Lying In Bed

by Rose, M. J.

  While it is only one kiss, two pair of lips coming together, it has sensors that seek out the empty crevices in your psyche where you have forgotten feelings that are waiting, dormant, ready to bloom and burst and then explode. Firecrackers of blossoms.

  This one kiss, if it lasts, turns into a kind of cut. Slicing open those places where want rises up and surges, up, up, up though your blood vessels and nerve endings. And mixed up with the spirit of that kiss can be a palatable sadness if you can’t find what you need from it because it is so new you don’t know where to look.

  It teases. It suggests a road unfurling in front of you and you think that if you follow where it leads, you will find the end of the kiss which will be a beginning of more kisses that will lead to other tastes and touches and sensations.

  Except deep inside of you there is another reality you don’t want to accept. It nudges you, reminds you that you have had first kisses before and you know, as miraculous as they are, you cannot count on them. As much as it seems as if worlds are opening up, they might not stay open. One of you will walk in a straight line and the other will zigzag. And even if it appears that you both want to take that road, and keep up the same pace, the road itself will reach a hill only one of you will climb, or a valley only one of you will be willing to descend into.

  Our first kiss was a promise.

  And it was more.

  It was gentle and passionate at first. As light as the fragrance of the lilacs and as deep as the color of the roses. It was as much about discovery and it was about destination.

  It was those things for both of us. I could tell that. And that alone made it astonishing. We were exchanging the same kiss.

  Under the trees that rained petals on us, our lips pressed to each other’s and our mouths opened at the same time and, as much as I knew better, the kiss seemed to answer questions that I had never before been willing to ask, much less hear the answers.

  When we broke apart, both breathless and overwhelmed, neither of us said anything. We sat, surrounded by the hundreds of flowers we’d bought at the market, many of them now crushed and bruised, and we simply looked at each other.

  Then Gideon smiled.

  The business that had brought us there was, for the moment, beyond recollection. Who we had been before was changed. What had happened to us with other people didn’t matter.

  I forgot, and he forgot, that we were there to compose a story for the woman he was having a relationship with. And in those few minutes before we remembered, neither of us said anything, we reveled in what it had been like to come together.

  He took my hand and turned it over and brought my palm to his mouth and kissed me again in a very different way. Giving. Not taking anything back this time. Not asking for anything or any knowledge of me, but bestowing information to another part of my body which accepted it, willingly. It was more intimate because I watched it, saw his head bowed over my hand, felt his fingers holding me to him, saw his shoulders strain over me.

  “We can’t do this,” I said finally.

  “Why?”

  “You’re with someone,” I said with chagrin. Shocked that he could forget. Elated that he could.

  “Are you?”

  I shook my head.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  I wasn’t even sure what he meant by that - was he sorry I wasn’t with someone. Or that he was sorry he was? Or was he just sorry that he had kissed me?

  It didn’t matter. I couldn’t ask. Instead, I said: “Don’t be.”

  “Are you frightened?”

  I nodded. “How did you know? No. Don’t tell me - something in my face.”

  “In your eyes. But it doesn’t have anything to do with me being involved with someone does it? Something else made you frightened.”

  I nodded.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Really?”

  “I wasn’t. Frightened. Not when you were kissing me.”

  “No. I could tell that. If you had been I would have stopped. What happened since then?”

  I didn’t know. I wanted to turn away. Away from him. I couldn’t stand looking into his eyes anymore because every time I did he figured out more about me.

  That was what frightened me, I realized.

  “You know what it is, don’t you?”

  I took my hand back from him, surprised that he was still holding it, not realizing that he had been gripping me the whole time we’d been talking.

  “Do you want to stop?” I asked him, not answering his last question.

  “Stop what?”

  “The stories. Should I stop writing them for you? I won’t hold you to the deal. It’s all right. I don’t even want to get paid for what I’ve done.”

  I could read his eyes now and saw worry fill them. A frown creased his forehead and narrowed his eyes. “No. I don’t want to stop,” he was talking about the stories wasn’t he? Why did I think he might be talking about the kiss? About another kiss. About more than a kiss?

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m frightened too, Marlowe. And when I get that feeling I want to throw myself into the center of what’s scaring me.”

  “That makes you perverse.”

  “Because your way of dealing with fear is to walk away from it?”

  “I know how to protect myself.”

  “Or you think you know.”

  I felt sad then. Feeling the edges of a thought forming but not wanting to focus on it, I looked down at all of the crushed flowers under us and around us. Couldn’t we go backward to where we had been before the kiss? Before the silent promises that, I told myself, over and over, were in my imagination.

  I stood up. “What should we do with the flowers?”

  “Leave them here. Imagine how it will be for people who walk by this spot today. What they will think when they see them. What they will imagine.”

  We began to walk away and were halfway down the hill when he stopped.

  “Wait. Wait for me here.” He left me and ran back up to the trees. He bent down. His back was to me and I couldn’t see what he was doing until he turned around. He was coming back to me, holding out a bouquet of pure white peonies with red tipped centers, offering them to me.

