He rubbed his eyes, trying to remember last night. Marie was in the hospital. It had been on the news. And she was addicted to ... something. She was going in for treatment? None of it made any sense. He would have noticed if she had those kinds of problems.
He brushed his teeth and scrubbed at his face. He looked like hell. Dark shadows, bloodshot eyes, pale skin—the works. He looked like a vampire. A hungover vampire. Had he talked to that friend of Marie’s? The one who bought the lessons for her—or had that been a drunken dream? He went to look for his phone, shaving foam still on his face.
Yes, there was an unfamiliar number on the call log. He dialed it back.
“Nishi here,” a bright, crisp voice answered. Luc held the phone a centimeter further from his throbbing head.
“Nishi. Luc Marchand here.”
“Ah, Mr. Marchand. You sound better this morning.”
“What happened?”
“Richard drugged her and she ended up in the hospital.”
“The news said she was found outside, unconscious.”
“I’m still trying to sort that out. It appears that Richard did that, called 911 and then left the scene.”
“What kind of asshole does that?” Luc yelled into the phone, then winced. His own voice was too loud for his headache.
“An asshole in danger of losing his Senate seat.”
“Marie said he wants her to go into rehab.”
“Yes. I think that’s what last night was about. He is setting the stage for that.”
“I’ve really fucked up her life, haven’t I?”
Nishi was silent for awhile. “No, I think you just walked into it at a bad time. No one could have predicted Richard’s behavior of late. Not even me, and I always expect the worst from him.”
After a shower hot enough to burn off any lingering alcohol, Luc went to the concierge station to ask where he might find a stationer in New York. When he boarded the train back to Washington, he was in possession of a box of overpriced cotton writing paper—in an elegant silvery gray—and a fine French fountain pen with gold nib. He settled into his seat with a fresh cup of coffee and pulled out a sheet of paper.
He needed to apologize and it seemed best to do it in writing. He’d made a complete and utter mess of everything. He should have told Sam that she needed to delay his show until he had other work to give her. It wasn’t wrong to want to paint Marie, but he should have kept those paintings for himself.
He put some words down, then crumpled up the paper and started over on a fresh sheet. If he wrote in French, the words would flow. But, of course, Marie didn’t read French. By the time the train rolled into Philadelphia, he’d gone through a third of the box of paper and still had nothing. He was shit writing in English.
It would be easier to draw what he wanted to say but after the meeting with Vitaly-Max, the very idea of drawing made him ill. Not to mention, if he hadn’t gone to New York to meet with Max, none of this would have happened to Marie. She would have been with him yesterday, not in a hospital, not being drugged by her asshole husband.
He stared out the window at the train platform, at students with their backpacks returning to school after the holiday, at lovers reuniting after weekends with separate families, at people disembarking by themselves and dragging their suitcases—alone—toward the light of the station. That would be him when the train pulled into Union Station. He would gather up the mess he’d made with the paper and lug his bag off the train and past the shops in the station. He would get in his car and drive to Marie’s apartment where he would grovel and beg for her forgiveness. Plead to still be hers.
He scratched his pen across the grey paper, trying to will words from his brain into the nib of the pen. He just wasn’t a words person. He didn’t interact with the world through his mind. Luc saw. That’s where he was most articulate, with his eyes. But this apology had to be in writing. It needed a permanence beyond mere speech, to be something she couldn’t just knock away with a smile and a kiss.
* * *
He took the outside steps up to Marie’s apartment two at a time, the envelope in his hand. It wasn’t poetry, but it would have to do. Several times he had to press himself to the wall as movers carried down furniture and boxes. Strange time to move, he thought, on a holiday weekend.
At the top of the stairs, the door to her apartment stood wide open and his heart soared. She was home!
Then a burly man staggered through the doorway, a stack of boxes strapped to his back.
It hit Luc like a piano dropped from a New York penthouse. The movers were in Marie’s apartment. He pushed his way inside and frantically began looking for her.
