by Primula Bond
‘He’s not in LA, Gustav. He’s right here in Manhattan. I’m certain of it.’
Hot tears of shame and fear blind me, but instead of asking any more questions Gustav nods to himself, as if that’s settled. He reckons I’m definitely unhinged. He pushes me back inside the gallery. My newly hung collection of Venetian photographs, the elegant bridges arching over khaki water, the deathlike masks processing in the distance, are obscured by the darkness. He doesn’t turn on the lights. Nor does he sit down on the couch where we were lying together just now.
He walks over to the desk and picks up our coats. He has his back to me. He pauses, staring up at the only image that is illuminated, of the arched green shuttered window. A bright red row of geraniums are planted in a box below it, and a thin white hand is reaching into the flowers to pinch off a dead petal.
‘I can’t stand seeing you so worked up, darling.’ Gustav turns over his phone. ‘Let’s ask the man himself.’
I galvanise myself. One more effort to make him understand.
‘No! Gustav, listen to me, not him! Then you can never accuse me of concealing anything, and he won’t be able to hold it over me.’
‘Concealing what? Holding what over you? How has our wonderful evening, our gallery opening, our engagement, our dinner reservation, how has it all just imploded?’ Gustav punches in the area code for Los Angeles. ‘I want to know what Pierre has done to scare you like this.’
I grab the phone from him, prising his fingers off the casing. I pathetically hold it behind my back, as if I’m stronger than him.
‘We’re getting married, so there can’t be any secrets or lies. The reason I was so bedraggled and my dress was torn when you found me on that bridge in Venice was because I was running away from him.’ It’s a hoarse whisper, but we can both hear it perfectly. ‘He followed me. He tricked me into thinking he was you, Gustav. We danced together at the ball, and then we went outside—’
‘Let me get this straight. Everyone at the ball was masked, weren’t they? You must be mistaken. You think it was Pierre, I get that, but in fact someone else had their eye on you. Now you’re frightening me, cara.’ His black eyes are shadowed with a fresh anguish that I haven’t seen for months. ‘The man you went outside with was some chancer. My God, Serena. You were molested by a random stranger, and you’ve kept that from me ever since? That’s why you were in such a state when I found you. And that’s why the peacock feather has sent you into hysterics!’
Gustav easily removes the phone from my fist, puts it down and eases my arms into the sleeves of my green leather jacket as calmly as he can before putting on his own coat. Then to my horror he picks up the discarded feather from the doorstep and bends it to fit inside his pocket.
‘You may be listening, but you’re not hearing me, Gustav! I wish it was a stranger who molested me!’ I try to grab the feather out of his coat. ‘Pierre Levi couldn’t have been further from my mind. I assumed you’d come to get me, knowing Polly’s stupid suspicions were a load of rubbish. I assumed you were the man in green velvet! I would never have gone off with him otherwise!’
Gustav pushes me back outside into the cold dark street and locks the gallery door. We stare at each other.
‘Gone off with him?’
Different images are flickering through our minds, leaving scorch marks across the happy optimism of an hour ago.
Gustav is starting to see me with my arms around another man. A faceless, masked stranger. That’s as far as his imagination stretches, for now, but in my mind, all too clearly, it is the reality. Exactly who I was with. Who was carrying me, a willing victim, through the shadows. Who was bundling me into a covered gondola so that we were alone and far from prying eyes.
Above all, I can see myself with Gustav’s brother, falling with him into the cushions, ripping at each other’s clothes. Turned on. Wet. And ready.
‘Answer me, Serena. What did you mean when you said you’d “gone off with him”?’
Gustav presses redial and lifts the phone to his ear.
‘We were dancing and I was calling your name, but then he – the man I thought was you – disappeared so I was running round outside the Palazzo Weinmeyer frantically searching, all the way to Piazza San Marco, thinking I’d lost you again!’ I batter feebly at Gustav’s arm, but he holds the phone away from me. ‘Then you appeared again, the man with the feather, so I let him lead me away from all the chaos and noise. I peppered him with questions. He didn’t speak, but I thought the silence was all part of your game. Then we were on the cushions – we were alone together in this gondola. That’s when I realised it wasn’t you and I ran away.’
