Lunch

by Karen Moline

  “That explains ‘Who Am I?’ ” she says softly, remembering with a sigh. “How many ­people must have hurt him.”

  She has forgiven me, forgiven us all, I can hear it in her voice, so tranquil, soothing me, I can’t bear it, there is no judgment there, only kindness and trust undeserving, and her hands, sweet, don’t stop, please, if you stop I will go mad. “How many ­people hurt you, M?”

  Don’t go, don’t leave me.

  “Who is the real Nick Muncie?”

  I will tell you, tell you this, tell you anything, anything but my name, as long as you don’t leave me.

  “Nobody,” I whisper. “A nobody, like me.”

  “Go on.”

  “He was a boy we knew, a kid. Nick. We never knew his last name. But he said he came from Muncie, Indiana.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He died.”

  “Died how?”

  “In a fight. On the street.”

  “How old was he when he died?”

  “Eleven, I think.”

  “Is that where you lived, on the streets?”

  I nod. Her fingers, comforting, stroking my neck, pulling my head down into her lap as if I were her child, “Baby,” she called me, her voice an embrace, lulling my fears away, had her voice not been such a lullaby I could not have spoken.

  I have quite forgotten that I am meant to be comforting her. It is such a relief to be able to say what has never been said, after all this time, her ears meant for my burden, listening to it calm and serene, taking it away and setting it free.

  Please, take it away. Make it go away.

  “How old were you when you met that Nick?” she says.

  “Twelve.”

  “Is that when you got the scars?”

  “No.”

  “How old were you when you got the scars?”

  “Fifteen.”

  She is silent for a moment, thinking. “Three years. On the streets, together. No one came looking for you.”

  My head buried in her lap, I cannot stop my trembling.

  “M,” she says, bending down to hold me tight, her hair falling over my cheeks, “forgive me. I’m sorry I asked, but I needed to know. I’m so, so sorry.”

  I am trying to pull away, I cannot bear her holding me so close, the perfume of her so close to me, smothering, I cannot breathe, I am choking, let me be.

  “Don’t leave me, M,” she says. “Please, please don’t leave me.” Her hands on me, she won’t let me go.

  I shake my head, dumbly, like a dog.

  “Look at me.”

  I can’t.

  Her hands on my cheeks, her thumbs on my scars. “Look at me.”

  I meet her eyes, the gray in them dark with emotion, polished pewter, full of tears.

  “Stay,” she says, her voice so gentle I think I will go mad. “I want you to stay.” There is no duplicity in her eyes, only an unbearable shining tenderness. “Just for a moment.” My lips move silently in sheer disbelief. “Please. Don’t leave me yet.” Her voice more frantic, remembering. “I need you, M. You. I need you.” Her arms around me, her face buried in my shoulder, and I am desperate, disbelieving, terrified she will dissolve into mist and melt away, that I will wake up from the unimaginable before my futile longing for her touch becomes the reality that is Olivia, here, now, sweet in my arms, asking me not to leave her.

  I don’t recall how long we stayed like that, secret sharers. I only know that in the twilight haze of half-­sleep where the mind cannot distinguish between the wishful thinking of wakefulness and the transcendent reveries possible only in dreaming, I could see it, so vivid and real, I could feel, truly feel, at last, my arms around Olivia, lifting her gently to carry her downstairs, my foot nudging open the door that has always been locked to us, taking her into the bedroom I could not describe even now in my imagination, because there was only Olivia, easing down with me, so close, onto her bed, and me melting into her with a pleasure so pure and indescribable I wish I could have died then, beside her.

  The essence of desire.

  “Thank you,” she would have whispered as we lay together, legs intertwined, smiling beatifically before drifting off to sleep. “You gave me my self back.”

  That is what she would have said.

  That is how I will remember it.

  WHEN AT last I can breathe again I sit up with a start, a chilled sharp ache in the small of my back. I look down at Olivia, dozing, her hair cascading down her back, tangled and lovely, but even its thick waves cannot cover the bruises on her neck, still livid and ugly, and I am jolted back to reality. Nick, in the flat, handcuffed to the bed.

