The Bar Harbor Retirement Home for Famous Writers_And Their Muses

by Terri-Lynne Defino

  “And what if I find a nice Italian girl to marry, one who’ll give me kids without secrets?”

  Cecilia leaned away. Her grin turned cold. A hand whipped out, cracked like doom across his face. “You’ll never,” she said. “You’ll stay true to me. I have no choices. Not what I wear or who my friends are or what man I fuck. You have every choice. If you make that one, I’ll never, ever forgive you. Do you hear me? Never.”

  Aldo clutched his stinging cheek. Moments ago, he’d been a Roman candle lighting up inside her on Independence Day. Now he watched her walk away, picking over garbage in her saddle shoes, cold and dead inside. Because he would do exactly what she demanded, no matter how it tore him apart.

  Chapter 6

  Bar Harbor, Maine

  June 1, 1999

  Love is a beast with sharp teeth, bad breath, and no conscience.

  —Cornelius Traegar

  Olivia looked everywhere for Cecibel. She’d sat among them at the fireworks, but no one had seen her since. No one but Salvatore, who said she wasn’t feeling well. And yet when Olivia knocked on her door, no one answered.

  There would be no more dinners in Alfonse’s elegant suite. If Cecibel wouldn’t come, he said, there was no point in supping in private. Judith and Switch had sadly agreed; Olivia would not argue, though it had been wonderful, keeping separate. The last of the new-old greats, glitterati no longer forced elbow to elbow with the peasants. For a little while, time turned backward, set her on the stage she once claimed to despise. No true artist produced art for fame’s sake, but when fame arrived, ideals snuck out the back door. Olivia accepted this truth, embraced it in her decrepitude.

  She didn’t knock on Alfonse’s door but opened it softly, slipped inside. He was sleeping, of course. Always sleeping. Saving every burst of energy for entertaining, being entertained. There he was in his armchair set beside great windows whose glass waved in the sunlight. Cornelius had spared no expense in this space he created for himself. For himself and Alfonse, who never came. No reproduction glass for these windows, but salvaged from other dilapidated places built in a more elegant time.

  A notebook, turned spine up, fanned on Alfonse’s lap. Olivia’s heart pittered. A blank page. A pen in hand. Was there anything as exciting? The endless possibilities, the potential for beauty, even genius, waiting for that breath of life.

  Carefully, so carefully, Olivia lifted the notebook from his lap. Alfonse didn’t stir. She checked to make sure—thank goodness—still breathing. Moving closer to the window, she flipped through the pages. Mostly empty. His handwriting on those first few. Black pen. Some words in the margins; others hovered over those crossed out. Alfonse Carducci revised as he wrote rather than letting it flow out of him in a creative burst. Funny, Olivia never imagined he’d be disciplined or cautious in his art. Wild. Chaotic. Art imitating life, but not so. Not so at all.

  Computers had changed everything. No more crossing out. No notes in margins. Clean, even in revisions. A simple delete, words replaced, scenes rearranged, and wobbling characters solidified. It made the process efficient. Fingers could fly without fearing the indecipherable scrawl, without cramping. No more writer’s bumps (though hers was mighty, ancient, and earned). No need for an assistant to decipher and type out a clean manuscript when all was said and done. A slower process, one given to care and distance no longer necessary. Something lost. Something found.

  Respect let her eyes take in his scrawl as a whole. Decorum demanded she set it back onto his lap unread, fanned and waiting. Old love begged her to read. Rekindled jealousy taunted. Oh, how weak virtue when baser instincts flexed.

  Buffalo, NY Paterson, New Jersey

  Winter 1939 1953

  She was, now, warm and lovely on in his arms. An unfamiliar gift. A grief to come. Always and always, his. That was the deal. The pact. The promise written in kisses and on long walks. In screeched battles and hours of makeup sex. Cecilia and Aldo. Aldo and Cecilia. The stars had proclaimed it; either they or the summer storm storm clouds always so thick over Buffalo, New York thick over encasing obscuring the Paterson Falls on the day they met when first they met . . .

  She read to the end. And again. Already Cecilia and Aldo bloomed in substantia grisea. Sparked images of a skinny young man sporting a greasy ducktail-doo. A pack of cigarettes rolled into the sleeve of his white T-shirt. No. Too cliché. Aldo was tall and skinny but muscular from lifting and carting crates of bottled soda. His hair was long only because he couldn’t afford regular haircuts. And he didn’t smoke. Cecilia would never stand for it. He wore an oil-spattered apron over a blue button-down, and jeans. His grin? Lopsided. His teeth? Endearingly crooked. His face was a collection of chiseled edges and angles, and blue eyes that could cut or coddle, a Roman nose he’d have to grow into, and a cleft in his chin that would become popular—Kirk Douglas, Spartacus—within the next seven or so years.

  Cecilia—oh, glory. Alfonse gave her five feet of hellion, dark hair and eyes. Olivia’s conjuring turned those eyes slightly almond-shaped. Catlike, not Oriental—Asian, so sorry. The vernacular of youth slipped in now and again. Her cheekbones were high, her lips pouted even when she smiled, and her nose punctuated the drama of her face like a button. Sixteen to Aldo’s twenty—trouble no matter what state or era from a parent’s perspective—Cecilia was soft and curvy and rich. She wore all the right clothes, had all the right friends, and hated her father with the burning passion of a teenager given everything but love. For her mother, she had only pity edged sharp with scorn. And loyalty. Misplaced. Unappreciated. Lonely. She was only a girl. Girls didn’t matter until they bore sons who would be turned into men who felt the same. She would marry such a man, though he would love her in his way. To make him completely unlikable would give applause to the future misfortune Olivia would give him, if this were hers to give him anything at all . . .

