A Tangled Web

by Judith Michael

  “Laura,” Stephanie said.

  “Madame!” Excitedly, he took her hand. “Is that your mother’s name? Don’t stop, madame, please go on, concentrate: your mother is Laura and your father is . . . Come, madame, tell me the name of your mother and father.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come, I will help you. Your name is Sabrina. Your mother’s name is Laura. Your father’s name is . . .”

  “I don’t know! I don’t know if Laura is my mother’s name; I don’t even know if Sabrina is really my name. Max says it is, but it doesn’t feel like my name—”

  “What does feel like your name, madame?”

  She shook her head then stopped, as she always did, because the pain became worse when she moved her head in any direction, and then she said no more.

  In January, Max took her home. The doctors and nurses said goodbye with affection and regret: they had wanted to help her, no matter how long it took, but she was still locked in her empty space, with no past, and her husband said she would not return to them.

  Stephanie looked back at the hospital as they drove away. “Home,” she murmured. It was the only one she knew, the doctors and nurses and other patients her only friends. She clasped her hands in her lap and sat quietly in the velvet interior of a dark blue Renault driven through streets completely strange to her, by a man who said he was her husband, toward a future he had arranged. She wore a country tweed suit he had given her, part of a complete and lavish wardrobe he had brought to the hospital over the past two months, and as she watched him maneuver easily through the traffic of Marseilles and into the rolling countryside, she felt like a child in a small boat carried by the current to a place so distant it could not be guessed at or even imagined.

  They did not stop when they reached Cavaillon, but drove through the town and beyond it on a road that climbed to a plateau overlooking the valley. On the plateau, a large plaque, mounted beside stone gates, commemorated the history of the village and the plain. Max turned into the gates and drove past homes spaced widely apart, set back from winding roads amid tall trees and shrubs, each one shielded from its neighbors. Within that small discreet community Robert had found for them the most discreet spot of all, a stone house set within wooded acres at the end of a road, well hidden behind a high stone wall with a wrought-iron gate.

  “Home,” Max said, echoing Stephanie’s word of two hours earlier, and opened her door to help her out.

  And then, almost without effort, she was living there. Madame Besset, the housekeeper, unpacked and put away her clothes; the gardeners touched their caps and one of them gave her a bronze chrysanthemum from the greenhouse. The maintenance man pulled a chaise to a protected corner of the terrace where she could look down upon the town with its orange tile roofs crammed together between narrow, angled streets and bustling squares, its slender church steeples silhouetted against the fields beyond. The terrace was made of white stones, pale beneath the winter sun and the deep blue sky; behind Stephanie the stones of the house were smooth and warm; below, a cliff fell away in huge rock outcroppings surrounded by dense shrubs and pines that clung tenaciously to the steep slope.

  I could jump, Stephanie thought the first time Max settled her in the chaise and she gazed over the low wall bordering the terrace. I could just float off the wall and disappear. No one would miss me because they wouldn’t know I’d died.

  She shivered in the pale rays of the January sun. No one who ever knew me knows where I am.

  Each day she lay on the terrace and listened to Madame Besset’s purposeful clattering in the kitchen, the low rumble of Max’s voice on the telephone in his office, the gardener pushing a wheelbarrow to and from the greenhouse, the maintenance man whistling as he repaired some broken tiles on the roof. Those were the only people she had heard since she arrived in Cavaillon. No one came to see them; they did not go out. “We will when you’re strong,” Max said. “There’s no hurry, and in the meantime this is hardly an unpleasant place to be.”

  It was a beautiful place, the stone house bleached white by the sun, with bright blue shutters, red and pink geraniums on the windowsills, and strings of garlic and dried herbs hanging in the kitchen. Stephanie’s bedroom was on the ground floor, a small room with a high four-poster bed, a painted dresser, and fresh flowers brought every day by Madame Besset to her bedside table. Max had taken her to the room when they arrived. “While you recover,” he said.

