Judy Gill

by Golden Swan [LS-377] (epub)

  "What? Darling, what are you talking about? Make sense, B.J. I know you're upset because I didn't tell you about the painting, but if you give me a chance, I'll try to explain."

  She shook her head. "No. You don't need to explain. I do. Cal, you have a reputation to uphold. You have a wonderful future ahead of you. You're the 'realism' painter. You show the soul of everything you paint. You show the truth. And if you painted me beautiful, it's because you don't know the truth." She patted the bed beside her. "Sit here. Let me show you ... realism."

  With a shaking hand, she opened the album on her lap, and Cal looked down at the first picture. It was a studio portrait of a chubby baby with curly blond hair. Janie, said the caption underneath.

  "Cute baby," he said, wondering where this was leading, but knowing he had to let her do it her way. She was strained as taut as a piano wire; the least little touch and she'd break4

  She nodded and turned page after page.

  The snapshots were all of the same baby as she grew to be able to sit alone, then stand, and finally walk. Still chubby, she was pictured in various poses and with various adults or other children. The little girl who appeared with her in most of them was Melody, Cal realized. His sister-in-law hadn't changed drastically, and the resemblance to both Kara and Laura was marked.

  But it was the pictures of the child named Janie his gaze lingered over. He saw with a pang the point in her life when Christmases and birthdays were no longer shared with parents, but with an older sister and her family. He watched the pale hair darken and straighten as the years were marked by turning of pages, and watched the chubbiness turn to blatant fat, then outright obesity.

  B.J., who had avoided these albums for years, felt sick as she watched the progression from cute little girl, round with baby fat, to enormous schoolgirl with braces on her teeth. Eventually, the family snapshots became fewer and fewer until there were none, only one head-and-shoulders photograph on each page, marking each year of high school.

  She wanted to slam the album shut and crawl under the bed, but she sat there stoically, looking with Cal at the repulsive, big-nosed teenager who refused to smile because of those braces. With each year's picture, the ugliness grew along with the nose. Dull, greasy, lank brown hair hung over the straining shoulders of a school uniform when she was fourteen, and the first of a crop of pimples was beginning to show. The hair was shorter in the next school photo, curled, but just as dull, and the face was even rounder, more dotted with acne, and the nose had developed a distinct hook and begun to appear wider at the tip.

  In the picture taken when she was sixteen, there was a glimmer of a smile, because the braces were gone, but it seemed to emphasize the large nose and the acne that even the most careful airbrushing couldn't completely eradicate.

  Cal felt her shivering beside him and put a warm arm around her.

  No, he kept thinking. This can't be B.J. How could she, with her slender body, her wonderful skin and brilliant eyes, have come out of such a chrysalis? But he had to believe her. She had no reason to lie, and he understood now why he hadn't recognized her as the girl he had met twelve years before. Of course he hadn't. It may have been the same person, but it wasn't the same body, or even the same face.

  After the page that held her graduation picture, she slammed the book and got to her feet, pacing away from him.

  "B.J. . . ." he said quietly. "Barbara Jane. Janie."

  "You got it," she said harshly. "Janie. How's that for exotic. Remember, you wanted me to have an exotic middle name? All part of the illusion, I guess. And now do you see why I hate it when you call me beautiful? When you talk about my blue eyes? My pretty little nose? When you go on about my 'purity of soul,' my 'lack of artifice'?

  "I am nothing but artifice! Under this false skin, I'm the original Plain Jane. The one the family called Sissy, or Janie, because she was named for her beautiful mother, and Barbara, or Barbie, couldn't be used for someone who was so horribly unlike the original!"

  "Whoever said that to you?" His expression said he'd like to commit mayhem on them.

  "Nobody ever said it, but I knew, and I was Janie to everyone except at school. My school had a policy then of no nicknames, so they called me Barbara. Now do you remember the girl who entertained you the weekend of Curt and Melody's wedding? The one with the funny eyes? The fat one? The ugly one? The girl you laughed at, Cal!"

  "B.J.!" He strode to her and took her by the arms. He didn't understand anything, not her anger, or her pain, or why he seemed to be at fault. "What do you mean, I laughed at you? I don't know what you're talking about!"

  'Then I'll tell you," she said, dry-eyed but anguished as she wrenched herself free from him. "I was just like that—" She went back to the bed, flipped open the album, and held up her high-school graduation picture for him to see. "Three hundred and two pounds, Cal! They had to have a special gown made for me. The others girls joked that they'd ordered it from Jones Tent and Awning! Maybe they did. I don't know. But that's what I weighed that summer, the summer I met you." She flung the album down In disgust.

