by Warren Adler
"We love you very much, Vivien. That goes for Dad and Ben."
"I know, Mother." She managed to say it without conveying her agony. Then she hung up.
When she went upstairs, Edward was waiting for her. He took her in his arms and kissed her cheeks.
"Salty. You've been crying."
She nodded.
"It will all come out fine," he said. "You'll see."
Her heart thumped. "Don't you ever say that to me," she cried angrily. "I will not be patronized."
"I hadn't meant—"
"But you did. You have no special gifts of prophecy. The next thing you'll say is trust me. I've heard that before."
"So have I."
She wondered if she had overreacted.
"I might have been testy, but I won't apologize."
Yet she did not disengage. Then his caresses soothed her, and they made love. Sometime in the middle of the night she shook him awake.
"I have to leave this house," she said, shivering. "I still feel his presence here."
He tightened his embrace. "As long as we're together," he said.
His response frightened her. To still further comment, she kissed his lips. No sense raising painful issues just yet, she thought.
In the morning she wrote a note to Dale Martin, telling him she was considering going away and reiterating her desire to set up the trust fund. She told him to mail any papers to her present address, as she was planning to leave a forwarding address.
The next day they visited some of the apartments that they had seen earlier. They found a small efficiency that did not have a Yale lock and arranged for the rental of a bed and dresser from a furniture rental firm. The apartment was on the ground floor of a small building that was surrounded by mature trees which blocked the light, but it was the only place they could find where they could move in immediately. She had filled two suitcases and a cosmetic case, leaving all her other possessions to be sold or carted away when the new owners arrived. She did not look back when she left the house. Sentiment for the past, she told herself, was the enemy. She was in transit to a new life.
"No regrets?" Edward asked when they had unpacked. They had bought a minimum of dishes and pots and pans from the hardware store and stocked the refrigerator with basics. They had bought linens and towels in a nearby department store. They did not order a telephone. And, of course, they brought with them the little bud vase and filled it with a fresh new rose. There was nothing from the other life now except their clothes.
They spent every moment together. And although they did not question their relationship in conversation, as if it were a pact between them, they both felt the sense of transition. Of impermanence. Neither had the courage to confront the dread specter of commitment. It was enough to feel, she decided. Wasn't it?
They had not bought a television set or a radio, no newspapers or magazines. Sometimes, when the days were bright, they drove along the Potomac and then walked along the paths of the parkland that lay beside the George Washington Parkway. Since there was still a chill in the air, the trails were usually deserted, and they could savor the delight of being totally alone with each other. They had shrunk the world to their own specifications.
Although the bed they had rented was double sized, they clung to each other all night, using a minimum of space. And they still made love as if they were the last ones on earth.
Despite the delicious feeling of euphoria, the sensation of drifting on calm waters on a sweet sunny day, Vivien did preserve for the moment some vestiges of practicality. The house would be sold. This would provide enough money for them to pursue another life, which remained vague and undefined. Beyond that, she felt no desire for material possessions. Since they possessed each other, what more could they desire?
There was also the matter of talk between them. She remembered what he had said: What did you talk about? Between Edward and her, options of talk, like their existence, were deliberately narrowed. Even when she described her earlier life, the life before Orson, her childhood and girlhood, she would measure her words against her memory of old conversations with Orson. Had she told Orson that? If she was to excise the past, she had to also excise everything that went before.
Finally, to spare herself the tension of the editing, she eliminated from her thoughts anything that referred to her past life, her past self. There was only the now. Only Edward.
"Can you make believe? No. Not make believe. Truly believe that all life began at the moment of our meeting." So that, in the end, despite their mutual caveats and prohibitions, the only discussion between them could be what they felt toward each other. There was only themselves to contemplate and their now circumscribed world of the present. The past was irrelevant and the future uncertain.
"When did you first feel you know, this sense of attraction?" she would ask.
"When I first saw you. And you?"
"It was later, at the coffee shop I felt it."
"Did it come as a bolt from the blue? A flash of light? Some explosive cosmic force taking possession of you? Something like that?"
They would be naked, clinging to each other. The weather had hit a rainy spell, and they rarely went out, except when it was necessary to buy food. Outside, the rain splattered against the windowpane. Days and nights merged. Conversations, like a moon-pulled tide, ebbed and flowed without any sense of time passing. Always the same theme surfaced, disappeared, resurfaced, like bobbing flotsam. Life lost all purpose other than themselves, knowing themselves, understanding how this had happened.
"Yes, something like that," She touched his cleft with her fingers, tracing a line down his neck.
"Was it something tangible? Physical only? Did you feel a yearning, an urgent need?"
"Yes, of course."
"Something beyond the flesh? Beyond biology? Like you had lost a piece of yourself and suddenly found it? Something like that?"
"Yes, something like that."
"Can you be sure? Try to say it. I want to hear it in your words."
