All That Was Happy by M.M. Wilshire

lets get
out of here, please.”
    Having come to grips for the moment with the
anguish of her rejection by her husband, not, as she’d previously
thought, because of an actual child on the way, but because of its
opposite, to wit--the absence of any child on the way, and having
overcome the feeling of being unfairly judged by her husband enough
to leave the Banos Damas off the breezeway of Taxco Mexican
Restaurant, and rejoin the waiting Huntington, and after having
accepted his invitation to ditch her limo in favor of his personal
vehicle, a huge Chevy Suburban, which sat high in the air on big
mud tires, and the interior of which was long enough to accommodate
a couple of surfboards in the back, and a lot of miscellaneous
restaurant boxes, Beckie, sitting in the jump seat in her white,
silver-sequined tube dress, her hair cut short, and shining with a
platinum glow, she herself looking fabulous, a shimmering dream in
gray-suede spiked heels, watched the world around her go by as her
date for the evening guided the mammoth SUV with a light touch
through the evening Spring traffic, heading west on Vanowen, a
six-lane cross-Valley arterial which cut through the endless sprawl
of uncontrolled strip malls, apartments, and shopping centers gone
to seed as they approached Haskell Avenue and the connection to the
405 freeway from which they could quickly, traffic permitting,
access any point in the five-thousand square mile sprawl containing
the eleven million estimated denizens of the City of Angels.
    “ I want you to see my place,” he said,
indicating his first choice among all the billions of possible
places available, piloting the Suburban up the onramp and stepping
on it, the humongous power plant surging them forward impressively
and competitively into the 10-lane engineering nightmare known, for
some reason unknown to anyone, as the San Diego Freeway.
    “ No,” she said. “I know we kissed last
night, and I know from the dress I’m wearing, you probably think
something’s going to happen, but I should warn you, I’m not in the
same place I was last night. I think maybe it would be best, in
fact, if we simply called it a night. Besides, don’t you have to go
wait tables at your restaurant, or something?”
    “ I have a manager who handles that,”
Huntington said. “Nobody there knows I own the place. Twice a
month, I wait tables so I can check up on how things are being run.
Last month, I had to fire the bartender after I observed him
skimming the receipts. The permanent staff just thinks I’m an actor
with a part-time waiter gig.”
    “ My husband isn’t having a child with
another woman,” Beckie said. “Leah just told me.”
    “ I’d really like you to see my place,”
Huntington said. “It’s right on the strand--the section of condos
just north of the channel at the Marina.”
    “ You live there?” Beckie
said.
    “ I’ve got a tri-level that overlooks
the strand and the beach,” Huntington said. “I surf every morning
right out my front door. Of course, it’s a shallow shore break and
if the waves are bigger than three feet they snap you in half, but
most mornings I can grab a few rides.”
    “ I envy you,” Beckie said. “I used to
surf, back before you were born, of course.”
    “ I’m thirty-seven,” he protested.
“You’re only forty-nine--twelve years is nothing.”
    “ I’ll tell you what I will do,” Beckie
said. “The truth is, I don’t dislike you--you’re very good-looking,
in fact. But I’m not interested in any kind of look-before-we-leap
relationship. We’ll go over to your place and you can show me your
view of the strand. We can have some hot chocolate, or whatever,
and we’ll lay out some ground rules for our being together that we
both can live with.”
    “ Fair enough,” Huntington said. “I can
respect that--we can decide what’s important to each of us, and if
we have a conflict, we can try to find some alternatives--it’s a
way we can make the