Crossing the Lines

by Sulari Gentill

  “And what if you decide to do me in?”

  Edward laughed. “You’ve been reading too many crime novels.”

  “You’ll find crime fiction often holds a mirror to society,” Blake warned, though he smiled now.

  “Then we have a deal?” Edward offered Blake his hand, still feeling vaguely ridiculous. “Whatever happens, you have the scoop.”

  “Please don’t say scoop.” The reporter shook his head. “Yeah, okay, let’s say we’ll share information and I’ll keep an open mind.”

  A Peace Offering

  The yellow 1953 Vauxhall Cresta caught Madeleine’s attention from the window of the tobacconist’s shop. Still in its original box, among hookahs and silver flasks, it was positioned to beckon collectors. Writers were probably not in the proprietor’s contemplation as a market. It wasn’t that the model made her think of Edward, because she was always thinking of him now, but that she knew he’d like it.

  “That’s a very special piece,” the tobacconist said on enquiry. “Rare in mint condition—which this one is.” He put the box on the counter rather than allowing her to handle it. “I can let you have it for four hundred and sixty dollars.”

  Madeleine tried not to let the horror show on her face, though it was probably apparent in the way her shoulders drew back. Common sense told her that it was a ridiculous price for a toy. But she wanted so much now to give it to Edward.

  “Is your husband a collector?” the tobacconist enquired, assessing her.

  “No, but it isn’t for him.” Madeleine handed over her credit card.

  She slipped the box into her bag, making sure it wasn’t crushed by the flotsam of daily life which languished there, and hurried to meet her agent for lunch.

  Leith was perched upon a stool at the sushi bar. She took her handbag off the stool she’d saved for Madeleine.

  “Hello, Maddie…what are you looking so chirpy about?”

  “A bit of retail therapy, that’s all.”

  “Always worthwhile. How are you?”

  “The novel’s coming along well, I think.”

  “I asked about you, not your novel.” Leith squeezed wasabi paste onto her dish.

  “We’re both fine,” Madeleine opened a little fish-shaped container of soy sauce.

  “Good.” Leith selected a nori roll. “I hadn’t heard from you in a while. I was a little worried.”

  “It hasn’t been that long.” Madeleine’s brow wrinkled. Leith was not normally so easily concerned. She set down her chopsticks and met the agent’s eye. “What gives?”

  Leith sighed. “Hugh called me.”

  “Really? What about?”

  “He’s worried about you. He thinks perhaps you’ve been working too hard on this new novel.”

  “He said that?” Madeleine could hear the shrillness in her own voice. She tried consciously to moderate it. “Why does he think that?”

  Leith patted her hand reassuringly. “He’s worried that you spend so much time at the computer, that you rarely leave the house these days. He said you missed a couple of work meetings last week.”

  “I wasn’t feeling well,” Madeleine replied, “and they weren’t important meetings.” She’d had a vague sniffle and the meetings weren’t crucial.

  “He’s also concerned that you are not taking the Grand Oak Productions offer seriously.”

  “How does he even know about that?”

  “I don’t know. I thought you must have told him.”

  Madeleine shook her head…and then she remembered. “Tarquin called last week about the offer when Hugh was home. Perhaps he overheard.” She frowned. “He didn’t say anything.”

  “He thought perhaps you were making excuses so you could stay with the novel. Hugh all but begged me to insist you come to lunch—just to get you out of the house.”

  Madeleine could feel the flush rising on the back of her neck. “How dare he! Why didn’t he just speak to me?”

  “Calm down, honey. Hugh says the two of you are not communicating well, that you’ve withdrawn from him.”

  Madeleine could not speak. Hugh’s complaints were not unfounded, but that did not prevent a defensive resentment lodging like a rock in her gut. It was heavy and hard. She took a breath and made her argument.

  “Leith, I’m in the middle of a novel…and, yes, I’m immersed in my work, but no more so than I am with any other book. I don’t leave the house because I like to work in my pyjamas and you can’t do that at coffee shops or wherever it is Hugh wishes me to write. Damn! I can’t believe Hugh is complaining that I work too hard—he’s barely ever home!”

  “He’s a man, Maddie. They are not always fair or even reasonable. I told Hugh that each book has different demands…perhaps this one is taking more out of you.”

  “Each book is more challenging than the one before. It’s why writers improve with experience.”

  “I know, Maddie. I didn’t ask you here to plead Hugh’s case, just to give you the heads-up that he might be feeling neglected.”

  Madeleine rolled her eyes and stabbed at a piece of sushi with her chopstick.

  Leith screwed up her face. “It’s kind of cute, really…he’s jealous of your book. Just organise a romantic dinner or something, seduce him once or twice—he won’t care how much you write after that. We can shop for some fox wear after lunch, if you like.”

  “Fox wear?”

  “It’s what Jase calls lingerie…”

  “Oh, my God!”

  “Seriously, Maddie, don’t be cross that your husband misses you. I think there’d be more to worry about if he didn’t feel a little put out.”

  Edward watched Madeleine carefully. He had written a woman who loved her husband. When he’d begun, that love had been simple, doubtless. And then he’d interfered.

