“Harem?” he whispered much later, and I realized I’d said that aloud. “How big a harem?”
I had this odd thought. Was I doing the brain dead in bed thing like Tommy? Okay, we weren’t in bed, we were stretched on top of the rug and under the afghan.
“How many do you want in your harem?” I asked. Graham, my head on his bare shoulder, my hands stroking him, following the line of his body, across his chest, his ribs and down the inner curve of his hipbone.
“Just one. Just you. And you’re more than I can handle.”
And then we stopped teasing, stopped talking, melted into each other. He whispered to me. I caught a few words, my name, endearments, but most of what he whispered was so soft and low I couldn’t make it out easily and didn’t want the distraction of trying. He wasn’t saying all those words for me, I rather suspected, but for himself, talking to himself, recording memories into his own mind.
So much later, when the fire turned to ash and the sky went black outside the windows, he whispered, “I am going to find a way, darling April. Give me time. Don’t leave me.”
Huddled under the afghans, we pulled our clothes back on and then we sat on the dusty old Persian rugs in front of the fireplace and Graham poked at the ashes until flames shot out. While he refilled our glasses, I stood and walked over to the window. With my forehead pressed against the glass, I stared out at the ever moving water.
The rain wove patterns on the cottage windows, a single drop sliding down the glass between the other clinging beads, and then another striking the pane to glide through the maze until it found a place to cling. Beneath the flat gray sky the Sound was a darker gray.
“What are you dreaming about now, my darling?”
“I’m not dreaming, I’m watching the sea. There aren’t any gulls.” I turned away from the window.
“No air currents. They’ll be out again when the wind rises.”
Sitting back down beside him on the floor, I held out my hands to the low flames. “I’d like to float across the sky like a seagull.”
“With your hair floating around you like an amber cloud.”
“I think I’ll skip the hair part and be a plain old feathered seagull in my next life.”
“Then I’ll have to be one, too.”
“Will you?”
“Whatever you are in our next thousand lives, I’ll be there to love you,” he said against my mouth.
I wanted with all my heart to believe him. He touched me and I came alive, and that sounds like he was a perfect lover. He wasn’t. Oh well, he knew the moves and certainly I enjoyed him, but he wasn’t amazing or athletic or anything like that. He was good because lovemaking is as much in the mind as in the touching. And he filled my mind with his whispered endearments, his charm, his ability to overwhelm all my senses with firelight and the sound of the gulls and the scent of his skin and the brushing of his hands across my body.
CHAPTER 28
Maybe leaving him would have been the thing to do, but I couldn’t and again, it was Graham who left me. A day later he phoned to tell me he’d be out of town for a few days.
“Where are you going?”
“Not off chasing past lives.”
That should have shut me up, but if he thought I was easy to intimidate, he was only half right. “Oh, it’s a secret, is it? And you’ll tell me all about it when you get back?”
“Not a secret. Just depressing. Darling, I’m flying to Vegas to collect my wife and take her, oh I don’t know where. The last clinic didn’t do her much good. Anyway, I’ll phone you as soon as I get back.”
“Yes, all right,” I said, ashamed of myself for adding to his worries. “Good luck. I’ll be thinking about you.”
“You’re always on my mind,” he said before he broke the connection.
It wasn’t until late that night, at home and alone in my room, that the present left me and Laurence and the life in Hollywood came rushing back, an overlay of memories, the whispered promises in my ear, the hands stroking me.
***
“Of course I love you, Silver. Of course I want to spend my life with you. But how would it look? We can’t be seen together yet.”
I’d had to sneak down a back alley and through the back door. Laurence met me there to lead me through an empty hallway and up the back stairs to his small apartment. He stopped at every turning, looked around, listened for any sound, as though we were burglars.
The apartment was one big room, really, with a bed at one end hidden behind a curtain, and a sink and hot plate tucked into a space the size of a closet.
