The Edge of Forever

by Bretton, Barbara

  Her face burned with embarrassment and she damned the brandy for the slip. “I’m not a cab driver. I’m a chauffeur. There’s a difference.”

  “Not much of one,” he persisted, glancing quickly at Hunt, who was crouched down in front of them, sketching madly.

  “You should see my W-2 forms,” she shot back. “There’s one hell of a difference.”

  “You’re evading the issue, Margarita.”

  “That’s my right.”

  He shook his head. “When you make a provocative statement, you owe it to your listeners to explain it.”

  She started to laugh despite herself. “Robert’s Rules of Order again?”

  “Maybe.” He rested a hand on her knee. “Bare your soul. It’ll do you good.”

  “Wait just a minute, Alessio.” She put the brandy down on a side table and sat up straight. “I haven’t heard you volunteering any provocative statements we can question.”

  He shrugged, those powerful shoulders pulling at the seams of his faded black sweater. “Writer’s block,” he said. “How’s that for an excuse?”

  “Writer’s block covers only creation," Meg reminded him. "We’re talking families here.”

  He leaned forward, elbows resting on his thighs, head hanging down. His profile was sharply delineated, the proud lines of his forehead and nose reminding her of statues she’d seen in Rome. No wonder Hunt loved sketching him.

  Hunt, however, had put his sketch pad down and was sprawled out on the floor at their feet. “I love family secrets,”he said, his long and skinny frame stretching almost from one end of the Oriental carpet to the other. “Would you believe I’m the black sheep in the Kendall closet?”

  Meg and Joe looked at one another then burst out laughing. Hunt seemed more amused than annoyed.

  “Evidently you have no trouble,” he observed. “No Kendall had ever ventured into any profession save law and medicine. I am a consummate disgrace to a long line of ambulance chasers and quacks.” His narrow face was righteous with indignation. “My dears, can you imagine this: they wouldn’t let me wear my turquoise jumpsuit to my sister Eleanor’s wedding?”

  “I’m astounded,” Meg said, giggling. “I’ll bet they even wanted you to take off your diamond stud.”

  “Truth,” Joe said quietly to the younger man. “That’s not the way it went down.”

  “Score one for the fiction writer who knows a good yarn when he hears one.” Hunt struggled to look amused but the pain was there in his eyes just the same. “I wore the requisite black suit, left the jewelry at home, but I was still the same disappointment.” He went on to tell them how his family had cut him out of the inheritance he’d been due to receive a year ago on his twenty-first birthday. He went from heir to a fortune to being heir to a truckload of bills. A career in the art world could be heartbreaking at the very least. Trying to pay for the supplies his elaborate sculptures demanded was backbreaking, as well.

  “How do you manage?” Joe asked. “How in hell do you manage to keep body and soul together?”

  Hunt made a face and gestured at his bony frame. “The body’s tough,” he said. “Friends in the arts help keep the soul alive.”

  Meg was quiet. His words had reached a part of her heart she’d been trying to shield. Where she had liked Hunt before and been amused by his sardonic wit and bizarre sense of style, now she admired him for pursuing his dream even at great cost. Joe apparently felt the same way, for she saw a softening in his eyes as he looked at the younger man sprawled at his feet.

  “And you want to show them, don’t you, Kendall?” The intensity Meg had come to recognize as being part of Joe’s creative process gave his words more impact than they usually had. “You want to be the biggest damn success you can just to prove they were wrong.”

  Hunt threw back his head and laughed. “So right, but it’s not as simple as that.”

  “It’s never simple,” Joe said. “Family dynamics shape us all our lives.”

  “How about you?” Meg loosened her French braid and let her hair tumble over her shoulders. Joe seemed spellbound by her movements, a fact she noted and enjoyed. “What about your own family dynamics?”

  “Complicated,” he said, dragging his hand through his thick dark hair. “Complicated and classic. I’m the middle of seven kids, three sisters before me, two after.”

  “The only son!” Meg exclaimed. “Your cradle must have been lined with gold.”

