by Karen Moline
She will call him, he knows, because at this moment she no longer fears his desire. She only fears her own.
Chapter 7
The table, the waitress, the bottle of champagne chilled just so, all the same, the glances, murmuring, hushed, expectant, room abuzz, blazing with anticipation. It is all the same, except this time Nick knows what he is waiting for.
He arrived early, irritation with his impatience masked behind the usual polite facade, smile frozen, small talk distracting, a flirting gaze, his hands through his hair. He smokes, inhaling his nicotine deep followed by a languid exhale, women watching enraptured, wishing they were his cigarette, his lips on theirs while he sits, willing Olivia through the door, his heart pounding slow, slow, he is lost in his world, alone with unpardonable thoughts, wishes swimming deep, waiting, always waiting, watching her as she stood behind her easel, fingers hovering over his painted face, watching, waiting, and wanting, certain now she will not come.
He looks up. Olivia.
A smile lights his face, surprised into gentleness, a pure sweet smile she had not thought possible, and she smiles back, sliding into her seat, her hair pulled back, tidy, prim, its glories tamed, because she is nervous.
“I’m not late this time, am I?”
“No, I was early.”
“Were you wondering if I’d come?”
“Maybe.” He pours her a glass. “Cheers,” he says. “Here’s to . . .”
“To what? Your portrait?”
“No. To lunch.”
The air between them is saturated, heavy with anticipation, the pulsing unseen, desire breathed out, breathed in, hypnotic, steady, and as relentless as his eyes upon her.
Olivia’s anxious fingers, slim and paint-flecked, sliding up and down the stem of her wineglass, unconscious mimics of unwanted thoughts. “It’s funny that M’s not here,” she says. “I almost expected him to be.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re always together,” she explains. “He’s like your shadow, isn’t he. Behind you, and you don’t even think about it, because you know he’s there. He makes you feel safe, right? Well, at least he made me feel safe, when I was painting.”
Nick frowns. This is dangerous territory. Who we are and what we do together, so much a part of us, so long taken for granted, is not meant to be talked about.
“M doesn’t usually make people feel safe,” he admits, trying to find the right thing to say, to steer her away.
“Of course he doesn’t. He’s damaged goods in a world that expects perfection, isn’t he, like a fat person in an ice cream shop, so who can be bothered to find the man behind the scars? He must have been really handsome, once,” she muses.
“He was. Much better-looking than me.”
“Why, Nick,” she says, trying to tease away her nervousness. “I do believe you’re jealous.”
“Me? Jealous of M?” Nick smiles at the impossibility of that thought, and shakes his head. “No, but what I’m jealous of right this minute is the implication that I don’t make you feel safe.”
“Nick,” she says, laughing, “how dumb do you think I am? Of course you don’t. Nor do you want to. That’s why I shouldn’t have come,” she says. “I know I shouldn’t.”
“Then why did you?”
“I think you know why. The portrait’s finished, and you like it, so what else is there to talk about?”
He has to bite the inside of his lip to refrain from grabbing her tight and pushing her down, flinging her on the table as he’d wanted to do in her studio, plates and silver crashing at their feet, wine spilled, soaking through white linen a bloody stain, kissing her, devouring, while everyone sits, transfixed with lust, envious, equally desirous yet never daring, sitting and watching him ravish her with complete, relentless impunity.
“How much longer are you in London? Shooting, I mean,” she asks, if only to say something.
“A few months. So far we’re a few days behind schedule, but it’s difficult with period pieces, you know, and—”
There is a shadow falling over the table.
“My dear girl,” says a mocking French accent, “and you said to me that you so dearly hate to go out to lunch.”
“Jean-Michel,” she says, her voice curt, turning her cheek for him to kiss. “So nice to see you. What brings the world-famous pianist to London?”
His eyes alive with mischief, eager yearning for some small humiliation to send winging along the grapevine of gossip. “Recording, what else, abusing my ghastly producer with long lunches and many martinis. The usual.” He shrugs. “And where is the charming Olivier?”
“You know very well he’s in Japan,” she says, a small flush rising into her cheeks. “But before he left he suggested that I paint Nick’s portrait. You do know Nick Muncie, don’t you?”
They nod to each other, coldly appraising, instantly wary, the knowing gaze of the professional seducer catching a fleering glimpse of his own hard face in the mirror.
“I don’t know,” she goes on, “should I paint him? I’m getting the feeling he might be difficult. What do you think?”
The wicked smirk fades imperceptibly in Jean-Michel’s fervent haze of delirious conjecture. So Olivier knew, did he, or perhaps he didn’t, no, she was bluffing, the cool lying bitch, trying to trap him, sitting for all the world to see in a public place, or is it a blind, the perfect cover for duplicity, but no, she is too straight and this is Nick Muncie, superstar, what could he see in her anyway, what did Olivier see in her anyway but devotion, she’s no great beauty, she is too quiet to be charming and she’s just a painter and besides she slapped me when I pinched her ass.
The cool lying bitch.