A smarter girl wouldn’t have said it. I knew it would anger him but I had to know. “What about Mabel Clara? People tell me you’ve been seen around with her.”
He rose up on his elbow to look down at me on the bed. “Don’t listen to ‘people.’ Listen to me. The studio set that up, me and Mabel Clara at a couple of posh places. For publicity shots. I’m going to be in her next moving picture. This is big. The director is a friend of Cecil B. De Mille.”
“Jeepers, is this picture for Paramount?”
“No. But her next one might be. So you can see how important this is for me.”
Dim light filtered through the brown paper shades, casting the shadow of the metal headboard on the wall. Sunrise in another hour, and the room would turn hot. This was probably the coolest time of day, with the fresh smell of morning in the air coming through the opened window behind the shades.
I had to look anywhere but at him. He was so handsome, if I looked at him, I couldn’t ask questions.
“There’s nothing else between you?”
“If there was, do you think the director would let us be seen together? So soon after my wife’s death? You’re making me feel guilty about being here with you, Silver.”
I could hear the irritation in his voice. He never shouted or talked mean. But he’d leave as quick as snapping my fingers.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be a tease,” he whispered in my ear. His mouth trailed down my neck, traced my collarbone. “Treat me nice, Silver.”
Maybe I should have asked him more about his wife’s death, because Esther had said some terrible things and maybe he should be warned, but I couldn’t. What if he thought I believed all that stuff about him killing his wife?
I stroked his hair and kissed his forehead. He kept whispering my name and all sorts of promises.
If I said another word, he’d get up and tell me to get dressed and then send me away. Probably I’d never be with him again, never hold him, never kiss him. If that happened, I couldn’t stand it. I’d rather be dead than lose Laurence.
CHAPTER 29
I woke stretched out on the floor of our apartment, sweat-drenched, shaking. Rain pattered on the dark window above my bed. The other bed, Cyd’s, was empty and I vaguely remembered she had told me she would be staying over at Mac’s place tonight.
Crawling on all fours across the room, I found the cordless phone, lifted it out of its cradle, rolled over on my back and lay there staring at the dark ceiling.
It was maybe three in the morning, a terrible time to ring anybody. I wouldn’t call his house because the bell would wake his parents, but if he had his cell turned on, please, Tommy, please, please. I punched in the number. It would ring three or four times, I didn’t know how he had it set, maybe turned off, and then it would take me into his voice mail which would be no help at all.
Ring. At three in the morning of any morning, my defenses are gone and tears rule. Second ring. I bit the inside of my lip. Third ring. I’d rather bleed than cry.
“Hmmm?”
“Tommy?”
A very long silence and then he said, “Can I listen without opening my eyes?”
“You can go back to sleep if you want to. Try not to drop the phone,” I told him. “I’ll keep talking even if you don’t but it would be really nice to be able to imagine you at least holding your phone sort of somewhere near your ear.”
>
“Ummm.” I could hear his breathing, that slow rhythm with a slight hum on each exhale. Odd way to identify somebody. But I could. I’d heard Tommy sleeping on my couch many times, and I had listened to him in the other bed in the dark hotel room in Minnesota. I knew his sleep breathing almost as easily as I recognized his voice.
“That’s okay,” I said softly into the phone. Because it didn’t matter if he heard me. What mattered was I could hear him and he was real. “I thought all this would stop, these stupid visions, now I know who she was and where she died. Now I know it’s all in the past and can’t be changed. See, for a little while I thought maybe I was supposed to change something, only there’s no changing the past, right? So maybe I am supposed to change the future. Because otherwise everything keeps happening over and over.”
He didn’t answer but I could still hear his breathing. He’d be lying in his bed, probably on his back. He’d told me that when he tried to roll over the move pulled on his ribs. So he’d be on his back, his long legs stretched out, his knee rigid in the brace. Probably he had one hand thrown up over his head. He slept with his arms over his head. His other hand would be loosely wrapped around his phone.