  “Better check your math, Margarita,” he said. “That only adds up to six kids.” He stood up, stepping over Hunt, and walked over to the fireplace. “We’re forgetting the jewel in the family crown.” He picked up an andiron and prodded the dying fire. Embers sputtered, and a tongue of flame shot up with a hissing, sizzling sound. “My brother Marco was born when I was five.”

  “With five sisters, I’m sure you weren’t starving for attention.”

  “In a normal family, maybe not. But Marco was the baby, and their last. He became the sun, and the rest of us revolved around him.”

  Meg, who understood all too well what he was saying, nodded. “What’s he like?”

  “Handsome, charming, talented—“ Joe stopped and shook his head. “He’s only twenty-eight, and he already has his doctorate in physics from Cornell.”

  Hunt had slid over to a spot over ten feet away from Meg and was furiously sketching her while she watched Joe.

  “You’re not jealous, are you?” Meg got up and joined him near the hearth, ignoring Hunt’s mumbled protests about perspective. “You have twenty-six books to your credit. You’re an enormous success! Your family must be so proud of you.”

  Joe arched a brow in her direction. “Guess again, Lindstrom. It was bad enough when I was writing sexy Westerns and Star Trek novelizations, but family sagas under a woman’s name are completely beyond their comprehension.”

  She thought of what he’d told her a few days ago about his working class family and their distrust of artists in general and writers in particular. According to Joe, the Alessio family respected those who worked with their hands and proved it by working up a good sweat in the process. Cerebral activities were highly suspect.

  “I wouldn’t think a Ph.D. would be high on their list either.” This time it was she who forced him to meet her eyes. “That’s hardly physical labor.”

  “No, it isn’t,” he admitted. “But it’s respectable.”

  “Respectable?” Her voice went high with indignation. “What you do isn’t?”

  “Not to them. I don’t get dressed every morning and go out to a regular nine-to-five job. I don’t get regular paychecks from a fancy university. And most of all, I don’t appear on television with Johnny Carson to talk about Halley’s Comet. I’m just the one who buys them houses and bails them out of trouble.”

  “Your brother was on Carson?” Hunt sounded quite impressed despite his counterculture tendencies.

  “Twice,” Joe said. “Once with Carl Sagan and once alone.”

  “And what about you?” Meg persisted. “You must have been on TV, too. I mean, all those books! You must have done plenty of—“

  Joe shook his head. “You’re forgetting one very important fact: I write under a woman’s name.” He leaned over and picked up a cigarette from the top of the end table and lit it. “When they ask to interview Angelique Moreau, they hardly want a jock with a five o’clock shadow showing up at their studio.”

  Meg was irate. “To write all these books, to even get on the Times list, and not even see your own name on the cover.” She shook her head in dismay. “I don’t think my ego could cope with it. I’d want to see my name somewhere.”

  Joe stubbed his barely smoked cigarette out in one of the many crystal ashtrays scattered throughout the house. “I got my own back on this last one.”

  “Against All Odds?” she asked.

  “You may not see my name on that cover, but you see just about everything else of me.”

  A vivid picture of that highly erotic cover poppe
d into her mind. She recalled every angle and plane of that gloriously dark, delicious virile man on the cover who looked so much like Joe that—

  “Oh my God!” she breathed. “You?”

  He grinned. “Me.”

  “You posed for the cover?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But that man was practically naked!”

  “Not ‘practically,’” Joe said. “Completely.” His grin was downright wicked.

  “Wasn’t that a little bit . . . difficult?” All she could think about was the lushness of the heroine’s body and the way his hands had been poised just above her ripe and welcoming form.

  The grin widened. “Extremely.”

  “You look like you enjoyed it.”

  “I did.” His eyes twinkled as he looked at her. “Immensely.”

  The alarm on Hunt’s watch sounded. “Speaking of posing, it’s time for me to go.” He gathered up his sketch pad and pencils. “I have a model coming over in half an hour.”

  Joe glanced at his watch. “It’s almost midnight, Kendall. Why not tomorrow morning?”

