Just Three Dates Read online

  “We’re expecting a crowd tonight,” Karen said, breaking the silence.

  Mark nodded. “I actually know a couple from my department who’ll be attending. John Martin, our department chair is on your board of directors.”

  “That’s true. I’d forgotten you would know Doctor Martin.”

  Without warning the driver of the car in front swerved into Mark’s lane. Mark slammed on his brakes and nudged his horn for two quick beats as he narrowly missed a collision. He shook his head. “Honestly.”

  He followed the other car until it turned onto Queen Street. He’d been worried the man might be going to the museum too. The last thing Mark needed was a confrontation with some crazy driver.

  A minute later, they approached the museum. Searchlights traveled back and forth across the building’s façade, while others pointed toward the sky, the beams reflecting from the clouds and lighting the museum as if it were noon rather twilight.

  “Wow,” Mark said. “Very impressive.”

  A long line of cars clogged the right lane, drivers stopping for valet parking, and Mark released a long sigh.

  “Don’t worry.” Karen smiled. “If you drive past the museum and turn right, you can go to employee parking and avoid all of this. I wouldn’t mind arriving a couple of minutes early to make sure everything is all right.”

  Mark followed her instructions, and Karen waved to the guard as they entered the parking lot. They found Karen’s assigned space, and Mark took her arm as they crossed the lot toward the front entrance.

  ***

  They stopped as they stepped through the doors. The atrium rose three stories, and long banners advertising the exhibition fell from the third balcony, nearly touching the ground floor. A large portrait of Claude Monet hung on one wall. Music from a string quartet filled the air, a variation on “La Marseilles.” Women in evening gowns and men in dinner jackets strolled past a ten-foot-tall ice sculpture depicting some of Monet’s most famous subjects—the Cathedral at Rouen, Westminster Palace in London, a haystack, and a water lily. Waiters bearing trays with flutes of Champaign mingled with the guests, and a table set to one side groaned with french pastries—Napoleons, croissants, brioche, and puff pastry in every possible shape, some filled with cream, others with chocolate.

  Karen chuckled as Mark’s eyes fixed on the ice sculpture. “Amazing, isn’t it?”

  “How in the world…” Mark stared, open-mouthed.

  They both took several moments to inspect the sculpture. “One of our board members wanted it and donated the funds.” Karen shook her head. “I could have found so many other projects, but Doctor Martin specifically—” She stopped suddenly.

  “I shouldn’t tell things…”

  “More likely Sheila Martin, John’s wife.” Mark smiled. “Sounds just like her. Rumor is she married John primarily for his money—his family is wealthy and he has done quite well—and she loves to spend it. Compensation, in a way, for living with John.” His eyes cut to Karen, whose face was heating with embarrassment as she had been contemplating saying something very similar. “Anyway, other than that,” Mark continued, “Sheila is really a very nice person…I shouldn’t have told you that, I suppose.”

  “I guess we’re even then.” Karen managed to smile. “Both talking out of turn.”

  Mark nodded.

  “Mark, Mark,” a man across the room called out. Karen had just accepted a glass of wine from a waiter and Mark had taken fruit punch.

  The room was already crowded and Mark had to search for the person calling him. His eyes darted around before finally settling on a tall man, impeccably dressed, standing in the middle of a large group. The man waved.

  He looked familiar, but Karen was unable to place him.

  “Will Simpson, of all people. Why is he here?” Mark wrinkled his nose.

  “Who is he?”

  “An attorney.” He made attorney sound like a slur, and Karen smiled.

  “Have you ever heard the joke that starts by asking why God created lawyers?” He paused a beat, grinning. “To make used-car salesmen look good.”

  Karen chuckled. He was funny. She liked that.

  “It applies to him wholeheartedly.” Mark scanned the group clustered around Will. “Most of them are attorneys too. Attorneys and their wives.” He sighed and turned away.

  “Mark. Over here,” Will called again.

  “Aren’t you going to speak to him?”