  "I don't know why you don't remember me. I can't have been all that forgettable, with pustulating acne and that awful, ugly, obscene beak of a nose!" She sobbed once, a dry, harsh sound, then regained control and faced him again, her eyes enormous, her skin without color, even her lips bloodless.

  "And you know what?" she said disbelievingly. "You were nice to me! That's what made it all hurt so much. I really thought you liked me. You'd treated me like a real girl. We'd laughed together while I showed you around town. We liked the same music, the same movies, the same fashions—not that I could ever have worn anything even remotely fashionable, but I still knew what I liked—and we shared enough common beliefs that we could talk together for hours. And did. You were the first man who'd ever really listened to anything I'd said, or tried to explain anything about himself to me. And we danced together. I didn't know how, but you showed me that it was easy. And fun, and that was the first time since I was a child that I'd really had any fun. It hurt so bad, Cal, when It all came crashing down and I knew that you weren't my friend, that you didn't really like me, that I was an object of ridicule even to you."

  "I do remember you, B.J.," he said quietly. "I remember that girl. Janie. One green eye, one gray. Funny, I remember her as being overweight, but I don't recall a really ugly nose. And she—you—were nice to me, too, when I was so down I could have slipped under the carpet and never even get tripped over."

  She covered her face with her hands. "If you liked me, why did you laugh?" Her moan of pain cut into him like a dull knife.

  "Darling, I don't remember laughing at you." He took her hands down and cradled her face. "I don't remember thinking of you as an object of ridicule. Honestly." When she only continued to look at him like an injured child trying to be brave, he said softly, "Tell me what happened."

  She swallowed and blinked back tears. "It was at the reception. One of the ushers—I guess he was a friend of yours and Curt's—asked if you were expecting a flood. You asked what he meant and he said because of the way you'd been dancing all evening with that big orange life raft. And then you laughed. I was standing on the other side of the screen that had been set up to keep the buffet separate from the dancing, and I heard you. You know, of course, which side of that screen I was standing on," she added bitterly.

  Her voice cracked and she turned to stare out the window at the chestnut true turned black in the dusk.

  He remembered her awful orange dress, but not the comment he'd laughed at. But still . . . "I'm sorry I laughed."

  "You laughed very loudly."

  "Oh . . . hell!" he cursed softly, then she felt his arms come around her from behind. "If you say I did, then I must have. But B.J., maybe it was one of those reflex laughs. I don't find what that guy said funny at all now. Maybe I wasn't even paying attention. I really was pretty self absorbed back then." He was silent for a few minutes, swaying from side to side as he tried to
comfort her, to ease a twelve-year-old hurt that could probably never be erased from her bruised psyche. But he loved her and he had hurt her, however unwittingly, and he had to try.

  "Remember when we were playing that game with the kids up at the lake, and you drew the card about laughing at an ethnic joke? Do you remember what you finally had to choose as your answer?"

  Slowly, she nodded, and he felt the tension beginning to seep out of her. She sighed. "Okay. Maybe that did happen to you. I guess it's all part of the insecurities I had from back then. I mean, it happened so long ago."

  "Is that the reason you told Laura and Kara you didn't like me?"

  "Yes. I'd put you out of my mind for a long time. The memory was too painful. Then when Melody asked me to be coguardian with you. I had to remember. When she asked me to go up to Kiniklnik Lake, I refused because I thought you'd recognize me and make me feel . . . bad about myself again."

  He rested his chin on top of her head and rubbed his hands up and down her folded arms. "And did I?"

  She shook her head. "You know you didn't. You didn't even remember me."

  He looked at her reflection in the window, then turned her. her back still to him. and placed her in front of the mirror. "Do you wonder why?"

  "No." She managed a weak smile Into the graveness of his reflected eyes. "I know how much I've changed outwardly. It cost me a lot in money and pain and time. When I was twenty-one, I came into my inheritance from my parents and that's the way I spent some of it after I returned from South America. So you see, I am a creature of artifice. What you see is not what you get. What you see is the result of rhinoplasty and breast-reduction surgery, dermabrasion and a weight-loss program that took more than four years to complete. To say nothing of colored contact lenses. Even my dimples are the result of a surgical procedure. I had one deep, pitted scar, so the surgeon gave me a matched set."

  She turned and faced him. "So, artist, what do you think now?" she asked, her voice ragged and hoarse and defiant again. "Still want to show the world a painting of the beautiful, totally honest, good-from-the-inside-out woman?"

