Acts of Love

by Judith Michael

  She had arrived at the end of November. It had taken six weeks to finish her illustrations and arrange with Robert to have her horses and her house cared for. When she was almost ready to leave, she wrote to three producers whom she had met years before in Sydney, asking to see them. All three replied with flattering letters urging her to call as soon as she arrived. But from the moment she stepped off the plane, Sydney overwhelmed her.

  It had been six years since she had been in a city. All those years, when she had been living so quietly in Arizona and then on Lopez, she had forgotten what a city sounded and felt like. Sydney, with its three million people and driving energy, seemed huge, deafening and frantic, as foreign as if she had landed on another planet.

  The city sprawled outward from the harbor, old buildings and new piled together like blocks that children had tumbled out of a toy chest. The

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  streets climbed up from the water on long hills lined with jacaranda and fig trees. Traffic was dense, fast and ruthless: a never-ending stream of cars and trucks that, to an American, seemed to careen toward disaster, since they drove on the left, as in England. The sidewalks were jammed with uniformed schoolchildren, tourists, business people and shoppers, all instinctively dodging each other, then clustering patiently at red lights even when no cars were coming from either direction. Often Jessica was jostled on street corners when she did not move with the crowd. Each time, she received a profuse apology, but she thought she was the one who should be apologizing, for being slow and stupid, for not fitting easily into city life—she who had fully mastered New York for so many years without giving its tumult a conscious thought.

  But she had repressed all memories of New York, until now, when sights and sensations and the din of traffic brought it all back, and made her shrink from calling the producers to whom she had written. What am I doing here? she thought. I don't belong here. What did I think I could do here? 1 ought to go back where 1 belong, where 1 know what I can do.

  But she did not go back. Instead, she began to look and listen, and soon found things that gave her pleasure. First was language, because language had been her whole life. She liked the Australian accent: a smooth version of Cockney, the words like notes sliding up and down the scale, as jaunty and cheerful as the people themselves. And she liked the names of places: sounds and syllables that rolled on her tongue like poetry or music. "Kir-ribilli," she would say. "Woollahra. Wooloomooloo. Taronga. Parramatta." They made her smile even when she did not feel like smiling.

  Then she began to explore Sydney, at first tentatively, then more determinedly. She went again and again to the harbor, an enormous natural bay bisected by the great arc of the Harbor Bridge, with fingers of land jutting out all around its periphery to form coves, harbors, inlets and dozens of small beaches. From Circular Quay, she took a ferry crowded with tourists and a tour guide who gave a running commentary as they made a circuit of the harbor, complete with anecdotes about Sydney's history and the people, including American film stars, who owned the houses and apartments that climbed up the hills from the water's edge. She took other ferries to the suburbs close to the center of the city, thinking about a place to live. One day she took a ferry to the Taronga Zoo, built on a steep hill, where she navigated the paved roads in a small motorized cart for disabled

  visitors and spent hours gazing at koalas and kangaroos, emus and wombats, and hundreds of other animals and brilliantly colored birds never seen in America.

  In another motorized cart she drove along paths in Sydney's vast Royal Botanic Garden, through tropical forests, rose gardens, herb gardens and stretches of lawn dotted with flowering bushes and enormous eucalyptus, palms, and Moreton Bay and Jackson Bay fig trees with trunks of thick cords braided together and branches stretching straight outward like welcoming arms.

  To get around the rest of the city, she took taxis, telling herself she was interested in everything. But she was lonely and it was difficult to concentrate.

  She was always alone. People looked at her with sympathy and often made way for her as she limped onto a ferry or across a crowded street, but she spoke to no one except waiters in the restaurants where she ate. I'll meet people when I'm in the theater, she thought. It will happen very quickly. But until then she missed her house, and her garden with its familiar view; she missed her horses and the farmers waving as she rode past; she missed her occasional conversations with Robert, the sound of the waves as she sat on her terrace, the moon through her bedroom windows. She missed Luke.

  She missed him in quick flashes that brought back a sentence, a phrase, a smile, and then vanished, leaving her aching inside. She missed the sound of his footsteps in the house, the quiet way he worked beside her in the kitchen, the warmth of his body in her bed. She missed the feel of him. At any moment, when she relaxed her guard, she felt his arms around her and his lips on hers, she felt him inside her as she drew him deeper and heard his sigh of pleasure, she saw his smile and the long, absorbed look in his eyes when they sat by candlelight talking, talking, talking... oh, how much they had had to talk about!

  He had written to her, brief lighthearted letters that arrived every few days while she was finishing her work on Lopez.

  Martin has found a new cookbook and has decided to try every recipe, first page to last. My chances of getting into the kitchen have dvindled to nothing. But I'm not sure I want to. I prow^led around it the da3' I got back and it struck me that it was unfinished: it desperately needed something to make it complete. And of

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  course that was you, and the two of us, side by side, doing mundane tasks that seemed magical because we were together.

  I saw your publisher at a dinner party the other night. I may have sung your praises too vociferously, because one of the guests asked me if I'd become an agent in my spare time. Only for extraordinary people, I said.