  Madeleine refused to see him. Refused to acknowledge the creeping confused sense of disloyalty. “Yes, of course. I’ll try.”

  ***

  Hugh was home when Madeleine returned. It surprised her to find him so, but perhaps it was a slow day at the surgery. She grabbed her bags from the boot and headed inside.

  “Hugh?”

  “In the kitchen.”

  He was washing dishes.

  “Good lord, you’ve been cooking!” Madeleine glanced at the stack of dishes on the sink.

  “I got hungry. There’s nothing left, I’m afraid. We might have to order out for dinner. What’d you buy?” He pointed at the shopping bag in her hand.

  Madeleine squirmed a little. “New pyjamas.”

  “Well, you can never have too many, I suppose—not when you wear them day and night.”

  “I guess,” Madeleine said, trying hard to ignore the note of criticism. “Shall I dry?”

  “No, I’ll just let it drain. Why don’t you ask Jeeves to cook Chinese tonight, and I’ll go in and pick it up?”

  Madeleine nodded happily, reassured by the solid familiar presence of their private butler. Taking the restaurant menu down from the refrigerator door and to the phone, she spoke to Jeeves.

  “Fifteen minutes,” she announced as she hung up.

  Hugh wiped his hands and grabbed her car keys. “I’ll head out now. It’ll be ready by the time I get there.”

  Madeleine took her bags into the bedroom while he was gone. Sitting cross-legged on the bed, she pulled out the little Vauxhall Cresta in its original box and placed it on the pile of books on her bedside table.

  Edward’s face was unreadable when he picked it up, extracting the car and examining it on the flat of his palm. “Jacob would have fought me for this,” he said, running his finger over the pristine cardboard box. His brother had loved the older models and he’d cherished the distinctive boxes.

  Madeleine hesitated then, began to doubt the impulse that had made her buy the yellow Vauxhall.
Edward noticed. And he smiled, touched, by the tentative excitement in her eyes, the uncertainty in her lips. He, too, gave in to impulse and he kissed her, tenderly.

  Madeleine felt her heart rise as he seemed to breathe her in. She allowed herself to linger in that kiss…a harmless fantasy. In time she pulled away. She could hear Hugh’s car coming into the driveway.

  She grabbed her shopping bags and slipped into the en suite to change, forgetting perhaps that Edward was in her head and not her bedroom. She donned the nightshirt she’d purchased as a compromise. It was not exactly fox wear but at least it was not flannelette. She tried to think about Hugh, to push Edward McGinnity away, to confine him to the pages of her manuscript so that she could be excited about her husband.

  Edward observed her nervousness, as intrigued by how painful it was to watch—how much he didn’t want her to return to the husband he’d created for her—as he was by her struggle.

  He recognised that he was losing perspective, immersing himself in his own process to a level that might be delusional—dangerous, even. But how could he pull back now? How could he never know what might have happened? That Madeleine was affecting him, changing him was confronting, even frightening. But he was fascinated by the notion of a story truly told by both the writer and the protagonist. Perhaps this was the partnership that all writers sought, that he had never before completely achieved. Whatever the cause, the surge of possessiveness was unmistakeable.

  “Maddie, don’t.”

  “What?” Madeleine was startled. Did he say that? Was it simply what she wanted him to say?

  “Maddie, I think you should be careful.”

  “Of Hugh?” she asked incredulously. “He’s my husband.”

  “I don’t trust him.” Edward was unsure when and why he’d decided that…if in fact he had decided.

  “Now you sound like a crime-writer,” Madeleine laughed. “Perhaps he’ll murder me and bury me under the roses.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Maddie—dinner’s getting cold!”

  Hugh had placed the containers of stir-fried vegetables, honey chicken, and Singapore noodles on the table with a bundle of cutlery.

  “I’ll organise plates,” Madeleine said, “unless you want to eat straight out of the containers?”

  “It’d save washing up, which is the point of having Jeeves cook,” Hugh replied.

  “Let’s hang on to plates as some last facade of civilisation.” Madeleine moved to fetch dishes. There were two plates on the draining board, and two wineglasses as well as a couple of pots and utensils.

  “Did you have someone call in for lunch today?” she asked as she set a plate in front of Hugh.

  “No, just me on my own.” He spooned half the noodles onto his plate and handed the container to his wife.

  “There are two wineglasses on the sink.”

  Hugh’s eyes narrowed. “Are you checking up on me again?”

  “No. I was just wondering who came by.”

  “Nobody.”

  “Why would you use two wineglasses?”

  “The first bottle I opened was corked. I used a fresh glass for the second.”

  “You don’t usually drink wine at lunch,” Madeleine said almost to herself.

  “Well, I did today!” Hugh snapped. “It’s the first day off I’ve had in months, I thought I was entitled.” He pushed away his plate. “For God’s sake, Maddie!”

  “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to—”

  “Well, what the hell were you trying to do?”

  “Nothing…I was simply making conversation. Let’s just eat, okay?”

  “I’m not hungry anymore.”

  “Please, Hugh, I’m sorry.”

  “I want you to see someone, Maddie. A professional.”

  “What…because I asked about lunch?”