Fear bubbles up, silencing me. Gustav is staring at me, but there’s a familiar stony stillness in his face as he waits for Pierre to pick up.
Just then Dickson the Driver glides up to the kerb in the new navy blue Range Rover. I have never been so glad to see him.
‘There must be some sort of explanation. Some mistake.’ Gustav opens the passenger door for me, but his eyes are fixed on the middle distance, waiting for his brother to answer.
‘Mistaken identity on my part, sure—’
‘But if he was there, maybe on Pierre’s part, too. Have you thought of that? He may have thought you were someone else! Christ, the way he goes through women he must have one in every port.’
‘You’re clutching at straws, Gustav. You can’t trust him. He won’t give you a straight answer.’
But what’s the point? The battle lines are drawn once again. And what if he chooses to believe Pierre over me?
Then Pierre will have won, silly. The familiar internal commentary of my cousin Polly, silent for so long when we were estranged, murmurs once again in my ear. You have to fight this tooth and nail.
Gustav frowns when voicemail kicks in at the other end of the phone.
‘I can’t let this happen. The rug is being tugged out from under us again, Serena, just when everything was looking so perfect.’
I reach out for him and run my hand down his anxious face. ‘Gustav! Honey. Everything is perfect. I only told you all this because Pierre reckons he has something to impart, when really it’s something and nothing. Nobody tugged any rugs.’
Rocked the boat, though, didn’t they? Polly’s commentary is in full swing now. Ruffled some feathers!
Gustav holds my hand against his chest and looks down at me. He’s so serious. So pale.
‘It’s not long since your cousin was waving those photos of you and Pierre under my nose, Serena. I know I was too quick to anger that time, and I’ve said I’m sorry, but surely you can see how badly this affects me? I need to see Pierre. He set me straight about Polly’s photographs and I need him to do it again. I won’t rest until I hear his version of this Venice business. It’s only fair.’
Gustav cuts off the phone without leaving a message and places me firmly into the car as if he’s a cop and I might make a run for it. Dickson starts the car and we move smoothly away from the gallery. Why do I feel like the condemned woman?
‘No, it’s not fair. I’m your fiancée and I’ve told you what happened. He’s your lying brother. You can’t believe a single word that comes out of his mouth!’ I snap the seatbelt so fast that the metal takes a bite out of my finger. ‘Let me count the ways. He ran away with your wife and didn’t speak to you for five years. He came back into your life with all these accusations. He strung Polly along and then dumped her. He told you he wanted to forgive and forget, then he kissed me and tried to steal me from you. Now he’s suggested I leave you. You should be listening to me, Gustav. You need to believe me!’
Gustav turns to me, takes me by the shoulders and gives me a little shake. His black eyes bore into mine until they blur and go out of focus.
‘I am listening to you, Serena. I will always listen to you, so long as you’re telling me the truth.’ His lips are pressed hard in my hair, but he’s not entirely with me. ‘Pierre deserves the chance to explain himself, too. So if he
sent this feather as you say, and he’s not in LA – as you also say – then we can do this face to face. And I know exactly where to find him.’
CHAPTER TWO
The diagonal journey across Manhattan is like a parody of a car chase. We are in a rush to find Pierre, yet the evening traffic is against us and we are crawling rather than careering. The set of Dickson’s broad shoulders as he steers skilfully through the one-way grid system would normally make me feel safe and secure. But the atmosphere in the car is too tense.
Gustav keeps trying his brother’s number. I pray with all my might that Pierre is nowhere to be found, because he’s the one Gustav will listen to next. I’ve told him we sneaked off together, and then I realised my mistake and ran away, but how can I tell my fiancé how perilously close Pierre and I were to shattering everything?
