by Frank Deford
“Go?”
“I’m sorry, there’s someone I’m supposed to see.”
“Now? It’s nine o’clock.”
“Well, it’s an appointment.”
“It’s a woman, isn’t it?’
“Of course not, Nina. It’s a student. A male student.” That was such a bald-faced lie it wasn’t even necessary to label it as such.
“I am so tired of this, Hugh.”
“I am too. And I’ll call you. Soon. I swear.”
Nina looked at him in disgust. At the door, she said, “Quite a day for me, Hugh. I started out with a guy who murders women. I end it with a guy I wanna murder.”
Hugh didn’t—couldn’t—say anything. He only watched Nina go. Then he rearranged himself and composed himself so that he could go over to Marilyn’s. There, she greeted him in a dressing gown the color of peaches. Straightaway, Hugh said to her, “I’m sorry, Marilyn, but I’ve always loved another woman.”
She replied, “You know, Hugh, I thought maybe that’s what it was.”
In her hotel room that night, Constance woke with a start. She was seeing Bess again, lying there. Bess—whom she always saw when she was a little girl back in Rochester. Bess, in her long, blue gown, lying in the creek, staring up with her vacant eyes. Yes, there she was again—there was Bess. But, no…wait. It couldn’t be Bess. This was a dark-haired woman, and she was not nearly so pretty as Bess. She was not reposing amid the pebbles of a stream, but was instead, sprawled undressed upon a bed, naked except for some sort of yellow scarf that was tied in a death-knot around her neck. What Constance found the most odd of all, though, was that although she had certainly never met the dead woman, she knew her name, which was Caterina.
Perhaps she should mention this curiosity to Dr. Winston, too.
23
Constance recalled going to a museum on a school field trip, but otherwise had no memories of art, so that when Nina escorted her up to the European paintings the next afternoon, it was as if she was guiding her into some foreign land. Oh, Constance did recognize some names—Rembrandt as they passed through gallery thirteen, then Goya, and for some reason, Filippo Lippi—but her recognition was in the manner of people who had learned the names of the presidents in grade school but really couldn’t tell the difference between Madison, Buchanan, or Coolidge.
Constance did say she liked some of the paintings, but more as you might express a preference for a certain wallpaper or bathing suit. Actually, she was most fascinated by the distribution of the paintings upon the walls—appalled at how much space was “underutilized,” as she described it. And then:
The instant she walked into gallery twenty-five, adjacent to the Rubens’s room, Constance changed. She began to grow alert and curious; she fidgeted, looked all around. “Is there something…?” Nina asked, leaving the question open-ended.
“I don’t know,” Constance replied, befuddled now, and even more disturbed—exactly as Bucky had reacted when first he chanced upon this territory.“There’s something eerie I feel,” Constance added, more agitated. And then, as she approached the entrance to gallery twenty-seven, her head swiveled about and she cried out, “Bucky! Bucky is here!”
The few other people in the gallery scurried away, giving her a wide berth. The guard, standing between the two rooms, went on alert. Oh my God, Nina thought, it can’t be.
But, of course, Nina knew this is exactly the way she supposed it would be.
As if following a scent, Constance advanced into twenty-seven through the door to the right—the other side from where Bucky had first come in. This put Constance right next to Venus and Adonis. She stared at the painting in awe and wonder. Then she gasped, “I’m home. I’m home.”
The guard looked around through the other door, eyeing her dubiously. Obviously, everything he had been taught about deranged people suggested that, momentarily, this strange, beautiful woman was going to pull out a knife, a nail file—something—and slash the masterpiece before her. He edged closer.
Constance was trembling some now, so Nina took her hand. “I’m there, Doctor,” she said. “I’m there.”
“Where?”
“I’m home, in that painting. How can that possibly be?” Shaking more, she moved a step up, searching for some clue that would explain this irrational reaction to herself—she, the most rational of human beings.
