The Secret Keeping

by Francine Saint Marie

  She was in need of its good cheer; it would be there by Thursday afternoon.

  For the rest of the day Lydia undertook to tie up the loose ends that had accumulated since winter. She came across Rio Joe’s last cover letter, copied it and put the stinky original through the shredder.

  He had switched strategies on her and all week she felt him circling again, all week casting her those long looks loaded with old suggestions. The renewed advance was filling her with an unwanted tension. She resented him for it and if he continued she feared an explosion, so she was constantly watching over her shoulder in an effort to evade him. She was not sure that she could make it to the weekend.

  With that in mind, she closed her office door, working then without worry or interruption, and mulling things over until five. After that she hung around putting the office in order and at six, just before leaving, sent a brief memo to VP Treadwell. Satisfied, she locked her desk, her files, and her office door and then left to have dinner with Delilah. Somewhere other than Frank’s had been Lydia’s only stipulation. She hadn’t said why.

  Armed with the diversion of the floors and couch, Lydia managed to escape her friend’s careful analysis, as well as any inquiry concerning her plans for the upcoming Friday night. Even after dinner, as she packed her clothes at Delilah’s and chatted, not a single word or emotion betrayed her.

  By ten that evening, she was living in her own apartment again, admiring the beautiful floors, checking her answering machine, and filling a garbage bag with the outdated papers that had piled up in her hallway while she was gone.

  At eleven-thirty she placed a long distance call and had a friendly discussion with the person on the other end of the line.

  At midnight she pulled her mattress out of the walk-in closet where it had been stashed by the workmen.

  She was going to replace that, too, eventually. She hauled it into the living room, threw some sheets, blankets and a pillow on it and went to bed where she lay wide awake into the wee small hours of the morning.

  In the morning she stayed in her bathrobe with no plans to go to work. Instead she waited until afternoon when the promised couch arrived. She had the delivery men place it next to the mattress and they eyed her funny as they left the apartment. After that she showered, dressed and put on her makeup, placing one more call to a midtown address before making herself some toast out of the stale bread left in her refrigerator.

  She had not unpacked her bag from the night before so there was no reason to fuss. She slung it over her shoulder, checked to see that the coffee was off and turned her answering machine back on before leaving the apartment and locking the door.

  In the hallway she took a deep breath, clutched the map she had drawn and hoped it was accurate.

  Downstairs in the lobby, she advised her doorman of her plans and tipped him handsomely for his confidence. She then proceeded to walk to a nearby parking lot, stopping to chit chat with a talkative booth attendant who finally handed her the keys to a rental car.

  It started fine, everything seemed to be in good working order, there was plenty of gas. She threw her luggage into the back, put the crude map on the passenger seat where she could refer to it when needed, pulled out of the parking lot and hurriedly left town.

  She’d send Delilah a postcard when she got there so she wouldn’t worry.

  _____

  Happy hour and everyone wondered where Lydia was. They called her penthouse and left loud messages full of the jubilant sounds of the bar, singing poor versions of well known songs, hoping that if she was there it might entice her to come out. It was odd for their friend to be absent, especially now that the patio had reopened.

  The waiter thought so, too. He inquired twice about her.

  A blond woman sat inside reading at the window seat, nursing a glass of wine. From time to time the spine of her book fell to the tabletop and roused her from her thoughts. She would then glance hopefully outside and over again toward the entrance, but whoever she was expecting never showed up. She left roughly at nine. Lydia’s friends sometime after midnight.

  The waiter closed around two in the morning, turning the lights out after him and locking the door.

  Done for the day. The chairs had been stacked on the tables. The shades had been drawn. The sign on the door read “closed” once more. In the darkness, the rubber tree plants lining the walls trembled ever so slightly. They were glad to be alone there and proud of their flexibility.

  Part Two: The Cab

  “Everyone is searching for a tall, dark and handsome stranger…such persons are rare and there is simply not enough of them to go around…the real Mr. Right is very likely someone you already know.”

  Dr. Helaine Kristenson, “Keeping Mr. Right”

  Helaine knew precisely the moment when she first laid eyes on her dark-haired stranger and it was not, by happenstance, in Frank’s Place. The overnight success of her book the year earlier had proven to be a boon for her private practice and had enabled her to move out of her small downtown offices and to take the lease on the larger and more luxurious ones located midtown in the city’s financial district.

  She had always been attracted to the youthful vitality of this neighborhood and now enjoyed observing its weekday inhabitants from her twelfth floor window as they flowed in and out of the city’s heart and rejuvenated its tired old veins. Weekdays the streets and buildings teemed with their optimistic activities.

  Even on the weekends when they had all gone home she could still feel their energy pulsing from the empty sidewalks and the high-rise windows.

  Helaine had just finished her Friday with one last difficult session and was trying to unwind in a chair beside the window, drinking her tea and making final entries in her journal. The Friday ritual. She had been listening to music as she worked, Ravel launching A Boat At Sea, when she glimpsed the young woman standing and daydreaming in the full-length office window directly across the street from her. She put her pen down and counted up fifteen stories with her finger, guessing by the woman’s elevation that she had probably earned the privilege of a few quiet moments there. The woman gazed out at the horizon, downtown, toward the waterfront.