Pierre won’t hold back. Oh no. He’ll rehearse every gory detail. The ripped muslin drawers, the velvet buttons flipping open his velvet breeches, my legs pulling him towards me as I urged him to hurry, the rope he tied round my wrist to keep me there. He won’t tell Gustav how I stopped him. He’ll put his own spin on it and say we went the whole way. He’ll convince Gustav that we’ve committed the worst possible deception.
We pass Katz’s Deli where Sally faked her orgasm in front of Harry – God, if only life was so simple – and cross over Rivington Street.
I can’t work out where we are. According to Polly, when she did some digging to find out more about him, Pierre lives in an apartment still owned by Gustav’s ex-wife Margot. But Polly said it was in Soho, not the Lower East Side, which is where we are now. It’s an area I’ve never been into, and after the almost eerie quiet of the Meatpacking District late at night, this place is still humming with neon-lit stores and cafés. Dickson drives behind the main drag and pulls round into a narrower street. The engine of the car sounds intrusive and loud bouncing off the tall, looming tenement buildings, where iron fire-escapes zig-zag across the red brick walls above the back entrances of bars and restaurants.
Polly was wrong. After all, she has never been here. Pierre never invited her to stay, even when, for those intense few months over the winter, they were lovers. Dickson, however, knows exactly where he’s heading. This might be Pierre’s apartment now, but Dickson must have driven here plenty of times in the past when someone else was in residence. When he had that other passenger in his car.
‘I hoped I’d never come to this godforsaken place again. Despite what Polly thinks she deduced, Margot has no hold over Pierre any more. She walked out of that apartment and out of his life six years ago, so the fact that he’s been living there all this time means he’s even more boneheaded than I thought,’ mutters Gustav half to himself as the car stops. He steps out into the cold night air and shudders as if someone has just thrown a bucket of iced water over him. ‘I guess staying there rent-free swung it for him. But I should have sold it when I had the chance rather than let Margot keep it.’
There’s the clatter of cutlery and barked orders from the surrounding restaurant kitchens. The primaeval heartbeat of club music thumps up from somewhere underground. But this street has a dark silence all of its own. It reminds me of the ghetto area of Venice where I wandered with my camera last month, thinking of Gustav. Thinking of Manhattan. Thinking it was all over between us.
The city noises clang and echo in my ears. The tall buildings in this narrow dark street are bending over, intent on crushing us. My fiancé turns his back on me, still clutching his mobile phone, and glares up at the mostly unlit windows in the building above.
I can no longer escape the series of disasters that has brought us to this narrow dark street. Maybe to the metaphorical end of the road.
The reason Polly had the incriminating photographs of me and Pierre which so infuriated Gustav was that she had been stalking us. The reunion of her boyfriend with his brother Gustav meant that when Pierre dumped her for no apparent reason after the New Year, Polly thought I could help her. So when Pierre commissioned me to shoot a storyboard at the theatre where he was working, that seemed like the perfect opportunity. Polly asked me to find out what was going on in Pierre’s head and ask him if he would take her back.
But instead of trusting me to carry out my mission, she decided to spy on Pierre and me in the Gramercy Hotel bar. And if she’d heard how graphic the conversation became she would have pounced on us sooner.
When I interrogated him about my poor cousin, Pierre decided not only to share but to shock. He laid out his entire sexual history in intimate detail. I was given chapter and verse about the volcanic sex he and Gustav’s ex-wife Margot indulged in after they had run away together, and how ultimately it destroyed him, because when she chewed him up and spat him out six months later, he realised no other woman would ever match up.
He had spent five years searching for the perfect specimen. Polly looked promising when they met at a magazine shoot. She was sexier than most, prettier, funnier, and English like him. They even shared a flair for fashion and style. But in the end, despite her connection with me and Gustav, she was the latest in a long line of casualties. Women who would never satisfy him.
Except that then, fired up by my slightly drunken attention, Pierre hinted that someone new might have come close. Me. He helped me into my coat as I prepared to leave, and knowing I was flummoxed by his insinuations he ran his lips across my mouth, and that’s what my cousin saw.