  Tonight I sat in my bedroom, very late, holding the blanket I told you about, ships and sailboats and links to my parents. It occurred to me that I took nothing from Lopez that was a memento of my week there. I wish I had. That is a sentimental thought that w^ould amaze many people w^ho think they knov me.

  I've decided to cut out and frame the illustrations from your books that I like the best. There's a wall in my bedroom that's perfect for them, catching the sunlight.

  New York is like a fabulous circus after the farms and forests of Lopez; I stayed home tonight to catch my breath. One has to get acclimatized to all the highjinks in order to survive. After dinner I pulled out my plays, thinking about your wonderfully perceptive criticism. I'm about to rewrite whole scenes. I can hear your voice reading the dialogue, with the fire sputtering and crackling in the background, and Hope watching over us, and I know that the magic we found was not just in the kitchen. I'll be working on the plays for some time, I think; I'm grateful for the time you gave to them.

  Grateful, Jessica thought. Grateful. I did it because I love you.

  She had answered him twice, her letters cooler than his, and then she had left Lopez without telling him where she was going. // can't drag on; it's finished. It's the past and this is now, and I'm starting over again.

  And so she took ferries and taxis and kept moving, learning as much about her new city as quickly as she could. It was a hodgepodge, seemingly without rhyme or reason. There were frame buildings with lacy steel balconies that seemed transplanted from New Orleans; there was a stretch of George Street raucous with discount hawkers shouting their prices into

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  microphones, Castlereagh with garish discount stores close to European designer boutiques, and WiUiam Street, where she saw her first Boomerang School. She thought there was no center to the city, but then her taxi came to a stretch of high rises near the harbor, where the crowds were more dense and parks and restaurants lined the streets, fountains played, the hospital stretched a full block—a sprawling pile of
turreted and columned red stone straight out of the nineteenth century—and office buildings, shops and hotels clustered tightly, as if creating their own private city.

  Just a few blocks farther were neighborhoods, called suburbs, crowded with mansions on private beaches or clinging to the hills above, with apartment buildings scattered among them. Farther inland stretched street after street of smaller homes and cottages dwarfed by the trees around them, each with its own garden. Sydney in November was a city of flowers.

  Three nights in a row, she went to the theater, applauding with the audiences while making a critical balance sheet in her mind of what she had found excellent and what was weak. As she did it, a ripple of anticipation ran through her and a small spurt of excitement, the first she had felt since arriving. I'm ready for this. I've been away too long. If I'm in the theater, the city isn't important. I can feel at home anywhere, if I'm in the theater. And then, on her fourth day in the city, impatient with taxi drivers who drove too fast when she wanted to dawdle, she rented a car and found, to her amazement, that it took only a short time to master driving on the left side of the street. That was a kind of triumph and once again she thought. Maybe I can do this after all. Maybe I really can feel as if I belong.

  And so, on the sixth day, she rented a house, a pure white stucco cottage with an orange-tile roof that reminded her of Provence, fine furnishings much like those she might have chosen herself, and a deck canti-levered over the hill below. From there she looked down on the houses that seemed to be clambering up to her from the harbor's edge, and on the harbor itself, with its inlets and coves snaking in and out from distant headlands on her right to the great arch of the Harbor Bridge on her left. Beside the bridge, on a peninsula jutting into the harbor, was the opera house, its roof in the shape of huge white sails moving majestically out to sea. A theater and water, Jessica thought, and a quiet place of my own, above it all. She felt almost as she had on Lopez: alone and sheltered. Safe,

  Hope sniffed, inspecting the rooms, always circling back to Jessica to be comforted amidst the strangeness. The rooms were overfurnished and no two pieces matched. After the clean, simple lines of her house on Lopez,

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  Jessica thought she could not Hve amidst such a riot of color and patterns, but somehow the stripes and florals and solids and geometries came together and were oddly harmonious.

  She set the box of Constance's letters on the mosaic coffee table in the living room and arranged her collection of plays on a shelf in the bedroom. / wish I had something of Luke's. Just one small thing to put somewhere and look^ at now and then. But I don't. Not a single thing. He said the same thing. We both parted empty-handed. She flung a Scottish cashmere throw, brought from Lopez, over the back of one of the couches, and arranged fresh flowers in a Majolica vase she found in the dining room. The hotel sent over her luggage and she found places for her clothes in closets and built-in cupboards. The delivery boy brought groceries and she stocked cabinets and the refrigerator and freezer. The landlord came to make sure the hot water was hot, the cold cold, and the air-conditioning working, since it was November; almost summer in Sydney. A woman called and said she had been the housekeeper in that house for five years and did Miss Fontaine want her to continue? Emphatically, Jessica said yes. When she hung up she looked around and sighed. It was almost home.