Nina kept playing the straight man. “Whatdya mean you’re in the painting?”
Constance tore herself away from staring at Venus and Adonis long enough to look beseechingly at Nina. “I feel it, that’s all. Am I the fat lady?”
“I don’t know, Constance.”
“Who painted this?”
“Rubens.”
“Who’s he?”
“Peter Paul Rubens. A very famous Flemish painter of the seventeenth century.”
Constance didn’t even seem to hear. Instead, suddenly, as if summoned, she let go of Nina’s hand and dashed the few steps to her right, past the small Van Dyke in the center of the wall, to the painting of The Holy Family with Saint Francis. The guard was there, taken aback by Constance’s move, but ready now to pounce. And now he tensed, for Constance’s chest was heaving, her eyes wild. She simply let loose her pocketbook, letting it fall to the floor. Then: “Bucky!” she cried out. “Bucky is here!”
Nina saw her reach out. Too late to stop her. Constance stretched up on her tiptoes, trying to touch the painting. The figures were just a bit too high, beyond her reach. The guard lurched toward her, crying out, “Don’t touch that, lady!”
There was no evidence that Constance heard. Instead, with her whole body straining, she reached up again, uncaring that her short tan dress hiked up high on her thighs. Nina couldn’t help but notice, too, that Constance’s dress was ripe with perspiration. Still, Constance couldn’t quite reach the Madonna, so she bent her knees, preparing to jump.
The guard couldn’t wait any longer. He grabbed Constance—although decorously, he avoided her torso, only seeking to pull down her right arm. When he did that, though, Constance extended the left. So without a choice, the guard stopped being polite and grabbed her firmly around the waist. But Constance immediately reacted, angrily gritting her teeth, slamming an elbow back into his chest, catching him off-balance, so that he staggered back with an “oof,” nearly falling down.
Just then, another guard, this one a tiny woman, hearing the commotion, rushed in from the El Greco gallery to support her comrade.
Nina, frozen in shock, regained her senses. “I’ll get her, I’ll get her!” she screamed, lunging at Constance, grabbing her around her chest, yanking her away. And somehow, that violent thrust seemed to bring Constance back to her senses. All of a sudden, she stopped her thrashing and looked around, horrified. Then, she tore out of Nina’s grasp, and eluding the poor guard who was just regaining his footing, she tore off, willy-nilly, through the nearest door toward the Dürer gallery.
Nina scooped up Constance’s pocketbook and rushed after her, scrambling ahead of the guard. “Don’t worry, I’ll get her outta here,” she called to him. Unconvinced, he followed, but at a distance.
Nina caught up with Constance. She’d stopped running, and was simply standing there, stock still, in the corner of the next gallery, appalled at herself, her face in her hands. Tenderly, Nina embraced her, whispering, “It’s okay, Constance, it’s okay.” And then, holding her hand, Nina led Constance down the huge staircase into the Great Hall, around the information booth, out the front door.
It was sweltering outside, but never mind—they simply collapsed there, on the steps. Nina kept an arm around her shoulder. Constance gasped for air, shaking her head. Finally, she looked at Nina, but “What?” was all she could manage to say.
Nina knew she had to level with her. “What happened in there to you—that’s exactly what h
appened to Bucky three months ago.”
“But…why?”
“I don’t know why. It only seems—I mean, anyway, Bucky thinks that you two both had an earlier life, together. He thinks you were both models for Rubens.”
“Who?”
Constance had been so entranced, Nina’s original reference to Rubens hadn’t registered. She explained again who the artist was. “He painted in Antwerp. The two paintings that affected you were probably done in 1635.”
“My God, could it be?”
“Constance, I don’t know. I don’t have the foggiest.”
“Well, what next?”
Nina had already decided what that must be. “I think it’s best that I go over what I know with both of you.”
“Together?”
Nina nodded. “I’ll call you after I speak to Bucky.”
Constance broke into the most glorious smile. “Let’s meet at my hotel room,” she said. “I’d prefer the privacy.”