So Polly took this as hard evidence that I was the reason Pierre had dumped her. His own damaged psyche was too complex to grasp. And when she stormed into our apartment, Gustav chose to believe a couple of grainy photographs over my emphatic professions of innocence.
That was the night my world caved in. Polly thought I’d gone behind her back with the boyfriend she still wanted. Gustav thought I’d been unfaithful with his own newly returned brother. I was incandescent that the pair of them could have so little faith.
So I went alone to Venice. Vulnerable. Broken-hearted. The perfect target for Pierre Levi. He came after me, impersonated his brother and got within an inch of penetrating me.
But I need to focus on what’s happening now.
I follow Gustav towards the apartment block, but before I reach him I see that parked outside the entrance is a sleek grey Porsche.
‘Let’s go home, Gustav. Better still, let’s get that table you booked at La Lanterna before it goes to someone else. We’ve got plans to make! We can just walk away, and you and Pierre can carry on as you were. He got it wrong, that’s all. He’ll be like a cornered animal if we go storming in there. He’ll lash out.’ I tug on Gustav’s sleeve, aware that I’m mewling like a kicked kitten. ‘You won, and he lost! Think how embarrassed he’ll be!’
Gustav stares at the apartment building, his arm hanging by his side. ‘Embarrassment won’t cut it! He could try shame. Remorse, if it’s true that he tried to take advantage of you. Sorrow, for upsetting and confusing you like this. And as for winning and losing? Serena, this isn’t a competition!’
‘It is to him, Gustav! That’s just it! He’s desperate to be your little brother again, but he also wants whatever you’ve got! That’s how it’s always been. He wanted, and took, Margot—’
‘She stole him, you mean. She knew exactly how to hurt me the most. He may have been a willing participant, but he was still a kid.’ Gustav’s face is set in a series of hard lines as he takes another step across the pavement. ‘Going after my girlfriend six years later is totally different.’
Yet again I regret saying anything. I slide my hand up to his face, lay it on his cheek. I can feel the muscles flickering with tension around his clenched jaw.
‘We can drop this now. What’s important is that you and he have made up. You’re brothers. So he’s jealous. He looks up to you. He wants what you have. Gustav, you’ve both worked so hard to get back to where you were. Don’t spoil it.’
‘He’s the one who’s spoiling it. Just when my life was settled again. Just when I wanted to
sit down and start thinking of where and when we might get married. Why does he never learn? Why did he have to mess with you, of all people? Why does he have to trample all over other people’s happiness like that? He had his own chance of romantic bliss with your poor cousin, and he blew it. He can’t have you. No one else will ever have you!’
We stare at each other out there in the street. The possessive words thrill me, but the new rage in his voice terrifies me, too.
‘I thought you were angry with me, Gustav. But if you’re not, let’s just – let’s just get away from here.’
‘I’m angry with everyone and everything at the moment. You think your life is finally on track – lovely girl, successful businesses, brotherly love restored, rosy future – and then a feather, of all things, wafts in out of nowhere and turns it all upside down. What you’ve said, or tried to say, has really shaken me up.’ He takes my hand and pulls me after him. ‘But it’s Pierre who has crossed a line.’
As we pass the Porsche, I touch the bonnet. The metal is still hot.
Gustav pushes open the big glass-panelled front door of the apartment building. We step out of the dark street into an even darker hallway. But there’s a certain faded grandeur to it, with high ceilings and period cornices. The wall-mounted lights flicker and crackle, making it even gloomier.
I try once more to stop this.
‘Pierre can’t help himself. Margot fatally corrupted him. I was a juicy challenge, just because I’m female. He was arrogant, and I was stupid. Darling, I’m so sorry. Your relationship with Pierre will survive this. No harm’s done. He’ll be hunting some other woman by now.’
Pierre’s boast comes back to me. Anything with a pulse and a pussy will do.
‘You’re not “some other woman”. You’re my woman.’ Gustav pulls me roughly towards him and kisses me. ‘Thank God he didn’t get what he wanted. But if I let it go, all that communication closes off again. Don’t you see? He needs to know he can’t shit on me.’