He would become inert, thoughtful. She studied him minutely: where his flesh creased when he smiled; the direction in which his chest hair curled, like a windblown wheat field; his flesh, alternately rough and smooth; the secret places of his manhood; the way his skin cooled and popped into goose bumps. And the sounds taking place within him, the pumping, whooshing, gnawing sound of his physiological life, the body alive. But his thoughts were mysteries to be plumbed, only hinted at by words, expressions, movements, all guarded and reflexive.
"Like...?" She would watch him struggling, journeying in his mind. Listen, she begged herself. Make no judgments. Do not commit.
"Like ... punching through the clouds, finding blue sky."
Not that. Beside him, she would tense up, stiffen. A plane! He had described an airplane, which meant that he had not completely exorcised her, Lily, that she was still alive inside him. And since the image was clear to her as well, Orson, too, remained.
"No," he would correct, perhaps understanding the image. It was awesome, being beside him, listening, touching, but not truly knowing the inside of his thoughts.
"Say it another way." She hungered for explanations.
"Like a pile of dry tinder, something hidden and unseen, a mysterious life force, suddenly becoming hot, bursting into flame, lighting up a totally interior world that we didn't know existed. All we knew was what we could sense, the source of the flame."
"Where did it come from?"
"From inside us."
"And you feel it now? This heat? This power?"
"Yes."
"And will it burn forever? Always?"
"Yes."
What she yearned for was some part of herself to detach, fly out of her being, hover over the room like a beam of light, probing his thoughts, then hers, evaluating, like some all-seeing, all-encompassing computer that could calculate truth and feelings and track its eternal validity, test and compute the furthest range of its power. She wanted proof,
absolute surety.
When they kissed, she imagined that, with some magic special maneuver, he could suck her inside him, absorb her into his bloodstream, into his mind. But when her eyes opened, she was, of course, still outside him. And when he entered her in other ways, she willed herself to open, not just her body, everything! To draw him into her, absorb him inside her. Wasn't it the only way she could always be certain of him, to foreclose on any future betrayal? Only then, with him absorbed into her, could she be certain of his permanence.
She had resisted it from the beginning, from the moment that her brain required a description of what she felt. Love? To declare it, even secretly to herself, meant a further diminishment of its currency. It was clichéd, overused, abused by countless lies and seductions. It had lost all value, all meaning. What she dreaded most was that he would send it first out of the silence.
He did.
"I love you."
Instead of some physical expression of validation, she got up, walked away, paced the room, her arms hunched against her body.
"You don't mean that," she said.
Her reaction startled him.
"That's what it all boils down to. However you describe it, that's the way I feel. I love you. It is everything. I love you."
"You can't..." She groped for some way to stop what Orson had also once said to her. Between them, it would always be the ultimate comparison. The sluice gates of memory were opening, spilling out. "You said it to her." Her voice rose with anger and frustration.
"It wasn't like this."
"Then it is empty to say it."
"But it's what I feel," he said.
"Did you feel it then?"
"It doesn't matter."
"Yes, it does." She wanted him to feel what she felt, the feeling beyond words, the feeling of eternal possession, of selflessness, of a love so pure and refined that nothing could shatter it, a love that defied betrayal. And words. "Don't you see?" she cried, wringing her hands.
"No, I don't. I love you. I want to devote my life to you. What more can I say? There is nothing in life that I want. Nothing but to be with you, to hold you, to be near you. However you describe it, it comes down to that."
"You can't know for sure. Not so soon."
"I know."
Still, something inside told her it was not enough, that they had not yet struck the essence of it. She would force her anger to cool, then would come back to him, embracing.
The focus of everything had narrowed down to that one tiny center of intense heat, like the heat of the sun, captured into a single tiny beam through a magnifying glass. What she wanted, needed, longed for was the ultimate assurance. No matter what transpired in a life lived, however age would paint her, whatever her failings—whether she was bored or excited, comforted or irritated—whatever circumstance might buffet her, change her, sicken her, stunt her, embellish her, whatever her faults or flaws, her attributes, her capacity to enjoy or give joy, to enlighten or diminish, the ultimate value of their relationship would remain as pure and untrammeled as refined gold. Purer than that. More lasting than that.
How was it possible to declare such a thing, to promise it irrevocably? The best that could be pledged was this feeling now, at this single moment of time. Could she promise more than that?
No!
In the end she would be alone, unloved and unloving. What she craved was impossible to achieve, nor was it possible to erase the memory of the past. Soon she would have to eliminate the last reminder of the past, Edward himself. That would leave her with the only person in the world to whom her future would belong, the only person she could ever trust with her life, permanently, eternally.
Herself.
33
Three weeks after they had moved into the apartment, Vivien's house was sold. Twice a week she had called the broker from a telephone booth and received a report on the sales effort.
Edward accepted the news more with concern than unmitigated joy. They had talked of going away and, at the beginning, had explored endless possibilities. Since they had both cut away all moorings, any place in the world would have suited them.
