Keeping Secrets

by Andrew Rosenheim

  ‘I’m glad you like it.’

  ‘If you could live anywhere,’ she said, ‘where would it be?’

  ‘Some place like this.’ An answer that surprised even himself, since this weekend was an exception – he was rarely outside San Francisco. His spare time was spent in bars or at ball games, or just reading in his apartment; when he’d been with Jenny it hadn’t been all that different, except for dinner parties with her friends. Jenny didn’t even like the country. Her idea of wilderness was walking in the Panhandle early enough in the morning that no one else was around.

  Kate said to him, ‘Not a lot of positive vetting out here.’

  He shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t be in the same line of work.’

  He paused, and asked, ‘You meant a fantasy, right?’

  ‘Sure. Go ahead.’

  Almost reluctantly he said, ‘I’d farm. I’d farm top fruit.’

  ‘Top fruit?’

  ‘Apples, pears. Not cherries – too difficult.’

  She looked at him a little sceptically, and he realised how fanciful this must sound. ‘How about you?’ he asked to shift her attention.

  ‘Oh, I’d like to live in the country too. I’d keep the day job – I’ll leave the farming to you. Probably commute into London. But I travel so much anyway it wouldn’t be much different. And we put out a newsletter which I can do from anywhere.’

  ‘You wouldn’t want to give up work then?’

  ‘No.’ Her voice was emphatic, almost harsh. He looked at her quizzically and she smiled in recognition of her sharpness. ‘Sorry.’

  They sat silently for a while, watching the fire burn down. ‘You know,’ she said, lifting her face to look at him with a generous smile, ‘it must be strangely appealing to know that you can find out anybody’s secrets. And maybe even guess them beforehand as well.’

  ‘I’d never use it in my own life,’ he said. He didn’t mention ‘tells’, though certainly he was pleased that she kept stroking her hair, brushing it back over her ears, once even sweeping the whole front comma of it back onto her head, until he remembered that this could hardly be a sexual tell intended for him.

  ‘Really?’ Her tone was teasing, but interested. ‘What about the women in your life? Do they mind what you do on the job?’

  ‘They have done,’ he admitted.

  ‘But not any more?’ She sounded playful.

  ‘No. Not any more. I told you that already.’

  Something in his tone must have sounded serious, possibly offended. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry . . .’

  ‘Really?’ he said, looking at her sceptically. ‘I thought you were giving me a dose of my own medicine.’ He smiled to lighten the edge in his voice.

  She smiled back at him, yet said, ‘But seriously, how can you keep it out of your life? Doesn’t it make you distrust people?’

  ‘If you spend your working life being paid not to trust anyone,’ he said with emphasis, ‘the one thing you want to do on your own time is give people the benefit of the doubt. It’s a kind of rule I have.’

  ‘Do you have many rules for life?’

  He shook his head. ‘Not other than don’t have too many rules.’

  ‘You don’t really like to talk about yourself, do you?’

  ‘Are you serious?’ It seemed to him he had done little else throughout the weekend.

  ‘Yes. This is unusual for you, isn’t it? I’ve always been talkative. Not a chatterbox exactly, at least I hope not. But not a shrinking violet.’ She got up and walked over to the fire, reached down for a log but looked at her watch and thought better of it. ‘You know, it’s late – maybe we should go to bed.’

  They went round the cabin turning off the lights, and she was in bed with the light off when he came out and got into the lower bunk bed. He wanted to keep talking to her, so as he lay down he said, ‘You haven’t told me anything about yourself.’ He added teasingly, ‘Not even your secrets. And I can’t guess them, whatever you think.’

  ‘You’ll learn them,’ said Kate. ‘Don’t worry, you will. Sleep well.’

  And this surprised him again, since he assumed that after this weekend he would never see this unusual woman again. Why not? he wondered, since he recognised how much he liked her and, until her admission, had been drawn in by – what? Sex? No, it wasn’t just sex; it was, remarkably for him, more than that; it was romantic, to use the word she’d used at the lake. And that’s exactly why I won’t be seeing her again, he thought, deft at cushioning himself from disappointment. What’s the point? he thought just before he fell asleep.

