Lying In Bed

by Rose, M. J.

  “You have secrets, don’t you?” he asked.

  I nodded. Wondering how he knew, guessing from other instances that he’d read something in my face.

  “Ever since I was a kid I wanted to have friends who had secrets,” he added.

  “Why?”

  “What a funny response. Why?”

  “I didn’t know what else to say.”

  “You didn’t? Or is it that you didn’t know if you should say what you wanted to?”

  “Don’t you ever have meaningless conversations?” I asked.

  “I try not to. Do you like being bored?”

  “It’s better than being in pain.”

  “No it’s not. And you know it.”

  I sipped my wine. It was rich and heady with a deep taste and a fruity smell. Delicious.

  “What kind of secrets did you want your friends to have?”

  “The kind that come from taking chances. From trying to do more, to push limits.”

  “Did you get what you wanted? Do you have friends who have secrets.”

  “Not till you.”

  I felt myself blush as heat suffused my cheeks.

  He laughed. It was a strong sound. Impenetrable. As if, no matter what happened, to him, he would be able to withstand what was thrown at him.

  “Listen, Marlowe, I’m not good at duplicity. What happened in the park is something I’m glad I did. I wanted to kiss you. I want to do more than that. The rest of my life isn’t what you think. I need you to trust me about that.”

  My skin started to tingle and I felt pressure building up behind my eyes.

  “You’re in the middle of another relationship. Of sending my stories to her.”

  “I know you think that I don’t know what I’m doing. But I do. I need you to give me some time.”

  I nodded. Stupidly. But said nothing.

  “I’d like to continue working with you if you feel comfortable with that.”

  “You want me to write more stories?” I didn’t understand.

  “Yes. Two more. As we planned. It will be all right in the end. I promise.”

  “Sure. We can write off what happened as intoxication from the scent of all those flowers.”

  “Even if neither of us thinks for a minute that that’s what happened?”

  The pressure increased.

  “I don’t understand.”

  He nodded, then got up and came over and sat down next to me.

  “Just give me today. Tonight. Tomorrow we go back to writing the stories.”

  I knew before he did it, what he was going to do.

  I didn’t fight him. This was an interlude. Something that I wanted even though I knew it wouldn’t lead anywhere. Even though I knew it had a time limit on it.

  Or maybe I wanted it exactly because of the time limit.

  This kiss was more complicated than the one in the park. It was not lighthearted or easy. It was not simple. There was no sun warming our skin and no overwhelming perfume. It was dark in the loft, the air was cool, there was the taste of wine in his mouth and the feeling that this was hurting him, that he was fighting himself and me at the same time. This kiss was a bruise.

  It battered me too. Buffeted me. I was lost. Not at his mercy, but at my own. Because I knew this feeling from a long time ago. I knew how helpless I was to fight it. How addictive it was to experience passion at this deep a level. How this kind of pleasure had once turned me into someone who was a stranger to me now – a stranger who had embarrassed me. I had abandoned her eight years earlier. Now, I was afraid. Not of Gideon, but of myself and my lack of control. Mostly I was afraid that she was back, and I was not going to know how to banish her again if she got too great a taste of this night’s pleasure.

  I was the one who pulled away. Who stood up. Who walked away from him. And facing the window, I was the one who laid the ground rules. Holding on to my own arms, wrapped up in myself, afraid of what I was saying, I spoke in a monotone: “We have two stories left to write. I think that’s what we should do, not this. Not now. Is that all right with you?”

  “Of course,” he said. But he didn’t apologize for what had happened.

  And I was glad. If he had, I don’t know but I could have gone on.

  I picked up my bag, to leave.

  “When we’re finished working on the stories, at some point in the future, I’d like to ask you to pose for me. I’d like to sculpt your secrets.”

  “You think that you’ll be able to find them?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think you will. And I don’t think I want to pose for you. I’m not a very good model. I’ve had some bad luck with doing that.”

  “Maybe it would be different with me.”

  I knew we weren’t only talking about my posing. But it didn’t matter. I didn’t want to explain the past or even think about it but I did want to get away from his deep green-and-black cat eyes and his swollen lips and his voice that, like the wind, had blown me off course.

  28.

  I stood at the door and reached out for the knob.

  “I don’t think you should leave yet,” he said.

  “Why?” I turned around.

  “Because you’re upset.”

  I didn’t say anything but I didn’t open the door either.

  “And it’s not only about me. It’s something that being with me is making you think about.” It wasn’t a question. He didn’t ask if he was right. He knew he was.

  He came over to me and took my hand and led me back to the couch where I sat down. I was suddenly very tired. I knew what I should do but had no energy to do it.

  “Let me get you some more wine. You can tell me.”

  “I can’t.”

  He didn’t listen. He went into the kitchen and came out with the bottle that we’d started. He poured more in the glass I’d been using and handed it to me. The glass in my hand was the only thing I was aware of. I drank from it as if it were water and I was very thirsty.

  “Who did you model for?” he asked.