  "Yes."

  She stared at him. "Yes? Cal, didn't you hear a word I've said? I'm a fake. A construct! A product of modern science! I am not real!"

  "You are real. You're a warm, caring person. And you worked hard and suffered to become as beautiful outside as you were inside. Snatching up the album, he opened it at random.. "Is that real?" He pointed to the baby depicted there. "This?" He opened to a page showing her as a ten-year-old. "Do those pictures look the same? Of course not, but they represent the same person, B.J., just as this does." He turned her around to face the mirror. "How can you see one image as more 'real' than the other? They simply show different stages of development. Do you think I won't love you when you have a seamed face and white hair?"

  She felt tears rise up along with hope, and crushed both back down. "Look at me," she said, turning from the mirror. "I dye my hair!"

  He laughed. "So do I."

  She gaped at him. "What?"

  "It's true. I started going gray when I was only twenty-nine, and I hated it. Made me look old. So I use that stuff that you comb in. It works. I feel lots better about myself when I look good."

  She drew in a tremulous breath and laughed. "You must feel great about yourself, then."

  "And so should you, my darling. You're Barbara Jane Gray, B.J., a very special lady to me, whether you call yourself Janie or Barbara or B.J. I love you, and I painted you because you are not only beautiful on the outside, you are beautiful on the inside, where it counts."

  She looked at him and felt the pain ease out of her chest as the tears welled up in her eyes. They overflowed even as he tried to wipe them away with his hands. "I love you," she said. "I'm sorry I ruined your opening by running like that."

  "That doesn't matter. I was wrong for not telling you about the portrait. I wanted to, but I was afraid. I thought If you saw it too soon you'd worry about it, about how it would be received. But everyone is going to love it, darling. Because it is a very beautiful image of a very beautiful woman. So will you come back to the gallery with me? Will you unveil it for me?"

  Her tears flooded over again. "Cal. I love you, but I can't do that even for you. I'm sorry. Oh, please try to understand. To me, the way I look for you is just for you. If I have to unveil it and let everyone there see what my body looks like when you're making love to me, it will demean our love. It won't be special anymore. Please. Cal. don't ask me to do that and—"

  "Wait a minute!" He shook her gently, his dark brows pulled together. "What do you mean, what your body looks like when we're making love? Dammit, B.J., have you got some weird idea that I painted a nude of you?"

  "Well, yes."

  He shook her again, a little harder. "Well, you just happen to be wrong! You've got some lousy opinion of me if you think I'd share with anyone, especially the public, what goes on between us in the privacy of our bedroom." Snatching up a tissue from the box on her dresser, he carefully dried her eyes. "B.J., I promise that portrait isn't something you need to be ashamed of, or something that will embarrass you in any way." She hesitated, her mouth trembling, and he kissed her gently. "Please, sweetheart? Trust me."

  And wasn't that, after all, what loving him was all about? What she should have done long ago? Swallowing hard, she nodded. "Okay. I trust you."

  "Cal. . . I'm really nervous," she whispered, clinging to his hand, her other hand on the gold cord she was about to pull. The canvas stood on a pedestal, its top two feet over her head. Life-size, it was billed, and a hushed crowd waited for its unveiling.

  "Don't be," he murmured. "The painting is good, love. The best I've ever done. And if it doesn't convince you of how totally lovely you really are, I'm just going to have to spend the rest of my life trying to do it some other way. Now pull the cord. Everyone's waiting."

  B.J. pulled. The gold drapes parted, fell away, and she stepped back with Cal, staring. Tears filled her eyes and her whole body began to shake. She struggled to control herself as she looked at his work of art, his portrait from the heart, recognized the love in every brush stroke.

  Perched astride her bike, she was dressed in black leather, with a V of pink sweater showing at the front. Her gauntleted hands gripped the handlebars, her helmet sat on the ground near the toe of one boot, and she was smiling, dimples dancing. Her hair, caught by the morning sun, lifted by the breeze, shimmered and seemed to move.

  "You see?" Cal said quietly. "What is that, an ugly duckling or a golden swan?"

  As applause began and grew, B.J. turned to Cal. He caught her in his arms and gazed into her eyes. "Well?" he asked. "Are you convinced?"

  Her dimples flashed as she laughed impishly. "Nope. So have you got a lifetime to waste trying to convince me?"

  Right there, in front of the applauding crowd, he kissed her long and hard. "You bet," he said fervently.

  And B.J. blushed.