  He hadn’t had the nightmare for a long time, but it could have been yesterday for its familiar immediacy. It began, as it always did, with him standing by the pond looking towards the greenhouse, where a figure lay inert on the ground. There was a dark stain on its chest, and he realised it was a man, then consciously thought within the dream, It’s Uncle Will. And though he knew Will was dead, he was unsurprised to hear him talking as he lay dead on the ground, saying, Help me, help me. And then, Why did you run?

  And the boy was about to protest, Because you told me to, Will; you told me to run, but then he was in the kitchen and the man in the yellow shirt was coming through the back door with a gun in his hand which suddenly swelled, like an inflatable figure in a Disney parade, the barrels the length of a grown man and the trigger as big as a fat man’s fist, and it was rising, as was his panic, and he felt without looking on the cheap Formica kitchen table for a knife. And the knife wasn’t there. It wasn’t there. And panic took hold of him like flu, and he wanted to shout but his throat was so completely constricted by fear that no sound would come out.

  Somehow an arm was on him, and his first reaction was to duck under it, free himself, get away from the powerful constricting force. But it wasn’t grabbing him; it was gentle, first stroking his shoulder, then his forehead, smoothly. He shuddered and quivered in fear, until a voice broke through his dreaming and like daylight woke him. ‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ the voice said soothingly, low but female, resonant but calming.

  And he opened his eyes and made out a figure leaning over him, and he realised first that he was in a bed, then remembered he was in the cabin, and then with an exhalation of relief knew it was this woman Kate next to him and he was out of the old familiar terror of the old familiar dream.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said weakly.

  She got up from the bed and turned on a standing lamp. He noticed she was still wearing only the man’s shirt. ‘I wasn’t sure what to do,’ she said.

  ‘You did fine,’ he said, still shaken by the dream.

  ‘You’re shivering,’ she said, looking at his arms, which were covered with goose bumps.

  ‘It’s cold in here,’ he said.

  ‘No it’s not,’ she said calmly and looked down at him. She took his forearm between both her hands and began rubbing it briskly. ‘I’ll make you a hot drink in a minute. What else can I do?’

  And whether out of the slight shock created by the contrast between his terrifying nightmare and this calm reality, or because he thought, What have I got to lose?, he looked at her and said, ‘What I’d really like right now, if you wouldn’t mind – and I do appreciate what you told me last night – is a kiss.’

  And she looked at him, he thought, incredulously, though not with any obvious hostility or disgust, and then her lips creased into a cupid’s bow and she laughed. Her eyes, dark rather than sky blue, seemed intensely alive – even when her face was calm, they seemed to move, and now they danced so vividly that he did not realise for a second that the rest of her had moved too, and that she was sweeping back his bedclothes. ‘Move over,’ she said, with a cheerful bossiness.

  She sat up on her knees next to him in the bed and slowly unbuttoned her shirt. In the lamplight her skin was the colour of light corn, and the short straight strands of her hair were lightly streaked. She leant back and shrugged the shirt off her shoulders, then moved over him until her knees were on
either side of him while he lay on his back looking up at her. She leant down and kissed him lightly on the mouth, and she stroked his hair with her hand. The sensation was utterly soothing, and he felt about eight years old.

  ‘I thought,’ he began to murmur but she cut him off.

  ‘Hush. Don’t talk. And remember it was only a dream.’ Her hands travelled down and began to lower his shorts. ‘But this isn’t,’ she said.

  She worked his shorts off then sat up slightly and he looked at her, then reached with one hand and slowly touched her breasts, which were round and full, the nipples now erect. She looked at him with a knowing smile. ‘Don’t you start applauding too,’ she said, and then moved her face down towards his and kept it there. They kissed for a long time until he could feel both their bodies stirring, and she stretched her legs down, over his and almost as long, and they rolled over until he was on top, and when he reached down to stroke her she moved his hand away and touched him instead, saying, ‘Now. Now, please.’