“Hmmm,” he says, regarding Nick’s famous profile. “I see him as Cardinal Mazarin, or perhaps Richelieu. No. More legendary. A Borgia. Napoleon. No. Too European. He needs to be an American legend.”
“But he already is a legend,” Olivia says slyly. “At least in his own mind.”
Nick laughs. Heads turn. He is deeply impressed with Olivia’s collected performance, that instantaneous, seamless whiff of mendacity far more alluring to his senses and sensibility than anything else she could have done. “I’ve only heard that about a thousand times,” he says.
Jean-Michel smiles, stiff, outfoxed. He lifts Olivia’s hand in a farewell kiss, scrutinizing her face for even a vague hint of deception, and, finding none, says goodbye and returns to his friends.
“Serves me right. Now I know I shouldn’t have come,” says Olivia, a tinge of bitterness in her voice that Nick finds intoxicating in its ferocity. “Jean-Michel is a second-rate—no, failed—pianist who’s insanely jealous of Olivier’s success, and he loves nothing more than to see his name nearly as large as Nigel Dempster’s, and I don’t want Olivier bothered with this nonsense.”
“This isn’t nonsense.”
“Isn’t it?”
She is agitated, her eyes shiny with stress. That damn French prick.
“Olivia.”
“Don’t. Please, please don’t.”
“Okay,” he says, leaning back and stretching his legs. “Relax. I can wait. We’ve got all day. Have a drink. Let’s order.”
“I’m not hungry.” She tries to smile. “Besides, I don’t think you can wait.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, my darling Olivia, because I can. I’m going to wait as long as I have to for you to revise your opinion of me.”
“But why should I?” she says soberly. “I admit that you’re a lot more surprising—or substantial, I guess—than I thought you were, but I expect you’re still a rake, a cad, and an abomination to women.”
His eyes spark with some unnamable hurt, a flash no longer than a blink, but Olivia catches it, sees that window opening only an instant to the bitter secrets locked inside his heart, buri
ed, forgotten, willed by his ambition to lie dormant and sleeping, far away where they cannot touch him. She sees it and as so she sees him now, outside the sealed calm space of her studio, sees him as she’d painted him, sees the shadow of a raw terror she knows must be real, for no actor could possess a skill so rare as to break his own heart.
Her defenses melt, she is sorry, ashamed of her harshness, because she is kind, and pain is no stranger to her thoughts. She brushes her fingers across the rim of his glass, a feather, a spontaneous gesture so unbearably erotic that Nick quickly picks up the glass and drinks, his lips touching the spot she’d so briefly caressed.
“Well,” she says, her voice lightening, apologetic, “maybe not an abomination.”
“I’ve had my moments,” he says. “Believe me, I’ve had way too many.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
He pours more champagne. “You shouldn’t be. Bad boys in Hollywood usually deserve their reputations. When I told my agent I wanted to do Faust even he thought I should be playing Mephisto.”
“I don’t pay any attention to gossip.”
“I know that. I just really have no idea what you think about me. You studied my face, who I am. It’s all there; I can see how you saw me, but not what you think.”
“Why is that so important?”
He does not know how to start what he wants to say, although we have rehearsed it so much I never want to write another word for him again, hours spent pacing in our suite in the Savoy, curtains drawn against the cold and dull throb of dreariness outside our window, hours spent on Olivia that should have been given to Faust.
Or perhaps in his mind’s eye the quest to conquer both has been inextricably melded.
“What do you think?” he’d asked me, and I’d hidden my amazement. Nick did not ask my opinion, not about anything important, unless it was work-related. He just told me what to do.
“She’s not Belinda.”
He laughed. “God, no. No, she’s definitely not Belinda.”
“She’s a woman.”
“I get the point.”
“But why her, you mean. Why now.”
Nick looked at me, silent, waiting. We know each other too well. We sat there for a long time.
“She’s so much smarter than I am,” he said, finally.
Nick has been with other clever women before, in whatever context of his choosing, but their purported intelligence has never mattered, not when he’d never cared enough to remember their names or what they did or anything they might have said. There was no need to listen.
“You’re smarter than you think you are,” I told him. “I’ve always believed it. It’s just that no one expects you to be. Intelligence is a burden to actors like you.”
He ignored my comment, because there’s no point arguing with that Hollywood truism. “So tell me what to say to her.”
I got up and pushed back the draperies to stare out at the blackness, punctuated by bright round suns of the headlights wavering below us. “How do you mean?”
“You were there, watching. How did it make you feel?”
I was not going to tell him how it made me feel. I can’t even tell myself.
“You mean how it made you feel,” I said.
“Whatever.” He shrugged. “Just do it.”
I did it, of course, and he repeated what I’d given him so often that it became his own.
Sometimes even I underestimated the determination behind his talent.
And so he sits, staring at the tablecloth. Nick, unaccustomed to the truth, wherever it came from, to telling it or feeling it, finds himself wanting to be honest with Olivia, wanting to confide in her, divulge and reveal. Why should this woman, this odd, truthful, strangely protective woman whose heart belongs to another, have fixed her peculiar eyes upon him and cracked through to his heart? How can he hope to understand why she makes him feel, so fiercely, that he wants whatever stolen moments he is to have with her to be real?
