Lunch

by Karen Moline

  She laughs, she can’t help it, this can’t be happening, it is a dream, a perverse, surreal dream, her head is spinning, there, don’t tell me anymore, don’t talk, just kiss me, there.

  She doesn’t even realize she has spoken.

  “I sold the finger, too,” he is saying, sweat dripping into her eyes, salt, like tears, blinding her to all but the hypnotic drone of his voice and the feel of his body on hers, a captive audience. “It was worth more than a ring. A lot more. A lot. A lot,” he says, biting her lips until he can’t bear it anymore, and he grinds into her, ecstatic, for the briefest of seconds, transported away from all memory of what made him.

  HE LOOSENS her arms and kisses her sore wrists, then strips off one of the satin pillowcases and dips it in the ice water of the champagne bucket he always keeps by the bed, delicately wiping the angry welts he’d inflicted only moments before.

  “Is that really the worst thing you ever did?” she asks, trying not to flinch at his touch.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think not,” she says slowly.

  “Well, what about you?”

  “The worst thing I’ve ever done?” she muses. “The worst thing you can do is deliberately hurt someone you love.”

  “Is it?” He pulls away, wads the pillow, faintly smeared with pink, into a ball, and throws it in the corner. “Is it?”

  She turns around to face him, wincing, and sees the same terrifying emptiness robbing all character from his features.

  “The worst thing is no love,” he says, his gaze locked into some primal memory, blinded. “The worst thing is when you do it because no one’s ever loved you.”

  He is talking to a ghost.

  I can’t watch this.

  Olivia’s face is troubled. Does she love him or simply pity his pain, does it matter, and if she does why can’t she say it, what will happen to her if she does, what more will he demand of her? She should be flinging her arms around him with no hesitation, holding him tight, she should be smothering him with kisses, deeply reckless, she should be saying I love you I love you till there is no speech left inside her.

  Instead she is lying on the bed, sore and stinging, with tears filling her eyes, wondering wildly what to do, she must say something, something real, put into words the ineffable moments of their time together. But it’s not real, she tells herself, these fantastical interludes in a secret gilded hideaway, created of lust, of amusement, and no more substantial. That’s why she can be here. She can shut the door behind her and it no longer exists. There is nothing to hold on to but a sketch in her studio, his portrait long gone, crated up and shipped away to the house in the hills, nothing to remember save a fading scar on her leg, the faint imprint of the lash, or the bruises, brightly colored horrible blossoms slowly fading into greens and yellows, soon to disappear as he will back across the ocean.

  Does she love him, does it matter, it’s not possible to only love him at lunch, that’s not what love is, it isn’t love.

  She has to think before she speaks, and that is answer enough for me.

  It’s too late, anyway.

  Nick does not even know that he’s been waiting for her declaration, only that the emptiness is so habitual he no longer expects it to be filled.

  Only Olivia came close. Not the real Olivia lying here beside him, the woman fearful of the truth he’d see if he looked upon her face as I do now. The dream Olivia, the Olivia who is coming with him when he leaves, although he has not yet asked her. The dream Olivia knows instinctively, and will oblige him, whatever he says, and wherever he goes.

  HER BODY is throbbing as she walks quietly back across the park, her feet dragging with lassitude over the frozen grass, her breath puffs of white smoke in the dull sky, her hands clenched deep in her pockets, replaying the unbelievable scene they have just enacted, in slow motion.

  He didn’t say he loved her, and she is glad, grateful for the words unspoken, and the silent, immeasurable chasm that will always keep them apart.

