by A. R. Taylor
“How did you find out about that?”
“The Water Mill housekeeper is a very good friend of mine.”
Jenna felt her face go red. “That time at the hotel when you were crying, was that about Tasha?”
“I was crying because I thought she had been unfaithful to me.”
Jenna tried to stand up but couldn’t and sat back down again, leaning in toward the other woman, trying not to yell in this most quiet of places. “Why now? Why are you telling me all this? It makes the whole thing even more horrible. You ruined my life, you and your goddamned sweetheart.”
“Really? All that money, all that time and freedom? You were nobody and nothing.”
“I was a young girl, enchanted by my job and the remarkable world I’d landed in. I was even enchanted by him. You used me and then forced me out of the country.”
“Did you really think all that sex and good fun came to you for free? Besides, it could just as well have been you underneath him anyway. He was on the way out, so to speak, but with whom? We could have held a lottery.”
“I suppose that’s a comfort to you, isn’t it? That I was guilty and might as well be punished, even if it was for the wrong crime.”
“There was something more threatening, more uncontrollable, and it made you the ideal choice.”
Jenna looked down at her expensive shoes, bought and paid for, and now perhaps she would find out how.
“Have you never guessed?”
Jenna looked away, trying to focus on another childish drawing on the wall over Sabine Hull’s shoulder.
“He was in love with you. After all the partying, the travel, the rampant philandering, the lies—all that meant little to me because it was nothing to him. Then he fell in love with you. I didn’t have to tell you, ever, but I thought perhaps it would help you to know.” Sabine Hull looked down, pulling a cigarette out of her bag and lighting up, despite where they were. “Jorge knew it too.”
Jenna stared at the pinball machines and the funny faces drawn on the walls to amuse the children, and now she felt empty, shattered, as if she’d been punched, but also suddenly filled with compassion for Vincent Hull, the real broken-hearted lover in all this. She stood up, gathering her coat and scarf. “Of course you had to tell me, because that’s how heartless you are. I must have been the only one to have any feeling at all for him,” she muttered and scrambled out the door, running down the hall, out the front door into a howling wind that almost knocked her down.
EIGHT
The next day, though she was scheduled to leave on the night flight to Rome, Jenna stayed in bed and drank tea and ate toast, treating herself like the victim of a horrid disease that could only be cured by hiding under the covers. In love with her? Vincent Hull was in love with her? So much so that it threatened his world? She looked back now on her recent talk with Jorge and wondered if he had been trying to tell her this too. She wanted to take comfort from it, be glad of it, but she could only wonder and grieve in confusion.
Drawn out of this funk by a ringing phone, she picked up. “We’re going back to Ohio right away, Cate, so if you want to say goodbye to Amon, now is the time.” Dragging herself out of bed, she took a shower and washed her hair, staring at herself in the mirror, convinced she had aged forty years. She looked the same, just dark circles under her eyes, but she felt as if she almost didn’t want to live in the world that had opened before her. She could feel its weight right there upon her chest, a weight of knowledge so intense she couldn’t even fathom how it had gotten there. Rousing herself, though, she sat down and wrote a very large check to Amon and slipped it into a hotel envelope.
At the hospital, she started to breathe again and even raced up the steps to the second floor, finding her way to room 207. Just in time, it turned out, because Lori had two bags in hand, while little Amon occupied a wheelchair once again. “Oh there you are,” the boy said. “We couldn’t figure out where you had gone to.”
Jenna grabbed one of the suitcases, giving the boy a kiss on the cheek at the same time. “I’m so sorry, I had an illness in the family, something like that anyway.” She handed Lori the envelope.
“What’s this?” Lori glanced at her.
“Open it when you get home. It’ll be more of a surprise then.”
Amon tugged on her sleeve. “We asked the nurse to give you something I made for you. I was afraid you wouldn’t come. She has it, and you have to go back and get it.”
“I will, I will, but I should have a present for you.”
“We didn’t know we were leaving today. It’s all a bit of a shock. They seem to be throwing us out.” As usual Lori looked as if she’d been caught in a windstorm. A nurse strode up behind them and began pushing the wheelchair toward the elevator. The three of them had that strange, empty feeling that resulted from having spent too much time in the hospital dead zone.
