A Husband for Beauty

by Lindsey Hart

  Again, Leena wasn’t sure how she knew that. She just did, like she knew what objects were. It was just that there was no association with them. For example, when she was shown into her own apartment on the second floor and she saw her kitchen, the living room with the antique settee, her neatly made up bedroom with antique dresser and brass headboard, she had no memory of purchasing the things or of sleeping in the bed or of anything else. She knew it was a bed and that it was for resting, but that was it.

  “Don’t worry, sweetheart.” Minnie gripped her hand just inside the bedroom as Leena stared around blankly. “It will feel like home soon enough. I know it’s too early to talk about these things, but we do have a production coming up and coming up fast. You were playing the lead role. We had someone else playing the male lead. He was- uh- fired. And now your part… I’m sure you won’t be up to it. We’ll have to find two others. We have time, but only if we act fast. I can call in some favors.”

  Leena blinked, the thick fog in her brain sliced like someone shone a flashlight beam through it and there was a fleeting instant where she saw herself on stage.

  “No,” she whispered, not at all certain. “I want to play the lead. I- this one is special isn’t it?”

  Minnie hesitated. “Yes, I think so. It’s a play that you and Dallas wrote together. You told me that it took you years to decide to make it public. You just said that it was time.”

  “And Dallas and I- we don’t normally write together?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Not that you ever mentioned.”

  Leena nodded slowly. “Get everyone together. We’ll have a meeting this afternoon about the production. I’ll get everything sorted out.”

  “We’ll get everything sorted out,” Minnie corrected softly. “You don’t have to do it by yourself.”

  “Thank you.” Leena felt the burn of tears behind her ears. It wasn’t the first time that morning she’d just about broken down. “I guess I had better see Dallas. He’s across the hall?” Minnie had pointed to the door when they’d walked up.

  “Yes,” Minnie said. There was something in her voice, a warning. “I would just- tread carefully. Dallas can be- well, he sometimes gets lost in his music. That’s what you used to tell me. It can be pretty shocking if you’re not used to it. He can be moody, so just be prepared. If he yells at you, don’t take it personally. Don’t stand for it either. You can leave or you can hold your ground. I just don’t want you to be unhappy. Before, you used to have years of experience dealing with him. Now, it would be a little like jumping into scalding water.”

  “I’ll take care not to get burned,” Leena said, but her words lacked conviction.

  “I’ll be downstairs in my office if you need me.”

  “Thanks.” Leena knew exactly where that was because Minnie had shown her right before they came up to the second floor. She’d received the full tour of her own establishment. She knew she was going to feel like a stranger in her own home, but now it was official.

  Leena watched as Minnie left. She felt a moment of panic when she was alone. Minnie was like her safety net. Not having her there, even though she was in her own bedroom, made Leena feel like she was floating away.

  She shook her head gently, refusing to give in to her fears. This was her life now. Maybe her memory would come back. Maybe it wouldn’t. She’d just have to make the best of it either way. She knew that if she put off meeting Dallas, it would only give her worse anxiety.

  It took Leena a moment to work up the nerve to leave her small apartment. She stepped across the hall. The floor was hardwood, probably original. She’d seen, when she came up a stairwell that was so narrow it was also likely original to the building, that there was a radiator near the large wooden door that separated the stairs from the hall. There were a few smaller windows that lined the hall. She figured the living quarters were built during the renovation. The kitchen in her place looked far too new to have just been there. The warehouse was used for offices, Minnie told her, before they bought it.

  She came to a broad wood door, scarred from use. It was one of those doors that was thick, solid wood, the kind of thing that belonged to another time and place, another world. She raised her hand and knocked slowly.

  Leena wasn’t sure what she expected. There was no answer. The door wasn’t magically pulled open. The man she was married to wasn’t there to greet her, to ask if she was well, to welcome her back into a life they apparently shared together.

