Summer Storm

by Joan Wolf

  “What!”

  “You heard me,” Kit replied testily. “I want to work at the Yarborough Festival. They’re doing Hamlet, with Adrian Saunders.”

  “But if they have Adrian Saunders for Hamlet, what will you ...” The agent’s voice trailed off in bewilderment

  “I’ll play whatever they’ve got left.” His client’s voice was clear as a bell over the three-thousand-mile connection. “Laertes, Claudius, the gravedigger—I don’t care.”

  “But Chris,” his agent expostulated, “that is exactly the sort of thing you always avoid like the plague. The media will swamp you, wanting to know why you're taking such a small role...”

  “Goddammit, Mel,” Kit said savagely, “I don’t want a lecture. I want you to get me into that festival. I don’t care what I play, or how much money they offer. I just want in. Is that clear?”

  “Yeah,” said his agent faintly. “I’ll get on it right away.”

  “Good,” said Kit, and hung up the phone.

  * * * *

  Four days after Kit’s visit the storm broke over Mary’s head. Personality hit the stands with a picture on the cover of her standing on the steps of Freemont Hall. “CHRIS DOUGLAS MARRIED!” screamed the headline. “Wife University Professor!”

  “Huh,” said Mary when she first saw it. “I wish I were a professor.” Then her phone started to ring and it didn’t stop until the end of the term when she fled the campus and went into seclusion.

  She went to Nantucket, where her oldest brother had a summer cottage. Her sister-in-law was in residence with the three children and Mike came out from Boston on weekends. Kathy was a warm and intelligent person who had the tact to leave Mary to herself and not burden her with unwanted sympathy. Mary played tennis with Kathy and went bicycling and swimming with the children. There was no television in the cottage and the only paper Mary saw for two weeks was the local News. It should have been a thoroughly relaxing time for her. She was with people she loved and who loved her, and she was doing all the recreational things she liked best to do. It was therefore disconcerting to find herself so restless and dissatisfied.

  She knew what was bothering her—more precisely, she knew who was bothering her. She had thought she was over him. She had put him out of her life and her work and that, she had thought, was that. She had convinced herself that her happiness lay with things of the mind, not with a dark, slim man who had once torn her life apart and almost destroyed her in the process.

  The day before she was due to leave Nantucket for Yarborough it rained. After lunch Mary took an old brown raincoat of Mike’s and went for a walk. She went down to the beach and there, with the rain falling on her face and the waves crashing on the sand, she thought back to those innocent undergraduate days of five years ago when she had first met Christopher Douglas.

  Chapter Two

  She had heard of him long before they met. He was in the graduate drama school at her university in New Haven and had been something of a celebrity on campus for over a year. For one reason or another, Mary had never been to any of the drama productions in which he had starred. She herself was very busy, and in the English department something of a celebrity in her own right. She was, for example, the only undergraduate ever allowed to take the famous graduate seminar of the university’s leading professor of Renaissance literature. Mary O’Connor, ran the talk in the English department, had all the marks of a real scholar.

  Her commitment to her work scared off a number of boys who would otherwise have wanted to take her out, but she didn’t lack for dates. At twenty-one, tall and slender, with long black hair, dazzling pale skin and absolutely blue eyes, she was stunning enough to be forgiven for her brains. She was the youngest of five children and, her brothers and sisters all said affectionately, the smartest. That was why her mother had relented and allowed her to attend a secular, coeducational university. Both her older sisters had gone to a Catholic college for women and upon graduation both had taught school for two years and then married.

  “Mary Kate is different,” her sister Maureen had told her mother. “For one thing, she’s ten years younger than I am and seven years younger than Pat. That’s two generations in today’s age, Mom. She shouldn’t be bound by the same rules we were.” And her conservative, apprehensive, but deeply caring mother had relented. Mary had gone to school in New Haven, only a few miles away from her native Connecticut town but worlds away in outlook and philosophy.

  She had loved it. And she had not, as her mother had feared, been “corrupted” by bad influences. At the beginning of her senior year she still did not smoke pot or get drunk every weekend; and she was still a virgin.

  It was shortly before the Christmas break that a boy she had been dating invited her to see the drama-school production of Twelfth Night. “Christopher Douglas is playing Orsino.” he told her, “and he’s supposed to be terrific.”

  “Okay,” said Mary casually, “I’d like that.”

  She went, and her whole life changed.

  * * * *

  She would never forget the first, time she laid eyes on Kit. The lights in the theater had dimmed, the curtain had slowly risen, and there he was, alone in the center of the stage, reclining carelessly against some brightly colored cushions. The first thing she had noticed was his voice. It came across the footlights, effortlessly audible, deep and velvety with just the suspicion of a drawl.

  If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die.

  She listened, breathless, caught in the magic of that voice. Then he rose and moved toward the front of the stage and she really looked at him for the first time. He was a splendid young male, beautiful and tall, slim-hipped and black-haired, with a virility whose impact she felt even across the distance that separated them. She sat rooted to her seat throughout the entire performance. She had never dreamed, she thought, that a boy like this could really exist in the world.