I knew how he looked, his hard chest bare with a tangle of dark hair, his skin that olive-dusky, smelling a bit like coffee beans. He’d be wearing drawstring pajamas tied around his waist. And I knew that because he’d once told me pajamas that were long enough to reach his ankles were always too loose around the waist and so he needed the drawstring. I couldn’t remember why the discussion had ever occurred. Not that it mattered.
“Tommy, what I can’t figure out is this. If Laurence killed his wife, and Graham is Laurence, is Graham going to kill his wife? And will this go on forever, life after life, me falling in love with some guy who is married and then maybe I am the reason he kills his wife? Because what if that’s what Graham meant, that he’s trying to find a way to get rid of her? If he meant what he said about loving me.” I stopped talking and listened.
And listened. And then heard it again, the sleep breathing. I could imagine his dark curls damp with sleep, his thick dark lashes pressed into the hollows below his eyes, his thin face plain without the grin.
I whispered into the phone, “Thanks for being there. At least I know you’re real. I can’t figure out the rest of it.”
Tom said, “Hmmm.”
CHAPTER 30
These were my choices, sit in the bay window and watch the rain and sink into depression or grab my coat and umbrella and go any place else. My friends were all at work and I couldn’t afford shopping, but at least I had bus fare. I could catch a bus to the U, walk around the campus, wander through the library.
And that’s what I planned to do. Except. Sitting on the half empty bus and watching the drab gray world go by, I didn’t think the U would cheer me up much. No Mac and Cyd at the coffee shop, no Tom in the library stacks, no Graham in the city or even in the state.
But I knew his street address and I had never seen his house and it would be empty and so why not at least walk by it to see where he lived. A house always reflects its owner. Maybe standing in front of it I would feel closer to him. More and more my whole life was turning into a chick flick, except those things usually have happy endings. I wasn’t seeing any happy ending for myself.
The neighborhood was comfortable houses, probably all at least fifty years old, set back behind carefully trimmed front yards, evergreen bushes, winter blooming heather, and gnarled old trees with their bare limbs dotted with tight buds that would soon blossom. Behind ornamental metal fences the raked gravel paths and swept walks led to the entrances.
His was much like the others, a wide walkway and steps and porch of brick leading up to a carved wood door with etched glass windows on either side. I stopped outside the gate and looked at all of it, the formal house, the professionally maintained garden, very elegant. Not Graham at all. He was more like the rustic cottage, all charm.
So this was the other side of him, perhaps, the face he kept public. As this was a neighborhood close to the U, I guessed the other homes also belonged to professors. I looked up, trying to guess which room was his bedroom, trying to picture him moving about, dressing, coming down the stairs in the morning, putting bread in the toaster, maybe opening the front door to pick up his newspaper. Did he do that?
There was a lamp on in a downstairs window and something flickering. I hadn’t seen it right away because of the daylight. Of course I knew what the blue flickering was, a television screen, not the sort of thing left on in an empty house. Had he changed his mind and canceled his trip?
Pushing open the low gate, I walked slowly toward the door, a bit nervous, because how would he react when he opened the door and saw me? What if someone else was there, a colleague or a neighbor? Did he have any family members living nearby? There was so much I didn’t know about him, but I did know, at least, that like Laurence, Graham wouldn’t shout at me. He might be thinking anything inside, but on the outside, he would be courteous.
I rang the bell. Heard it echo deep within the house. Waited. I wouldn’t ring twice. If he didn’t want to answer, I would leave.
And then I heard footsteps. The handle turned. The door opened.
“May I help you?” she said.
She was about Graham’s age, had small lines around her eyes, was carefully made up, wore her hair in what Cyd called the wife short cut, beauty shop neat with carefully applied highlights. She was a bit taller than me and slim, dressed in designer jeans and a cashmere sweater. She didn’t actually smile but she looked kind. She could have been anyone, a sister, a friend, but I knew she wasn’t.