  And so she divided her time between her bedroom and the terrace with its sheltered corner and its view of the roofs of Cavaillon, listening to the sounds from the house and the garden. She lay on the chaise, and the sun settled deep within her, easing the last, lingering pain from surgery. She wore a hat to keep the sun from making her headache worse and to protect the sensitive skin grafts on her face, and the days merged into each other as she lay motionless for hours at a time, listening to the silver trills of the birds and the snapping of clippers as the gardener trimmed the holly hedge, and smelling saffron and garlic in the bouillabaisse Madame Besset was preparing, and the fragrance of the red rose Max had brought her that afternoon.

  She took the rose from its vase and held it to her nose, breathing deeply of the heady fragrance. Roses. I’ve cut roses . . . with a scissors, a silver scissors, and put them in a vase, a tall vase with a design . . . some kind of design . . . But Max’s voice from the study grew louder, repeating something to make a point, and she lost the thought.

  His voice wove through her days. Every morning and afternoon he was in his study, on the telephone. But he joined her at lunch and dinner and after dinner, when they sat on the couch in the living room, finishing their wine while Max talked. He told her about his travels, his acquaintances on four continents, his art collection, his childhood in Holland, Belgium and Germany. “I was always a loner; I never stayed anywhere long enough to make friends.”

  “I moved around, too,” Stephanie said.

  “Where?” he asked quickly.

  “I don’t know.” She looked at him with puzzled eyes. “I don’t know.”

  They were sitting at either end of the long couch, and all the living room lights but one had been turned off. The room was large and high-ceilinged, with a floor of square white stone tiles and scattered Bessarabian rugs patterned in bold flowers in oranges and greens and browns. Hand-hewn beams ran the length of the ceiling, the slipcovered furniture was deep and soft, and paintings of the lavender fields and vineyards of Provence hung on the walls. One large painting, a wild scene of the Alpilles range signed with the bold signature of Léon Dumas, stood in the most prominent place, on an easel near the fireplace. It was almost midnight and the house was quiet, the housekeeper and gardener gone, the birds still.

  “What did I wear?” Stephanie asked abruptly. “When you met me, what was I wearing?”

  “A long skirt and a blouse, off the shoulders, I think.”

  “What color were they?”

  “I don’t remember. I don’t notice that much about clothes.”

  “That’s not true. You’ve bought everything I have and it’s all the right size and the styles are right for me and so are the colors. Max, please, what colors was I wearing? What was the skirt made of? And the blouse?”

  “Cotton. The blouse was white and the skirt was striped red and black.”

  “Where did I buy them?”

  “I have no idea. Probably in France.”

  “You didn’t see a label on them?”

  “No.” He contemplated her. “You didn’t ask any of these questions in the hospital.”

  “I didn’t think of them then. Did you see labels on any of my clothes?”

  “You unpacked a Valentino evening dress on the ship, and two Christian Dior blouses.”

  “That’s all?”

  “We didn’t finish unpacking. I wanted you to see the skyline of Monte Carlo from the lounge and we went forward.”

  “That was all you saw? No private label?”

  “What made
you think of that?”

  “If I had a dressmaker, she would know me.”

  “There were none.”

  Stephanie was frowning, studying his face. She did not believe him. Something was wrong; she knew it, even though she had no idea what it could be or why he would lie to her. She felt ungrateful, doubting him after all he had done for her, but she could not shake this certainty. “Did I have a purse?”

  “Of course, but I wasn’t in the habit of rifling it.”

  “Did I wear makeup?”

  “A little. Not very much. You didn’t need it.”

  “What was my hair like?”

  “Long. Magnificent. You can let it grow again, if you like.”

  “I think I will.” She looked at her hands. “You said I hadn’t been married. When did I tell you that?”

  “Soon after we met. Why?”

  “I don’t know. I think . . . maybe . . . it might not be true.”

  “Indeed. Why do you think that?”

  She fell silent, suddenly reluctant to confide in him the new thoughts that came to her each day. “What did you do after your mother died?”

  He paused, wondering if he should pursue his question. Not necessary, he thought; the less we talk about it, the better. “My father and I kept moving: Spain for a while, then London. I told you about my mother yesterday. You remembered.”