  Afterward she and her date, whose name she never afterward remembered, went out for something to eat. They stopped around first to see a friend in one of the dorms, so they were late getting to the local eatery they had made their destination. When they came in the door the place was crowded. Her date had taken her arm and was steering her into the room when someone called his name. They turned and saw a tableful of students eating pizza and drinking beer. One of the students was Christopher Douglas. The boy who had called to them spoke for a minute to her date and then, as they were turning to leave, her escort said to Kit, “We just saw Twelfth Night. It was terrific.”

  “I’m glad you liked it,” the beautiful voice replied pleasantly. He looked at Mary and stood up. “Why don’t you two join us? I’ll round up a few extra chairs.”

  Before she quite knew what was happening, Mary found herself sitting next to Him. “Did you like the play as well?” he asked her.

  “Yes, I did,” she answered. “Very much. Your interpretation of Orsino was fascinating.”

  He raised a black eyebrow. “Oh?”

  She subjected him to an appraising blue stare. “If you were even the slightest bit effeminate,” she said at last, “you couldn’t have gotten away with it.”

  He grinned appreciatively. “Do you know the play?”

  “Yes. The English Renaissance is a particular interest of mine.”

  “Ah. An English major.”

  Her date caught his last words and leaned across her. “Not just an English major, a summa cum laude English major.”

  Mary flushed with annoyance. “Perhaps I ought to tattoo it on my forehead in case anyone should miss the fact,” she said lightly. The remark passed completely over the head of her date but he looked at her even harder.

  “Hey, Kit,” called one of the students from further down the table. “I meant to ask you if you’d seen the latest production at the Long Stage.”

  “No,” he answered, easily pitching his superbly trained voice down the length of the table, “I haven�
��t.” A jukebox was playing and a few couples were up in a small dance area. “Would you like to dance?” he said to Mary.

  “Why, all right,” she replied, startled, and he took her by the hand and led her out to the floor.

  “I’m afraid I didn’t get your name,” he said, drawing her competently into his arms.

  “It’s Mary O’Connor. Did I hear someone call you Kit?”

  “Mm.” His mouth wore a faint smile. “After Kit Marlowe, the Elizabethan playwright. Jim thinks I look the way he must have.”

  Mary thought of Marlowe, brilliant, poetic, and dead in a barroom brawl at the age of twenty eight. She laughed. “He may be right.”

  He pulled her closer until she could feel the whole hard length of his body pressed against hers. The music was slow and dreamy. Mary felt herself relaxing against him, relaxing into him. “Do you live on campus? Can I take you home?” he murmured into her ear.

  The music stopped and she pulled away from him. “No, you may not take me home,” she said with what she hoped was firmness. “I came with someone else and he will take me home.”

  She turned and made her way back to their table. Her date looked both grateful and relieved when she sat down and immediately began to talk to him. They stayed for another thirty minutes during which time she could feel Kit’s dark gaze boring into the back of her head. When they got up to leave she smiled generally around the table and refused to meet his eyes.

  She thought to herself as she undressed and got into bed that she had behaved like a child. He must think that no one had ever suggested going home with her before. She should have been funny and casual and made a clever remark. The problem was he unnerved her so much that she still couldn’t think of a clever remark. She thought of the feel of his body against hers and of her reaction. The problem was, she thought, he scared her to death.

  He called the next day and asked her out. She said she was busy. He named another time and she said she was busy then too.

  “Doing what?” he asked.

  She thought he was being rude and answered repressively, “I’m working on a paper.” She would have liked to tell him that what she did was none of his business. She didn’t, however, because she was almost constitutionally incapable of being rude herself. Her parents, she thought regretfully, had brought her up too well.

  “When is the paper due?” he asked relentlessly.

  “The day before Christmas recess. Then I go home.” That should give him enough of a hint, she thought.

  “I’ll call you after the vacation then,” said the beautiful voice in her ear and she stared at the phone in astonishment.

  “I’ll probably be busy preparing for finals,” she got out.

  “I’ll call you,” he said firmly and hung up.

  She went home for Christmas and tried not to think about Christopher Douglas. She went out with a boy she had known since high school who was also home on holiday and she found the dates strangely depressing.

  “You don’t look very happy, honey,” her father said to her as she came into the living room one night after saying good-bye to her escort in the car.

  “I don’t know. Daddy,” she replied with a sigh. “It’s just that I’m so sick of mediocre boys.”

  “Mediocre?” he queried with a grin.

  “Well, they’re nice enough, I guess. It’s just that they don’t interest me much. And lately it seems everyone I go out with starts to talk about marriage. Why do men always want to get married?”

  He laughed. “Does Dan want to marry you?”

  “I think so,” she answered gloomily.

  “I always thought you liked Dan.”

  “Oh, I like him. But he’s so—so conventional. His talk, his ideas, his clothes, his car. I don’t think in all the years I’ve known him that he’s ever once surprised me.”

  “Well, then,” her father said gravely, “clearly you oughtn’t to marry him.”