“I’ll miss you,” Jenna said. She thought she might start to cry, but to stop herself she bent down and kissed the top of the boy’s head. He looked up and put both his warm arms around her, and she held on, feeling his whole little body nestled against her. He dropped one arm and whipped a cell phone out of his pocket.
“You can call me any time. I have a camera on my computer at home. You can watch me on video.”
“I’m going to do that.”
She lingered as the two climbed into a cab and stared at the snowflakes beginning to fall, and then she walked slowly back upstairs. At the nurse’s station on the second floor she stopped and waited while they ignored her, until at last one of them responded to her request for help. “Yes, there is something, let’s see . . . Vonda, where is the picture for Ms. Myatt? Wait, here it is.” She pulled a smallish canvas up off the floor.
Amon had painted in oils a portrait of himself sitting before the canvas, viewed from behind, brush in hand. Over his shoulder a woman looked on, but turned away slightly toward the window, staring at the buildings outside, rendered like walls blocking the view. Jenna was that woman, her hair a little too brown, the chin a bit lopsided, but herself nonetheless. Some have skill as technicians, some have art, and then there are some who can see, and Amon could see. He could see her, at least. She turned the painting over and on the back saw that he had written in bold slashes of red paint, “My Friend Cate.”
Jenna ran down the hall, trying to stifle her sobs but not really doing so. Then she hid her face in her hands, and several people reached out sympathetically to her, thinking she mourned a sick child. At last she reached the library, where the Bélange hung right alongside the other masterpieces. The room was empty, and now Jenna stared at the incredibly vivid picture of that young woman holding her wet hair behind her head, up to her breasts in the shimmering blue and white water. Up to her breasts.
In later years she could not remember how she got back to the hotel, only that it was through falling snow. Rushing to get her things packed and take her leave, she propped Amon’s painting on a chair in the lobby, but not before she paid her grotesquely huge bill. Hotel living, such as it was, no longer suited her at all, and she longed for her own place in Italy, for her friends, but above all for the vision she had had of her life before these awful women had taken her in hand. Jenna had resisted the urge to call Tasha and confirm all that Mrs. Hull had said. She didn’t need to confirm it; she knew it was true. It made brutal sense, but why hadn’t she asked more questions at the time of Hull’s death? Obviously, youth and panic and a dead man on the floor. She saw now that they were the desperate ones, so frenzied to hide their affair that they picked her, an easy target, a sympathetic victim, easy to lie to. But they were jealous too. Incredibly they saw her as a bigger threat than anyone else around them, so why not destroy her life and her reputation? It was the perfect revenge. Whatever this all meant, it was time to leave New York and go home. She had such a place there, not ideal, certainly, but a place where people liked her, even loved her, for real.
What to do about Inti? He had been leaving her mess
ages, most of which she had left unanswered. She wanted to see him, but after these latest revelations, she felt even more secretive. The hypocrisy of these people, the lies—they would do anything. And now she possessed what they had feared revealing for years. Maybe they’d have her killed. Oh god, she thought, I’ve gone mad, and isn’t that exactly what they want?
Jenna had hours before she had to leave the city, but they seemed an eternity. Should she just drink herself into a stupor, trying to forget? That seemed like a bad idea. Vincent, Vincent, she kept calling out in her mind. Why had she not known? She should be happy he loved her, but she could not feel that at all. Even in the midst of her packing hysteria, still she had wanted to dress herself up for something, for anything, and she had chosen a dark-blue wraparound dress that flattered her figure and made her feel sexy. Sexy for what?
Her cell phone pinged. Inti. Oh the wretched persistence of the man. Their conversation was short, and she told him her time was limited but arranged to meet him at an Indian restaurant over on Park.