The nature of the game was to be together, as they were now. Beyond that was the void.
Yet, regardless of how he studied her, there was always a point beyond which he could not penetrate. At times she drifted, grew vague and brooding, then she would surge up in intensity and passion. She alternated between reflective silence and curious probing questions.
"Do you think you know me, really know me?"
"I'm not sure," he replied.
"Just testing. I don't think I know you."
"Not consciously."
"What does that mean?"
"That we probably know each other deep in our subconscious. Really well. Totally."
"I don't believe that for a minute."
"Then why do you ... make me feel so physically complete? What makes that happen?"
"Chemistry."
"But why you?"
"I don't want to think about it. Just feel. That's all I want to do. Just feel. No past. No future. Only to feel what I feel."
"And what is that?"
"It has no definition. And if it did, it wouldn't matter."
"But it must have some definition. Surely there are words to explain it."
"There are no words for that."
It seemed a refrain, and he longed for her to frame her feeling for him in direct and simple language. He wanted her to put it flatly, nakedly. Perhaps a simple "I love you," despite all its clichéd meanings. He did not ask any other assurance beyond that.
But he did. not press her, he accepted her own special definitions and those that he would concoct at her urging. What was happening was beyond any of his experience. Perhaps it was, he told himself secretly, beyond the ability to articulate, something infinitely ethereal and spiritual, a perfect melding of desire and mutuality. He had never known such perfect joy.
On the surface, they existed in this finite world: a room, a bed, space, the present. To him, the past was dead, unmourned. Sometimes, merely to test himself he tried to dredge up old images. When they came, the definition was so feeble that it barely had the power to preserve itself, like a Polaroid picture that did not take.
Nothing intruded on the glory of the present, which was being with Vivien. Vivien was all life, an entire world, her body eternity, her spirit an indestructible force inside him. How could words convey that? He lived in a cocoon of fulfillment and ecstasy.
"I do love you."
Sometimes she would be playful.
"Just that? But how do you know? How are you sure?"
"I know."
"That's no answer."
"I feel."
"That's no answer."
"I'll give you proof."
They made love, passionate, intense, culminating as they crested on a single wave, the all-perfect legendary ninth wave.
"What does this prove?" she asked when they had cooled.
"That the body is the cathedral of the soul."
She laughed.
"I want to worship in your cathedral."
"Forever?"
"Of course forever."
"Do you love me?" she pressed.
"More than that."
But while coping with her questions, his questions had their own special perils. Why had this happened? First had come the random selection of joined lives: he and Lily, she and Orson, then the coming together of Lily and Orson. More random selection: betrayal and death. Each phase had triggered the other, expanding the mysterious connections, culminating finally in he and Vivien.
Why?
Between the frenetic love-making, they began to expand their verbal excursions. It was all part of the basic investigation of themselves. They talked of their general interests, favorite foods, flavors, seasons, colors, actors, political ideas, a panoply of sensations that might be a clue to the spark that set them off and joined them. Nothing fit with the smoothness of
a jigsaw puzzle. There were always wrong angles, jutting tabs, bad fits.
"Ordinary people, that's us," she would say when it became apparent that whatever worldly talents or interests were inside them were unremarkable.
He would tick off the obvious categories of assets, and she would respond.
"General education?"
"Fair to middling. No marketable specialties."
He had majored in political science, she in psychology.
"Blood and breeding?"
"Not thoroughbred, but good sturdy stock."
"Physical aspect?"
"To others, well, sort of pleasant."
"And to you?"
"Surpassing beauty."
"It's in the eye of the beholder."
"And I'm the beholder."
"So am I."
In other words, he thought, nothing special, except to each other. He would have to look elsewhere for answers. Give it time, perhaps a lifetime, which suited him fine. A lifetime with Vivien, like this, was all one could wish for.
There were moments when he truly felt that they had reached some nadir of communication, transcending experience and gender, as if they had achieved a cloning effect. Yet he still could not find the words to describe it, except in that way, which sounded more wishful than actual. However he wished it to be, he could not truly get inside her mind. And she could not get into his.
Which was why the subtle changes he began to detect began to worry him. Sometimes he was awakened by her soft sobbing, but when he asked her the matter, she would say: "Just happy."
Which satisfied him for a time. But when it persisted and he pressed her, she would answer finally: "It will go away."
"What will."
"This. Us."
"Never." Again he would proclaim his feelings.
"It's not enough," she would sob. "It's transitory. It will disappear, disintegrate. You'll betray me. Perhaps I'll betray you."
"Nonsense." He tried to joke her out of it. "I'll never let you out of my sight." He meant it, envisioning a life like this, with every moment together.
"It's true," she said.
Despite the foreshadowing, he was stunned when it happened. He had gone with her to the title company, and the settlement had gone routinely. She received a certified check for nearly $200,000, which she slipped into her purse.