  So, at last, she made the first of her telephone calls and that afternoon met with Alfonse Murre, a producer whom she had met long ago in Sydney. She wore a summer dress of fine silk with a long skirt and long, almost transparent sleeves, and when the secretary announced her Murre came forward, hand outstretched, smiling broadly. He was fatter and balder than Jessica remembered, with a flimsy mustache that quivered anticipatorily before he spoke. He stopped when he saw her. "Jessica? My goodness." His face smoothed over and they shook hands. Jessica's was cold. "Come in; sit down." He pulled an armchair forward and watched as Jessica sat on the edge, propping her cane against the arm. He bypassed the armchair beside hers and sat behind his desk. "What brings you all the way to Sydney? I was surprised to get your letter."

  He had not said he was surprised in his answering letter; he had said he could not wait to see her.

  "I've been here before, as you know," she said.

  "Of course. n A Moon for the Misbegotten. You were quite wonderful. I was new here and you made Sydney seem civilized, when I'd been thinking it felt like the end of the world."

  Jessica smiled faintly. "I've been here three times and I like the theater here. So now that I've decided to direct plays, this is where I want to start."

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  "Direct. You want to direct."

  "I've always been interested in it; I don't think that's unusual. You know how many musicians want to be conductors; it's the same thing with actors. They usually think they understand character better than— "Don't explain so much; it sounds lil{e pleading. "Well, it's what I want to do now. I saw your production oi American Buffalo the last time I was here and I thought it was excellent. I'm hoping you have some scripts under consideration and we can work together on one of them."

  "Well. Interesting. I wouldn't have thought..." He drummed his fingers on the desk and frowned at the carpet. "Of course you stopped acting because—well, I mean, no one would ... I mean you couldn't possibly ... Dear me, Jessica, it doesn't seem likely, does it? I mean, to direct one of my plays, to be in the public eye, giving interviews, being written up in the papers, there's so ranch public, you know, about directing. I mean, you may think it's all behind the scenes, but even there, you know, where you have to instill confidence in actors and the crew, you have to be someone they look up to and— Oh, now, just a minute—" Jessica had stood up and he leaped to his feet as she walked away, leaning on her cane. "Jessica, dear me, you mustn't think / don't have full confidence in you, in your ability, that's not the issue, the issue is—"

  "—your narrow-minded, frightened, ignorant prejudice," Jessica said icily. Standing in the doorway, knowing his secretary was listening, she turned back to him. "You think because I've changed physically, I've lost my brains, my competence, my ability to function as anything, much less a director. You—"

  "Now wait a minute; you can't talk to—"

  "You don't think, you react." Her voice soared, filled the office, swept over him as once it had swept over audiences. "You scurry away when something surprises you. Look at me! What do you see.'' Someone who isn't beautiful anymore. What does that have to do with my ability to direct a play.''"

  "I didn't say—"

  "That's just what you said. No one would look up to me, no one would have confidence in me, no one would admire me. How do you know.^" Your pitiful little mind imagines it, but those are excuses to hide the fact that you don't like looking at me, you don't—"

  "Goddamn it, I won't listen to this crap. What the hell is wrong with you.? You were never a bitch before. You've gotten sour and mean, and

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  if you think I'll forget this, I won't. I won't forget it, Jessica; you can't insult—"

  "You fool," she said, her voice a despairing sigh. She turned and limped through the anteroom, trying to hurry, knowing she was even more awkward when she did, aware of the secretary watching her and seeing the image of Murre in her mind as he stood just inside his office, his lower lip thrust out, his eyes furious. She was trembling and her throat was choked with tears.

  Damn, damn, damn. I knew it, it's why I stayed on Lopez. I was right, I knew this would happen.

  She found a sidewalk cafe a block from Murre's office and sat at a table tucked in the shade of an awning. "Iced coffee," she said to the waiter, and clasped her hands to still their trembling. He's only one man, she thought, and not a smart one. There's no reason to think the others will react that way, have that look on their face. . . .

  But it might be too late. Damn it, she thought, how could I let him get to me? How could I be so stu
pid? In every city, the theater is a small world; he'll tell everyone.

  And he did. When Jessica telephoned the other two producers, their secretaries reported that they were out of town, and would be unavailable even when they returned; so busy, so backed up, right in the middle of one of Sydney's most crowded theater seasons; they were deeply sorry . . . perhaps when the season was over . . . they knew Miss Fontaine would understand.

  From the aerie of her living room, she gazed at the harbor and the far-off headlands. She was halfway around the world from New York, but the nightmares that had haunted her for six years had followed her here. She felt bruised and lifeless; she barely had the energy to pet Hope, who sniffed and licked her face and followed her in bewilderment as she walked indifferently through the house. She paced aimlessly, seeing over and over Murre's instinctive withdrawal, hearing the reproach in his voice, as if she ought to have known how public a director was and spared him the entire interview. "The hell with him," she said aloud, but he clung to her thoughts like a burr.

  Once again, her house became her refuge. She did not go out. With Hope at her feet, looking as melancholy as she felt, she sat by the windows, filling her notebooks with sketches of the harbor and scenes of Sydney from

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  her memory. She hstened to music and read books and the morning paper that was deHvered daily; she ordered groceries by telephone and had them delivered. And at night she lay in bed, her thoughts roaming where she could not stop them.

  / never pretended that you still have the beauty and perfect body you once had. But the more I got to J^now you the less important any of that seemed. To me, you are magnificent.