“I love you.” They were whispered words as she slid quietly into the car. He touched her face, then he kissed her.
“I love you too.” They were both smiling, suddenly it was not a time to be sad. They had shared a bond of joy and peace and love like none other, and it was something no one could ever take away. It was theirs. For a lifetime. “Are you as happy as I am, Deanna?” he asked. She nodded, smiling. “I don’t know why I feel so goddamn good, except that you make me happy, and you always will. No matter what.”
“You do the same for me.” And you will. She would cling to the memories in the long winter’s night of her life with Marc. She would think of him when she held the baby, thinking that it could have been his. She wished that it had been; suddenly she wished that more than anything in her life.
“What are you thinking?”
They had started the drive back to San Francisco. They planned to be back by two in the morning. The next day they’d sleep late, and then after breakfast he’d take her home. Marc was due in that afternoon. Tuesday, at three. That was all his telegram had said. Margaret had read it to her on the phone when she called to make sure that all was well at the house. Tuesday, at three.
“I asked you what you were thinking.”
“A minute ago I was thinking that I would have liked to have your son.” She smiled into the night.
“And my daughter? Wouldn’t you want her too?” They both smiled.
“How many children do you have in mind?”
“A nice even number. Maybe twelve.” This time she laughed and leaned against his shoulder as he drove. She remembered the first time he had said that, the morning after her show. Would there ever be another morning like that one?
“I would have settled for two.”
He hated the tenses she used. It told him what he didn’t want to know. Or remember. Not tonight.
“Since when did you decide that you’re not too old?”
“I still think I am, but… it’s easy to dream.”
“You’d look cute pregnant.” This time she said nothing. “Tired?”
“Just a little.”
She had been tired too often all week long. It was the strain, but still he didn’t like the dark circles under her eyes, or the pallor of her face when she got up in the morning. But he was no longer to worry after today. This was his last chance. Miraculously, on the morrow, he was to stop.
“Now what are you thinking?” She looked earnestly up at him.
“Of you.”
“That’s all?” She tried to tease, but he wouldn’t play.
“That’s all.”
“What about?”
“I was thinking how much I wanted our child.”
She felt a sob make a fist in her throat and she turned her head away. “Ben, don’t.”
“I’m sorry.” He pulled her closer, and they drove on.
“And what is that supposed to mean?” Chantal glared at Marc from across the room. He closed his suitcase and swung it to the floor.
“It means exactly what it sounds like, Chantal. Come on, don’t play games. I’ve been here for almost three months this summer, now I have to do some work over there.”
“For how long?” She looked livid, and her eyes showed that she had been crying.
“I told you. I don’t know. Now be a good girl, and let’s go.”
“Non, tant pis. I don’t give a damn if you miss your plane. You’re not going to leave me like that. What do you think I am? Stupid? You’re just going back to her. Poor, poor little wife, all heartbroken because she lost her daughter, and now little darling husband is going to console her. Alors non, merde! What about me?” She advanced on him menacingly, and a muscle tightened in his jaw.
“I told you. She’s sick.”
“With what?”
“A number of things. It doesn’t matter with what, Chantal. She just is.”
“So you can’t leave her now. Then when can you leave her?”
“Dammit, we’ve been over and over this for a week. Why do we have to do this when I have to catch a plane?”
“The hell with your plane. I won’t let you leave me.” Her voice had risen dangerously and her eyes were darting around the room. “You can’t go! Non, Marc-Edouard, non!” She was in tears again. He sighed as he sat down.
“Chantal, chérie, please. I told you, it won’t be for much longer. Please, darling. Try to understand. You’ve never been like this before. Why do you have to be so unreasonable now?”
“Because I’ve had it! I’ve had enough! Whatever happens, you stay married to her. Year after year after year after year. Bien merde alors, j’en ai marre. I’m fed up!”
“Must you be fed up right now?” He looked at his watch with despair. “I told you last night, if it looks as though it will be a long time, I’ll have you come over. All right?”
“For how long?”
“Oh, Chantal!” He had the look of irritation he had previously worn only with Pilar. “Voyons. Let’s see how it goes. You can stay in the States for a while, if you come over.”
“How long is a while?” But she was beginning to play now, and he saw it, with an exasperated gleam in his eye.
“As long as my foot. Will that do? Now, let’s go. I’ll call you almost every day. I’ll try to be back in a few weeks. And if not, you’ll come over. Satisfied?”
“Almost.”
“Almost?” He shouted the word, but she tilted her face up for a kiss, and he couldn’t resist.
“Toi, alors!” He kissed her, and they both laughed as they raced back into the bedroom, teasing and touching and hungry again.
“I’ll miss my plane, you know.”
“So what? And afterward let’s have dinner at Maxim’s.”
One would have easily thought that she was the pregnant one, but they most emphatically knew she was not. They had once thought she was pregnant, and it had produced such an appalling scare because of her diabetes that they had decided never to take any chances again. They couldn’t afford to. Her life was at stake. And she didn’t really mind not getting pregnant, she had never been particularly anxious to have a child. Not even Marc’s.
Ben stopped the car halfway down the street. “Here?”