“Marie!” he called.
“Hey buddy,” one of the movers said. “No one’s here. Just us.”
“Where is she moving?”
The mover shook his head like Luc was an idiot. “Can’t tell you. What I can tell you is that if you’re not out of here when I come back up, I’ll have to make some calls.”
Luc figured that gave him five minutes, tops, to find a place for the letter. The kitchen was already cleared out. The movers were working on the living room so he slipped down the short hallway to what used to be Marie’s bedroom. The bed and mattress were gone, but stacks of boxes still littered the room. He flipped open a few lids. Toiletries, socks, shoes, books. Some of these boxes she might not open right away.
Then he spotted her backpack, leaning against the wall. She had finals next week. She would have to open her bookbag. He pulled back the zipper a few inches, pressed a kiss to the envelope, and slipped his apology inside.
Chapter 25
Marie dragged her mother into the walk-in closet. “What’s wrong with this picture?”
Eileen Witherspoon peered into the closet. Dozens of hangers hung empty. More lay discarded on the carpeted floor.
“I don’t know, Marie. You haven’t unpacked your clothes yet?”
Marie pointed to the far corner where, on a shelf, a pile of clothing was neatly folded and stacked. Jeans, tee shirts, a sweater. Next to them sat a small leather toiletry case. She unzipped the case and dumped the contents out onto the floor. Lipsticks, compacts, a vial of perfume, tampons.
“Not mine!” She took a wild swipe and knocked more hangers onto the floor. “Maya hasn’t completely moved out of this house, has she? When I’m in rehab, who do you think will be here?”
“So throw her things out,” Eileen replied. “Richard isn’t seeing her anymore.”
Marie rolled her eyes. “Oh my god. Please. He’ll never give her up.”
He didn’t have to, after all. Marie would spent some undetermined number of months in rehab, then make the campaign rounds with him. After the election, he would dump her again and Maya would be back in her rightful place. She just had to bide her time.
“I informed him that he must. Otherwise, I will not press my donors to support his campaign. It makes me look bad if he’s cheating on you.”
Marie blew out a big, exaggerated sigh. “It makes you look bad. Heaven forbid. But it’s okay that it’s been making me look like an idiot for years now. Why the fuck didn’t you inform him earlier?”
“Marie, I’m leaving. If you can’t behave better ...” Eileen turned on her heel and marched down the hall, her heels clicking against the hardwood floors.
Marie followed her downstairs. “Well, I’m addicted to painkillers, right? I’m a little unstable, or so I’ve been told.”
Her mother retrieved her coat from the foyer closet.
“He made me miss my finals, mother. I thought that was part of the deal you negotiated. That I could finish my MBA. Well, I just wasted an entire semester. All that money down the drain.”
“You can file for incompletes and make it up.”
“Filing for an incomplete gives me an additional six weeks to make up the work. What am I supposed to do? Phone in the exams from rehab? And where is this rehab anyway?”
“I don’t know, dear.” E
ileen opened the heavy front door.
Liar.
The word was on the tip of Marie’s tongue, but she let it die there, swallowed the bubble of anger in her throat. Her mother probably didn’t know. Oh, if she were to ask Richard he would tell her but she knew better than to ask. Her mother saw the world the way she did—the way she wanted to—and no matter how much Marie tried to clean the lens or angle the light differently, Eileen Witherspoon was never going to see things the way her daughter did.
Marie had asked Nishi once, after one of Nishi’s clients had self-destructed in a very public way, how she stayed so calm around people like that. Nishi had replied, “We get angry with people when they aren’t the people we want them to be. But our anger doesn’t change them. I can’t really make my clients behave the way I’d like them to even though it would make their lives easier in some cases. All I can do is change course when they don’t—or fire them as clients.”
She looked at her mother standing there on the slate walkway to Richard’s front door, her black Mercedes parked in the driveway. Her mother was wearing a crisp knee-length coat over one of her St. John’s suits—on a Saturday. She’d never seen her mother in sneakers, ever. Not even on vacation. Loafers were as casual as Eileen Witherspoon got.
