunflowers. So bright they made his eyes water.
A cigarette hung from her crimson lips, its long ash threatening to fall onto her mammoth bosom at any moment. Its acrid odor filled the air, and smoke streamed about in misty, eerie clouds.
“Whattaya mean, you’ve been expecting me?” Nick finally choked out.
“You been drivin’ by every day for weeks, too proud to ask for my help.” She flashed him a toothy, gloating smile. “Guess you weren’t desperate enough . . . till today.”
Yup, desperate, that’s me. Desperate and nuts.
Nick followed the floozy into a bright sitting room with windows on three sides and dozens of pots filled with flowers of every variety imaginable. Outside, the heads of sunflowers the size of hubcaps peeped over the windowsills. He raised an eyebrow in question, and Madame Nadine—he presumed she was Nadine—raised all six of her chins defensively. “We don’t got flowers where I come from.”
Where’s that? he wondered. Probably prison.
“Are you a Gypsy?” he asked suddenly. Weren’t Gypsies supposed to be especially good at fortune-telling and stuff? If she was a Gypsy, maybe she really did have some talent that could help him.
The blowzy babe flashed him a look of utter disbelief. “The only Gypsies I know are moths. You want a Gypsy psychic, you better call one of them 900 numbers.”
Nick barely heard her. His eyes kept coming back to the growing ash on her cigarette, amazed that it still held on.
Noticing the direction of his gaze, the fortune-teller added, “We don’t got cigarettes where I come from, either.” She put her hands on her hips belligerently. “Any objections?”
“Nah, I used to smoke myself.”
“I know.”
“Huh?”
“Sit down,” she ordered, shoving him rudely into a straight-backed chair drawn up to a round table in the center of the room. Immediately, three cats slithered up and rubbed themselves sinuously against his pant leg. He shivered. Lord, he’d hated cats ever since he was a kid in the projects, and the super’s answer to rat control was cats. Every time he saw a cat, he remembered . . . well, he remembered too much.
He raised his eyes mutinously to the woman who was easing her ample rear into the chair opposite him. Two more cats ambled in and jumped up onto her wide lap.
“Let me guess. You don’t have cats where you come from, either.” When she didn’t answer, he asked, “Do you charge extra for cat hair?” Damn, I’ll be covered with hair when I get home. Probably smell like cat, too.
“You’ve got a smart mouth on you, boy. Be careful, or I won’t help you.”
His eyes widened hopefully. Oh, please, God, I need help so bad. “Can you help me?”
“Do angels have wings?”
“I don’t know. Do they?”
Ignoring his sarcasm, Madame Nadine reached under the fringed tablecloth and pulled out a round glass ball, open on one side. She dusted it off on the hem of her dress and plunked it ceremoniously in the center of the table. It was the most pitiful-looking crystal ball he’d ever seen—more like an upended fish bowl, or a ceiling light globe.
“So, what’s your problem, sonny? Want a tattoo? Or a body waxing? Yeah, I bet that’s it. You’re one of them modern manscaped fellas? You want your chest hairs removed so you can be smooth as a baby’s butt all over?”
He slapped a hand to his chest defensively. “You’re not pluckin’ anything from my body. No way!”
“Fortune told?”
“Well . . . maybe.” Nick could feel his face flame. But he never blushed. And he’d never been shy about expressing himself before, about anything. What was wrong with him? “I was thinking more on the lines of . . .
well . . . oh, hell . . . a love potion.”
Madame Nadine’s ash finally fell into the cleavage of her dress, and she immediately lit up another cigarette. He watched, fascinated, as she blew a waft of smoke his way, which hovered in the air, then swirled about the glass globe, finally filling it with a murky sheen. Then she turned her attention back to him, studying his face with disconcerting thoroughness.
“A love potion ain’t gonna do you diddly-squat, sweet cakes. You need big help.”
Tell me about it! “How do you know?”
Madame Nadine shrugged. “You are one screwed-up hombre. But maybe you’re not hopeless yet. Start from the beginning, and let’s see if we can unravel this mess you’ve made of your life.”