She nodded, feeling as though the world were going to end. As though someone had announced the Apocalypse to them. They knew it was coming, they even knew when … but now what? Where to go? What to do? How would she live every day without him? How could she exist without the moments they shared in Carmel? How could she not wake up in that yellow bedroom, figuring out if it was his turn to make breakfast or hers? She wondered, as she sat there, if it could even be done. She looked at him long and hard and then held him tightly in her arms. She didn’t even care if anyone saw her. Let them. They would never see her hug him again. They would think it had been a mirage. She wondered for a moment if that was what she would think in years to come. Would it all seem like a dream?
Her words were a whisper in his ear. “Take good care. I love you….”
“I love you too.”
They clung to each other then, saying nothing. At last, he snapped open her door. “I don’t want you to go, Deanna. But if you stay any longer, I won’t be able to … to let you go.” She saw that his eyes were too bright, and she felt her own fill with tears. She looked down into her lap, and then quickly up at him. She had to see him, had to know he was still there. Instantly her arms were around him again.
“Ben, I love you.” She held tightly to him, then slowly peeled herself away and looked at him for a long, agonizing moment. “Can I tell you that these months have made my whole lifetime worthwhile?”
“You can.” He smiled at her and kissed the tip of her nose. “And can I tell you to get the hell out of my car?” She looked at him in surprise. Then she laughed.
“You cannot.”
“Well, I figure there’s not going to be an easy way to do this so we might as well have a good laugh.” And she did, and at th
e same time started to cry again.
“Jesus, I’m a mess.”
“Yes, you are.” He said it with an appreciative nod and a grin that gave way to a slightly sobered look in his eye. “And so am I. But frankly, my dear, I think we’ve got one hell of a lot of style.” And then, with a lopsided grin, he bent to kiss her once more, looked at her very hard, and said, “Go.”
She nodded, touched his face. With her hands clenched into tight fists she slid out of the car, looked at him for an interminable moment, turned, and walked away. As soon as she had turned her back, while she still fumbled in her bag for her keys, she heard him drive away. But she never turned, never looked, never saw, she simply buried him in her heart and walked back inside the house she would share for the rest of her life. With Marc.
25
“‘Good morning, darling. You slept well?” He looked down at her in bed.
“Did you miss your plane?” There was no mention of the past week, of the fact that she had literally run away from Paris.
“I did. Stupidly. I couldn’t get a cab, there was a traffic jam, ten thousand tiny incidents, and I had to wait six hours for the next flight. How do you feel?”
“Decent.”
“No more than that?”
She shrugged in answer. She felt like hell, and she wished she were dead. All she wanted was Ben. But not like this. Not with Marc-Edouard’s baby.
“I want you to see the doctor today,” Marc said. “Shall I have Dominique make an appointment for you, or do you want to do it yourself?”
“Either way.”
Why so docile? He didn’t like what he saw. She looked haggard and pale, nervous and unhappy, and yet indifferent to everything he said. “I want you to see him today,” he repeated.
“Fine. Can I go by myself, or will you have Dominique take me?” Her eyes spat fire into his.
“Never mind that. You’ll go today?”
“Count on it. And where are you going today, Athens or Rome?”
She walked past him into the bathroom and quietly closed the door. It was going to be a delightful eight months, Marc thought grimly. When the baby came a month later than Deanna expected, he was simply going to tell her it was overdue. That happened all the time, babies born three weeks late. He had thought about it all the way over on the plane.
He walked to the bathroom and spoke firmly at the closed door. “I’ll be at my office if you need me. And be sure you see the doctor. Today. Understood?”
“Yes. Perfectly.” She kept her voice steady so he wouldn’t know she was crying. She couldn’t go on like this. She couldn’t live with it. It was too much. She had to leave him, to find her way back to Ben, with or without this damned child. But she had an idea. When she heard the front door slam, she emerged and went directly to the phone. The nurse told her he was busy but when she had the woman explain who was on the phone, he took the call.
“Deanna?” He sounded surprised. She rarely called anymore.
“Hi, Dr. Jones.” Her voice sagged with relief just to hear him. He would help her. He always had before. “I have a problem. A very large problem. Can I come see you?” He could hear the urgency in her voice.
“What did you have in mind, Deanna? Today?”
“Will you hate me if I say yes?”
“I won’t hate you, but I may tear out the little hair I’ve got left. Can it wait?”
“No. I’ll go crazy.”
“All right. Be here in an hour.”
She was, and he settled back in the huge red-leather chair that she always thought of when she thought of him. “So?”
“I’m pregnant.” His eyes didn’t waver. Nothing moved in his face.
“How do you feel about it?”
“Awful. It’s the wrong time … and everything about it is wrong.”
“Marc feels that way too?”
What did he have to do with it? What did it matter? But she had to be honest. “No. He’s pleased. But there are a thousand reasons why I think it’s wrong. For one thing, I’m too old.”
“Technically, you’re not. But do you feel too old to cope with a small child?”
“It’s not so much that, but … I’m just too old to go through it again. What if the baby dies, what if something like that happens again?”