That with her, far from home, he can be real.
“I would watch you, you know, when you were painting, there and not there, so remote from me,” he says finally. “I’m not used to that. To being seen, but not acknowledged. To having a woman look at me and not want to take something.”
“But I wanted you, to paint.”
“That’s different. Now it’s yours. You made it. You made me immortal on a canvas. But I would watch you, I’d be talking, or maybe I wasn’t but it didn’t matter because I knew you weren’t really listening. You’d nod or say umm-hmm but you were lost in the work, and I’d stand there watching you with such envy, such envy at the easy rhythm you’d fallen into. You’d paint, glance at me but not seeing me, and I am standing there, useless, a captive audience that can only watch in silence, my actor’s ego dented, watching yours at work, giving me nothing, needing nothing more than my face, or my body, no role to play, no lines, no being, no director giving me cues, no camera in my face, no one there but you, and you didn’t even see me.”
Olivia is astonished by his words. My words.
“Sometimes you’d push your hair impatiently off your forehead or chew on a knuckle or even talk to yourself, so lost in thought, concentrating, remote from me, from the world, it had disappeared, I no longer existed because you didn’t need me, you were turning me into another, and I was standing there silent in a maze, lost, with only my eyes upon you in your painter’s dance, and there was nothing, nothing I wanted more in the world than to hear you say, ‘Come with me now and we will dance together.’”
She doesn’t know Nick, or me, well enough to have heard that subtle shift in his voice, she has not seen him act before, act truly, and she would never have guessed that all these words are not the spontaneous outpourings of his soul, that I thought them up, wrote them down on the Savoy’s smooth stationery for Nick to repeat to her, caring only that she would hear them.
She doesn’t know.
Nick has leaned closer to her as he spoke, that famous voice made magical with the rawness of truth unexpected, and she cannot help herself from leaning in to hear him, knowing without knowledge that he is speaking full from the heart, nakedly yearning, auditioning for a role he never thought he’d want to play.
Their heads are so close he could have kissed her, his loins full of heat, burning, they are breathing hard, together, lost, until she pulls away and sighs, breaking the spell, leaning back to sip her champagne.
“But isn’t acting like that?” she asks after an excruciating moment. “I mean, don’t you feel that you can lose yourself completely in the character you’re playing, be whoever, be Faust, lose yourself in this journey and yet still be yourself, and then when you see it on film you can’t believe you said what you said or remember how you felt in that moment, because it wasn’t you, Nick, talking, you had disappeared, and all you hear is the voice of your spirit?”
“Like a personalized Ouija board?”
She laughs. “Not quite.”
“I know what you mean,” he says slowly. “That kind of acting is what you’re supposed to feel, except of course you don’t when you’re playing idiot parts in idiot movies.”
“Faust isn’t idiot.”
“Which is one of the reasons I’m doing it. I’ve said I wanted to do this for years, and no one believed me. Everyone laughed. You can’t imagine the fights that went on to pull this together. Muncie’s Madness, they called it.”
“Even M?”
“No, not M. It was his idea, originally. We were out by the pool and I picked up this book he’d been reading and saw that he’d marked a passage: ‘I stagger from desire to enjoyment/and in its throes I starve for more desire.’ So I asked him what the story was about. ‘Faust is insatiable,’ he told me, ‘seeking the unattainable. He’s willing to surrender eternity in a quest for one perfect moment.’ He looked at me, as only M ca
n look at somebody. ‘You’re born to play him,’ he said.”
“Did you believe him?”
“Of course not. I laughed, but M knows me, all too well, and he kept on at me. ‘You’ve got it in you,’ he kept saying. ‘You’re always complaining about the movies you do—so package this for yourself. What do you care what anybody says?’ ”
“But you do care,” Olivia says softly.
“Of course I care. My whole life as an actor is at stake. My whole life.” His hands through his hair. He finds it hard to look at Olivia, surprised that he is telling her what he’d never admitted to himself. “I mean, the story struck a chord, somewhere, one I usually don’t let myself think about.”
“Why not?” Her voice is gentle.
Nick clasps his hands in front of him. This conversation is harder than he thought, even with all our rehearsals. “What’s the point? In the business I’m Nick Muncie, valuable commodity, nothing more. And then at home I’m reading these lines, at first without really understanding them, but still knowing that this is me.”
“What lines?”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” Nick says, smiling, as anxious to veer away from the pangs of confession as he is to dazzle Olivia with every utterance. “It sounds pretentious.”
“Tell me.”
“ ‘I awake with horror in the morning/and bitter tears well up in me/when I must face each day that in its course/cannot fulfill a single wish, not one!’ ” he recites, his eyes far away. “ ‘The very intimations of delight/are shattered by the carpings of the day/which foil the inventions of my eager soul/with a thousand leering grimaces of life.’ ”
There is a long silence. “Nick,” she says, finally. “Is that how you really feel?”