Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 124, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 757 & 758, September/October 2004

Nothing she could think of explained her dream. With her arms and legs still fluttering with adrenaline and a fuzzy skunklike taste souring her mouth, she realized it didn’t feel like a dream at all.

It felt like a premonition.

Scott Goodsell was in love. He was sure of it. He felt like dancing, in the middle of the day, in the middle of the bank parking lot like some crazy homeless person on Venice Beach. He was in love with the most beautiful woman in the world. She was a goddess.

Scott thought of himself as a sensitive man, a post-women’s-liberation man who respected women and treated them as equals yet appreciated their oddities. He’d grown up with three sisters and had listened when they wept about their boyfriends. On occasion, he’d even flipped through women’s magazines, astonished at their tales of sexual abuse, even more astonished at all the products women could buy to make themselves more appealing to men, stuff men don’t even like — perfume, makeup, shit like that. He couldn’t understand guys who shouted obscenities at a beautiful woman walking by. Did they really think women found that sexy? Or did it give them pleasure to torment women they could never possibly have?

Scott felt he’d tried to be honest in his relationships — at least during the last few years — and when he broke up with a woman, he always did it in person, gently, always reassuring her that she was incredibly desirable, but that it was all him, a problem with commitment he was working on. He almost always was able to remain on good terms with them, usually to the extent that they’d welcome a call if he got stuck alone on a Saturday night without a date.

Yet, even though he’d had his share of women, and despite what he considered to be his special understanding of them, he’d never before been in love.

Laura changed all that. Her beauty took his breath away. She was thin and delicate, with long fingers, a long neck, and long thighs. Her dark-brown hair fell perfectly straight down to the middle of her back, and when he turned her to him, pushing back her hair to reveal her piercing blue eyes, he lost himself.

She was a Modigliani come to life. She possessed a sad, mysterious quality, her body relaxed but alert, her head angled slightly to one side as if she were trying to catch the words to a distant song. And if he stood quietly beside her, sometimes it seemed that he too could hear the music.

He loved her efficiency and that she never complained. To his relief, she never talked about her job. All the other women he’d dated yapped on about their careers, office politics, job deadlines, chauvinism, both real and imagined, from superiors. Not exactly what a guy wants to hear after a long day. Nor did she jabber about her periods or her mother or her ex-boyfriends. In fact, she didn’t talk much at all.

Laura talked with her body. To Scott, her movements were enchanting. Even something as simple as picking up a book or walking across the room seemed choreographed — graceful, fluid, pregnant with meaning. Starting with her lips, her smile spread down her shoulders, up her lifted arms, then to the tips of her fingers. It was like watching a flower unfold in time-lapse photography.

He liked to play a game. He’d watch Laura while she did something simple like peel an orange, then try to guess what she was thinking. Then he’d ask her. He loved her all the more when he guessed right. And when they made love, he found he forgot about himself, completely enchanted by the undulations of her body.

This must be why he loved her. No matter how anxious he was about his work or family, when he saw her he forgot everything, seduced like a pyromaniac gazing into a fire.

So this is it, he thought, as he sat in his white BMW convertible queued up to make a left turn on a backed-up Westwood Boulevard. What was he waiting for?

He stepped on the gas and swerved into the right lane, accelerating through a yellow light. Two blocks down, he pulled up to the red zone in front of a flower shop. He dashed in and bought a dozen long-stemmed red roses. Before the florist finished wrapping them in silver paper, he impulsively asked her to add one white rose. He didn’t know why, it just seemed right.

He jumped back into his car and raced toward the beach. He swerved into a parking lot next to a liquor store.

It was the grungy kind of store that made most of its money from overpriced junk food, beer, and lottery tickets, but in a refrigerator hidden in the back, he found a dozen excellent champagnes to choose from. Overpriced, of course, but what did he care? This was a once-in-a-lifetime event. He selected a bottle of Dom Perignon.