  “Oh.” She sat forward. “Max, I remembered!” For the first time since she awoke in the hospital, she smiled, a slow smile that caused Max to draw in his breath on a wave of desire that made him dizzy. He had wanted her every minute of the past week, since coming to Cavaillon, but he had held back and given her her own bedroom, put off by the distant look in her eyes when she turned to him: the look of a stranger, the look of someone who had no desire to be close to him. He knew that was not true of her; their affair in October, in the weeks before the yacht exploded, had been the most passionate he had known in a lifetime of sexual encounters.

  They had met again, in London, years after Max had first met her, when she and Denton, newly married, were guests on his yacht. She was unused to their ways then, resisting the drugs and casual sex that the rest of them took for granted. When he saw her again, at the end of September, sitting with Brooks and Gabrielle at Annabel’s, there had been a hunger in her eyes for adventure, and a kind of recklessness, as if she were trying to squeeze everything into a short time. He had liked that; it was the way he had always lived.

  He had asked her to decorate and furnish his new town house, and she had done it brilliantly, and then she had made it hers as well by staying there for a weekend that had struck him with that same kind of intense recklessness: as if it were to be their only time together.

  He had fallen in love with her then; her presence haunted him after she left. But at the same time he had been preoccupied with his company, Westbridge Imports, with Denton’s trying to take it over, with rumors of reporters working on stories about smuggled antiquities and forged works of art. He had been busy winding up his London operations, setting up Lacoste et fils in Marseilles, and getting out of England while he could, to make a new life with a new identity in France, and so he did not recognize the fact that he had fallen in love with her and, in fact, probably would have asked her to marry him if the explosion on the yacht had not happened.

  Now, in Cavaillon, seeing her smile, seeing her eyes come to life, he could not wait any longer. He took her in his arms. “My beautiful, adorable Sabrina,” he said, and covered her mouth with his.

  She let him hold her, but her mouth was slack beneath his and her hands stayed in her lap, and after a moment he let her go. “What we had was so memorable,” he murmured, but then he realized the irony of it. Nothing was memorable to this woman, and that was the way it had to be: they could go on together only if she remained locked in her amnesia, believing she was his wife and knowing nothing of the bomb on the yacht, or that it had been put there to kill not only Max Stuyvesant but Sabrina Longworth as well.

  “Memorable,” Stephanie said wryly. “It would have had to be a lot better than that.”

  “It was better, and we’ll have it again. Listen to yourself, Sabrina: this is the first time you’ve been able to look at yourself with humor. You’re getting better.” He took her unresisting hand. “If you still want to wait, if you insist on sleeping downstairs . . .”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, for a time.” He kissed her fingers and her palm. “I adore you, Sabrina; you’re everything I want. You’ll come to me, and I promise you we’ll be everything to each other. We don’t need anyone else; all we want, all we need, is here.”

  Stephanie gazed at the top of his head as he kissed her hand. She felt his lips brush her skin, but that was all. I ought to feel something if he’s my husband. I ought to want him. And she knew then that she knew what sexual desire was and that she had felt it once, but felt nothing now.

  Two weeks after they arrived, the weather changed: the sky lowered into a solid gray and the wind rose, bending the trees and making the shutters creak. Rain spattered on the white stones of the terrace, and chill air crept into the house. For the first time, Max and Stephanie ate lunch indoors, in a small room off the kitchen with a round olivewood table and four cushioned wicker chairs. Madame Besset had been making bread, and the room was fragrant and snug while the wind flattened the grass beyond the windows.

  Something let go within Stephanie. The tense fearfulness of the past two weeks began to ease, her body relaxed against the flowered cushions of her chair, and she picked up her glass and saw how beautiful was the pale gold of the wine in the golden light from the chandelier. I’m alive and I’m getting better, she thought. And if I keep getting better, pretty soon I’ll remember everything. I’m already remembering things that happened yesterday and the day before, and I do know some things about myself. She ticked them off in her mind. I knew someone named Laura and she may have been my mother, and I cut roses with a silver scissors and I moved around a lot. She felt a sudden sinking. It isn’t much. It really isn’t anything.