“If that’s what you’re worrying about, you don’t have to, and you know it. You know as well as I that the two incidents were totally unrelated, they were just tragic accidents. It won’t happen again. But I think what you’re telling me, Deanna, is that you just don’t want this baby. Never mind the reasons. Or are there reasons you don’t want to tell me?”
“I… yes. I—I don’t want Marc’s child.”
For a moment the good doctor was stunned. “Any special reason, or is that a whim of the moment?”
“It’s not a whim. I’ve been thinking of leaving him all summer.”
“I see. Does he know?” he asked. She shook her head. “That does complicate things, doesn’t it? But the baby is his?” He would never have asked her that ten years before, but now things were apparently different, and he asked with such kindness that she didn’t mind.
“The baby is his.” She hesitated and then went on. “Because I’m two months pregnant. If I were less pregnant, it wouldn’t be his.”
“How do you know that you are two months pregnant?”
“They told me in France.”
“They could be wrong, but they probably aren’t. Why don’t you want the baby? Because it’s Marc’s?”
“Partially. And I don’t want to be tied to him any more than I am. If I have the baby, I can’t just get up and leave.”
“Not very easily, but you could. But then what would you do?”
“Well, I can hardly go back to the other man with Marc’s child.”
“You could.”
“No, Doctor. I couldn’t do that.”
“No, but you don’t have to stay with Marc because you’re having his child. You could get out on your own.”
“How?”
“You’d find a way if that was what you wanted.”
“It isn’t. I want … I want something else.”
And then he knew.
“Before you tell me, let me ask you how your daughter fits into all of this. How would she feel, one way or the other, if you had another child?” But Deanna was looking somberly into her lap.
At last she looked up at him. “That doesn’t matter anymore either. She died two weeks ago, in France.”
For a moment everything stopped, and then he leaned forward and took her hand. “My God, Deanna. I’m so sorry.”
“So are we.”
“And even given that, you don’t want another child?”
“Not like this. Not now. I just can’t. I want an abortion. That’s why I’m here.”
“Do you think you could live with it? Afterward, you know, there’s no getting it back. It’s almost always a situation that creates remorse, guilt, regret. You’ll feel it for a very long time.”
“In my body?”
“In your heart … in your mind. You have to want to get rid of it very badly, in order to feel comfortable about what you’ve done. What if there were a mistake in their diagnosis in France, and there was a chance that this were the other man’s child? Would you still want the abortion?”
“I can’t take the chance. I have to get rid of it in case it’s Marc’s. And there’s no reason to think they made a mistake.”
“People do. I sometimes do myself.” He smiled benevolently at her, then frowned as he had another thought. “Given what just happened to Pilar, do you feel able to cope with this now?”
“I have to. Will you do it?”
“If it’s what you want. But first I want to examine you and make sure I agree. Hell, maybe you’re not even pregnant.”
But she was. And he agreed, it was probably two months though it was always difficult to be precise so early in a pregnancy. It was just as well to do the operation quic
kly, Deanna seemed so determined on it.
“Tomorrow?” he asked her. “Come in at seven in the morning, and you can go home by five. Will you tell Marc?”
She shook her head. “I’ll tell him I lost it.”
“And then?”
“I don’t know. I’ll have to work that out.”
“What if you decide to stay with Marc and have another child, but after this one you find you can no longer conceive? Then what, Deanna? Will you destroy yourself with guilt?”
“No. I can’t imagine that happening, but if it does, I’ll just have to live with it. And I will.”
“You’re quite sure?”
“Totally.” She stood up, and he nodded and jotted down the address of the hospital where he wanted her to go. “Is it dangerous?” She hadn’t even thought to ask until then. She didn’t really care. She would just as soon die as be pregnant now with Marc’s child.
But Dr. Jones shook his head and patted her arm. “No, it’s not.”
“Where are you going at this hour?” Marc picked up his head and glanced at her as she slid out of bed, annoyed at herself for having awakened him.
“To my studio. I can’t sleep.”
“You should stay in bed.” But his eyes were already closed.
“I’ll spend a lot of time in bed today.” At least that much was the truth.
“All right.” But he was sleeping again by the time she was dressed and he didn’t see her go. She left him a note: She had gone out and would be back in the afternoon. He might be annoyed, but he would never know, and when she came home it would be too late. As she got into her car and started the motor, she looked down at her sandals and jeans. She had last worn them in Carmel with Ben. As she waited for the car to warm up, she found herself thinking of him again and looking up at the pale morning sky. The last time she had seen a sky like that, it had been with him. Then for no reason at all she remembered what the doctor had asked her: What if the baby were Ben’s? But it couldn’t be, how could it? Two months before, she had made love with Marc. But she had also met Ben at the end of June, it could have been his too. Why couldn’t she be certain? Why couldn’t she be only one month pregnant instead of two? “Damn.” She said the word aloud as she put her foot on the gas and backed out into the street. But what if it were his child? Would she still want the abortion? She suddenly wanted to talk to him, to tell him, to ask him what he thought, but that was insane. She drove straight to the address, her mind beginning to swim.
Summer’s End Page 23