Lying In Bed

by Rose, M. J.

  “Really?” I think I said it too fast and with too much delight. But he didn’t react.

  “We can tell so much about each other. But it’s never happened with anyone else. So this is as odd to me as it is to you.”

  “What is it like?”

  His hair fell in his eyes. I reached up and brushed it away. “It’s not words. Merely a sense of a thought. An idea. It shows suddenly.”

  The way he was looking at me, made me suddenly realize I was naked under the sheets and that my breasts were exposed. Before I could cover myself, Gideon reached out and with pulled the sheet down lower.

  This time I knew what the look in his eyes meant.

  “You want me to pose for you now?” I said it half-shocked and half as if it was the most natural thought in the world.

  “I do. But I know this isn’t the time, you have things to work out, and I want to help you do that. It’s much too important to you, too tainted. I never would have brought it up, but since you guessed, yes, one day, I want to sculpt you like this, lying in my bed.”

  “One day? You talk as if we have a future.”

  There was no reaction on his face. He simply looked thoughtful. I waited. He said nothing.

  “It’s okay,” I pulled the sheet up to cover myself. “I knew you were involved. Hell, I’m helping you be involved. I’m still happy that this happened. It makes it easier in a way that this has an end point.”

  “Easier? How?”

  “There’s an honesty that it’s hard to find when every action has another possible meaning and subtext.”

  Something about the way his eyes narrowed, made me think he was going to argue but then he changed his mind.

  “I’m going to take a shower. Why don’t you get dressed? I’m going to take you out to breakfast and then we’re going to see your stepbrother.”

  33.

  Cole’s studio was on Union Square in a turn of the century building that housed over a half dozen photographers’ studios. I’d been there only once before in the last few years.

  There was a shoot going on, the receptionist told us when we asked to see Cole. “Would you like to leave your number and–”

  “It’s urgent. We’ll wait until Mr. Ballinger takes a break,” Gideon said.

  She left us in the front room, which was hightech and filled with expensive chairs and end tables, exotic orchid plants and a state of the art computer and phone system on a marble slab that functioned – though not too well - as her desk.

  “I don’t know if interrupting him is the best way to get him to listen to us,” I suggested once we’d sat down in side-by-side leather chairs.

  As attractive as they were, they weren’t at all comfortable, and I felt as if I’d slid backwards onto a contraption that was going to be difficult to extricate myself from.

  “I do.”

  “Why?”

  “I know enough about him from what you’ve told me to understand what kind of man he is. Or at least what kind of artist he is. And the only place to talk to him is on his home turf and at an inopportune time.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. He’s likely to be aloof and angry. I’ve seen him like that. Entitled would be the perfect word.”

  “I know the type,” Gideon said in a voice tinged with sadness. I struggled to name what I heard. What I’d heard before. There seemed to be words that lived underneath the ones he said aloud. Whole thoughts and ideas that he wanted to talk about but was hesitant to even bring up. But why? And what were they?

  “How?”

  “Do I know the type?”

  I nodded.

  “I knew a writer once…he felt totally comfortable taking what he wanted from someone’s life and using it in his books. It never mattered to him what the repercussions were. Only that it furthered his career.”

  “Someone did that to you?”

  “No. To my father.”

  “Who?”

  “His own father. He used him. Damaged him. He died when I was fifteen. But I have the books. And my father’s letters. And his suicide note.”

  Before I got a chance to respond, just as I was reaching for Gideon to put my hand on his to say something sympathetic, I heard a familiar voice. Cold, etched with superficial delight.

  “I won’t say anything as cliched as ‘long time no see,’ Sis, but it has been forever, hasn’t it?” Cole was striding across the room, arms out, looking as handsome and sophisticated as ever with his short buzz-cut hair, open-neck shirt, tanned skin and sparkling black eyes that were impossible to read.

  He was expecting me to stand up so he could embrace me, but I didn’t. The idea of feeling his arms around me, of smelling him, especially so soon after being with Gideon and being wrapped in such sheltering, giving arms, was an anathema to me.

  Beside me, Gideon stood and extended his hand.

  “Gideon Brown.”

  Cole shook his hand. “Cole Ballinger,” he said, his eyes examining Gideon with a haughty expression, as if he’d already summed him up and wasn’t impressed.

  “I know you’re in the middle of a shoot. And we don’t want to keep you any longer than we have to so we’ll get right to the point…” Gideon turned to me slightly. Cole was already looking at me. I’d stood up by that point but hadn’t stepped forward. Cole and I had not touched.

  “Is something the matter, Marlowe? Do you need help? Is there trouble at home?”

  “I…” I took a breath and started again. Gideon and I had worked out exactly what I needed to say on the walk over. I needed to stop being afraid long enough to say it. And I was afraid. Because I hadn’t seen Cole in six years, hadn’t looked into his eyes. Hadn’t confronted him or his betrayal of me ever. It was like looking at a piece of me, broken and shattered. To be caught in Cole’s glance was to be faced with how unimportant I’d been to him. How easy it had been for him to use me. Facing Cole was like facing my weaknesses all at once.