  The door handle was cool when she wrapped her hand around it. She turned, half expecting it to be locked, but it wasn’t. She pushed the door open and stepped over the threshold.

  It made perfect sense that the door seemed to belong to another world because that’s what she stepped into. The large studio was full of instruments of all shapes and sizes. There was a small green antique couch on one side. Underneath was a woven red Persian rug. The hardwood floor was the same as that what was in the hallway. The walls were raw exposed brick. The room was lined with radiators. It looked like a true studio.

  The room was dark, so much darker than she expected. The window coverings were pulled down. It took her eyes a second to adjust. When they did, she blinked quickly. There, hunched over a huge, impressive black piano, was the man who was her husband. A stranger. She wore a gold wedding band on her finger, marking her as his, but she knew nothing about him.

  He turned slowly, as she closed the door. He didn’t rise. He made no effort to come and see her.

  Leena kept staring, frozen in place, the situation made that much more awkward by the fact that she knew she looked like she’d just been run over by a bus. Or more aptly, hit by a car. She knew she was bruised and scraped, the cuts on her face and jaw still not healed. Her hands were a mess of bruises and cuts. At least her clothing covered the rest.

  Dallas slowly stood. He wore jeans and a red and black plaid shirt. Not at all what she expected. She wasn’t sure what she’d envisioned him in, but it wasn’t that. His clothes were rumpled like they’d been slept in. His long, sandy blonde hair lay tussled about his shoulders. It was snarled and matted in places like it hadn’t seen a good brushing in a few days.

  Despite the fact that there were deep black smudges under his eyes and that lips that looked like they would have been beautiful if they smiled were pulled into a thin, hard line, he had the impressive physique of a man who took care of himself. By all accounts, he didn’t. She did that for him, which meant he must have been blessed with an amazing set of genetics.

  His shoulders filled out his shirt well. They were surprisingly broad and powerful. His broad chest tapered to a narrow waist. Powerful, long legs held him upright. He stared at her, his cold grey eyes biting into her, assessing her in a way that made her more than a little uncomfortable.

  Since he wasn’t about to speak, she finally decided to break the silence. She let her hand fall away from the door and stepped into the dark room. It felt closed in, the lack of light and the dank smell of dust and hopelessness thick in the air.

  “You never came.” It wasn’t what she wanted to say, but the words squeezed out of her throat.

  Dallas never blinked. His hard, flat expression never altered. “No.”

  “Why not? You’re my husband, aren’t you?”

  He laughed coldly, a sound that wasn’t truly a laugh at all, just a calculated sneer of derision. “You can cut the act now. If you’re doing it for attention, you’re not going to get any sympathy from me.”

  Leena’s mouth literally dropped open. “Are you insane?” she hissed. “Look at me!” She jabbed her index finger upwards. “I have stitches on my face. I am bruised all over my entire body. That car ran me over! There is a guy going to court right away for leaving the scene. I’ve spent the last week in a hospital with doctors telling me that I might never recover my memory and you think it’s an act!” She couldn’t believe his nerve. This man was her husband and she could see absolutely no emotion at all in his eyes.

  “You
always were a good actress, Leena. You might have everyone fooled, but not me.”

  “This is not an act!” She wanted to scream in frustration. Instead, she balled her hand into a fist and let the sting of her nails biting into her palm take away some of the anger.

  He shrugged. “Either way, I didn’t come because we both know that I can’t.”

  “What do you mean you can’t? Can’t or won’t?”

  “That is just a matter of semantics.” Those cold grey eyes finally blinked.

  “Convenience? That’s what you call our marriage? By all accounts, I do everything for you. I look after you all day and after most of this place too.”

  “Is that what people told you? That you’re some kind of saint looking after the monster that I am?”

  “No. Of course not. They just made it seem like… like if we were married, then the convenience was definitely on your side.”