My mouth moved faster than my brain. “Mrs. Berkold, I’m April Didrickson.”
She waited a moment for me to hold out my hand like a salesperson or an evangelist. When I didn’t, she said, “Graham isn’t here.”
“I know. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb you.”
“Come in,” she said, and that woke me up. Surely not spider-to-fly. She looked like a nice person. A small smile softened her face. “Please come in, April, or I will have my across the street neighbor phoning to ask who I turned away.”
She led me through a wide entryway and there was a staircase and a table with flowers. Afterwards that’s all I could remember because I followed her in a daze. Cutting through the living room, she paused to switch off the TV, then went through a formal dining room and beyond that, a kitchen. I had a quick impression of large, lovely rooms that were well decorated, and then there was the kitchen. All new and shining and filled with huge stainless steel appliances and wide granite counters.
She waved me to a tall stool at the island counter, took mugs from a rack, filled them from a coffee pot, asked if I took cream or sugar. I must have said neither because she placed a mug of black coffee in front of me and then sat down on the stool next to me with her own mug cradled in her two hands. The stools swiveled.
Facing me, she said in a pleasant voice, “Are you one of Graham’s students?”
I mumbled a no, then added, “I was doing some research on campus.”
She nodded. “I see. My name is Barbara, by the way. And what am I this time, dying of cancer, crippled by an accident, or an addict of some sort? Usually he confines that one to alcohol or prescription drugs, which is nice, because I am on the board of a nonprofit that sponsors education and aid for drug addicts and their families.”
I must have blinked at the right word because she said, “Alcoholic. And do I look like an alcoholic?”
I shook my head.
She sighed, maybe more to give me time to collect my wits than because she was weary. “You’re nothing new, April, although usually his affairs don’t knock on my door. But sometimes they phone. Or write letters. And I always feel sorry for them because they are always like you, nice young women, and I could strangle the bastard.”
“Why don’t you?” I managed to say.
She thought that was funn
y, did a sort of giggle, then said, “We were in college together. I thought Graham was perfect. And in a lot of ways he was. Still is, I suppose, I mean, he’s always courteous, always thoughtful, never forgets an anniversary. Maybe not much of a father, but still, never unkind.”
“You have children?” Was that possible? Could he have children and never mention them?
“A son. He’s fifteen. In school right now.” Her face lit when she said it.
I wanted to say I’m sorry about a thousand times because I felt so terrible. There wasn’t any way to apologize without making her feel worse. And then she continued in that cheerful voice, “I grew up in this house. My parents gave it to me as a wedding present. They were moving to Florida, anyway. I had the kitchen remodeled last year. Do you like it?”
“It’s wonderful,” I managed to say.
“Do you like to cook?”
“Umm, I’m not very good at it. My roommate does most the cooking.”
“I see.” She sat quietly looking at me, summing me up. At a job interview, if anyone looked at me that way, I’d know I was going to get a very polite turndown. She said, “I don’t know what else to tell you, April. I’m sorry if I’ve destroyed some fantasy, but that is honest to God what the man is, a fantasy. He told me he was going to a convention in Las Vegas this weekend and I didn’t bother asking what kind of convention because it probably doesn’t exist. But he would have had an answer.
“Anyway, do what you want. If you want to end whatever you have with him, tell him you met me. Otherwise, play along with his story. I certainly won’t mention you.”
“But why do you put up with him?” I blurted.
She looked a little sad. She could have wept, played on my sympathy. She didn’t. “I have a home I love, a wonderful son, and a husband who does what I ask. Sometimes I need him to play host. Sometimes I need him to accompany me to an event. I’m on the boards of three non-profits and I chair committees for a half dozen more organizations. It’s the life I was raised to live. I really don’t want to be known as the charming Mrs. Berkold, divorcee. If Graham asked, I would certainly give him a divorce. But you know what? He is as fond of his lifestyle as I am of mine.”
My Deja Vu Lover Page 16