  “There’s a full moon tonight,” he said, heading toward the hallway. “Ivan only poses on the night of the full moon because—“

  Meg laughed and put her hands in the air. “No details, Hunt, please! Just have fun.”

  “I fully intend to, darling.” He waved at them, but just before he went upstairs to get the keys to the studio across the yard, he turned to Meg and mouthed the words, “I told you so.”

  “What was that all about?” Joe asked when Hunt disappeared.

  “He’s gloating,” she said. “He told me last week you were the cover model and I told him he was crazy.”

  “You didn’t see the resemblance?”

  Meg’s visual memory was superb. The cover in all its full-blown eroticism filled her mind. “Oh, I definitely saw it,” she said finally. “It just never occurred to me that it could be you.”

  “I’ll admit it’s a flattering picture, but I’d think you’d know it’s me.”

  She couldn’t tell him that the reason she didn’t dwell on the possibility was because she loved beauty in all its forms and knew it could easily be her downfall.

  “Now that I think of it,” Joe said, “it looks more like Marco than me.”

  “Marco, the wonder boy?”

  Joe’s laugh was bittersweet. “One and the same.”

  “Not to me,” she said. “I can’t imagine anyone but you on that cover.”

  “You haven’t met Marco. Maybe then you’d feel differently.”

  “I don’t want to meet Marco. I’m satisfied with the original.”

  His smile was without the sadness she’d noticed a few moments ago. “I appreciate the kind words, ma’am. When I’m in my rocking chair, I’ll look back on them and be mighty grateful.”

  “Watch it, Angelique,” she said with a wink. “You’re slipping back into your Western mode.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “The only time we’re in trouble is when I start muttering, ‘Beam me aboard, Scotty.’”

  Meg poured them each a bit more Cointreau. She handed Joe his glass, then curled back up on the couch. She watched as he look a long sip and sighed in appreciation.

  “Anna knew her libations, didn’t she?”

  Meg took a sip and let the warmth slide down her throat. “It’s a wonder any of us accomplished anything here with a bar like she had.”

  “Don’t be fooled by the mighty accomplishments we’ve been cataloging,” he said, sitting down next to her on the couch. “For every artist or writer who made the grade, there must have been ten who ended up selling suitcases at the mall.”

  Meg toyed with the rim of her glass. “Or driving limos.”

  “Or driving limos.” There was a long pause. “Why, Margarita?” She wondered how he made his deep voice sound so sweetly seductive. “What made you give it up?”

  She put her near-empty glass down on the end table and sighed. “I lost it,” she said quietly. “One day I was filled with burning ambition, and the next—“ She snapped her fingers. “Gone.”

  He reached over and took her right hand, lacing his fingers loosely through hers and resting them together on his knee. “It’s never that simple, Margarita.”

  “Of course it’s not.” She took a deep breath, marshaling her thoughts, trying to put complex and irrational emotions into a simple and rational form. “I suppose it’s a case of family dynamics again. For you, there’s Marco; for me, it was Kay.”

  “Your sister?”

  She nodded. “Kay gave me a little Instamatic camera when I was ten years old that started the whole thing. No matter how busy she was with her career, she was always there for me, always pushing me forward, always opening doors for me. She was even responsible for my discovering the Colony. When she died—well, success didn’t seem so important anymore.”

  Joe squeezed her hand. “You were afraid you’d fail without her guidance?”

  Meg looked at him, a half smile on her face. “Maybe I was afraid I’d succeed.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do I,” she said. “At least not completely. All I can tell you is when I won my second award two months after Kay’s death, I withdrew from professional organizations, stopped submitting my work, and started traveling.”

  “Maybe you were burned out,” he said. “It happens.”

  “I was only twenty-three, Joe. I hadn’t had time to even catch fire yet, much less burn out. It went deeper than that.” It seemed paradoxical that the less gifted daughter would survive the brilliant star. The look of betrayal on her parents’ faces had reinforced any vague feelings of injustice and guilt that Meg had felt at the time.