  Mark bristled. Karen read “Yes, mother,” on his lips, and she looked down, mentally kicking herself. No man wanted to be nagged on a first date.

  “I suppose I should,” he said. Then, as he turned back toward Will he murmured something that Karen swore sounded like, “Three dates,” and she kicked herself again. Karen pasted on a smile and followed him to the corner where Will and his group had congregated.

  “Mark Stuart, whatever are you doing here? You’ve no interest in art.” Will smirked as he looked at Karen. “But you do fancy beautiful women.”

  “Karen Wingate, this is Will Simpson, his wife, Helen Barringer. Will’s an attorney with the Barringer Law Firm.”

  That’s why he seemed familiar. Helen must be Mr. Barringer’s daughter, Karen decided.

  As the other introductions were made, Will took Karen’s hand. “It’s so nice to meet you, Ms. Wingate. You’re no doubt the reason for Mark’s presence tonight. It’s good that he’s met someone who can introduce him to the finer things in life.” As he spoke, his eyes traced the neckline of her dress, pausing at the bottom of the V.

  Karen glared at him and he ducked his head, reminding her of a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar. She withdrew her hand from his. “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Simpson.”

  “Oh, call me Will. Everyone calls me Will.” He turned away from her. “Mark, we were discussing the demonstration at Marion Square this morning. What do you think?”

  “A demonstration? What happened?”

  “A mob of bra-burning, man-hating, fem-libbers virtually took over the Square.”

  Mark seemed ready to laugh at Will’s forty-year-old description of the women.

  “They shouted and whistled at us when we stopped to watch,” one of Will’s friends added.

  “There were hundreds of them,” Will continued. “I thought I had stepped aboard a time machine and been whisked back to the seventies.”

  “Hundreds of them? In Charleston? Perhaps we should call out the militia.”

  Karen heard a note of sarcasm in Mark’s voice, and worked to suppress a grin.

  Either Will had missed the tone in Mark’s voice or he had chosen to ignore it, for he continued with his rambling. “Waved signs, sang songs, made speeches…”

  “What did they want?” Mark sighed.

  “Oh, who knows?” Will flipped his hand as if waving off an irritating mosquito. “Went on about all sorts of things. They want a woman to be appointed president of your college, for one thing.” He smirked as if he was certain Mark would react to the prospect.

  “Any woman, or someone specific?”

  “I don’t know. I heard a name…Barrett, maybe?”

  “Amy Barrett?”

  Will shrugged. “I suppose.”

  “Doctor Barrett is an outstanding scholar and an excellent vice-president,” Mark said. “I’ve not met the other candidates, so I have no opinion concerning them.”

  “Of course you wouldn’t say, even if you did.” Will sneered. “Job security and all…It was a general feminist gripe session. At the tops of their lungs, amplified with a speaker system.”

  “I’m sorry I missed it.” Mark glanced around the hall as if looking for rescue.

  “Surely you could hear them at the college,” Will exclaimed. “Can you imagine? Total foolishness.”

  The other men in the group joined in Will’s critique, guffawing and muttering words of agreement.

  “They were disgusting,” one guy said. “One woman shouted that she’d like to…to…” he cut his ey
es toward his wife, “get me in bed.” He glanced at his wife again, and his eyes lit up. “I almost took her up on it…” His wife punched his arm, and he chuckled. “Just disgusting. It really was.”

  “Sounds like a group of construction workers,” Helen Barringer, Will’s wife, said. He glared at her, but she smiled like an indulgent mother with a rambunctious child. After all, Karen supposed, the woman had kept her maiden name when she’d married Will…she likely felt at least some degree of sympathy toward “bra-burning, man-hating, fem-libbers.”

  “But we’re guys,” the other man protested.

  “You’re correct,” Will said to the other man. “They need to know their place.”

  Politics, religion, and sex are not up for discussion.