This was ridiculous. He’d been a fool even to enter this rattrap. The chick was a scam artist if he’d ever seen one, and he ought to know. He stood abruptly and threw a few bills on the table. “Thanks for your trouble, but I’ve changed my mind.”
He hightailed it for the door.
She called after him, “Don’t wait too long, sweetie. You only got seven days left.”
The fine hairs stood out on his neck as he pivoted slowly. “What did you say?”
“You only got seven days till your divorce is final, hon.” She was leaning back in her chair, blowing smoke rings with studied casualness. “If you want to save your marriage, you better not dawdle.”
“Who . . . are . . . you?” he asked, spacing his words evenly, as he plopped back down into his chair.
“Madame Nadine. The answer to your prayers. So, you better start showin’ some respect.”
He pressed a thumb and forefinger of one hand to his eyes, closing them tiredly for a second. Paula refused to see him or take his phone calls. How could he save his marriage if she wouldn’t talk to him? Despair enveloped him like a shroud. He had nowhere else to turn.
When he unshuttered his eyes, Madame Nadine patted his hand compassionately. He could swear he felt a tingling sensation where her skin brushed his.
“Tell me what happened, and let’s see what we can do,” she advised and lit another stinking cigarette.
Nick surprised himself by spilling his guts, giving her a brief capsule of his problem, finally ending, “So, even though Paula and I have been separated for a year, the divorce doesn’t become final until next Wednesday.”
“How long you been married?”
“Five years.”
“Why did you split?”
“She left me,” he admitted bleakly.
“And you just let her go? And you waited till now to try to get her back?” She looked at him as if he was the most brainless, ass-backwards blockhead in the world.
He was. It must show on his face.
“Just like a man. Dumber’n a doornail.” She made a tsking sound of disapproval. “Do you love her?”
His throat closed over, and he had trouble speaking. Finally, he answered in a raspy voice, “Yes.”
“And does she still love you?”
“Yes . . . no . . . damned if I know.” He blinked rapidly, feeling his eyes begin to water. It must be the damn cigarette smoke. “Paula said that in the end love wasn’t enough.”
Madame Nadine nodded as if she understood perfectly. He wished he did.
“And now you want her back?”
“Desperately.”
“Desperate is good.” She ground her butt into an ashtray and studied the cloudy fish bowl, waving her long fingers over it with a practiced flourish. Then she raised her two hands in a voilà fashion. “It’s simple.”
“What’s simple?” he asked, frowning. Had he missed something here? Maybe his brain was becoming numb from nicotine and cat breath.
“All you need to do is find your wife’s heart craving.”
Some memory flickered at the back of Nick’s mind. Hadn’t that psycho shrink on The Woman’s Edge said something about men needing to discover what women craved? And, holy cow, the last time he’d seen Paula, she’d said he didn’t have a clue as to her cravings.
“Heart craving? What the hell is a heart craving?”
“That’s for you to discover,” Madame Nadine said with a mysterious smile. Then she added dismissively, “That’ll be twenty dollars. Shut the door on your way out.”
Stunned, Nick watched as Madame Nadine waddled toward a beaded curtain on the other side of the room.
“But I don’t understand. What kind of craving? For food? Like chocolate? Or sex? Or kids? What?”
But Madame Nadine was gone. The only thing left was her cigarette smoke—and about two zillion cat hairs on his dark trousers.
And the words, “Heart craving, heart craving, heart craving . . .” echoing in Nick’s puzzled brain.
When dumb gets dumber . . .
THREE HOURS LATER, Nick was at the bookstore in the mall, doing another really dumb thing.
He’d decided to seek some reference materials.
When the salesclerk stepped away for a moment, he punched “craving” into the computer, and about two hundred entries came up, most of them in the “human sexuality” section. He wondered idly if that was different from the “unhuman sexuality” section.
So, the craving thing did refer to sex, after all. Well, he could handle that.