  Chapter 18

  I would drive along the coast, just after dawn, lost alone in a world dissolved in mist, the fog obscuring the waves, the world condensed in gray droplets. Early in the morning, when the sky is that peculiar damp blue threatening never to fade into the brightness of day; early in the morning, when only the garbage trucks and the hangover and the displaced of the earth are moving, when even rats and roaches are expected to sleep; then, early in the morning, I would get in the black car and drive, just drive, up the coast, drive a little too fast, too fast for the Harley that would only be skidding on the dew-­soaked asphalt, concentrating on nothing but the rhythm of my foot on the clutch and my fingers on the stick, caressing the knob, shifting, hit the clutch, shift, move forward into the murky air, mind empty of all thoughts and pain, wide and vast as the ocean crashing soundlessly to my left. It was as if I were still, stranded in place, and the world were unrolling through my window, rushing past me, I could not stop it. If I saw the horsemen of the apocalypse galloping past into the enveloping mist it would not be surprising. Only when other cars began to creep into view would I turn back home to where Nick lay sleeping, legs entwined with a blonde still blindfolded, she too exhausted to dream, yet eager to resume whatever contortions he demanded of her.

  I cannot drive in London, I cannot breathe this damp air of a landscape so contained, as if the very hills were squashed down into the earth. Nowhere here can I imagine the endless open vistas of the desert, shimmering mirages and land parched into empty salt flats and twisting alluvial canyons. I should have driven to the moors, bleak, cold, and enshrouded in gloom, seeping into your skin, the moss oozing, alive, the wet pulsing, a wild creature skulking just under the surface, wanting to eat, waiting to devour anyone who dared step over it.

  I want to be hot in the desert breathing deep the dry clean scent of heat, driving, sweat gluing me to the seat, the wind a sauna in my hair. I want to leave this place, I wish we’d never come.

  It will end in tears, Olivia said. It will end in tears.

  It will end.

  I cannot drive because Nick has forbidden me to leave for longer than a few hours, now, and then only on days when he is so preoccupied with the scenes to shoot that I am dispensable. Those days are rare, he needs me by him, he needs me.

  “I close my eyes and I see her,” he says to me. “I see her everywhere.”

  And so I give in to his needs, as I have always done, because there is nothing else to save me from it.

  Toledo thinks this preoccupation clouding Nick’s eyes is an even deeper concentration because the end is near, and he pushes Nick, harder, because it is so visible, and so good. What he cannot envision is that Nick’s eyes are haunted all the time, seeking knowledge he knows he’ll never find. All Toledo sees is Nick on the set, inhabiting the character of a man so like and yet impossibly unlike himself, living and breathing as this creature daring to take a journey in the hopes that his heart might awaken, daring himself as he wonders if he will indeed be able to embrace death, the rightful death he has challenged, with a willingness of spirit, and a swiftly murmured prayer for his soul.

  What Nick started as a whim and a dare is now the only railing separating him from the plunge into the abyss where obsession calls him, echoing endlessly the sound of her name.

  SOMETIMES I still wake at dawn, the sky the color of stale milk, and sit on the balcony at the hotel and watch the world awaken, barges down the Thames, stirring the mud, worms of cars and trucks attacking the traffic circles, clouds scuttling like the smoke rising from my cigarette, wondering what visions came wandering, unbidden in the night, fluttering gently behind Olivia’s queer gray eyes, clenching tight her muscles, and disturbing her dreams.

  Chapter 19

  She is meandering down the mews, swinging her bag, her limbs still languid with lingering kisses, her hips bruised, when she sees the back of a
familiar figure paying a taxi driver in front of her studio.

  Olivier. It isn’t possible.

  Her heart stops in an instant of stunned shock, and her knees nearly buckle. She should be flying into his arms, so happy is she that he has stolen time that is not his to steal, to be here, with her as she has begged him to so many times, her voice crackling with the effort of holding back tears she does not want him to hear, but instead she steps quickly into the shadowy recess of a doorway, shivering with guilty, anxious dread. She can’t let him see her now, not after lunch, not as she reeks of Nick, still feeling the imprint of his body, the soreness of her wrists, his lips toying with her nipples, the endless caresses, the sticky wetness between her legs. Her fingers still laden with him, he took her fingers and licked them one by one, suckling them, and she was helpless.