  The music played, tranquil in the background. Helaine stopped writing. The boat drifted further and further from the shore, dropping its oars and sails. She could hear the water as it lapped at its sides and feel the cool spray on her face as the craft bobbed gently in the waves. Behind it she saw a wake of brilliant sparkles. It spread like a blanket across the deep blue sea.

  The figure on the fifteenth floor was so majestic on her cloud, so serene in her motionless state, so elegant in her black dress, that it struck Helaine that she might have invented her there. She sat stiff in her chair, afraid to look away lest the mirage should suddenly dissipate. The journal slipped from her lap to the floor with an important thud, but she didn’t pick it up.

  The woman in the clouds. A ghost ship perhaps. She wore a tight black dress, stood like a queen in her window surveying her castle’s defenses. Land and sea. Clear skies. The boat floated further. She was far more agreeable to contemplate than the list of irreconcilable differences scattered on the floor–Helaine kicked the journal aside and pushed her chair back so she wouldn’t be discovered spying.

  On the other side of the world, Dr. Kristenson’s lover had disappeared on her again, initially to the catwalks in Paris and from there, according to the rags and dailies that covered such things, to Milan. She had received only one postcard from her, from neither of those locations, a hasty wish-you-were-here scrawled beneath faded red lip prints. Might not even be her own, Helaine reminded herself at the time, though she had saved it anyway, putting it in a secret drawer for safekeeping, safe next to the other similar mementos.

  It was not unusual for Helaine to find herself abandoned, but this time Sharon had left her alone for a full six months. She saw the placid figure across the way finally make a move and watched as the woman began to preen herself, using her
window as a mirror.

  She had unreasonably high hopes that her lover would return soon since there was nothing preventing her from doing so, and she had been making periodic visits to the waterfront flat in search of her–it was not unlike Sharon to slip back without telling her and to lay around for days before calling.

  The waterfront. Helaine used to like living there. The woman in the upper window raised her arms behind her head and tugged at her hair until it finally came loose. It fell carelessly into her face and onto her shoulders and she let it hang there for a few seconds before pushing it away with the back of her hand.

  Helaine ached to find Sharon, but the quests to the flat produced nothing but disappointment and she had recently resolved to stop going there. She was waiting instead in a kind of self imposed exile for the phone call that never came, checking her messages two, sometimes three times a day. Now and then she even perused the magazines that kept tabs on the super-model and the other stellar creatures that Sharon Chambers circled the earth with. She was stung by those exposés, the lover beyond compare and her tawdry sexual escapades.

  On that Friday afternoon Helaine had already thrown some magazines into the wastebasket when the woman on the fifteenth floor decided to comb out her hair, bending at the waist, tilting her head to the left and then to the right as she did it. It was similar to Sharon’s, dark and silky, but Helaine didn’t think she was quite as tall as she was. And she was slightly fuller in the hips, too, with supple, round breasts, which Sharon didn’t have. Older, though by how much she couldn’t determine. Helaine had begun to suspect that Sharon wasn’t coming back. Worse even, that she might never have existed. The woman in black took her time appraising herself, turning herself around slowly as she examined her reflection. The dress had a cutaway back. She saw the woman lift it up, revealing her legs so she could adjust her stockings, doing each one carefully so as not to rip them. The legs were well toned all the way up the thigh, not like those of the willowy model, but more lithe and athletic, as were her arms and shoulders. And that well conditioned back.

  Sharon was a bit of a phantom even when she was around, Helaine mused.

  That she could tell from her chair, the dark-haired woman had more color than Sharon, but then Sharon spent most of the daylight hours in bed and didn’t get much sun, not unless she had to, say for a swimsuit edition. Even then she preferred lamps in booths over natural light–sunshine was bad for the skin. Helaine doubted that the sky woman had any real significant imperfections.

  Behind these considerations, strands of music floated like clouds over a sparkling sea and Ravel’s boat wandered aimlessly across its surface. Helaine leaned forward in her chair and felt the sun warm on her lap.

  In the clouds, the woman dreamily caressed herself. She was under mistaken assumptions. Wrong to suppose that the offices opposite hers had all been vacated for the weekend. Wrong to absently unfastened the side of her dress and reach into it.

  There was, Helaine speculated, always the possibility that Sharon Chambers had flown the coop. This time for good. Would that be a nightmare, she found herself wondering, or a self-fulfilling prophesy?

  The dark-haired woman studied her own reflection, using her free hand to perform an inspection of her outer garment, running it slowly down the length of her body and smoothing out along the way the small bunches of fabric as she came upon them. She patted them down over her rump and tucked gently around her breasts, her fingers lingering there unconsciously. The music faded softly in the background, deserting the boat, and Helaine couldn’t recognize what it had been replaced with. She had thought then, in a new light, of Sharon’s bedtime stripteases, and as it usually did, a trill of excitement had gripped her inside. She felt the blood rush to her cheeks and got up from her chair. It was that old feeling. But it was not for Sharon.