Not that he didn’t know his way around the block, and then some. And not that he and Paula had ever had sex problems. But . . . Hmmm, maybe there was something he’d been missing all these years. Or, rather, something she’d been missing.
Women were always examining things to death—reading how-to books, trying to make their relationships better. They watched too much Dr. Sheila, in his opinion.
But he had an open mind. Maybe something new had been invented in the sex department recently that he hadn’t heard about yet.
And, frankly, he was willing to try anything at this point. Anything. Yeah, he was cool with this stuff. He was an open-minded guy. He was willing to learn.
Aliens must have stolen his brain.
Still, Nick gave himself a mental push and headed toward the sex books.
An hour later, a dozen books lay at his feet, and Nick was bug-eyed and gape-mouthed with amazement. “Who reads all this stuff?” he muttered.
“My wife,” a skinny guy of about ninety answered with a groan. His trousers were hiked up practically to his armpits, and four inches of white socks showed at the ankles. “Lorna—that’s my honey—Lorna says she wants to spice up our lives. I think she’s tryin’ to kill me.” He grinned with lewd satisfaction.
“Get outta here!”
“It’s the truth.” The gray-haired codger pulled a paperback from the shelf and handed it to Nick. “This is Lorna’s favorite.”
Nick turned the slim volume over in his hands and read the title aloud: “How to Make Your Baby’s Motor Hum When Her Engine Needs a Tune-Up.”
“The diagrams are pretty good, I must say.” The old coot winked suggestively.
God! Against his better judgment, Nick flicked through the book till he came to the illustrations. Turning his head this way and that, he tried to figure out just where the “spark plug” was on this particular model.
“I think you have it upside down,” his newfound friend informed him.
“I don’t believe this,” Nick said when he finally figured out the drawings.
“I’m partial to the chapter on lube jobs.”
“Did you get a look at this dipstick?” Nick exclaimed, with a low whistle. “This guy must need a wheelbarrow to haul his equipment around.”
“Lorna calls me Mr. Eveready—”
Nick slanted him an incredulous look.
“—but, I must say, that fella musta invented the expression ‘hung like a horse.’”
Nick sla
mmed the book shut with disgust and put it back on the shelf. Then he gathered up the pile of books at his feet, wanting to put as much space as possible between himself and this old-age pervert.
Just before he turned away, the guy added, with a chuckle, “And, I must say, the book has good advice on how to prime her starter.”
Yep, I’m going off the deep end.
“Was that guy bothering you?” a teenage girl at the checkout asked as he stacked the twelve books he’d chosen on the counter. “The manager says he’s harmless, but I think he’s a pre-vert. Do you want us to call security?”
Nick shook his head with amusement. “Nah, he’s okay.”
Cracking her chewing gum loudly, the girl began to call out his purchases as she rang them up on the register, out loud, in a grating, singsong voice.
“Women’s Sexual Fantasies, $4.95.”
“Miss, do you think it’s necessary—”
“Two-hour Orgasms, $10.99.”
“Can you keep your voice down?”
“Huh?” She stared at him blankly, then went on, “The All-Time, Most Spectacular Sexual Position in the World, $34.50. Criminey! $34.50? I hope it’s worth it.”
“I hope so, too,” Nick murmured.
“Women Who Ejaculate, $15.95.”
The man in line behind Nick craned his neck over his shoulder and whispered, “Where’d you get that one?”
Nick pointed, and the man, along with two others, left the line and headed back toward the section on human sexuality.
“Listen, can you just hurry this up?”
Ignoring him, the girl yelled to a clerk on the other side of the store, at least a mile away, “Hey, Hank, can you look up the price on this one? G-Spots and Love Knots.”
Every single person in the store turned to look at him. Nick thought he’d like to put a knot in the big-mouth’s tongue.
That night, Nick ordered pizza and sat down in his living room, surrounded by his purchases, planning a long night of “research.” He was going to save his marriage or die trying.
The high school student who delivered his pizza an hour later scanned the room while Nick dug in his pockets for a tip. The kid snickered over the titles, boasting, “I know everything in these books.”