At Akhbar, she now told Inti the upshot of her relationship with the Hull family, specifically the fact that Tasha and Sabine Hull had been in love. He took a bite from his chicken korma and boti kabab, fascinated by the tale. He spotted it instantaneously as one that was worth money, and beyond that, awards, fame, and every other gift the profession had to offer. In this time of hysterical celebrity worship, it represented pay dirt of the most serious kind. He didn’t know what he could or would do, but this secret inflamed him in a way he rarely felt, and as Jenna talked excitedly, sometimes enraged, other times mystified—she was nervous, he could tell—he wondered about the nature of his own loyalties. He wanted to reassure her, but he wasn’t sure he could. Yet it was grotesque to think of revealing everything, because this girl, this woman, had revealed it all to him without a care, without an inkling that he could betray her. The two of them seemed to sink under a wave of New York nausea, and so as she talked on, he resolved to get her out of the place and back to his apartment.
“I’m going, I’m going.” She struggled once again into her coat. He held her tight as they emerged into the heavily falling snow. “Andiamoci.” She kissed him on the cheek. “I’m Italian now. I’m also slightly drunk.”
So far she hadn’t mentioned leaving for the airport. What was a little plane ticket? A nothing in her ocean of money. She could rebook, she could toss it into the East River, or give it to the USO for a lonely serviceman wanting to get home. Seriously drunk, she tottered a bit and leaned on Inti’s arm.
He took her back to his apartment, where she immediately suggested another drink. “Oh, let’s just watch bad television or listen to music,” he said.
“Yes!!” She sank down onto his couch, still in her coat, but he lifted her up and took her to his bedroom, pulling off the coat, sliding off the dress, leaving her in her sexy black thong. There she rested, while he went back out and sprawled on the couch, head not clear enough to figure out the future.
In the very early hours of the morning, snow covered every street, every solitary tree, all parked cars. Jenna had gotten up early, head pounding, mouth dry. Out in the living room Inti slept, one arm curled beneath his head. He looked so innocent, so good, better than that whole gang she had encountered at NewsLink. Maybe she shouldn’t leave at all, just make love to him until his head flew off, and he promised her the world. But no, that didn’t seem possible. “They” would try to deport her again, though she wasn’t so sure what they could do now that Mrs. Hull had violated the contract. Or would they claim she had demanded the meeting? Too much, all too much to think of with a hangover.
Snow the first day of March, how mystically appropriate. Cabs remained where they had stopped in the middle of the road, and a bus lay diagonally across 72nd Street, frozen into a mound of snow. All had closed down, the whole world of noise and motion that was normally Manhattan. Jenna sat at the window while her erstwhile lover slept soundly, hardly moving. Nothing moved outside either, and the fearsome silence took her back to that night almost five years before, when she had slid her body under the cold, dead frame of Vincent Hull, still hot at the center.
No chance of getting to the airport now.
THE END
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Profound thanks to:
My daughter, Vanessa Taylor, always my first and finest reader.
Elizabeth Trupin-Pulli, brilliant agent and wonderful friend.
Jesse Holcomb, adept at just about everything.
Elizabeth Kaye, a sharp-eyed editor and a terrific writer.
I am so grateful to the inspired women at She Writes Press and SparkPoint Studio: Brooke Warner, Samantha Strom, Cait Levin, Crystal Patriarche, Keely Platte, and Paige Herbert.
As always, for my two best friends, Dorothy Duff Brown and Diana Ketcham.
Finally, for Eileen and Marie Rooney, without whose inspiration there would be no book.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Author photo by Deborah Geffner
A.R. TAYLOR is an award-winning playwright, essayist, and fiction writer. Her debut novel, Sex, Rain, and Cold Fusion, won a Gold Medal for Best Regional Fiction at the Independent Publisher Book Awards 2015, was a USA Best Book Awards finalist, and was named one of the 12 Most Cinematic Indie Books of 2014 by Kirkus Reviews. She’s been published in the Los Angeles Times, the Southwest Review, Pedantic Monthly, The Cynic online magazine, the Berkeley Insider, So It Goes—the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library Magazine on Humor, Red Rock Review, and Rosebud. In her past life, she was head writer on two Emmy-winning series for public television. She has performed at the Gotham Comedy Club in New York, Tongue & Groove in Hollywood, and Lit Crawl LA. You can find her video blog, Trailing Edge: Ideas Whose Time Has Come and Gone at her website, www.lonecamel.com.
SELECTED TITLES FROM SHE WRITES PRESS
She Writes Press is an independent publishing company founded to serve women writers everywhere. Visit us at www.shewritespress.com.
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