  She runs down to the end of the Mews, and flags the very same taxi that has just dropped off Olivier.

  Porchester Baths, she tells the driver, slumping down on her seat and trying to calm the frenzied beating of her heart. The baths will sweat the shame away.

  I can’t take it anymore, she is thinking, this is it, I can’t lie anymore, I don’t want to lie anymore. Olivier flying home on the few days he has for a long-­overdue break, the shocking boredom of all those hours in the airplane, away from his work, jeopardizing his life, and here she is crying in the backseat of a taxi driving off in the opposite direction, hating herself as she examines her wrists to see if there are any bruises to give her away.

  She sits in the steam room until she is panting, dashing from the wet heat searing her lungs to squat, breathless, for only a second, in the plunge pool, the cold of its still blue water shattering, making her nerves dance in jittery rhythm, before running back to the sauna, stretching out on the cedar bench, the only sound the ragged hiss of steam when she ladles water onto the hot stones, and the sharp intake of the deep breaths she is gulping to still the jumping thuds of her heart.

  The baking heat of the ritual in the baths, purifying her pores and cleansing away the scent of her sins, soothes her shattered senses, roasting Nick’s smell out of her, cooking her tortured thoughts in a steaming brew of hot burning liquid, fat drops of sweat rolling down her face past her eyes misted with tears.

  In the baths no one can tell that you’re crying.

  After she dresses she calls the machine, telling Nick curtly that Olivier has shown up unexpectedly and she doesn’t know how long he is staying, and she will call back as soon as possible.

  By the time she hurries home she has no problem pretending to be surprised.

  THEY MAKE love in the dark, in her tiny bedroom beneath her studio that Nick will never see, lit only by candles. I want to see you flicker like a ghost, because only a ghost of you is here when you’re gone, she says to him. Olivier laughs softly at her, drowsy with travel fatigue, teasing her that she has gone all melodramatic as she lights the wicks, a long matchstick shaking in her fingers.

  She cannot tell him making love in the daylight might make her think of Nick. She cannot tell him she is afraid of what he might see on her body, but he is very weary and his eyes remain closed, and for the moment she is safe.

  Afterward, they lie intertwined and content, all trace of Nick vanishing like the thin plume of smoke from her candles.

  “Let’s get married now,” she says.

  “Right now? In the middle of the night?” He laughs.

  “Tomorrow, then. Let’s go to the registry and do it. I don’t want to wait any longer. I can’t bear it.”

  “But darling,” he says, “I’ve got to go back tomorrow morning, first thing.”

  She props herself up to look at him, stunned. “You mean you flew all this way only for a night?”

  He shrugs. “It was worth it. I missed you.”

  Tears start to her eyes, and he pulls her close, tenderly, to kiss them away.

  ANNETTE IS lying on the chaise next to Olivia in the steam room, patting a garishly pink clay mask onto her face, her hair sleeked back with conditioner, and her flesh glowing rose in the shimmering heat.

  “You look like a big pink rabbit,” Olivia says.

  “And you look like a lady with a problem.”

  Olivia rolls on her side to look at her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I’m not going to ask,” Annette says, pointing to the thin trail of a welt, nearly healed but still visible, on Olivia’s hip. “I’ve always preferred discretion, as you know, so I’ve been waiting for you to tell me. Why, for example, you seem to be avoiding me. Why you hardly come by the gallery anymore. Why you look like you’re wrestling with all the demons in hell, my darling. That sort of thing.”

  Annette knows. Of course she knows. Even if it weren’t written all over Olivia’s face, it’s been written all over her body, naked and sweating in the baths, with reminders she’s so accustomed to seeing that she pays no attention, not to bruises on her arms and legs that aren’t the result of clumsiness, or the sideways stares of other women around her.

  “Of course, I can hardly blame you,” Annette adds, matter-­of-­factly.

  “What?”