  Olivia stirs, pushes her hair out of her face, and sits up. “What time is it?” she says. “What are you doing?”

  “I have to go.” I get up and stretch, I must keep moving, I must, or I won’t have the strength. “Are you okay?”

  She nods. She is. She must be.

  There is nothing else to say, I can tell. For once I am not lying to myself.

  Everything has been said already.

  She gets up and follows me to the door, then throws her arms around me, hugging me tight.

  “Goodbye, M,” she says, her eyes full of tears, then tries to laugh. “This time it’s goodbye for real, isn’t it?”

  I try to smile, but cannot.

  “Take care of yourself, M,” she says, pleading. “And take care of Nick. Promise me you’ll take care of him. He needs—­”

  Her voice is wavering, but her spirit is not. She has never been more a woman, scarred forever, yet with a heart full of forgiveness.

  “He needs you,” she says. “Only you know what to do. Don’t let him suffer.”

  Only I know what to do.

  I open her door, and step outside into the cold night, clear and sharp. The stars are shining.

  “I promise,” I say, and she closes the door.

  AFTER

  Chapter 22

  Nick sits and smokes, rocking. He has disappeared from the world, hiding in a house I have found us high in the Jamaican hills. This current landscape is far, far removed from everything that preceded it, the chilling, seeping, bone-­rot winter of London. Here, we are drenched with a humidity that is warm and seething, bathwater for a baby. It is the rainy season, the downpours descending with a violent rush, drumming on the verdant greenery at our feet, but Nick sits oblivious on the veranda, his senses dulled by the fat spliffs of ganga plucked and delivered each morning after toast and mangoes, damp with morning dew, greenly moist and intoxicatingly pungent. With the delicacy of the hand of the surgeon who so neatly stitched and tied the sutures around the silicone saucers stuffed inside Belinda’s breasts, Nick mindlessly rolls one cigar-­shaped spliff after another, his gestures tidy and precise, as unfeeling and unaware as an automaton’s, lining them up on a tray in rows as orderly as Olivia’s fat crumpled silver tubes of paint. He covers them with a silver dome to keep the raindrops and bugs away. He drinks coffee, or ice water, or Irish whiskey. He eats mechanically, without tasting the spice of jerk chicken or curried goat made in vast quantities by the housekeeper, Daisy. She clucks, she fusses over him, she clears away the plates, eyeing the shiny dome hiding Nick’s pile of hand-­rolled treasures and muttering darkly about that poison, and stays out of his way.

  She has no idea who this man is. All she sees is the torment of his silence, enshrouded in fragrant smoke and humid mist. Of all the women in the world, the only one who has ever genuinely pitied him is a large Jamaican named Daisy, who has never strayed farther than the isolated hills where she was born, who has never seen his movies and would not care to, a sweet-­tempered woman with a gold tooth and a white knit cap covering her graying hair, and an instinctive knowledge of the language of pain.

  Nick sits and smokes, rocking, staring out over the valley. She
ets of tropical rain descend, thick and luscious, ricocheting off the creeping umbilical tendrils of broad plants, dripping in staccato beats on the corrugated steel roof of the veranda. That is all Nick sees, the greenness of this insidious creeping vegetation. Plumes of wood smoke rise up into the sky, thickening the mist before dissolving into the heavens, as untouchable and insubstantial as the desires captured so faithfully on videotape, flickering images, shameful and unreal. As impenetrable as they are, they cannot hide the carnal torture of his uncoupling and the burden of his memories.

  I wonder what he remembers.

  Nick does not speak, withdrawn into near-­catatonia. He sits and smokes, rocking, unshaven, his proud muscles drooping like the wide leaves burdened with rain. It doesn’t matter what he looks like because there are no mirrors, and even if there were, he couldn’t bear to look in them.

  It is not just withdrawal from the physical addiction of Olivia. It is the absolute abdication of his life, a thorough retreat from the possibility of love.