  That bitter laugh sounded again. She didn’t like the acoustics of the room, the way the sound bounced around and came back at her. “Well, seeing as you say you don’t remember, I’ll give you a bit of a refresher. Yes, our marriage is an arrangement. One in which I continue to hide away from the world since it is what I need and one in which you get what you want, namely my millions of dollars to build this place and make yourself the actress you always dreamed you could be.”

  “What? I’ve never… I would never-”

  “Squander my money?” He shrugged. His eyes flicked away, back to the piano off to the side. They were maybe twenty feet away, but she felt the distance growing, the gap yawning, widening. How could she ever have married this man? “Maybe you didn’t. Anyway, you got what you wanted. You sing, and you act out there, or whatever you would call it and my money made it possible, so I’m telling you that on the side of the arrangement, maybe you came out on top.”

  He stalked forward his height growing as he neared. His shoulders seemed broader, his size that much larger and looming up close. Leena wanted to take a step back, but she held her ground. Dallas stopped. His eyes swept over her body, assessing. “I wouldn’t worry about the stitches and the bruises. They’ll go away in time. You never were anything but a sub-par actress anyway. People don’t come just to see you.”

  She didn’t mean for it to happen, but her anger got the best of her. She had the strangest feeling he was trying to goad her into being angry, like he wanted her to hurl words at him that she didn’t even mean. Despite her resolve to hold back, the words spilled out anyway. “Damn you to hell, Dallas.”

  His lips curled into a thin smile. “That, we both know, will never happen.”

  Leena balled her other hand into a fist. She was so rigid her shoulder muscles began to ache. “Let me ask you this. Did I hate you before? I can’t remember?” She knew, in her heart, that she didn’t. This man infuriated her. He said horrible, mean, spiteful things. But she could not shake the feeling he didn’t mean it. That he was trying to keep her at bay, drive a spike through a heart that was softening as the minutes ticked by. She’d only felt tenderness before when she heard his name. Why? What had he ever done to endear himself to her?

  He shrugged. “I have no idea. It doesn’t matter to me either way. We might not love each other. I might not even be capable of love. None of that matters. The only thing that meant anything is the music. My work. There was an opera I was writing, between lovers. It was a tragedy. She dies in the end and leaves him alone and he is nothing but a pathetic wretch. I wrote it in a day and I couldn’t stand to look at it after. I crumpled it up and threw it away. You found it and over the weeks, you rewrote it. One morning I came, and it was sitting at the piano, the pages ironed out, the fresh ones, where you’d replaced the ending, evident. You gave them a happy ending. Instead of death, you gave her life. You gave him a heart and a soul. It was then that you went from being a student to being a partner and I knew that this would work. I suppose that’s why I tolerate you. It’s why I allowed this building, the shows, the musicals, the plays, my work on parade for everyone to criticize or love as they see fit. That’s why this works. Because as much as I love music, you love it too.”

  “I was never your student.” She had no idea how she could say it with such conviction.

  His mouth slammed shut and he turned, clearly not wanting to say more. Leena didn’t know if she should press him or not. Something, as though a fog cleared, slammed into her mind. A memory. Of Dallas at the piano, instructing a girl. She was maybe sixteen. She was singing, singing so beautifully and there she was, in the background, listening to his every word. She saw herself, fleetingly, as though through someone else’s eyes, after, at home, singing the notes again over and over, stroking the cold piano keys until she poured life into them and they warmed under her touch.

  Who was the girl with me? Why was I even there?

  She couldn’t have been more than sixteen at the time. Was the vision even real? It was so fleeting, it could have come from anywhere. A movie even. She knew it was a memory, a true memory since Minnie had sketched out a sort of timeline for her. She knew that she’d known Dallas from the time she was fifteen, literally half her life.

  “No, you were never my student.”

  Before she could ask anything else, Dallas turned. There was a door on the other side of the room that she hadn’t noticed before. He left through that, walked over and disappeared. It shut with a quiet click. She had no idea where he’d gone or if he’d come back. Her instincts told her no.