  He watched as I started to reach, but then I hesitated. It seemed that if I took them I would be agreeing to something. And I wasn’t sure I should. I wasn’t certain that it was the best thing for me.

  Before, a long time ago, I’d been this scared. But that was a fearless alarm. The way only someone who is younger can know they are doing something wrong and be scared but also be brave and daring at the same time. To know there is danger but not to care. In fact, to crave the risks.

  Then, I wanted to feel everything being offered to me.

  Now, I wanted to reject the offer itself and feel nothing.

  I meant to drop my hand and not take the peonies. I think Gideon expected it, too. But that was not what happened.

  Part III

  “Come!

  Come!!

  Come!!!”

  – Sarah Bernhardt in a letter to Charles Haas in 1869

  27.

  At home that night, I wandered around my own loft, dazed and slightly bewildered by what had happened earlier. Finally at 7 o’clock, I made myself scrambled eggs and a toasted English muffin, which I pretended to eat. I wasn’t hungry. I kept replaying the kiss, actually feeling the sensations all over again and being stunned by then.

  That’s happened to me only once before. A physical act that repeats without encouragement, stunning in its clarity.

  I finally gave up on the eggs, poured a glass of wine and climbed onto my bed to watch “Sabrina” with Audrey Hepburn, which I’d seen at least a dozen times. With the movie playing in the background, I turned on my laptop and wrote out the fantasy I’d talked out in front of Gideon that morning.

  I hoped that if I wrote with the movie on it would distract me, and hopefully I wouldn’t c
onnect to what I was writing in a personal way.

  I couldn’t have done it by hand. It would have been too painful to form all those words with my fingers, to see the shapes swirl and curve and climb in my own handwriting. I needed to separate from the story. It wasn’t me lying in the bower of flowers. I wasn’t smelling them and feeling their fragrance overwhelm me. It was a nameless, faceless woman. Narrower than I was. Blonder. She was sweet looking without the cruel set to her mouth that I see on my own when I look in the mirror. In her eyes there was nothing of the sense of cynicism that hardly ever leaves mine. She could believe in the story because Gideon was falling in love with her. And what had happened in the park with me was only a momentary confusion that she didn’t know about.

  I finished up at about 9:30. Unable to reread it, I printed it out, folded it in thirds, put it in an envelope, and put it on the little table by the front door. I’d mail it in the morning.

  It was like having a small fire burning, unprotected in the grate, building up to a frenzied heat which might at any moment blaze brighter and reach out to do even more damage.

  I got up, grabbed my keys and the envelope and left my loft. I wanted the story out of there.

  Even though it was ten o’clock, my neighborhood was busy. SoHo, which had once been an isolated part of New York, was now simply another gentrified section of the city. There were people coming home, going out to walk the dog or meet friends for drinks, or strolling on a warm May night. There was nothing to fear from the well-lit streets and pedestrians. The thing I was afraid of had been inside of me. Hopefully, I’d exorcised it with the writing, but had I?

  The kiss had been a momentary aberration.

  I knew better than to be fooled by a man’s passion. Or my own. Lust is so fickle, motivated by so many of the wrong impulses. Fooling us into thinking it has some significance when it has none.

  Gideon’s studio was close by and it didn’t take me long to walk the two blocks downtown and three blocks west to 35 Broome St. The red stone building was a mid-19th-century structure. Five stories high, renovated and refurbished, it had an elegance that I marveled at – these buildings had been factories and yet they were artfully designed.

  The glass and iron front door was locked. Of course it was. And of course the mailboxes were inside the vestibule. I should have known that. It was the same in my building.

  So why had I really marched over here to drop off the story?

  Feeling suddenly foolish, I turned and walked down the two front stone steps. At the corner, while I stood waiting for traffic to pass, I glimpsed Gideon on the other side of the street about to cross. Clearly, he was coming home.

  How could I disappear so he couldn’t see me?

  It was too late. He’d already noticed me and waved, motioning to me that I should stay where I was and he would cross the street. There was no escape. I only hoped that he wouldn’t ask me what I was doing here, that we were close enough to the store and where I lived that he wouldn’t question running into me.

  “Hi.” His smile was too intimate. His eyes too focused on mine. “You on your way home?”

  “Yes.”

  “You live nearby don’t you?”

  “Just a few blocks away, not far from the store.”

  “I think you told me that.”

  “Maybe. I think I did. I might have.”

  “This is stupid, Marlowe. For us to stand here and make small talk. Do you have to go home right now? Can you come upstairs?”

  “I don’t think I should.”

  “That’s not what I asked you. No. You probably shouldn’t. But I want you to. And you want to. So you will, won’t you? I’ll make you a drink. I’ll even show you some of my work.”

  Maybe if he hadn’t mentioned showing me his work I might have been able to walk away. But by then I was desperate to see it because I was so badly hoping that it was going to be terrible. And, if it was, then I’d feel differently about him. No matter how attracted I was to him, if I hated his sculpture, if he had no talent, if his work was as pointless and vapid as most of the artwork I saw at most of the shows I went to, I’d be immune to him. I could go back to doing my job for him and not be tempted anymore.

