To answer the questions related to his motives and the state of his heart, he first needed to resolve the mysteries of Maddison and understand with what intention she had come into his life.
When he’d fixed the eye to the hook at the neck of her dress, she turned to him and favored him with a deep and searching kiss.
Leaning back in his arms, she seemed to know his thoughts. “When you sat down next to me at the bar that first night and I realized who you were, I wanted to be part of your life because I’d read and reread your books. I lived in them, really, while I read them, and I loved the world you evoked, the way you saw life. I hoped you’d made a world for yourself like the one in your books, that you were what you write. And you are. You’re so humble in spite of your success, considerate, funny, tender. I feel not only as though I’m with David Thorne, but as if I’m in a David Thorne novel. It’s a wonderful place to be.” She kissed him again. “May I come here tonight and cook dinner for you? I’m a very good cook. I’ll bring everything I need. Six o’clock?”
“That would be wonderful,” he said. “I’d love it.”
He walked with her to the front door. He didn’t ask where she parked her car or if someone was coming to pick her up, someone whom she’d called while he’d been preparing the coffee. As he opened the door, however, he said, “I’m so glad you found the spare key—but how did you know where to look for it?”
Cocking her head like a beautiful bird regarding a curiosity, she said, “You don’t really remember?”
“I’m baffled.”
She cited one of his novels: “The Last Flight Out.”
She had so unsettled—and so satiated—him that his mind was flaccid, empty, and he could not access any memory of his book, as if it had been written by someone else, a tale he’d read a long time ago and little recalled.
“The lead character, Elijah,” she reminded him, “keeps a spare key under one of two rocking chairs on his back porch. Rocking chairs exactly like the two on your porch.”
Although the key had no thematic or plot purpose, though it was a small detail of no consequence, the memory of his book coalesced around it as if it were of great meaning akin to that of the green light, in Fitzgerald’s classic novel, that Jay Gatsby saw from across the bay, at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock, a light symbolizing the orgastic future forever beyond his grasp.
If Maddison had committed to memory even such minor moments of David’s work, perhaps she might be one of those obsessive fans whose admiration could compromise their reason, drawing him into dark and dangerous territory. But he didn’t find it credible that a woman with all her qualities would have a psychological need to obsess about anyone or anything. All the world was an orchard for her to harvest as she chose; she was more likely to be the object of obsession.
“The Last Flight Out,” he said. “I forgot I gave Elijah my own back-porch rocking chairs.”
“I know it was bold of me,” she said. “But last evening, after our time in Laguna but before I came here . . . the business I had to take care of was so terrible, depressing, this awful man of such wicked character. There was no way to sleep, and only one antidote to all that. You. And it was right, wasn’t it, Davey, so good and so right?”
“Yes,” he agreed for many reasons, including because it was true that in spite of all the strangeness of their relationship, Maddison seemed to be healing him. “Yes, it was lovely and real and very right. Listen, I don’t have your phone number.”
“But you do, sweetie. After I showered, I texted it to you. You’ll find it on your phone.”
She kissed him lightly, quickly, and opened the door and said, “Six o’clock.”
He said, “I might be a little late. Let yourself in and make yourself at home.”
“I love you,” she said, and hurried off the front porch.
After closing the door, he moved to a window and watched her follow the flagstones to the public sidewalk, where she turned right toward downtown Corona del Mar and the Pacific Coast Highway. He remained at the window until she was out of sight.
He wondered how Maddison had gotten his phone number. It wasn’t listed. He hadn’t given it to her, and he had certainly never used it as the phone number of a character in a novel.
“I love you, too,” he whispered, and wondered why he had not said that to her when she had been with him.
Whether rationally or irrationally, he was in love with her even though he didn’t know who she was.