She looked down at her own feet, bare against Richard’s gleaming hardwood floors, and her grey leggings beneath an oversized black sweatshirt. She would never be her mother—and her mother would never be able to see that.
How do I fire my parents?
“Thanks for stopping by, Mom. Will I see you at the reception tonight?”
“No. Your father and I have a dinner to go to. But you’ll enjoy it, I’m sure.”
Marie stood in the doorway and watched sadly as her mother’s silver Mercedes drove away. She almost felt bad for her mother. Richard was thumbing his nose at her little request that he stop seeing Maya. Few people did that to Eileen Witherspoon—or got away with it. Marie knew her mother thought she was helping but Richard had neatly inserted her between a rock and a hard place. Her husband’s career or her daughter.
I will always let her down and she will always be disappointed. There was no way to change that.
When the car was out of sight, she waved jauntily to the guy sitting in the rented SUV at the curb. He pretended to ignore her, the ever-present cable of his earpiece snaking along his jaw. She had nicknamed him T. Rex because he looked so stiff all the time, even just sitting in the car. His bearing screamed military. He was practically her new best friend these days, following her every time she left the house, which she did frequently to get meals. The coffee shop for breakfast, a deli for lunch, grocery store for dinner. The last thing she wanted was to eat or drink anything Richard had in the house.
Even when they went out to dinner, Marie abstained from drinking anything. Not a single drop of anything liquid that a pill could be dissolved in. He had more. She just didn’t know where he was keeping them. She’d searched the house from top to bottom, but found nothing.
She closed the door and retreated back into Richard’s large, gracious home—the home she had lived in during their marriage. It felt completely foreign to her now, even though their wedding photos had been conspicuously planted throughout the rooms. She looked happy and hopeful inside the fancy frames. She wasn’t that girl anymore. Maybe she never had been, and just hadn’t stopped long enough to notice.
Her bare feet softly padded into Richard’s study. She yanked open the paper drawer on the laser printer and pulled out several sheets of paper, then opened one of the desk drawers. No pencils, only pens. That would have to do.
Plopping her butt in the big leather executive chair, she began to marshal her thoughts for the first time in weeks. After Richard brought her “home” from the hospital, she’d spent a week “on bed rest.” Or house arrest, as Marie termed it privately. She was put on leave from her job at Witherspoon & Associates, no surprise there. After a week, Richard began taking her out, having them seen in public together. Dinners at nice restaurants in the city, the Nutcracker at the Kennedy Center, the lighting of the White House Christmas tree. All conspicuously unmentioned by the J Street Chronicle though, Marie was sure, not unnoticed.
At home, Marie was nearly always alone. Congress and the White House were trying to hammer out a last-minute budget deal before the end of the year, keeping Richard on the Hill most days. The rest of the time, she assumed, he was with Maya. That was all well and good—Marie had no desire to spend any more time than she had to with Richard.
But he was also deliberately keeping her isolated, and that was a problem. She had set up three separate lunch dates with Nishi, only to have all of them thwarted at the last minute. A sudden lunch date with Richard’s mother, shopping with his sister for a New Year’s Eve gown, a policy briefing session with his legislative assistant.
“He’s having your phone and e-mail monitored, dear,” Nishi had finally pointed out. “He knows when you contact me.” Richard had simply shrugged when she confronted him about it.
And Luc. She missed him so much it physically hurt, a gnawing ache in the center of her chest that never subsided. It even woke her in the middle of the night, just to remind her that it was still there. How could nothing hurt so much?
She didn’t dare try contacting Luc, though. As much as she hated to admit it, putting rohypnol in her wine had done exactly what Richard intended: put the fear of God into her. She had been rather foolish to think there was no way he could force her into rehab. Not if he was prepared to take measures like that.