  “I know you are about to have a show and since the shot on the invitation is one of me… of my mouth… I need to know… you have to tell me… are you using other shots of me?”

  Cole had found a thread on the cuff of his fine cotton shirt and was slowly twisting it around and around the button. “Marlowe, I would never do anything to embarrass you.”

  His voice poured like a viscous liquid. Too heavy. Too studied. His voice wasn’t like that when I’d first met him. As a teenager he hadn’t yet been frozen into the personna that he’d created of himself.

  “Cole, I didn’t ask you if you were going to embarrass me. I want to know if there are other shots of me in the show?”

  “You signed a release, Marlowe. The photos are mine to do with as I please.”

  I felt Gideon’s eyes on me. He’d asked me about a release, and I told him that I hadn’t signed anything.

  “There was never a release,” Gideon said.

  Cole turned, gave him a dismissive glance. “I think I’d know best on that score.” He turned back to me. “I have a letter from you telling me that I could use the photographs.”

  “A letter?”

  He laughed. “Yes, dear. One of your love letters. All sweet and sexy. Back when you were like that. I’d written and told you I was doing a class presentation and asked if you minded. And you wrote back and told me that you’d never mind. That you’d loved my taking pictures of you when you were–”

  “That was before–” I interrupted

  “I have the letter, Sis. Have them all.” His eyes glittered. Like cold hard stones.

  I hadn’t thought about my letters to him in a long time. There were dozens of them. Written from me to Cole when he was in college and I was still in high school – before I knew better, before I understood that Cole was anything but my fictional hero.

  “She was underage,” Gideon said.

  Cole laughed. “This is all an exercise in futility. Marlowe - you posed for me from the time you were sixteen to nineteen. You were not underage in all the photos. And yo
u gave me a release when you were eighteen.”

  “So there are pictures of me in the show.”

  “I didn’t say that, did I?”

  My head was pounding. He was so slick. I searched his eyes for the boy that I’d fallen in love with and caught a glint of recognition. I latched onto it. Saw his face muscles relax a little and some of the mask-like quality dissipate. “Marlowe, I promise. There is nothing in the show that will upset you at all. I’ve taken hundreds of photographs since then. Please, don’t worry. Do you think I’d invite our parents to a show of naked photographs of you?”

  Our eyes held. It sent shivers through me. There never had been anything like having Cole look at me. He could see through me right to the other side of me. He was coaxing it out of me then, even as we stood there in his studio, with Gideon next to me. The old pull. The old attraction.

  But I knew better. I hadn’t always known better, but I did then. “Do you still have all those photographs?”

  “Of course. But I’d like to remind you that there’s a difference between keeping them and having them all to myself and showing them.”

  This was the more recent Cole. The look in his eye that I’d connected to had disappeared. He turned and glanced back at the studio. He’d left the door open and inside his clients were milling around. “I wish I could stay and reassure you further, but I’ve got to get back. Will I see you at the opening?” He didn’t pause long enough for me to answer. He was looking at my mouth now. “Isn’t the invitation wonderful? That’s one of the best shots of you I ever took.” He reached out with one finger and drew a line in the air that followed the outline of my lips. It might have been seductive if it weren’t so crass and if it weren’t Cole who’d done it. “Only a piece of your beautiful mouth. Unrecognizable. You always think the worst of me.”

  “I don’t… but–”

  His expression was rueful as he interrupted me. “Give me a little credit. And please come to the show.” He leaned past me and picked up a glossy invitation off of the end table and held one out for Gideon who didn’t take it. “Please, Mr. Brown. You should come, too. Now, I’m sorry, but I really have to get back in there.”

  Cole tilted his head forward to kiss me but I stepped back, managing to bump into Gideon who reached out and grabbed my arm to steady me. But Cole had gotten close enough so that I could smell him – his cologne was the same as it had been when we’d been together. Bile rose in my throat. It tasted of sweet memories gone rancid.

  No matter how many years had passed, the girl I’d been was still in me, lurking, sleeping, hiding, but she was there. The young woman he’d encouraged to come out and play with him.

  She humiliated me and it was Cole’s fault that I was forced into facing her again over the wide divide of years that has passed between then and now.

  34.

  “Thank you for trying,” I said when we got back downstairs and were out on the street. My voice was flat. Seeing Cole had pulled all the energy out of me. Around us people passed. Some noticed us, some walked by. One of these people might wander by the gallery in Chelsea in two weeks. If the photographs attracted him to go inside, and what would he see? If it was a seventeen-year-old girl posing for an invisible photographer how lurid would it seem? What would anyone think of that girl?

  Of me?

  “Do you believe him?” Gideon asked. “You know him, you’re in a better position to judge whether or not he was telling you the truth?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re not okay, are you?”

  I shook my head, the tears were hovering right behind my eyes. All I wanted to do was go home and let them flow. Bury my head in the pillows and give in to the anger and frustration.

  But Gideon didn’t let me go. He took my arm and walked me to the corner where there was a coffeehouse.

  We both ordered espresso and Gideon added a package of chocolate-dipped graham crackers, and we sat down at a table by the window. Gideon had put his attaché case on the floor. The type that has a middle section with a zipper and two side pockets, which were open and filled with papers. It was old and the leather was worn.