  What kind of a man was her husband, this man cloaked in shadow and apparent misery? More importantly, what kind of a woman was she to have married such a man?

  CHAPTER 6

  Leena

  After a frustrating afternoon spent trying to belong in a world she no longer felt was her own, Leena was about to head back to the apartment that apparently was hers. She’d walked through the small kitchen, bedroom, living room and bathroom. Her things were there. They were feminine, the rooms clearly that of a female occupant, but other than that, they were impersonal to her.

  Her mind felt like a fog, a series of closed doors that refused to open. It was as frustrating as it was painful. Her head felt like it was going to explode.

  Though images of her bed, neatly made up, beckoned to her, she didn’t want to leave things the way they were with Dallas. It had bothered her all afternoon, their fight. She felt like she’d gone in swinging, though it had been the last thing she intended. He’d attacked first and even if she’d been on the defensive, what she’d done wasn’t right. She’d sworn at him. It was hardly a good first meeting.

  She’d asked him why he didn’t come, but she knew, from somewhere deep inside of herself, that Dallas didn’t leave the auditorium because music chained him there. The walls around him, his rooms, the building itself, was safe. The outside world, she could tell by the fear she’d seen in his eyes, was not. What fears or even illness did Dallas hide under that handsome surface? Did she once know all about it? Had he ever let her into his private world, the world he kept locked inside himself?

  Her stomach churned and her chest threatened to cave in on itself, a good indication that the answer was yes. The tenderness she’d felt when she first heard his name hadn’t gone away. If anything, it had only grown stronger.

  Though Leena sensed she should probably just leave well enough alone, she walked across the hallway, out of her small quarters. She pushed open the door of the studio. Just like before the room was dark, the lights off and the shades pulled down. As her eyes adjusted, she truly looked around, surprised at how much she’d missed earlier. She made out the shape of three different pianos, an organ, several guitars, cases with other instruments, violins or something, and at the back of the room, a drum set. Can Dallas play all of those?

  She’d been to the recording room, on the main floor. Did he ever set down his music on anything other than paper?

  There were pages everywhere, stacks and stacks of pages. Along the open piano lips, on benches, tables, scatt
ered around the floor. Of course, there were balled up pages as well. She resisted the urge to pick them up and smooth them out, as Dallas said she once had.

  Why can’t I remember? That day was likely the start of our partnership, the start of whatever Dallas and I are, and I can’t bring back a thing.

  She swallowed back her frustration and stared at the door on the other side of the room. If Dallas wasn’t in the studio, he was probably in there. Leena steered herself towards that door. She sidestepped piles of paper, some smooth, some wadded up, instruments, cases, other debris she couldn’t make out in the dark even if her eyes were well adjusted.

  She expected the door to be locked when she placed her fingers on the cool handle, but it wasn’t. She turned it and it opened smoothly, without protest or resistance.

  She realized immediately that she’d walked into Dallas’ private domain. The shades on the windows weren’t drawn like they were in the other room, as though the glow of the city in the dark was less threatening than the warming sun of the day. The lights were off, but she made out pieces of the huge room. It wasn’t like hers, divided into compartments. It was all open.

  A small kitchen stood off to the right. She expected a pile of dirty dishes mounded up in the sink, but it was clean. The entire place was fairly tidy. It smelled closed in, but it had an unlived-in feel, like its occupant ghosted in and out instead of actually residing there.

  There was an upright antique couch in the corner and a massive chandelier overhead. Leena found herself wondering if it had ever been turned on before.

  What caught her attention was the large bed in the corner. It was made up, but the covers were rumpled, as though Dallas slept on top, not below, when exhaustion became too much to overcome.

  Her eyes landed on the grand piano in the corner of the room. She saved it for last. It was black and the glow from the windows lining the far brick wall cast a sweet sheen over the impressive, polished surface.