  “No.” She sighed. “I don’t think I’ll ever marry. I think I’ll devote my life to scholarship. It’s much more satisfying than going out on all these boring dates.” She trailed gracefully upstairs, leaving her father with his head buried in the newspaper, his shoulders shaking.

  She got back to college on Monday and by Friday he still hadn’t called. She was unreasonably annoyed. If people said they were going to do a thing, then they ought to do it, she thought. She refused two dates for Saturday night and was sitting in her room reading Tamburlaine the Great by Christopher Marlowe when she was called to the phone. He was down in the lobby. Would she care to go out with him for a bite to eat?

  “All right,” she heard herself saying. “I'll be down in five minutes.” She brushed her long hair, dusted some blusher on her cheeks and put on lipstick. She changed her jeans for a pair of corduroys, picked up her pea jacket and went downstairs to the lobby.

  They had a wonderful time. She had thought they could have nothing in common, but by the end of the evening she felt she had known him forever. She didn’t quite know what she had expected—a “film star” type personality, she supposed, to go with his looks. But he wasn’t like that at all. He was, in fact, the nicest boy she had ever met. The nicest man, she corrected herself, as she said good night to him sedately in the lobby of her dorm. He was twenty-five, four years older than she, and centuries older in experience she was sure. She did not invite him up to her room.

  Mary shivered a little; the Nantucket rain was turning colder and she got up and began to walk slowly down the beach. It was painful, looking back like this; painful to look honestly and see how cocksure and how foolish and how young she had been. And yet she knew, as she reflected on the self-absorbed adolescent she had been, that she could not have handled things any differently from the way she had. Her only alternative had been to simply say good-bye and refuse to see him. And that was something she had not been able to do.

  They had reached the crisis point in their relationship rather quickly. He wanted to go to bed with her and she would not. He was very persuasive, and every sense she owned was screaming for her to give in to him, but there was a hidden core of iron in Mary’s character and on this issue he came up against it.

  “But, Mary, why?” he asked, his lips moving tantalizingly along her throat. They were both in the front seat of a car he had borrowed and the car was parked in front of her dorm. He wanted to come up to her room.

  “No, Kit,” she said, and his mouth moved to find hers once again. She closed her eyes; nothing she had ever experienced had prepared her for the way she felt when Kit kissed her. His hand slid inside her open coat and began to caress her breast

  “I want you,” he said. “I want you so much. Mary—let me come upstairs.”

  “No,” she said again.

  “God damn it, why not?” Frustrated passion was making him lose his temper.

  She gave him the same answer she had given all the other boys, the answer that had stood her in such good stead for four years. “Because it’s a sin,” she said and stared resolutely out the front window.

  “What?”

  That was the answer she usually got. “You heard me. It’s a sin. Against the sixth commandment—you know, the one that says, ‘Thou shall not...’”

  “I know what the sixth commandment says,” he replied irritably. He looked at her, trying to make out her expression in the dark. “Are you serious?”

  And in fact she was. Then, as now, she was as oddly simple in some ways as she was bafflingly complex in others. Sex before marriage was a sin and she wouldn’t do it.

  He had tried to change her mind. By God, he had tried. He would have succeeded too, she thought, if she hadn’t been so careful about where she would go with him. He was as hampered by lack of opportunity as he was by her own resistance. You can’t make passionate love in the middle of a crowded student party—or at least not if you are as private a person as Kit was. You could do quite a few things at a movie, but certainly not what you ultimately wanted to do. He didn’t
own a car, and on the few occasions when he suggested borrowing one, she had said she had other things to do.

  He stopped calling her and for a month she didn’t see him. It was pure hell and it was then that she came to the reluctant realization that she loved him. It was a terribly upsetting recognition. They were of two different worlds, really, and she feared and mistrusted his. Those worlds had touched briefly here at college but in June they both would graduate, and like two meteors on opposite courses, they would grow farther and farther apart as the years passed, never to touch each other again. She would continue her studies and, with luck, land a teaching job in a decent university. He would make it big in acting; she had no doubt at all about that. He had the looks, the talent, and the drive. Most of the boys she knew traveled through life in a pleasant cloud; they did things because they seemed like good things to do at the moment. Not Kit. He knew exactly what he was doing and exactly where he was going. And he was going to the top. There was no place for her in the future he envisioned for himself.

  In March she learned she had been awarded a fellowship for graduate study. Kit was offered a job with the Long Stage, a regional theater based in New Haven that often sent productions on to Broadway. He called her up to tell her the good news and to congratulate her on her award. Her heart almost jolted out of her body when she heard his voice and she agreed to go out with him for a drink to celebrate.

  They went to Guide’s, the place where they had first met. Kit ordered a pizza and—as a special treat—a bottle of wine instead of the inevitable beer.

  “I’ve located a small apartment in a decent area of New Haven,” he told her, his strong white teeth making quick work of the pizza. “It’s in a two-family house. Not very elaborate, but it’s clean. And cheap. And I have yard privileges.” He looked at her out of brooding dark eyes. “You could move in with me while you’re working on your degree.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Christ, sometimes I think that’s the only word you know.”