“Oh,” she says.
“I’m sorry if I was forward,” he says, “but I’m practicing a new philosophy of life that involves being more forward.”
While Mr. Ray Porter explains his presumption in sending her the gloves, Mirabelle sizes him up. Her intuition, rusty as it is, absorbs him in one single clinch, and no alarm bells sound. He is dressed for business – though without a tie – in a sharp blue suit. In every respect, size, height, weight, he is normal. Again, she checks out his shoes, and they are good. It is then she first notes, in the split second that has passed, that he is probably fifty years old.
Mirabelle forgets all about Lisa’s complicated instructions and simply asks Mr. Ray Porter who he is. He tells her he lives in Seattle, but has a place in Los Angeles because he does business here. She asks if he is married and he says he is four years divorced. She asks if he has children and he says no. The question she does not ask, but is foremost in her mind, is “why me?” As these subtle negotiations proceed, it is determined that they will meet at a Beverly Hills Italian restaurant at 8 P.M. on Sunday. She declines to have him pick her up, and Mr. Ray Porter easily agrees. This keeps her free of all worries she might have about going to dinner with a total stranger: she can drive herself home. He has an easygoing manner that relaxes her, and they exchange exactly one semihumorous line each. Both glance around to see if anyone is watching, and he seems to be aware that employees should not be seen chatting up customers, although vice versa is common. He backs away with an aside that he will need a map to find the glove department again, then he says something about how glad he is that she is coming to dinner, then he faintly blushes and disappears around a corner.
mr. ray porter
THERE IS NOTHING TOO MYSTERIOUS about Ray Porter, at least in the usual sense of the word. He is single, he is kind, he tries to do the right thing, and he does not understand himself, or women, or his relationships with women. But there is one truth about him that can be said of a man who asks a woman to dinner before he has ever exchanged one personal word with her. Mr. Ray Porter is on the prowl. He does not know Mirabelle, he has only seen her. He has responded to something visceral, but that visceral thing is only in him, not between them. Not yet. He only imagines the character that unites her clothes, her skin, and her body. He has imagined the pleasure of touching her, and imagined her pleasure at being touched. She is a feminine object that tweaks him at his animal best.
Extrapolating from Mirabelle’s wrist, he understands the terrain of her neck, he can imagine the valley of her breasts, and he knows that he can lose himself in her. He does not know his further intent with her, but he is not trying to get what he wants at any expense. If he thinks he would harm Mirabelle, he would back away. But he does not yet understand when and how people are hurt. He doesn’t understand the subtleties of slights and pains, that it is not the big events that hurt the most but rather the smallest questionable shift in tone at the end of a spoken word that can plow most deeply into the heart. It seems to him that nothing in the world of relationships proves to be generally true, that nothing follows a logical sequence, and that his search for cohesion leaves him empty of answers.
His attraction to Mirabelle is not random. He is not out and about sending gloves all over the city. His action is a very spontaneous and specific response to something in her. It may have been her stance: at twenty yards she looks off-kilter and appealing. Or maybe it was her two pinpoint eyes that made her look innocent and vulnerable. Whatever it was, it started from an extremely small place that Mr. Ray Porter never could have identified, even under torture.
His small house and furnishings in the Hollywood Hills tell one simple story; Mr. Ray Porter has money. Enough that there is never a problem, any time or any place. The giveaway is the lighting. Little hidden spotlights alternate with warm lamplight, creating a soft yellow glow that implies “decorator.” The house, being a second home used for business only, isn’t strewn with personal objects. It is this anonymous quality, like being on vacation in an expensive hotel room, that makes you want to take off your clothes and start fucking. In the bedroom, there is a fireplace opposite an antique four-poster bed, with books piled high on either side, all nonfiction and all stuck with three or four bookmarks. The house focuses on the view of the city that Mirabelle is so casually denied.
Neatness, which the house displays on every coffee table and bathroom countertop, is not a characteristic of Ray Porter. Neatness is a quality that he admires, however, and therefore buys, by hiring an obsessive maid.
In the garage are two cars. One is a gray Mercedes, the other a gray Mercedes. The second gray Mercedes is used for hauling his sports equipment, so he won’t have to load and unload every time he feels like a bike ride. A rack hangs incongruously on the back, and in the trunk are rollerblades and a tennis racquet. When Mr. Ray Porter tempts fate by exercising in traffic, he wears a twenty-first-century version of armor, which offers similar protection but not the romance: a beaked plastic bicycle helmet, elbow pads, and knee pads. He dons this getup whether it is winter or summer, meaning for three months out of the year he wears large black knee pads while wearing shorts. When he is astride his bicycle, tooling down a Seattle main street and sporting this outfit, the only visible difference between Ray Porter and an insect is his size.
The kitchen is the most unused part of the house. Since his divorce, the kitchen has become like a middle-American living room: for display only. Usually he eats out, alone, or tries to fill the evening with friends or a date. These dinner dates, which function mainly to fill a vacuum of loneliness between the hours of 8 P.M. and 11 P.M., cause him more grief than a year of solitary confinement. For even though they look like dates and sound like dates, and sometimes result in a liaison, to him they aren’t exactly dates. They are friendly evenings that sometimes end in bed. He incorrectly assumes that whatever is his understanding of the nature of one of these evenings, his date is thinking it, too, and he is deeply shocked and surprised when one or another of these women, whom he has seen over the past several months and with whom he has had several sexual encounters, actually believes they are a couple.
These experiences have caused him to think very hard about what he is doing and where he is going. And the result of all this thinking is that he now understands that he doesn’t know what he is doing or where he is going. His professional life is fine, but romantically he is an adolescent, and he has begun an education in the subject that is thirty years overdue.
His interest in Mirabelle comes from the part of him that still believes he can have her without obligation. He believes he can exist with her from eight to eleven and enter a private and personal world that they will create that will cease to exist in the off hours or off days. He believes that this world will be independent of other worlds he might create on another night, in another place, and he has no intention of allowing it to affect his true quest for a mate. He believes that in this affair, what is given back and forth will be exactly even, and that they will both see the benefits they are receiving. But because he picked Mirabelle out by sight alone, he fails to see that her fragility, which he smelled and sensed and is lured by, runs deep in her heart and is part of her nature, and cannot be separated out for him to fuck.