  In her mind, Karen heard her mother speaking the warning, but when no one argued with Will, she cleared her throat, and prepared for battle. “Tell me, Will, it’s all right for guys to shout obscene things at women, but women are disgusting when they shout at men?”

  “Now, Karen—may I call you Karen? These things are not at all that simple.” His voice sounded like he was addressing a child.

  “Surely they are. You’re saying it’s all right for a man to proposition a woman, but it’s wrong for a woman to hassle you.”

  “It’s totally different,” one of the other men said.

  “Will?” Karen wanted him to answer. “Am I right? Is that what you’re saying?”

  She glanced at Helen. Her arms were crossed and she glared at her husband, seeming to want to hear from him too.

  Do not make a scene. Karen’s mother’s voice again.

  Will waved his had dismissively. “Of course it’s totally different. Men and women are as dissimilar as chalk and cheese. Men have needs.” Will looked at her condescendingly.

  Karen’s right hand, she realized, was clenched tightly. When she was thirteen years old, she’d punched a guy at school during a very similar conversation, and the principal had summoned their parents. The boy’s mother had been livid when she’d seen his bloody nose, but Karen’s father had defended her, refusing to allow her to be bullied into an apology.

  When she was sent home for the afternoon, he had taken her out for ice cream. While she had consumed a cone of double chocolate crunch, he had praised her for standing up for herself and he had suggested she learn to fight with words rather than with fists.

  “I know it felt good to hit him,” her father had said, “but using logic, you might have made him see your point.”

  She had promised to try. Karen took a deep breath and wiggled her fingers to relax her hand. “So, it’s all right for one of your ‘needy’ guys to make lewd comments to Helen, but not all right if I should come on to you.”

  “Maybe it would be better if…” Mark began.

  Karen’s eyes darted toward him, then cut back to Will.

  Her father had once told her that when she was angry, her eyes became tiny, dark dots in a sea of white, reminding him of an animal staring at its prey, ready to pounce. When Mark had stopped mid-sentence and stepped back, joining the others who had formed a ring around Will and her, she knew he had seen that expression on her face.

  Mark exchanged his glass of punch for a flute of Champaign from a waiter who was passing through the crowd. .He raised the glass, almost in a toast.

  She turned back to Will and they faced off like two boxers. “Well?”

  Will ignored her question. “Those women believe they’re just like men. Identical. They believe there is no difference at all.”

  “We should pop them into bed and show them the difference,” one of the men said while the others laughed.

  “Just so.” Will smirked.

  She crossed her arms, as much in defiance as self-control. “No one wants to be like a man. All we were asking for this morning…”

  Karen saw the looks of shock on the faces of some of the women, and the smirks the guys tried to hide. A couple of the men laughed.

  “You were there?” Will’s eyes grew wide and his head spun around toward Mark. “You’re dating one of them?”

  “So it seems.” Mark took a sip of Champaign and shrugged, glancing at Karen.

  “I’m guessing Doctor Stuart here would prefer you not to be identical to a man.” Will’s eyes slid down the neckline of her dress for a second time, focusing on the ruby necklace.

  Karen had brought her silk scarf, fearing it would be cool in the museum. She wrapped it around her shoulders and pulled the ends together in front as Will smirked.

  “What do you do for a living, Ms. Wingate?”

  Several men chuckled.

  “I’m a curator here at the museum, Will.”

  “Well, whose job do you covet? The Director’s? Should you have his job just because you’re a woman?”

  Karen wanted to punch him.

  “Not at all. He has to put up with Neanderthals like you.”

  “Ooooh.” The men drew back, assuming exaggerated poses of pretend terror.

  “Who did you have to, shall we say, impress in order to obtain your job?”

  “Will…” Helen put her hand on his shoulder. “You need to stop.”

  Will locked eyes with Karen as hers narrowed dangerously. “I have my job because I’m a published expert on nineteenth century art. You have yours because you impressed the boss’s daughter.”

  “Two points,” one of the guys called out. The others laughed.

  Will’s face turned red and he glared, first at the man, then at Karen.