  BELINDA CALLS, calls again, swearing her fealty, token lying gestures, then gives up in mock defeat. She’s done her bit, pretending she can’t live without Nick, and now all she can do is wait. Besides, McAllister is the one assigned to all the day-­to-­day dirty work, that endless drivel of Hollywood business I was never equipped or expected to do, of keeping Nick up there on the scrap heap of egos even when he is hidden far away. That’s what he’s supposed to be paid for, Belinda screams at McAllister, her precarious position atop the pecking order du jour teetering with Nick’s increasingly long absence from the spotlight, it’s Mac’s job, isn’t it, to find his pretty boy, and do something, fast. Because he has disappeared, Nick is so hot he’s sizzling, so hot he’s practically incandescent, although that is not a word in Belinda’s vocabulary, but she can repeat what she hears, and she’s hearing it from everybody. Yes, we need him here, and Mac had just better find a way to bring him back home where he belongs.

  McAllister calls the house once a week, sometimes more, begging, and then soon, when tired of groveling to Nick’s silence and my monosyllabic explanations, the threats begin. You’ve got looping to do, Nick, he says, it’s in the contract, you’ve got to get back. You’re meant to be doing your next picture, you agreed to it months and months ago. Go ahead, throw your career away, everybody’s talking about you, your price is up to fifteen million, go ahead, name it, everybody wants to work with you.

  Everybody wants to be you.

  Nick listens blankly. He says nothing, he never speaks, only the sound of the rain on the steel roof a faint echo over the phone to let McAllister know the line is still open and he is listening, and then he hands me the phone. Leave us alone, I say, Nick will call you when he has something to say, and hang up.

  SOMETIMES, WHEN his rocking drives me mad, I disappear into the hills on the bike I have rented, smaller than a Harley but easier to maneuver on bumpy bad roads, shifting gears, hands clenched, steam rising off my naked back as I ride through the rain as warm as the Jacuzzi by the pool, lost, the road curving up, past shacks and tethered goats, past ­people who stare and then smile and wave, past the verdant plots of pot, up, climbing into nothingness.

  I don’t want to know where I am going, because wherever I turn, the road heads back to Nick.

  NICK SNAPS out of it weeks later, months, there are no separate days, only the same moments, the endless dreary rewind of rocking, smoke, and silence.

  I have just gotten off the bike when I hear him doing push-­ups on the veranda.

  “Get me out of here,” he says, and we leave the next day.

  WE HAVE no reason to talk about anything other than the plans for the day. Nick throws himself back into his work, meets with McAllister, who is smart enough not to bring up the months lost and does not say a word about the stoniness darkening the blue of Nick’s eyes. They remind Mac of a winter’s twilight, a winter’s evening he spent once, years ago, in New York, when a nor’easter had blown the skies clean and the air was pure, so cold the little hairs inside his nose, clipped so assiduously by Mr. Tony the barber, froze a bit more with each breath, an evening when the square, lit windows in the skyscrapers around him seemed to dance they were so alive, brightly colored and dazzlingly clean, the wind blowing the grit from their surface to reveal the jewels glowing beneath, unearthed for his eyes only as tears came to them in the wind, and the blue of the sky a deepening sapphire, hard and cold, immeasurably blue.

  It frightens him, this color so brilliant and yet so bleak, so he politely hands Nick scripts to read, and as politely they discuss them. Thankfully the film Nick is scheduled to shoot has been pushed back. He isn’t ready for that kind of work, so he plays the waiting game, lunching with Mac and everyone they should be lunching with, flashing his famous smile.

  That is the prerogative of the superstar. He can smile, he can mope, he can laugh, he can lure women into his lair and not even know their names, he can withdraw into paranoia, but if he smiles for the camera with the babe on his arm he is there, and that’s all they need for the moment, theirs to see, their beloved, Nick Muncie, superstar. Everybody wants to work with him.

  Everybody wants to be him.