  “Sabrina?” Max was looking at her.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you.”

  “Dreaming again.” He looked up as Madame Besset came in.

  “There is a man waiting to see you in your study. Very serious, very intense. He calls himself Father Chalon, though you would not know he is a priest to look at him, and he says he will wait until you have finished your lunch.”

  “No, bring him here; he’ll join us for lunch. A good friend,” Max said to Stephanie. “I’ve been wanting you to meet him.”

  Stephanie looked up as he came in: he was short and slender, with a neatly trimmed brown beard shot with gray and dark brown eyes set close together above a thin nose. He bent over her hand. “I’m so pleased to meet you. Max speaks of you often.”

  “Join us,” Max said. “Madame Besset is bringing a plate.”

  “Thank you.” Robert sat down, his eyes still on Stephanie. Quite young, he thought. Thirty? Perhaps thirty-one or -two. Slender, holds herself well; perhaps she has been an athlete. He recognized the clothes she wore: the white turtleneck sweater and blue jeans that Max had bought on a shopping trip in Marseilles. Robert had been with him, watching with amusement Max’s sureness with sizes and styles: he knew how to dress a woman.

  But more than anything, Robert was struck by her beauty, a vibrant beauty enlivened by the curiosity and intelligence in her eyes. That had not been visible when he helped bring her to Marseilles; he had known only that she probably had once been beautiful. Now, looking at her as if he were viewing a Botticelli in the Uffizi, or one of Titian’s glorious women in the Louvre, he felt the tug that beauty exerts: the desire to draw close to it, to absorb some of its perfection, to believe that, because it exists, the world can become a place without pain or sorrow or grief. He became aware that the silence was stretching out and he said, “I am delighted to see you so much improved.”

  Sabrina looked at Max quest
ioningly.

  “Robert accompanied us to Marseilles and to the hospital,” he said.

  “And would not have predicted such a rapid recovery. I can see that your bruises have faded, as has the swelling; how is the wound on your head? That frightened us very much.”

  Instinctively, Stephanie’s hand went to the scar, hidden by her hair. “It’s much better. I’m getting better.”

  “And remembering, too?”

  “No.” She looked swiftly at Max. “You promised you wouldn’t—”

  “I told only Robert because he’s very close to us. We’ll tell no one else; I promise you that.”

  “Close to us?” Stephanie waited as Madame Besset arranged a plate and cutlery for Robert and placed a casserole nearby so he could serve himself. Max poured his wine as Robert broke off a chunk of bread from the large round loaf in the center of the table.

  “Robert and I do some work together,” Max said. “It’s something that would not interest you. But—”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, it might, someday, but not today. Anyway, Robert has had a most unusual life; he might tell you about it.”

  “If madame would be interested,” said Robert.

  “Oh, not ‘madame,’ ” Stephanie said. “It doesn’t sound like me.”

  “Ah, thank you. Sabrina, then. A very lovely name. If indeed you are interested . . .”

  “Yes.” And to her surprise, she was. It was the first time since she had been in the house that she had felt a spark of curiosity. She had not opened any of the books that filled the library; she did not look at Figaro when it arrived each day on their doorstep, nor had she read Madame Figaro, the glossy magazine that came with the Friday edition. She had thought idly of going into Cavaillon, especially on market days, but Max said they could not go yet, and she did not care enough to press it.

  But today the wind howled, the breakfast room was cozy, and it was exciting to talk to someone who was not a doctor or a nurse or Max. Today, over the deep sadness that lay like a weight inside her, and over the terrors of emptiness that haunted her nights, she felt a ripple of being alive and of being glad that she was. She smiled at Robert. She liked him. He wore corduroy pants and a dark blue sweater over an open-necked shirt, and his raggedly cut hair reached his collar. He looked like a schoolboy. “How old are you?” Stephanie asked.