  And as he moved very gently into her she gasped and drew his mouth down again onto hers and they moved together, gently at first, then with increasing vigour, and she broke her mouth away. ‘Don’t wait, don’t wait,’ she urged him, but he did, losing sense of himself in her, feeling the alternating softness and strength of her thighs gripping him as she encircled the backs of his legs with her own calves, and her arms held him tight, meeting in the middle of his back, and he watched her as her gaze left his and seemed to be searching high in the sky for something, though there was no sky, he told himself, and she was suddenly arching and then her whole body seemed to quiver from her spine and he was no longer waiting but felt overtaken by his own climax which came in an emptying rush and he held her even tighter and they rolled until facing each other sideways and looked intently into each other’s eyes and she said softly, ‘Usually it takes for ever,’ and then she giggled happily.

  ‘I thought you said you liked women.’

  ‘Maybe I do,’ she said, and she giggled again. ‘Actually, it seemed a safe way to keep you out of my bunk. I wasn’t sure if it was just a quick leg-over you were after. I wasn’t having any of that.’

  ‘“Leg-over”? I’ve never heard it called that before. What do you call what happened then?’

  She giggled. ‘I call it me calling the shots.’

  ‘So the lesbian business was some kind of test then? To see if my intentions were honourable.’

  ‘I didn’t intend it that way, but I suppose that’s how it turned out. I just thought that telling you I was gay would remove any tension about sex. I could see you weren’t very pleased, but you did your best to hide it. A red-blooded American, in other words, but a gentleman too.’

  ‘Pretty ingenious to say you were gay,’ he said, not without acerbity. ‘You get to know that you’re desired without the awkwardness of saying no.’

  ‘Yes,’ she seemed to agree. ‘So ingenious that I end up here.’ She gestured at them both lying in bed, and he laughed, conceding the truth of this.

  ‘Who is Emily then? You mention her so often I thought she must be your girlfriend.’

  ‘Emily is exactly nine and a half.’ She hesitated. ‘She’s my daughter.’

  ‘You’re married?’ he asked bluntly. Nice of her to let me know now.

  ‘Divorced.’

  He was astonished by the turn events had taken. What had got into her so suddenly? The dream; of course, it was the dream. He’d had it many times with Jenny next to him in bed, but perhaps never quite so dramatically. He shuddered slightly at the thought of it, disturbed as he remembered his uncle’s accusation: Why did you run? Then a hand pinched him lightly on the thigh. ‘Hey,’ said the voice, and it was Kate, her mouth not twelve inches from his. ‘Don’t go away.’

  He forced himself to smile. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Do you do that with all the girls?’

  ‘What? Say I’m sorry?’ he asked, intentionally misunderstanding her.

  ‘No. Go away like that, like you just did. I wasn’t with you any more.’

  He exhaled slowly. ‘There have been complaints,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

  ‘What, the complaints?’

  ‘No, silly. The nightmare you were having. It sounded terrible.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Okay,’ she said in a way that discomfited him. He turned and now she was lying on her back, her eyes focused on the ceiling.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘why did you get irritated when I asked if you’d ever want to give up work? I wasn’t chauvinist – most people’s fantasy is to give up their job.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘But I’ve been through it once before with my ex-husband. He not only didn’t want me to work, he thought it was up to him. Once Emily was born,’ she looked away from him as she said this, ‘he didn’t even bother to use her as an argument. You know, a baby needs a full-time mother. He just thought he had made a decision and that was that.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I stuck it out for three years; I thought it was important for Emily to have a father. Then I decided it couldn’t actually be any worse for a child to grow up in a single-parent household if the alternative was her mother going mad. I waited until Angus went stalking near Inverness, then took Emily and one big suitcase and caught the shuttle to London. I couldn’t get my old job back at the Economist, and for a while it looked pretty bleak – Angus wouldn’t give me a bean. He wouldn’t even help me with Emily; I had to take him to court. Then I met Seymour Carlisle, the head of the consultancy, and he gave me a job. Things got better.’

