She had known almost from the beginning that Peter was married and had children. There had been nothing new divulged this morning. That wife and those children were no more real now than they’d ever been. But now she’d seen them. That was what destroyed her peace.
Out of sight, out of mind. How could she allow that of herself? That was for people with amnesia and brain damage. That was for newts and frogs. What was wrong with her? Why couldn’t she hold things in her mind? There was no comfort to be taken from her inability, no excuse.
This was a different game she was playing. Not a playground challenge or a warm-up or a scrimmage. It was real and it counted. Peter was an adult. She was an adult. They had real lives to make or lose.
She could flit around and show off in front of the married man. She could kiss that married man and pretend it was all big, mischievous fun. But it wasn’t.
As she walked she shuddered. It was time to grow up. She looked ahead of her and saw the crest of a hill. That crest stood for growing up, she decided as she willfully crossed it.
She stood up her straightest, to her full woman’s height of five feet and ten and a half inches. If she didn’t take her life seriously, who would? She was becoming the person she’d be for her whole life. Each thing she chose contributed to that person. She didn’t want to be like this.
Carmen liked being in the theater. Even the longest, crankiest late-night rehearsal was preferable to being in her dorm room. Andrew Kerr could take her down with a look, but even at his scariest he was friendlier than her roommate.
Carmen had transformed from invisible to visible in the eyes of everyone on campus except for one person. For two long weeks, even though they shared a small room and slept within five feet of each other, Julia had acted like Carmen wasn’t there.
Which was why it surprised Carmen in the third week of rehearsals when Julia turned to her and said, “How’s the play going?”
Carmen was pulling off her socks at the moment it happened, exhausted but also excited at having tried on her costume for the first time.
“It’s going pretty well. At least, I hope so.”
“How is it working with Ian O’Bannon?” Julia asked.
She asked this like they’d been having friendly chats night and day. Carmen was scared to believe it was actually happening.
“He’s…I don’t even know what he is. Every day I think I can’t be more amazed and then I am.”
“Wow. Lucky you, you get to work with him.”
Carmen sifted through these words, girding herself for jeering or sarcasm, but she didn’t hear it.
“It is really lucky,” Carmen said warily.
“It’s like…the experience of a lifetime,” Julia said.
Again Carmen weighed these words, studied Julia’s face. Julia’s face, which had seemed so beautiful and commanding at one time and now seemed furtive. The qualities Carmen had most admired in her seemed extreme now. She was too thin, too poised, too careful.
“I think it is,” Carmen said.
Carmen fell asleep that night wondering what had brought about the thaw, scared to trust it, but more than anything, grateful that it had happened.
So that when she woke up the next morning, she was still doubtful, though still hopeful.
“You should wear those green pants. They look really good on you,” Julia said when Carmen was rummaging through her drawer.
Carmen turned. “You think so?”
“Yeah.”
“Thanks.” Carmen put on the green pants even though she didn’t think they looked so good.
“What are you rehearsing today?” Julia asked.
Carmen counseled herself to take the friendliness at face value and just be glad for it. “I think it’ll be Leontes going bonkers for the first part. Perdita doesn’t even come in until act four, scene four, but Andrew wants me to watch. ‘Watch and absorb,’ he always says, and he shakes his fingers over my head. He thinks that’s entertaining for some reason.”
“He’s kind of an oddball, isn’t he?” Julia said.
“He is,” Carmen said, though she suddenly felt protective of his oddness. “I have no experience or anything, but I think he’s a good director.”
Julia could easily have said something cutting then, but she didn’t. “He’s got a huge reputation,” she said.
“Does he?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Huh.” This was enough pleasant conversation to last Carmen for the week, but Julia kept going.
“I can read with you if you ever want some extra practice,” she said.
Carmen looked at her carefully. “That’s nice. Thanks. I’ll let you know.”
“Seriously, any time,” Julia said. “My part in Love’s Labour’s is not exactly consuming, you know?”
Carmen didn’t want to be caught agreeing. “You have the last word, though. That’s a big deal.”
“As an owl.”
“Well.”
Julia’s expression was openly rueful. “R.K., our director, asked me if I’d give a thought to helping with sets during my downtime.”
Carmen tried to keep her expression neutral. “What did you say?”
“I said that sets really aren’t my thing.”
Carmabelle: Wow, Leo’s black?
LennyK162: Yeah. Half, anyway.
Carmabelle: You really are trying to kill your father.
LennyK162: Pretty much any color boyfriend would do it.
Carmabelle: Does Leo identify more with his black side or his white side?
LennyK162: What?
Carmabelle: I’m a woman of color. I’m allowed to ask these things.
LennyK162: I still don’t know what you’re talking about.
Carmabelle: Okay, does he listen to U2?
Bridget ended up that evening not in China, but on her dirt floor with a bad sunburn stinging her shoulders.
She was glad to have her floor again. She had worried that the joy of her floor somehow depended on Peter, but she now realized it didn’t. It was her own separate joy and could not be taken away.