Nina agreed. What the hell? She knew as soon as she left Bucky and Constance alone they were going to pounce on each other, so she might as well expedite the inevitable and start them off in a bedroom.
Constance rose, dusted off her bottom. “I need to ride,” she announced, and without another word, she strode away from Nina, down the steps, walking briskly in the heat along Fifth Avenue. Nina watched as all the men turned to look at her in that way men always looked at Constance, with as much wonder as lust. It was odd, too, that even as she witnessed this welter of admiration for Constance, Nina felt a certain sadness for her…although she wasn’t quite sure why.
As soon as Nina hung up, after telling Bucky—a thrilled Bucky, an amazed Bucky, a beside-himself Bucky—that they would be meeting with Constance tomorrow afternoon, she began to make some notes. Nina decided that she would not tell them that Ollie was a murderer. That was too much for now—especially since she didn’t want to prejudice Bucky in the event that she hypnotized him again and was able to get past the scream.
But even as she outlined what she would tell them, her heart began to race. Merely the anticipation of meeting with the two of them together, of talking to them about past life. She struggled. Her mind zigged and zagged. And her next patient would be here in five minutes. Oh, if only she could talk to someone about this. If only…Hugh. And now she was thinking about Hugh. Why had he acted the way he had last night? Somehow, she knew she should give him the benefit of the doubt. On the other hand, she also wanted to give him a piece of her mind. So, she dialed Hugh, even if Nina hoped he wasn’t there. She wanted to talk to his phone machine.
Nina liked phone machines. People were always bitching about having to talk to machines, but Nina quite enjoyed that. Yes, she preferred talking to real people, one-on-one, face-to-face. That, after all, was what she did for a living, and she did it very well. But Nina found telephone conversations so lacking in definition, in dimension. She wanted to see how people looked when they spoke to her, how they acted. Nina was probably too visceral a person. Visceral persons are not, as a general rule, good telephone persons.
But phone machines. Nina liked them right from the get-go, as soon as they were invented. Because, with phone machines, you didn’t talk with people, you spoke to them. You could deliver soliloquies. Now that we had phone machines, soliloquies were back. This, in particular, was the soliloquy that Nina delivered at this moment:
“Hugh, I’ve waited impatiently to hear from you today because I have never thought you were common. But you cannot kiss someone as you did last night, and then send that someone off and not call and explain to that someone the next day. You can’t do that unless you are common.
“I especially wanted you to call, Hugh, because I am discombobulated today. I am meeting with the, uh, Double Ones tomorrow afternoon in her room at the Sherry-Netherland, and I am scared as hell, and I need to be with someone, and the only person I want to be with under these circumstances—or, indeed, under many circumstances—is you. So, I would appreciate it if you would get back to me so that I can be with you tomorrow after I leave the Double Ones. I guess that’ll be five-thirty, six, something like that.
“So please call me, or I will have to conclude that you really are common, which would surprise me, because as you know, I love you, and I have always prided myself on my good taste, and it seems impossible to believe that I could actually fall in love with someone common.”
Hugh did not call back. Nina did not sleep at all well that night.
Bucky was more distracted than Phyllis had ever seen him. He told her that he would have to stay in New York the next night, because he had a client to take to a women’s basketball game at the Garden. “A what?”
“It’s a new women’s summer basketball league, and this client—well, it’s a she—and this is the one thing in all the world she wants to see. I think I’m gonna get a lotta pages outta this.”
As weird as Bucky was behaving, Phyllis believed him. It was all too outlandish an excuse, a women’s basketball game in the summertime.
Bucky did not sleep at all well that night.
After she rode in Central Park, Constance asked the hotel concierge to get her a ticket for a musical. She wanted to be distracted. The concierge suggested Miss Saigon. It did not hold Constance’s attention at all. Not even when the damn helicopter landed right on stage. She was not only too keyed up about seeing Bucky, but she could not put out of her mind the inexplicable behavior she had exhibited in gallery twenty-seven.