  Hugh stood. “You’re depressed. You may not recognise it but I do. You rarely get dressed or leave the house, you spend every minute on that bloody computer, you talk about some figment of your imagination as if he were real. You’ve shut me out, you barely speak to me unless it’s about him or unless you’re accusing me of God-knows-what.”

  Madeleine recoiled, shocked by the way he saw things.

  “You’re avoiding the real world and calling it writing, Maddie!”

  “Hugh, I’m not depressed…I’m just not. Maybe I am a little obsessed with this novel, but that’s just the way I work. I’m sorry if I’ve shut you out—I haven’t meant to.”

  “If you’re sorry, then see someone. I have a colleague who specialises in this sort of thing. If you’re not depressed, he’ll be able to tell, and if you are, he’ll be able to help.”

  “But I’m not—”

  “I mean it Maddie. I’m at my wit’s end. I love you more than anything in this world, but we can’t go on like this.”

  Madeleine heard that he loved her, and it made her long for the way it had been. And so she had only to agree. What harm would it do? A psychiatrist would see she was not depressed and she would show Hugh that she cared what he thought, what he wanted. He would feel silly and apologise and things would be the way they were. And so she agreed.

  He took her hand. “Thank you, Maddie. You’ll see—it’ll help.”

  They ate dinner then. For some reason, Madeleine felt shy now. Perhaps it was the knowledge that Hugh was seeing her differently, that he was scrutinising her. Knowing she should not mention her writing or anything connected to her writing, she was not sure what was left to say. She asked Hugh about his work, but he too seemed reluctant to speak of the surgery. So they talked about their meal, of Chinese food in general, then food, the modern obsession with cuisine, celebrity chefs, and then celebrity. In this way they filled the space with conversation. As they washed up the dishes they’d used, Madeleine remembered that there had been two plates as well as two glasses. She let it go.

  They made love that night because not doing so seemed like it would hold too much significance. Madeleine worked, wanting Hugh to find pleasure in her, wanting to bring back that first lust that they once thought would never wane, but which had given way to a kind of content familiar laziness. He seemed careful and, in the final throes, angry, thrusting into her with a battering fierceness, which might have been erotic but was not. And when they were finished, Madeleine told herself that they were both just trying too hard. As Hugh fell asleep, she turned to Edward.

  Scrutiny

  Edward had seen many counsellors and psychologists in the years after the accident. Earnest, harried professionals from the Department, who either cared too much or far too little, followed by the slick, excessively specialised private experts retained by Andy Finlay to testify in his case. Despite the differences, it wasn’t difficult to conglomerate them into a single character, as they had become so in his memory—the result was a strangely removed, sexually ambiguous practitioner who reflected and summarised ad nauseum.

  Edward called the physician Gerry McCauley and made him a man only so that he’d know which pronoun to use. Dr McCauley would, at the request of his old friend, Hugh Lamond, see Madeleine d’Leon on a bi-weekly basis.

  Madeleine’s eyes widened as she stepped into McCauley’s large office. The red and gold seals of various universities and institutes formed an ordered constellation on the white facing wall. A single file sat on the desk, slim, closed. Madeleine presumed it was her file, newly opened. Two leather armchairs, placed at opposite ends of a Persian rug, were angled towards a studded couch. It was this that caught Madeleine’s attention in particular. She had always thought the psychiatrist’s couch a Hollywood myth.

  “The divan is just so I can have a power nap at lunch,” McCauley said smiling. His teeth were large and long—rather like a horse—and he held the smile for a beat too long. “You don’t have to lie on it, I promise you…unless you wa
nt to, of course.”

  Madeleine shook his hand. “The armchairs look perfectly comfortable, Dr. McCauley.” She smiled too, determined to demonstrate as quickly as possible, that she was not depressed.

  He agreed and asked her to take her pick. She chose the seat furthest from the door so that he would not think she was keen to leave…which she was. He wrote a note.

  He sat with one long leg draped over the other as he explained that their sessions would simply be “chats” giving her the opportunity to talk about anything she wanted…that she was simply to regard him as a sympathetic ear.

  She nodded and he made a note.

  Madeleine was tempted to ask him what he was writing, but she thought better of it. Instead she told him about her writing, her method such as it was, how that sometimes made her uncommunicative but did not mean she was depressed.

  “So sometimes you don’t feel like talking?” he said, jotting the fact down.

  “No, it’s not that. Sometimes I’m so caught up with what I’m writing, I forget to talk,” Madeleine struggled to find the correct words. “It’s like getting immersed in a good book and losing track of time. It’s not that I don’t want to talk, I just forget.”

  “Yes, of course I understand.”

  Madeleine wasn’t sure that he did, so she tried to explain further. “I know Hugh thinks I’m depressed, but in some ways I’m happier than I’ve ever been.”

  “In some ways…what ways?”

  “I don’t know. I feel most myself when I’m writing.”

  “Why is that, do you think?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Do you think you might use your writing to avoid confronting other aspects of your life?”

  “What aspects?”

  “How about you tell me?”

  “I have no idea.”

  McCauley wrote a note. Madeleine responded to his silence. “There’s really nothing in my life that I wish to avoid. Everything’s perfect.”