  If Sharon never came back…she was dissolving in the woman’s hands…it would bring an end to the disappearances, to the forever waiting…the woman held up a compact and lifted her face toward the sky as she freshened her lipstick…it would complete the sorry searches on the waterfront…it would put an end to the secret keeping...Helaine sighed…she’d be gone, that’s all.

  She stood watching the upper window long after the woman had vanished from it. Gone. The idea tossed around in her head like a ship on a turbulent ocean. She smiled without knowing it. Lost at sea.

  After a while the woman emerged from the building below and walked out onto the sidewalk. Helaine followed the black dress with her eyes for about a block, pleased to see it stop and enter Frank’s Place. Ah, she said, finally dropping the blinds and taking in a deep breath. You must be the one they’re all singing about.

  _____

  When she was not in session counseling her patients, Dr. Kristenson indulged herself with opera and books and love poems and the perpetual springtimes of impressionist painters. She delighted in the likes of Bisét, Colette, Burns, the Brontés, Monêt, Manét and Sinatra. Sinatra, because he frequently sang about the weather and about flowers and the sky and the sea and his songs about women were generally so jubilant.

  She was prone to idealism and to romantic notions that at inopportune moments would sweep her up and leave her weak inside. Almost forty, she was skeptical of ever conquering either of those tendencies.

  She possessed a tolerant and generous disposition, was fascinated with people, wanted to see them happy with the world and personally satisfied. She rarely met a person she didn’t like. People found her fascinating, too, with her casual elegance, the warmth in her voice when she spoke to them, her easy to traverse and sometimes porous boundaries. And her green eyes. People were always spoiling her about her green eyes.

  She had charismatic features, especially the eyes and, as she discovered early in life, the kind of good looks that attract both sexes. That was fortunate, she quickly determined, since the feeling was nearly always mutual. In love, it was not a matter of preference to Helaine Kristenson. It was simply that all beautiful things were persuasive. That was the case whether they were women or men.

  Not so long ago she had loved sex, loved everything about loving. She believed that she had been made for it, that she had been created for the purpose of intimacy, to love and be loved in return. She had not been designed a mere object to own and admire in secret, to fondle in a hidden pocket somewhere or to neglect after a time and forget someplace on a shelf. She was meant to be taken up, to be held frequently to the light and hung intimately around the neck. Her arms and legs were not there simply for begging. They were intended for grasping and wrapping tightly about the waist, to be worn around it like a satin ribbon. The soft thighs were to be slipped between, her sex coaxed and entered like a glove on a hand.

  _____

  Suppertime. Time to sit at a table at Frank’s. Helaine would eat dinner there once in a while. Lunch every Saturday. It wasn’t very far from where she worked and no one but the waiter ever recognized her.

  The stranger was flawless, having her wine outside with her friends. Helaine watched her from inside in awe of the low-backed summertime dress. She had treated herself that Friday, followed the woman into Frank’s. Why not, she had debated, take her mind off Sharon? It was a most successful distraction.

  Nothing is more revealing than the arch of a woman’s back, Helaine thought, tracing the woman’s spine with her eyes to where it curved into the backside. This one was quite rare in that it didn’t easily bend. But that’s not what the young man circling her believed. Helaine watched as he invited himself into the woman’s personal space. How he held her captive with his hand on her waist as she tried to step away from him. He touched her lightly on her cheek and relentlessly whispered suggestions in her ear. He was, as Helaine’s friends might say, drop-trow gorgeous and good-for-the-go. He was, she could see, intent on wearing down the woman’s resistance. She saw her smile weakly at him and accept the glass of wine he was soliciting.

  Dr. Kristenson knew that the woman was in conflict over his
attentions. The muscles in her shoulders flexed anxiously at his touch. She was visibly taken aback by his propositions yet she stood in place where he held her, lost in a state of uncertainty. An expert, he had dedicated himself to those ends, had gone to great lengths to create her current confusion. Helaine knew his type. The woman was a challenge for him and he was going to conquer her, to prove to himself that he could bend her. He was going to get that girl, just for the fun of it.

  The shoulders, the arms, the back. She looked strong enough to take it. It would be a shame if he broke her though, a shame to cast even one cloud over the life of a woman with stars like that for eyes. Such beautiful eyes.

  Her eyes were…?

  Blue.

  “How’s everything?” the waiter asked.

  Helaine hadn’t realized he was standing there. He smiled patiently. She picked up her book again.

  “Delicious. Could you wrap it for me?”

  “I certainly can.”

  _____

  Eight months and only a postcard. Typical her friends told her. She is after your blue blood.

  Her blue blood. How blue it was now. “I made my blood blue, Robert.”

  “True,” he replied, “and Sharon makes it red.”

  They laughed together. A swell dinner.

  “Be quiet,” chided his wife. She was relieved to see Helaine smiling. “Why don’t you sleep over tonight?

  You look like you could use a rubdown with velvet gloves.”

  Couldn’t she? Helaine glanced from Robert to Kay and then at her plate. Out of the question. Such pretty people though, smooth as velvet. She studied their almond shaped eyes. Both hazel. They could be brother and sister. But blue eyes. Blue were the eyes of a perfect stranger. She looked at her watch. It was late and she simply smiled back at them.