She sketched in a head on one of the sheets of paper. She’d been drawing constantly since she had been moved in with Richard. There was little else to do, anyway. That and visit Samantha Smith’s web site to look at the tiny images of Luc’s paintings. According to the site, the show was coming down on Christmas Eve, a month earlier than originally planned.
She shouldn’t have let him paint her. She should have known better. There had been that voice in the back of her head warning that her parents and Richard weren’t going to be happy with nude paintings of her. But she had thrown a blanket over the voice and smothered it. She’d been too infatuated with Luc Marchand, too take that Senator Macintyre! A man like Luc had been interested in her—no, crazy about her—and she let it go to her head. Well, who wouldn’t, right? Still, it was no excuse.
Then again, who could have predicted that Richard would call off the divorce? He had sucker punched her with that. It all seemed so ridiculously hopeful now, the idea that Luc’s paintings would make Richard change his mind. Instead, she’d drop-kicked herself right back into her old life and ruined Luc’s show in the process.
She sighed as she continued drawing, only half paying attention to the lines materializing on the paper.
Luc had been wrong. Seeing like an artist wasn’t enough, not when other people couldn’t see you that way. In Luc’s world of paint and canvas, paper and pencil, seeing clearly was enough to fix any problem. In Marie’s world, not so much. In Washington, she would always be her parents’ daughter, always be attached to Richard, even if they did divorce for good someday. People would always see her through their eyes.
It was time to change course.
She needed to leave Washington, go someplace where no one knew her parents or Richard. Someplace where people would look at her through their own eyes and form their own opinion of her, good or bad. But where to go? That was the question. New York wasn’t far enough away. Chicago likely wasn’t, either. It had to be someplace out of driving range and further away than just a few hours’ flight. California seemed like an obvious choice, but Marie had never been there.
She needed expert advice, and there was only one person she knew who had been just about everywhere. Nishi. Nishi could put her in touch with people and help her find a job. But how to reach her without tipping off Richard? Where could they meet that wouldn’t make T. Rex suspicious until it was too late?
She stared down at the sket
ch she had made almost without thinking. It had a head and hair, neck and shoulders. But no face. It reminded her of Elizabeth Calhoun and her faceless portraits. Everyone, it seemed, assumed that she had hidden her face because she had needed to hide her identity. But what if Alistair, despite being her lover, just hadn’t been able to see her? To see past her public face as a senator’s wife? Maybe she had even recognized that and, knowing that, refused to allow him to paint all of her.
Suddenly, Marie wanted to know. Needed to know whether Elizabeth Calhoun had been hiding her face from everyone—or just her lover. If she saw the paintings again, would she be able to tell for sure? She pulled up the Phillips Collection web site on her phone. The show was probably already closed, moved on to the next tour stop or packed back into storage. She scrolled down the tiny screen. There it was. Alistair Smith & Elizabeth Calhoun: A Model Revealed, closing December 20.
December 20. That was the day after tomorrow.
She palm-smacked her forehead. The museum! That was the perfect place to meet Nishi. The Phillips had a café but she doubted T. Rex knew that. Doubtful even Richard did. He only went to museums to be seen, like he was a work of art.
Well, he was a piece of work. That was for sure. He could keep her from seeing Luc, but he wasn’t going to keep her from seeing Nishi.
She would have to contact Nishi without tipping off Richard, however. It would have to look innocent.
A secret message, that’s what she needed. Best friends used to have secret codes they used to communicate with each other. She suspected kids no longer bothered with that. In the age of Facebook, nothing was really secret anyway. Marie never used Facebook herself, although Richard had made her set up a page a few years back so she could develop a platform on preschool education. She dropped the platform after the divorce filing.
Alistair Smith & Elizabeth Calhoun: A Model Revealed, closing December 20.
There had to be a way to contact Nishi. She stared at her phone’s screen. A box alternating images from the exhibit was surrounded by buttons. Enlarge. Event admission. Curator’s Notes. Share This.
Drawing Lessons Page 22