Constance did not sleep at all well that night.
She kept seeing a dead woman in water. But no, it wasn’t Bess. Constance knew that right away. Bess was so beautiful and clean, lying there on the bed of pebbles. This woman was altogether different—herself and the water, too.
The woman was heavy and red-haired. And the water. The water was so dark. But it was red, too. A blood red. And the woman was drifting along in some sort of a channel. Moving with her, too, were all sorts of debris. And then Constance watched as the redheaded woman drifted out of her sight, under some building.
But even then, even as the body disappeared, Constance remembered the woman’s name. It was Elsa. So clearly she recalled it: Elsa. And now she could see her before she was in the water. When she was still alive. A hefty woman. Busty. Big, flouncy bosom. And vulgar. But not rotten vulgar. Rather: naughty vulgar. Bawdy. Yes, Constance could see Elsa perfectly. She could even hear her laughing.
Constance shuddered at that recollection, and tried to think of Bucky instead.
Slowly, too, Elsa did fade away, but it was not Bucky that she visualized then. Rather, Constance saw the red and black diamonds, lined up as always in their unique pattern. But that calmed her and finally she could slip into a sleep, the one that would carry her into the morning of that day in her life, when at last, she would have all to herself the love of the only man she had ever wanted.
24
Nina escorted Bucky up to Constance’s room. “I’ll give you two minutes,” she barked at him like a schoolmarm. Normally, he would have had some wiseass comeback, but now he was ashen and nervous and without repartee. Certainly, without smirking.
Constance opened the door, and Nina stared at the two of them staring at each other. Constance was lovely, far more simply dressed than ever—probably because she had dressed to undress. A plain dress of brown and white, buttoned all the way down the front. She was without jewelry, and barefoot—and altogether, Nina thought, presented some rare combination of sensuality and innocence. Anyway, without a word, Nina closed the door in her own face, leaving them inside the room together.
Immediately, Bucky took Constance in his arms. It was, really, the first time they had ever touched, and they kissed with such power that they seemed to all but suck the breath from one another. But they needed to affirm their love, too, and so at once they exchanged vows, for
forever and always. Then Constance fell upon his chest and pleaded with him to hold her, tighter. He did, too, only after a while, Bucky knew he must say, “We have to let Nina in.”
And so she entered, as coldly professional as she could be, with a blank expression purposely plastered upon her face. Nina put two chairs next to each other (separating them just enough to keep Constance and Bucky out of actual physical contact), bade them take their seats, and then sat down on the side of the bed herself, facing them. Then straightaway, without ado, Nina began:
“I do not understand what is going on—only that something incredible has happened between you two, and that somehow, somehow, it relates to pictures painted by Peter Paul Rubens in the year 1635 in his studio in Antwerp. For now, I’ll leave it to you to decide whether we’re dealing with reincarnation or some other phenomenon or”—Nina threw up her hands—“God knows what. But let’s not speculate on that for now. Let me only tell you what I know. Okay?”
Bucky and Constance looked over at each other with excitement, then nodded enthusiastically. So, Nina took out her notes, even though most of what she’d learned was emblazoned on her mind. Quickly, she recapped the past of their lives—their current lives—acknowledging to them that under hypnosis, they’d both vividly recalled the same incidents from Philadelphia, almost verbatim. “You also both expressed—in talking to me and under hypnosis—the same sort of instant physical—or metaphysical—attraction for one another.”
Bucky smiled shyly, Constance more triumphantly.
Then Nina moved onto a discussion of their similar extreme reactions to the Rubens’s paintings in gallery twenty-seven. Bucky gasped. Constance ducked her head, losing her usual bold assurance. “Yes,” Nina started to explain to Bucky. “I took Constance up there yesterday.”
“I completely lost it,” Constance admitted. “I’m afraid I kinda hit a guard, didn’t I?”