The Legacy by D. W. Buffa

“It's hard to explain to a man, and it seems stupid to say it. But every woman was in love with Jeremy.”
    I laughed. “Were you?”
    She looked at me again, and there was still a question in her eyes; and though I did not know what it was, I knew it was somehow different from the one that had been there before.
    “I think I could have been,”she replied, trying to be honest. “In a certain place, at a certain time.”
    “Like that boy you knew in college?”
    “There were things they had in common,”she said after she had thought about it.
    I looked at her and waited. She bit her lip and then her eyes opened wide as if she had found the exact phrase for which she had been searching.
    “You thought they were poets,”she said softly, “and you worried they might be frauds.”
    The question in her eyes—whatever it had been—vanished. She forced a smile.
    “I said that every woman was in love with Jeremy Fullerton, but I'm not sure it's really true. I'm not sure that Ariella was in love with him at all. I'm not sure she's capable of being in love with anyone.”
    Reaching across the table, she patted my hand.
    “You should have been there. If you had just seen them all there together—Lawrence, his daughter, Jeremy—you would understand everything.”
    She had a gift for description, and, listening to her describe what happened that night, I could almost see Ariella Goldman, wearing a long black dress with her hair pulled up, a pair of diamond earrings dangling next to the smooth white skin of her neck, standing there with cool, lucid eyes, measuring with each movement of her slender hands the few graceful words she bestowed on each of her father's guests.
    “And every time someone asked about her mother, Lawrence would explain in that same unchanging, unhurried voice that 'Amanda wanted to be here, but she's down at the ranch getting everything ready, and she just couldn't get back.' ”
    Everyone understood. Whether it was the two-story Nob Hill apartment, or the two-hundred acre Sonoma Valley vineyard, or the three-thousand-acre ranch in the mountains above Santa Barbara with the long view of the Pacific, or the fifteen-thousand-square-foot hideaway tucked into twelve secluded acres down the Peninsula in Woodside, surrounded by what had become some of the most expensive real estate in the world, they were always moving from one house to the next, getting the next place ready almost before they had settled into the one where they had just arrived. It was a way of life that could rather easily become a convenient pretext for living apart. In the case of Lawrence and Amanda Goldman, one of them seemed always to be just one house ahead of the other.
    “Odd, when you think of how they met,”Marissa remarked as she pushed her plate aside.
    Signaling the waiter, I ordered more wine.
    “I shouldn't,”protested Marissa mildly.
    “It's only a second glass. Why is it odd because of the way they met? By the way, how old is he, anyway?”
    She had to think about it. “Mid-seventies, I suppose,”she said presently. “Hard to tell, really. Lawrence has that look men get who are well taken care of: snow-white hair and a reddish tan face. He could be seventy; he could be eighty; he could be older. When they have that look, you can only be sure of three things: They're rich, they're old, and they could live another twenty years or be dead tomorrow morning.”
    The waiter set new wineglasses in front of us both.
    “That sounds a little like Albert Craven,”I said, peering over the glass as I lifted it to my mouth.
    She tossed her head and then laughed when she caught me watching the way her hair sailed back over her shoulder.
    “No, that isn't Albert at all.”
    Still laughing, she narrowed her eyes and tried to concentrate.
    “Albert isn't … sleek. That's it! Sleek. Old men without any lines in their faces, all very smooth, very—how shall I say?— rounded, contoured, like someone took a statue while the