  “A woman should be at home—barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen,” Will declared in a loud voice.

  Karen stepped toward him, her clenched fists resting on her hips.

  “You patronizing—”

  “And yet your wife, Helen—Ms. Barringer—is here with us tonight…” Mark said as he slipped between Karen and Will, “…and wearing shoes.”

  The women in the group chuckled as Helen lifted her right foot to show he was correct.

  Mark leaned toward Helen, speaking in a stage whisper. “Is this Will’s way of announcing he has done his duty and a little Barringer-Simpson is on the way?”

  Everyone but Will laughed. He whipped around, glaring at Mark.

  “I’d have expected her to find support from fuzzy-headed, free-thinkers in the philosophy department. I’d have had higher hopes for a mathematician,” he huffed.

  “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  Mark turned to Karen. “Perhaps we should go.” He grasped Karen’s arm and tugged gently, leading her away, across the room. She looked back as Will’s voice rose above the others in the lobby.

  “I’ll wager Ms. Wingate calls the shots in that relationship. He probably needs to ask permission before he…”

  The musicians began to play, again, drowning out the remainder of Will’s words. Thankfully.

  “I’m sorry, Mark. I’m so sorry.”

  “You should have let me walk away.” Mark said as they reached the other side of the room. He asked a waiter for a glass of wine and offered it to Karen. “Have something to drink.”

  Someone called their names.

  “Mark. Ms. Wingate. I didn’t expect to see the two of you here together.” John Martin strolled over. He placed a hand on Karen’s shoulder. “Do you know Will Simpson, Ms. Wingate?”

  Karen felt herself blushing. “We’ve met.”

  “He makes an immediate impression, doesn’t he? I was hoping you were going to slug the little twerp.”

  “No, sir.” Karen dropped her eyes. “Not during the gala, at any rate.”

  “Perhaps another time.” John laughed. “Careful, Mark, I think she can be dangerous when she’s angry.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind, John.” Mark half-smiled.

  “It’s good to see you both, but I need to find Sheila. She’s plotting to make an offer to purchase one of Monet’s paintings.” He shook his head. “No danger in that, of course, but if she’s in the mood to buy something…I need to go.�
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  He glanced over his shoulder as he moved away. “Have a good time, you two. Watch her right cross, Mark.” He laughed as he disappeared in the crowd.

  Karen stared at the wine glass, lost in thought. If this was an audition for corporate wife, she was failing, miserably. She looked up at Mark, wondering what he was thinking.

  “Why don’t we tour the exhibit?” he suggested.

  ***

  They moved through the crowd toward the Great Hall, where the exhibit had been set. As they approached the museum store, Karen squeezed is arm. “Wait here a minute. I’ll be right back.”

  As she hurried into the store, Mark turned toward the ice sculpture, staring at it as he re-played the confrontation with Will Simpson.

  He had known Will in high school, where Will was the stereotypical jock, long on muscles and short on brains. He had seemed to take great pleasure in making fun of anyone who differed from him, whether it was the boy who excelled at the piano (mama’s boy) the one who wanted to be a professional chef (sissy), or those like Mark who were more interested in tinkering with computers or solving math problems than with running around a football field (Geeks and weirdos).

  Mark had lost track of Will after high school, having no reason to keep in contact. They had run into each other one morning on King Street, neither having changed much. Mark had wondered how Will made a living as an attorney, until he learned Will worked for his father-in-law. Karen had zeroed in on his weak spot.

  He smiled at the image of her confronting Will and his cronies, back straight, hands on her hips, anger in her voice.

  “Good for Karen,” he said to himself. He was pleased she had stood up to Will, and Will would do well to make sure he kept whatever hours he’d been keeping so that she didn’t cross his path coming or going from the office below her apartment one of these days. Mark wasn’t so sure she would pull her punches in a less public arena.

  He chuckled at the image of his mother’s face should she hear of the confrontation. And if she were to learn Karen had been at the demonstration?