  And his work would be awful. I was sure of that. Because there were so few people who really studied their craft anymore, so few artists who stretched and tried to create anything using a moral compass as well as they used a blowtorch or a brush or chisel or shining silver camera.

  We climbed three flights of old marble stairs. On the fourth floor we walked down the hallway to a metal door with three locks on it. One by one, Gideon opened them, and then held the door open for me.

  “The locks came with the place,” he explained.

  “They’re not a bad idea.”

  “Three? They’re overkill.”

  The first thing I saw before Gideon turned on the light was a room full of people in shadow. They conveyed an immediate sense of power and purpose and their stance and size immediately communicated heroism.

  Once he flicked the switch for the overheads, the six full size people were revealed as bronze sculptures. Three women. Three men. Nudes.

  They were all of a piece - so you didn’t feel as if you were looking at separate people but a planned grouping. The surface of each shone with a rich patina on the metal that called out to me to come closer.

  I stepped forward and saw them all for the first time, not in profile but from the front: each of the six people was split in half, lengthwise, and between each half was a foot of space, large enough to walk through. Gideon didn’t have to tell me what to do. The work insisted I take a journey though them. And when I did, I was surprised yet again, to find that the insides were mirrored.

  I stood inbetween the two halves of a young man and looked to my right and then my left, seeing my own face and body reflected back at me.

  It took about ten minutes for me to walk through the group, stopping often to examine each and to notice how I fit into each of them.

  It was an unearthly feeling. To find myself inside each of them, part of all six of them - a woman my age, a boy much younger than me, a pregnant woman, an older man.

  There was a theme and a meaning to this work, an investigation into how we interact. Questions raised about separateness, isolation, and connections.

  This was not what I’d expected. It was, though, what I had feared: a powerful statement by an accomplished artist. Careful, creative, wildly thought-provoking.

  I found Gideon in the kitchen where he was opening a bottle of wine.

  “Do you want some of this? Or would you rather have coffee?”

  “Wine, please.”

  I watched him take glasses out of the cabinet and pour us each deep red burgundy. And then I followed him back into the living area which consisted of two deep cushioned dark brown leather sofas and a slab of glass sitting atop rocks that had been shaved clean to make a base.

  “What are they called?” I gestured back to the sculpture.

  “The show is called Mirroring. Each of the people is numbered but not named.”

  I was still looking at them across the room, not sure of what I wanted to say, or even knowing if I’d be able to express it. “I’m surprised,” I finally offered and then realized how vapid I sounded. “I didn’t expect anything that strong.”

  “Because?” He was smiling.

  “This is silly. You know how good you are, don’t you? It’s redundant for me to say anything.”

  “I know that my work says what I want it to say. And I know that certain people get it. I knew you would. But I try not to worry about whether I’m good or not. That’s a judgment call I’m satisfied to let other people make.”

  “Why? How can you be?” I was thinking, damn it, I was thinking of Cole who was so preoccupied with how other people viewed his work, obsessed actually over what they said about it and how they perceived him.

  “How can what other people say matter to me? The minute you crea
te something you have a choice – you can be satisfied you’ve been true to your own ethics and aesthetics and judge yourself only on how well you succeeded at creating what you wanted to this time. Or you can give it to the world and let them tell you what to think about yourself and your efforts. I think the latter would be setting yourself up for misery.”

  “But what they think makes a difference in how you will be received. On your success or failure.”

  “Not in my own eyes. If someone judges my work poorly, I have the right to reject or accept their opinion. I also get to judge them back. If I find them wanting, or uneducated, or incapable of making the kinds of distinctions that are necessary in making an informed opinion, then what they say simply can’t matter.”

  “You’re that strong? That sure of yourself?”

  “If you want to call it that. I think I’m clear about what I need to do in order to survive as an artist.”

  “I’m not sure I understand the difference?”

  “Marlowe, I need to create. This–” he gestured toward the sculpture, “is what feeds me and makes me feel alive. So I have to be protective about the place in me where the creativity lives. If I started to take other people’s opinions into account it would pollute me. I know that. I’ve seen it happen with other artists. There are people whose work I admire, who I trust and whose opinions matters. But the random critic or stranger who comes to my work with their own subjective likes and dislikes and prejudices? Nope, I can’t give into that kind of self-flagellation.”

  “Well, I’m envious of you. And actually a little bit in awe of you. After what I–”

  I had been about to tell him about Cole. About his work and his need for strangers admiration. About his willingness to break faith with me in order to be provocative and ensure attention. I wanted badly to tell someone about the position Cole was putting me in. About how worried I was about my family finding out about us. But I couldn’t. No one knew. I’d kept it secret so long.

  What bothered me the most, I realized, as I twisted around on Gideon’s couch to look at his work again, was that Cole had tricked me into being someone I wasn’t. He had seduced me into acting a role that I wasn’t right for. For the wrong reasons, I had gone along with it, and now I was going to have to pay the price, in public.