  At first he stayed away from Belinda, and it almost worried me, realizing that he’d never gone so long without a woman. But as he ventures out into the twisted thickets of the places we know so well, the old patterns slowly reemerge by sheer force of habit. Belinda is not happy with Nick’s increasingly sporadic visits, but she is not stupid, no, she will play any game Nick wants to play, easily, it suits her, she will do anything to maintain the illusion of Hollywood’s hottest ­couple, even if it means submitting to the increasingly sadistic demands of the most adored superstar in the world.

  Sex is no longer of any interest to Nick. No more the trawling ventures into nightclubs, the endless succession of choreographed pleasure taken so violently from lissome blindfolded bodies I have procured. Only pain engages him, and the idle curiosity of how far he can push Belinda before she cracks. In this they are matched, unsurpassed, because she likes what he’s doing now almost too much as long as the bruises don’t show, and she trusts Nick not to ruin her reputation, as well as his own. But even they are soon bored, going through the motions, tamed by their sheer banality of their excesses, linked only by an insatiable craving for physical release slowly diminishing to the odd sporadic whipping. It is tiresome, for them, and for me.

  I no longer watch. Nick no longer expects me to watch.

  There is nothing to see.

  MORE MONTHS fly by, a false calm, a spurious dawn when the sun’s rising is a cheat, delayed by the heavens themselves, obscured by a storm. The months fly by and the whispers have started, small, a word here, bewildered, a leak, a hint, the town is soon abuzz with the unbelievable possibility that Nick Muncie has pulled it off, yes, can you believe it, how could he have found it in him, sure he’s an action hero, a romantic star, but no one ever thought he could act.

  The whispers become louder, swelling, the words husky, portentous, he has done it, this is it, it is a marvel. The marketing department continues their plotting in feverish anticipation. “Faust: The Movie!” they exclaim after test screenings with such predictability that even Nick laughs. “He sold his soul to the devil! His thirst for knowledge took him on an incredible journey beyond his wildest dreams!”

  ­People actually believe this bullshit.

  The movie theaters are booked, and the carefully orchestrated leaks are as blithely unbelievable as Nick’s modest shrugs when asked about the film. Just wait, he says, just wait, and judge for yourself.

  That the film is indeed a success has confounded the critics eager to deflate the hype before they’d caught a glimpse of Nick in costume. “From heaven through all the world to hell!” they write, claiming Goethe’s words as their own, but that doesn’t matter, because the author’s been dead so long there’s no one around who co
uld possibly sue, much less understand what he’s talking about.

  Faust, a metaphor for the misery of our century, Faust, a metaphor for the destruction of nature, they say, Faust, the genuine quest that few of us dare risk, Faust, the fictitious man more audacious than any authentic person of our time.

  Faust is fabulous, but don’t bother reading the original, they say again, the movie is so much better.

  Nick does not mind the daily machinations demanded of him by the studio, the numbing weariness of meetings, interviews, and the fawning public, the world’s press at his feet. Why did he decide to do it, why Faust, why now, why him, why London?

  Why London, why Queens Gate, why Queens­way, why the flat in Porchester Square, why that flat, empty now, I imagine, the holes plugged and sanded, painted over with such smooth precision that no one would ever know they even existed. The furniture is gone, I gave it all away, shipping the gilt chairs to McAllister and the lovely round table to Jamie, wrapping up the pillows and objets and linens that were unstained with blood for the cast and crew, I gave away every last thing as presents, forging Nick’s scrawled signature as I was accustomed, more perfect than his own, on his thick cream embossed note cards, thanking them for all that Faust was and will become, can you forgive those moments when I was a pain, I hope we can work together, soon, with love from Nick.

  I wouldn’t have minded seeing their faces, the bewildered gratitude for such exquisite things, such generosity, they would have been saying, this is worth a fortune, I can’t believe he thought of me.

  I kept the vase of Murano glass and the Mapplethorpe flower for myself, hidden away in my room, impossible for Nick to find. The sight of them would drive him mad.

  The mirrors were no longer there to give away. He’d smashed them both to pieces.

  AN OSCAR for sure, the pundits declare.

  Nick smiles and looks happy, delighted, he knows he’ll never win, he hasn’t a hope in the world.