She was glad to hear that Peter had gone with his family into town for dinner. She wanted to skip dinner, but she didn’t want to skip it on his account.
She continued this busy overthinking, feeling it an annoying by-product of adulthood. Were people in her work team treating her too carefully?
At least her hands still knew how to seek out the floor. She was down to the final couple of feet left over from last night. She couldn’t draw it out much longer.
She dug and sifted and sorted. At the final edge, her finger touched something hard. She was used to that by now. She assumed it was a piece of terra-cotta, like so many of the other bits were. She shook if off and held it up, but the sunlight was too faded to help. She felt it between her fingers. It was tiny. It wasn’t porous like clay. It wasn’t heavy like metal.
She recorded its provenience and hopped up the stairs to find a flashlight. Holding the little thing under the light, she felt her heart begin to thump.
She took it to the lab, glad that Anton was working late.
“What’ve you got?” he asked her.
She handed it to him. “I think it’s a tooth.” She was shaken by it. She felt a shaky chill in her abdomen.
He looked at it. He held it under magnification. “You’re right.”
“A baby tooth.”
“It certainly is.”
“Can you tell who it belonged to? I mean a boy or a girl?”
He shook his head. “You can’t discern gender from any of a child’s bones. Before puberty, boy skeletons and girl skeletons are exactly the same.”
Why was Anton looking so jovial about this when she felt sickened by it?
“I found it in the house,” she said. “In the new room.” Her breathing was moist and a little bit ragged. “I expect to find this kind of stuff in mortuary, but not in the house.” She really did not want to cry.
Anton looked at her ca
refully. “Bridget, it wasn’t in mortuary because the kid didn’t die.”
“It didn’t?”
“Or I should say, its death was not related to this tooth.”
“It wasn’t?”
“No.” Anton smiled, apparently wanting to cajole her out of her somber face. “The tooth fell out, Bridget. It got lost on the floor. Maybe the kid’s mother saved it.”
Bridget was still nodding as she walked back to her floor, almost wanting to cry with relief. This person, whoever he or she was, had long, long since died. But the person hadn’t died with a baby tooth. The little tooth did not represent death. It represented growing up.
“Do you miss him?” Carmen asked.
“I don’t think so. I’m not sure,” Tibby said, holding the phone with her shoulder and picking her big toenail. Some of the summer students were crowded around a portable video game in the hall. It was too noisy for a serious conversation.
“You’re not sure?”
“No. I don’t know. I was pretty sure of needing to break up with him. I don’t want to see him, but I do sometimes think about whether he’s going to call or something.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I kind of think he will, but also that he won’t. Does that make any sense?”
“Uh.” Carmen’s voice was high in her throat. “I think so.”
Tibby could tell it didn’t make sense to Carmen at all, and that furthermore, nothing Tibby had said about any part of the relationship since the summer began had made one bit of sense, but that Carmen was hanging in there nonetheless.
“Do you want to talk to him about anything in particular?” Carmen asked. Carmen’s patient voice was among her least convincing. Tibby found it surprising to think that she was having so much success as an actress this summer.
“No, not really,” Tibby said wanly, purposeless. There was an explosion of hooting out in the hall.
Most conversations, particularly with the Carmen of old, had some storyline, some momentum. Going toward intimacy or coming away from it. Achieving agreement on some subject or unearthing a probable conflict. Giving succor or getting it. This conversation had nothing. Tibby knew that was her fault, but she didn’t feel motivated to take the steps to fix it. She felt tired. She was supposed to work on her script. She needed to take a shower. What was she going to eat for dinner?
“It’s really noisy here. I’ll talk to you later, okay?” she said to Carmen.
“Okay,” said Carmen.
There was no satisfaction in being on the phone or in hanging up.
Tibby sat at her desk and pulled up the document on her computer that supposedly contained the script for her intensive screenwriting class. The document was eagerly titled “Script,” but it didn’t actually contain any scriptlike writing. She’d been in the class for almost three weeks and all she had was a page of notes, randomly spaced and ordered. Not one of them seemed to have anything to do with another. She couldn’t even remember writing half of them.
She let her computer fall back to sleep. She flicked on the TV. She could live a full life just going from one screen to another. Everything she needed was inside an electronic box.
She waited for her favorite newslady, Maria Blanquette, with the big nose and the laugh. An authentic island in a sea of fake. But Tibby was too late. The newscast had already moved on to the weather.
She wondered again about Brian calling. He would probably call her as he made his plans for the fall. He would call her with a good excuse—advice about housing or requirements, or meal plans or whatever. He was almost certainly expecting that once he got to NYU in September, they would go back to being friends, at least.
And what would she do? And what would she say? Should she help him? Should she encourage him, or was that a mistake? Would that just make it harder for him to get over it?
Bridget still felt weepy when she called Tibby from the empty office late that night, deeply grateful that the satellite service was back up and running. She knew the call would cost a bundle, but she didn’t care. She hadn’t told any of them the truth about Peter, but now she needed to.