  We drank our coffee. Gideon tried, but failed, to get me to share his cookies. We didn’t do very much talking.

  He told me he had a meeting at noon and was going to drop me off at the store and then head uptown to Cooper Union, but before we were ready to leave, he went to use the men’s room.

  As he got up, he kicked over his briefcase as he got up but he didn’t notice it.

  I bent over to pick up the sheaf of papers and envelopes that had spilled out.

  Dazed, I wasn’t paying much attention as I shuffled the papers back into a pile. I don’t remember the actual moment when I noticed the envelope. It was the stamp, though, that caught my attention first. I’d seen it the night before on Gideon’s desk and something about it had attracted my attention then but I didn’t know why.

  Now, in the coffee shop, I knew exactly why it looked familiar. I’d received a letter with the same Spanish stamps last week.

  My eyes traveled to the return address and I read her name on the envelope. Without thinking it through, without reasoning it out, I pulled out the letter that was inside.

  It wasn’t my upright printing with the fat O’s and rounded letters and the extra tall ascenders. It was slim and cursive and in a dark blue ink that I didn’t like.

  How could the letter be in that color ink? Why was it in that handwriting? The words were mine. I knew every one of them. I could tell what sentence was going to follow the one preceding it without even looking.

  Dear Gideon,

  It began – but I had never written to Gideon.

  The light here is naked light. The heat is naked heat…

  My eyes jumped to the end of the letter and that the full force of what I was holding hit me. No, it wasn’t my handwriting. It wasn’t my signature. But they were my words.

  I had been hired to write that letter for Vivienne Chancey. One of four of them I’d written for her in the past two months.

  What was it doing addressed to Gideon? What was it doing among his Gideon’s papers?

  It wasn’t possible. It didn’t make sense. It couldn’t be what I thought it was.

  And it couldn’t be anything else.

  35.

  I was still squatting on the floor of the coffee shop, next to his briefcase.

  If I didn’t get up, Gideon was going to come out of the men’s room any minute and find me there, and he would certainly ask me what was wrong. And even if I didn’t tell him, he’d know. Because he always knew with that crazy sixth sense of his.

  He’d know that something was bothering me. Even if I wouldn’t tell him.

  And then it hit me again. The way the second wave comes up and slams you just when you’ve finally gotten up after the blow of the first. There was no time to recover. Shock on top of shock.

  Gideon was involved with Vivienne. She had been sending him letters I had written for her. He, in response to my letters, was sending her back erotic stories I’d written.

  I wasn’t just inbetween these two people, I was helping them connect to each other, helping them seduce each other. It was ludicrous. Impossible.

  Except that it wasn’t.

  Gideon must have seen the photographs Vivienne shot of my letters, or the actual article in the magazine. Certainly she wouldn’t have told him she’d hired me- she’d pass the letters off as her own. The way Gideon was passing off the stories as his own. The way all of my clients did.

  The night Gideon and I had spent together was too fresh for it to be anything but an insult now.

  I got up and left.

  As soon as I was out in the street, I turned right, ran down the block, and found a cab. I was due at the store, but I could call Grace once I got home and tell her I was sick. So I gave the driver my address.

  I needed to figure out what had happened. How it had happened. And what I had to do about it.r />
  But, inside, I already knew there was nothing I could do about it. The sick feeling in my stomach told me. The pain starting behind my eyes told me.

  I couldn’t see Gideon anymore.

  I couldn’t write his stories for him. He and Vivienne were in love with each other and I might have facilitated that. I certainly would not stay in the middle of it.

  Running away from him, not explaining, not confronting him might have seemed a cowardly way to handle what I’d found out. But I didn’t have any choice.

  If I told Gideon that I was the one who’d been writing Vivienne’s letters I would be destroying his idea of her. I’d be exposing her. He wouldn’t be able to see her the same way ever again.

  I’d hurt him.

  Possibly ruin a relationship that meant a lot to him. Or that was headed that way.

  And I couldn’t do that to him.

  The whole ride home, and then once I got upstairs, I kept thinking of Gideon’s bronze sculptures and the one I had been standing in the middle of when he’d come over to me and made love to me. When I’d watched the two of us, naked and hungry, acting out our passion in the mirror.

  I had stood in the middle of his sculpture and looked at myself. Now I was in the middle of his relationship with another woman and looking at myself again.

  36.

  Sleep eluded me for the next two nights and the days dragged slowly. I cried. And then admonished myself for doing it. I took food out of the refrigerator and then let it sit on the counter without touching it. I forced myself to take showers and get dressed and work. But nothing I tried to do was any good.

  It rained steadily for those two days, too. In late May, it’s usually mild and lovely in Manhattan. But we were having a heat wave and the humidity was extreme. Thunderstorms clapped with a sound that was angry and the rain fell in a steady downpour that flooded the streets and tore petals off the flowering trees.

  I had letters to write. Clients who wanted to meet with me. There were assignments I’d taken in the last month that were due. And I spent those two days trying to focus on them, trying to use them to push away all my thoughts about Gideon.