  “Why do you want to know that? Of all the things you could have picked up on from our conversation, how and why did you zero in on that one?”

  He came and knelt at my feet. Reaching up, he touched my cheek with his fingers, tracing the line a tear would take if I had let it fall. This more than the kiss, more than anything that had happened so far with us, touched me in a place that I had forgotten existed inside of me.

  “When you told me, your eyes filled up. I saw you blink them back. You succeeded. But you couldn’t stop the initial emotional reaction. It has to be very powerful to do that to you. So far you’ve proven that you have very good control over your emotions.”

  I felt defeated. And elated. And brazen. It didn’t matter anymore. “My stepbrother asked me to model for him.”

  I’d never said it before and it came out so much more easily than I’d imagined it would, and much more violently. It filled the room with a dark fog that had a putrid sulfur smell, and I had to put my hand up to my mouth to stop from gagging.

  Gideon got up and sat down next to me.

  “When?”

  “When I was seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen.”

  The expression on his face was a mix of horror and an effort to hide that horror. “Your brother?”

  “No. My stepbrother. My mother remarried when I was fifteen. Her husband had two children. A son who was two years older than me and a daughter four years older. Cole and I were never siblings. We never lived together in our parents house for longer than a few months at a time.”

  “Is he a painter?”

  “A photographer. You actually saw his work. In the museum last week. Cole Ballinger.”

  He thought about it and then nodded. “Did he photograph you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was the photograph in the museum you?”

  I shook my head.

  “But there are photographs of you.”

  “That’s an understatement.
”

  He was looking at me but I turned away. I had never taken anyone where I was leading and I didn’t want to. It was all too complicated. I got up I walked over to the desk where I’d left my bag and saw the corner of an envelope under a stack of papers. I noticed the stamp and stared at it, the way you do when you are unfocused. There was something about it, but I was too distracted to focus.

  “What happened?”

  I turned on him. Like he had something to do with what had happened to me.

  “It all happened a long time ago. It doesn’t matter any more.”

  “Except it does. You’re still angry about it. What did he do?”

  “Why? What will you do if I tell you? Say how sorry you are and I didn’t deserve it? It won’t make it go away. I won’t get myself back. The photographs are still out there. He’ll have his first show opening in a week. And there I’ll be. At least in black and white. Everything he stole from me. Up on the wall.”

  He came up to me and took me by the arm and brought me back to the couch and then he pushed my head so that it was laying on his shoulder.

  Neither of us said anything for a while. I was smelling his cologne and still tasting the wine, and listening to him breathing and thinking that if things were different it would be so easy to be there with him.

  “I don’t understand,” he finally said. “What is it about the photographs that make them so awful?”

  29.

  “My mother is a photographer,” I told him. “Mostly landscape work. Lush, evocative work. When I was six my father died.” I thought I was repeating myself but I wasn’t sure. I could only tell the story in sequence. Like a litany.

  “When I was fifteen she remarried Troy Ballinger A Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist. He had two children and was divorced. We never lived with his children who were both older than my sister and I were. But his son, Cole, spent a lot of time with us. Vacations, summers. We lived in Vermont, a large, old farm. I had a crush on Cole. From the minute I saw him. He was a bad boy, the kind that is irresistible to teenage girls. Irreverent, arrogant, sure of himself, and he was a photographer like his father. But he wasn’t going to work in journalism. He was enamored of the artistry and cutting edge imagery of Helmut Newton and Chris Von Wagenheim. He wanted to push boundaries. His photography was all about sex. My mother used to say he’d grow out of it. That it was merely hormones. His father fought with him and urged Cole to get a job with a newspaper and get some news experience. But Cole was rebellious. And the summer I was sixteen and he was eighteen, I was part of his rebellion.”

  I was sitting in Gideon’s living room, but I was seeing the farm.

  The air was redolent of the smell of cut grass. The strawberries were fat and shiny and, as I picked them, I couldn’t resist eating some. A fresh strawberry, warm from the sun and just plucked, is not like anything you can buy in a store. My fingers were stained red and I’m sure my lips were too. I was wearing shorts and an old shirt - open - with a tank top underneath and I’d smeared the juice from the fruit on my chest while trying to chase away mosquitoes.

  It was like being at the beach or in the museum: Gideon, the room we were in, his work, the night, it was all disappearing and I was seeing a story play out behind my eyes.

  Cole walked up from the direction of the house. It had been seven months since I’d seen him last, when he’d come home for Christmas. He was a sophomore at Cooper Union in Manhattan, living with a group of other art students in Greenwich Village and he looked older than he had in December. More sophisticated.

  Cole always seemed as if he was from another world than mine. But it was more exaggerated now. His clothes were all black, even though it was summer, and his hair was more styled than anyone I knew. He looked like a movie star.

  “Hi, Picasso,” he joked, using his pet name for me. I was always drawing, painting, working on some sort of art project, and he teased me about my seriousness. I was already obsessed with becoming a painter. Actually, my artistic passion was a bond between us since he was obsessed with making a name for himself as a photographer.