“I feel so stupid,” she said. She let herself weep. She was a walking wound and she needed to get the fluid out.
“Oh, Bee,” Tibby said soothingly.
“I knew he was married. I knew he had kids and I let it happen anyway.”
“I know.”
“I saw them this morning and I felt so disgusted with myself. But why weren’t they important before?”
“Mmm,” said Tibby to indicate she was listening and not judging.
“He’s part of a family, you know? They depend on him. They belong to him. I’ll never belong to him.”
With that said, Bridget took a long break to cry. And as she did, she realized she had been more honest with Tibby than she’d intended.
“Beezy, it’s okay. You belong to other people,” Tibby said, her heart in her voice.
Bridget thought of her father and felt an overwhelming sense of despair. She thought of Eric and felt no right to his love. She thought of her mother and ached for the things she hadn’t left behind. “I belong to you and Lena and Carmen, Tibby,” she said through her tears. “I don’t think I belong to anyone else.”
On Monday morning, Lena got to the studio first. Leo got there second. He came over to her immediately. She was shy again.
“I’ve been too excited to sleep,” he told her.
He did in fact look both very excited and very tired. Was it the painting? Was it her?
“I brought it,” he said. He lifted the thin box. “Can I show it to you?”
“Not right here,” she said. Already other students were wandering in.
“I know. But later. We’ll go somewhere private.”
“Okay,” she said. She was nervous to see it.
She tried to concentrate on her painting. She tried to get into the trance of watching and working. It took a while.
He packed up fast after class. She had to hurry to catch up to him. He found an empty studio on the second floor and closed the door behind them.
He leaned the painting in its box against the wall. He drew her to him and kissed her. He pressed his face into her cheek.
“Nora’s a great model,” he said. “But now I just want to paint you.”
He kissed her more until she was out of breath, furry headed, and furry limbed. “I never kissed a model before,” he said. “I never painted a girl I kissed.”
“You could try kissing Nora.”
He made a face.
“Or Marvin.”
He made a worse face.
“Okay. I’ll show you,” he said. He took the painting out of the box. He did it gingerly because it wasn’t entirely dry.
It was hard to make herself look. She took it in one bit at a time, trying to think of it as just another student painting of a female figure. This building was loaded with such paintings.
But no. This was her. It was hard to set her appreciation for Leo’s work apart from her own self-conscious judgment. It was hard to look at it without distortion.
But when she could relax a little, she could see that it was beautiful in some objective way. And it wasn’t a school painting either. There was something different about it. It was more intimate. It was a painting set in his room in the house where he had grown up. And it was of her, and she had belonged to him alone for those hours when he painted it.
She realized something else. Most school paintings were purposefully desexualized. This one was not.
“It’s sexy, isn’t it?”
His smile was inward and outward, too. “Yeah.”
“Boy, I hope my parents never see this.”
“They won’t.”
They were still awkward together. At a few different places in the relationship at the same time—seen each other naked, didn’t know each other’s friends.
When the pose had ended the day before, what if she hadn’t put her robe on? What if she
had let his kiss develop? She could tell it was what he wanted. She’d had all those thoughts too. But the sheer heft of the sexual energy between them had been too much for her.
“You did a lot better than I did in this trade,” she said.
Leo looked genuinely regretful of that. “You were a better model.”
“You were a better painter.”
“Less inhibited, maybe,” he said.
She could still feel the place on her ribs where his fingers had lain on her skin. “That’s fair,” she said.
“Maybe we could try it again.”
“I don’t know.”
“Please?” He had a slightly desperate look. “Because if you don’t paint me, I can’t ask you, can I? And I really want you to pose for me again.”
Was it just a painting he wanted from her? What would happen if she agreed? “You can ask me,” she said.
“Will you? Please? I’ll beg if you want me to.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Sunday?”
It wasn’t so bad being wanted. “I’ll think about it.”
“Say yes.”
“Okay.”
“Do you want to have dinner tomorrow?” He was happy. He packed up the painting. She knew he had to get to work.
“At your house?” she asked.
“We’ll go out,” he said as he led her down the hall. “I don’t think I can kiss you in front of my mother.”
Julia was waiting at the back entrance of the Main Stage when the cast broke for lunch. Carmen was taken aback, but pleased that Julia was looking friendly and ostensibly waiting for her.
Prince Mamillius, who was also called Jonathan, was walking next to Carmen, so Carmen introduced him to Julia.
“Are you coming to the Bistro?” Jonathan asked Carmen when they reached the split in the path. The Bistro was what they called the smaller, nicer dining room, which was reserved for the professional actors. Bistro people never went to the canteen and vice versa, Carmen understood, although Ian and Andrew and especially Jonathan tried to persuade Carmen to eat with them.
“No,” she said.
“Oh, come on.”
She was tired of having this argument. “I’m not supposed to.”
Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood Page 15