  “You said we were talking about family dynamics. So far you’ve only mentioned your sister. What part do you parents play in this?”

  “Very little now.” She withdrew her hand from Joe’s and wrapped her arms around her chest. The fire had dwindled and she was suddenly chilled to the bone. “We were a classic example of how not to handle a tragedy. When Kay died, we fell apart, each of us in his or her own way.”

  “Where are they?”

  “They retired to Arizona. I don’t see them much.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I would be, too,” she said, “if things had been different. The truth is, Kay’s death only confirmed something I’d always known: they really had just one child who mattered, and that child was Kay. When she died, they lost everything.”

  How stronge. How amazing it was to be able to say those words and not feel her heart breaking. She’d always imagined she would shatter in a million pieces if she admitted the way things had always been, and would always be, with her parents, but there she was, still breathing, still whole, sitting there on the overstuffed sofa in Anna’s study, sharing the secret of her heart with a man who watched her with beautiful green eyes that absorbed her sadness and helped take away the hurt.

  His hand rested gently on her shoulder, fingers moving against the back of her neck with long, soothing strokes.

  “They still had you,” he said, anger coloring his words. “Why couldn’t they see that?”

  “There was never any contest.” Kay had been a child of wonder and light, while Meg was a child of uncertainty and shadow. “Kay was everything I wasn’t. She was courageous and confident, while I was solitary and insecure. She even died a hero.” She sighed. “All in all, my parents thought she was the better deal.”

  Joe’s fingers were toying with a lock of her silky hair. Every now and then he would brush against her cheek with the back of his hand, and a tremor would rock her body. “How did she die?” he asked then shot her a look. “You can tell me to mind me own damned business.”

  “I’ve told you everything else,” she said. “Why not this.” She paused long enough to collect her emotions. It was still hard to think of her sister’s death. “Kay was working in Manhattan for the independent news stat
ion as their anchorwoman. A man whose daughter died during a simple appendectomy was holding hostages at the University Hospital. The SWAT teams couldn’t get through to him. He said he’d release the hostages if Kay would meet him in person and interview him on camera.”

  Across the room the grandfather clock chimed midnight and they could hear the sound of Hunt’s footsteps as he raced around upstairs.

  “Of course, the police were completely against it, but Kay was an idealist,” Meg continued. “She didn’t care that much about the story—she wasn’t a street reporter any longer, and she had nothing to prove. But she did care about the hostages, so she went.”

  “Did he release them?”

  Meg closed her eyes against the vivid images that had been captured forever on film. “Yes. Kay was inside the administration office with him when he let them go. Everything would have been settled except one of the SWAT team members decided to play hero. He rushed the gunman. The cops swarmed in, and there were shots . . . .” There was nothing more to say. Kay Lindstrom was the lead story that night on the six o’clock news.

  Joe was quiet for a long moment. “I remember that story,” he said. “But wasn’t she known by another name?”

  “Kay DeMartino,” Meg said. “She used my mother’s maiden name. They already had Pia Lindstrom on Channel Four, and I guess they didn’t want to be outnumbered by the Swedish contingent.”

  “Your sister was good.”

  “I know.” She forced a smile but knew it wasn’t one of her best. “Tough act to follow, wouldn’t you say?

  “Definitely,” he answered. “But well worth the effort, if you’re not afraid to stumble a few times before you can run.”

  How did you explain to a man as goal-oriented as Joe that sometimes stumbling is the least of your worries? Meg didn’t believe in false modesty; from the very beginning she understood that she’d been blessed with a particular vision and the talent to express that vision through fine-art photography. She had fully believed she would one day be as successful as Kay, and the pleasure she’d get in proving to her parents that their second daughter was a force to be reckoned with had fueled her ambition. Given her competitive nature, it was miraculous that she hadn’t hated Kay, resented her every triumph, but she hadn’t. Kay had prodded her, opened doors for Meg, then pushed her through. Meg had loved her, and when she was murdered, Meg’s powerful ambition was dwarfed by a grief so intense that she knew her heart had broken as surely as she’d heard her parents’ hearts break.