  This was put dispassionately, but he sensed a great well of emotion behind it. There was a sense of a long struggle, but of survival as well; of pride, but no triumph; a sense, too, of unhealed wounds. ‘Didn’t your parents help you?’

  ‘My mother thought I should go back to Angus. My father seemed to understand.’ Her voice faltered slightly. ‘But then he died.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Two years ago.’

  ‘You were close?’ He thought, I sound like a psychotherapist.

  ‘Very. I adored him.’

  She’s not over it, he thought, and she seemed to read his thoughts because she said, ‘I know it seems odd, that I still get upset about it. But I felt like I lost my only ally. And why do people always say you should “get over it” – he is gone after all, am I supposed to stop missing him?’ He could sense her eyes on him, felt her breath slightly graze his chin on the exhale. ‘Don’t you miss the people you’ve lost?’

  He paused before replying, saddened by the words he was about to say. ‘I try not to let myself. I guess I thought once I started missing them I’d never be able to stop.’

  They slept late, as sunshine flooded through the cabin, then made love again before Renoir brewed coffee and brought it back to bed in two tin mugs. When they got up at last, they went for a long walk up the mountain, packing ham sandwiches and a thermos of Sangria. It was warmer than the day before, and they both sweated freely as they emerged at last from the tree line onto the grassy slope beneath the summit. They stopped for their picnic, with a vista of the lake below. ‘I love water,’ said Kate. ‘Even the most beautiful scenery isn’t the same without it. And swimming in a lake.’

  ‘Do you get much chance for that?’ asked Renoir. He couldn’t think of a single body of water in England except the Thames.

  ‘At Belfield there’s a lake.’ Then she explained, ‘That’s where I grew up. My mother lives there now, and sometimes my brother.’

  Was it their summer house? he wondered. He tried to imagine a beach house – no, it would be something classier, maybe an old Victorian pine house, like those he’d seen in photographs of Maine. The beach was probably rocky, too – somehow he couldn’t associate England with sand. He pointed down at the lake in the valley below. ‘They’ve managed to keep the developers out so far. But some day there’ll be houses all around the
shore. How about your lake? Is it very built up?’

  ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘It belongs to the house.’ She looked embarrassed.

  ‘Belfield?’ he said with sudden understanding. She nodded. He resisted the impulse to tease her. She had money, that had been obvious from her first appearance in his office as a high flyer in her business. But now he understood that her family had money too. Oh well, he thought, another reason why he was unlikely to see her again.

  ‘Sounds nice. Did you learn to swim there?’

  ‘Yes. How about you?’

  ‘I learned in a pond, actually.’ And he remembered his uncle’s patience as he struggled and kicked and struggled some more, until one day, just as even his uncle looked like he was about to give up hope, presto and he could swim. Soon you couldn’t get him out of there; all those times when Maris would say, ‘See if I care if your supper gets cold,’ and stomp off back to the house.

  ‘I thought everyone in California had swimming pools.’

  ‘That’s LA,’ he said. ‘We’re hardier stock up here.’

  ‘Speaking of stock, was your mother’s family French too?’

  He smiled and shook his head. ‘My grandmother’s name was Shaughnessy.’

  ‘Oh, Irish. You probably don’t like the English then.’

  He shrugged. There was a large Irish community in San Francisco, with a long tradition of nationalist sympathy and, supposedly, a history of gun running for the IRA. But it hadn’t been part of his upbringing, since for all her essential conservatism, and church-going habits, his grandmother had never been an ethnic ‘type’. If anything, Renoir had always sensed she wanted to escape it – though with the name Shaughnessy and a house in the Sunset, she was never going to do that entirely. ‘I don’t think much of it one way or another,’ he admitted. ‘I’ve never been to England.’ He looked at her out of the side of his eyes. ‘Or Europe.’

  Her own eyes widened. ‘Gosh,’ she said, and standing up began to brush the sandwich crumbs from her jeans, ‘you’d better do something about that.’