  “Hi, Cole.” I had a private nickname for him but never had the nerve to use it. Instead, when he was around, I became quieter than usual, self-conscious and aware.

  “Can I have some of those?” he asked after he’d already reached down into my basket and eaten three of the berries.

  I laughed.

  He had his Nikon around his neck. He wore it constantly. At meals, he took it off but hung it on his chair where he could feel its strap against his back.

  Cole was looking at me as if he hadn’t noticed me before that afternoon, and I grew uncomfortable under his gaze.

  “If you’re going to stand there, grab the basket and start picking,” I said, channeling my mother, knowing that’s what she would have said if she were there with us. “There are too many ripe berries. The sudden heat and everything.”

  “You are putting me to work? You’re the midget.” Another nickname. Cole used them all the time. I hated midget. Almost as much as I loved Picasso.

  I threw a berry at him and it landed splat on his face. He laughed and brushed the wet spot off his face, and then sucked on his fingers. “I can’t believe I forgot how good these were.” He picked up the basket and followed me, up and down the aisles of plantings.

  “How have you been?” he asked.

  “Good. I got the art prize at school this year.”

  “I wouldn’t have expected anything less from my Picasso.”

  Something thrilled in me - the use of the possessive - the intimate tone. I’d had three boyfriends that year, but none of them lasted for long. Eventually I started to compare them to Cole in my mind and none of them measured up. They weren’t as charming, as good looking, as worldly, as talented. My mother teased me about being picky, but she also let me know she liked that I was taking my time settling down with anyone. She didn’t know, no one knew, that I wasn’t taking my time. I’d chosen who I wanted to be with. He just didn’t know it yet.

  And there was no way I was ever going to tell him.

  My crush on Cole fit in with my overly romantic imaginings. He was the cruel and handsome hero of the books I read when I wasn’t painting. Max DeWinter in Rebecca. Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre. Heathcliffe in Wuthering Heights. Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy and D.H. Lawrence’s Mellors.

  “You seem different,” he said after we’d picked a few dozen more berries.

  I turned around. He was standing behind me. Camera up to his eyes, its lens trained on me.

  Looking at someone who was looking at me with a camera was nothing new to me. My mother had been shooting me since I was an infant. My stepfather took pictures of us all. And when Cole was home, he did too. The three of them versus the two of us - my sister and I. She was going to be a writer. Nothing visual for her. I was going to paint. Create images the old fashioned way.

  The sun was reflecting off a side button on the camera case; like a diamond, it gleamed.

  Click. Click.

  It was nothing. No big deal. A snapshot. He took a few more.

  And then I sensed something.

  I’ve wondered about this for a long time. What was it? Something in Cole’s stance? Or was it his energy reaching out to me at a time when I was receptive to even the slightest shift in his mood from studying him too much.

  I became self-conscious and brave at the same time. Shifting my hip, throwing out my chin, I posed for him for the first time. It wasn’t the same as standing still for my mother. Nor was it the same as the previous three or four shots had been.

  Frozen, there in the sunshine, listening to hot summer sounds of the buzzing of the bees and the low thrum of the katydids, I watched him approach, retreat, circle, taking picture after picture. The shutter the only mechanical sound in the noisy field.

  He’d take a shot, step forward, take a shot, step back, take a shot, step forward, all the while murmuring small sounds of encouragement, not so much words as non
-verbal clues. A seductive music that I’d never heard before but responded to viscerally. I was in his eye. He was watching me. I could see myself reflected in the lens and I didn’t look like anyone I knew. I was tall and slim and I could tell that I looked sexy. I tried to look sexier. Not that I really knew what that meant… except that Cole was responding to it and I liked that. I wasn’t the midget anymore. I wasn’t Picasso the painter either. I was the woman who was the object of his attention.

  He got so close that the camera was right up to my face. And finally, teasing and slightly insane in the way teenagers can be, not thinking, not caring, not worrying about what it meant or why I was doing it, I put a strawberry in my mouth the way a pin-up girl would.

  His fingers flew out as fast as one of the summer mosquitoes and knocked it out.

  My lips hurt as if I’d been stung. He dropped the camera around his neck and glared at me. “What are you doing?” he yelled.

  “I… I… was only kidding around.”

  “Don’t ever do that. Don’t ever ever do that!”

  His eyes were bright and brilliant and his lips were almost white with anger. I was frightened but something else too. Excited that I’d elicited that kind of emotion in him.

  “Do what?”

  “Cheapen yourself like that. You looked like some little slut.”

  I laughed. In his face. Where did that come from?

  Whatever I was feeling had taken over.

  He didn’t say anything but reached out and grabbed me and pulled me to him and then kissed me. Hard. In a way none of the boys I’d been with had even come close to. My imagination kicked in. It wasn’t just Cole kissing me. It was Heathcliffe. It was a man. It was Rhett Butler. It was all my fantasies coming to life. And with his lips on top of mine, I opened my mouth.

  After the kiss, he brought the camera back up and he shot me. He kissed me again. Then he took another photograph. He made my lips swollen and then documented them.