  “I was there when you met, at lunch that day. I saw him looking at you like that. Nick Muncie. Your famous subject. I don’t see how you could have resisted him. I wouldn’t have.” She puts down the jar of her mask and picks up another, dabbing a cream smelling of coconuts into her cuticles. “Quite frankly I was wishing he’d look at me like that. Adrian never does, and never will, I suppose. I don’t think he has it in him, poor dear. But I should think every woman wants a man to look at her like that, at least once in her life.”

  “You’re lucky he didn’t,” Olivia says, relieved to talk of it at last to a trusted friend who will not judge her more harshly than she already judges herself. “Looking is one thing. Giving in to it is another.” She sighs deeply and drinks from a water bottle. “When Olivier came home the other day to surprise me I thought I was going to go mad. And you know what I did? I ran, ran from Olivier! I saw him at the door, and I ran away, because he would have looked at me and known, instantly, all I could think was I have just come from my lover, will he notice, don’t let him find out, please. It was pathetic. That’s the real disgustingness of betrayal.”

  “How very American.”

  “Don’t tease me, Annette, please don’t,” she says, tears in her eyes. “It’s completely out of control. I never meant for it to last so long, I never wanted . . . I’m going to crack any minute if I don’t get out of it.”

  “Because of Olivier.”

  “It’s more than that. You don’t know what Nick’s really like.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Do you love him?”

  “When I think of love, I don’t think of Nick,” Olivia says, only realizing it as she speaks. “Love belongs to Olivier, and what we have together, we just fit. Nick’s about wanting, and taking what he wants, about lust, about pure animal fucking . . . he’s—­”

  “—­a beast?”

  Olivia smiles, barely. “Yes, a beast. His own species, master of his kingdom. It’s what I saw in him to paint. It’s what I wanted him to show me.”

  She sighs. “He rented a flat, it’s just around the corner from here,” she continues, “this marvelous magical flat with the most gorgeous things in it. It’s so golden and quiet, I’ve never heard anyone else in the building, it was as if we were sealed off from the world in it, and it was made only for us to be together. Our safe house. As soon as I’d go in, up the flight of stairs, put my key in the lock, and open the door, I felt as if I no longer existed, not me, Olivia, the person I thought I was, I’d disappeared, melted into this room where Nick was waiting for me. He’d always be there before I arrived, lying on the bed, reading a script or dozing, and as soon as he touched me the real Olivia vanished, I was suspend
ed in some bizarre intoxicating dream, and I told myself that as long as it wasn’t real then I could take it, whatever he’d concoct, whatever he’d do to me. I wouldn’t wake up till I walked out the door, and I was always shocked that only an hour or two had gone by, that the air was still cold and wet on my face, and I could hear the traffic and see the ­people walking around, minding their own business. Only then would I wake up. I’d wake up amazed that life is going on just as it always has, me painting, you selling, Olivier at the piano, all that I had before, and all that I ever wanted.”

  “I understand, Olivia,” Annette says, wiping off her mask. “At least I think I do.”

  “But how can anyone understand what he does to me when I can’t understand it myself, or why I let him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Every time he pushed me, just a little bit further, I almost couldn’t see how far I’d gone, or that he’d hurt me, till I got home. And then I’d hate myself, swear I’d never see him again, till the next time. I always let him, it’s part of the game we played, it’s always been a game to him, dominating me, and I welcomed it, actually, giving in to him made it easier for me to deal with the guilt, because I could tell myself it wasn’t really me playing, it was some awful creature who was curious and flattered by the attention, some silly girl who was lonely and wanted one last fling, as if I were punishing Olivier because he was so far away.” Her face is deeply flushed, and she wipes the tears and the sweat away, closing her eyes.

  “Are you guilty because of him, and worrying about Olivier, or because you like it?”

  “What are you, the shrink of sauna?”

  “For the moment.”

  “Both, of course. Nick is . . . well, he’s always been overwhelming. What got him off was to feel me helpless, and my pleading with him to stop. I never liked feeling that way, not really, it’s not how—­”