  Olivia dropped the pen in her hand, horrified. Blue pen beneath Alfonse’s black. Her neat, calligraphic script like the sea beneath his stormed scrawl. Fingers cramped. Writer’s bump ached. Shame! How could she? Another writer’s work, purloined. Closing Alfonse’s notebook with a soft snap of pages, she scurried for the door.

  “Bring it back when you’ve finished.” His voice came from the slumbering corpse in the easy chair set against sunshine-waving windows. The corpse smiled. Cheeks pinked. Olivia Peppernell darted out the door before he opened his eyes.

  * * *

  Cecibel ached. A short span of elegant dinners she never tasted, taken with the kings and queens revered by even those who’d never read a single one of their books, or any books at all, had been a dream. A dazzling one of wit. A nightmare of worry. Had Judith seen the water dribble down her chin? Had Switch sat beside her to spy the monster hiding behind her hair? Could she hope that none had noticed she never ate a morsel? No, she couldn’t, and that was worst of all.

  The first dinner had been glorious. The second, less so. By the third, Cecibel could not even eat once she got back to her room, her stomach being far too traumatized. Alfonse had seemed genuinely sad when she said she’d not dine with them again. It was all too grand. All too nauseating. Far too frightening to do again.

  And yet, the ache of depriving herself of their company itched like healing wounds. How had she never realized how starved she was? Work, eat, sleep, work again. The occasional conversation with Sal. Olivia. They’d been enough for so long. And now? Alfonse Carducci had ruined everything. He’d drawn her out. He’d made her think thoughts she’d forgotten. He acted as if she weren’t flawed beyond repair and made her believe it was so. But it wasn’t. Not when she couldn’t even share a meal with him. With them.

  Cecibel worked in corners, in avoided glances and ignored calls. Given a few days, she’d be able to face them again, whether singly or as a collective. Time would lift her shame, dull the fear. Just a little time.

  In her room, alone once again, Cecibel tossed her scrubs into the hamper. She walked naked to her tiny bathroom. The mirror ta
unted. Her bugbear. And as she did once—no more—every day, she looked. And looked away. No change, of course. Magic didn’t exist, and only magic could mend what had been torn away. Several plastic surgeries she couldn’t afford and still paid for with every paycheck had done what could be done. At least she had a face to frighten away children, small dogs, and the squeamish. Most of what she’d been born with got left on windshield and asphalt.

  I saw it and didn’t care . . . I didn’t want to be saved . . .

  The words, Alfonse’s words, tumbled from the showerhead.

  Both, or none. I was content to fall.

  Cecibel closed her eyes against the water falling, her mind from the shattered thoughts. A book salvaged from the wreckage, left at her bedside. For when she felt strong enough to open it, to hold it, to read. To find the note in the margin, and wonder why she’d made it there. Years and years left wondering. Answers too monstrous to seek.

  Drying, dressing, disremembering, Cecibel hummed a song she maybe remembered from the past, maybe made up on the spot. She’d go down to the commissary, snag a tray from the kitchen, and eat in her room. Routine. Comforting. If she spied any of the kings and queens, she’d wave and hurry on if she couldn’t duck fast enough. Just another few days. That’s all she needed.

  It was still an hour before the official dinner bell. Kitchen staff scurried. The garde manger and the potager; the entremetier and saucier; poissonier and rotisseur. Even the pattissier, creating decadent but harmless tapiocas and puddings, light cakes and sorbets. Le personnel gastronomiques hired and maintained to the exacting standards of Cornelius Traegar ran like a well-olive-oiled machine. Cecibel ducked and dodged, apart from but a part of the routine. Filling her plate and loading her tray as she had been doing since her first days in the Pen, she thanked and pardoned her way down the line.

  In the vestibule between kitchen and formal dining room, Cecibel placed a cloche atop her tray. Early-bird diners were already making their way to tables, unassigned but daily claimed. Olivia and Alfonse would arrive five minutes after six. Judith and Switch would be with them, modestly pretending it was not a staged thing. Their table of four, never five or six, would be empty even if it was the one closest to the hearth, near to the bathrooms. Such a short time ago, before Alfonse Carducci arrived, those arriving after six o’clock took what seats remained, in usual places left by the infirm, or the dead. How long before their newly celebrated table of four dissolved back into unassigned but daily claimed? Cecibel didn’t want to think about that, so she put it out of her mind.

  Hurrying across the commons separating the dining area from her room, Cecibel wished a tiny wish she could set her tray upon a picnic table there and eat her bland-gourmet dinner in the cooling warmth of June’s sunshine. Wished and discarded quickly.

  “Cecibel! Girl, wait up!”

  Another few steps and she was safe behind the hedgerow that shielded the entrance from the wind. Sal panted, one hand up in surrender, the other on his cushioned heart.

  “Never make me run, honey. My heart’s about to burst.”

  “Don’t you dance as part of your act?”

  “I sway, sugar dove. Something you’d know if you ever came to see me. I sway and I sing.” He sang the words, a rich contralto that always took her a little by surprise. And his grace for so big a man. He’d learned to dance sometime, way back. When? Cecibel didn’t know, and never asked. One didn’t ask questions of others when answers would be expected in return.

  “I see you perform every New Year’s Eve,” Cecibel said. “And last year, you danced a cha-cha.”

  “Me? Cha-cha? Honey, I couldn’t even cha. That was a rumba. Much sexier. And slower.”

  “I stand corrected.” She lifted her tray a little higher. “I was about to have dinner. Did you need me for something?”

  “I need you for everything.” He smiled, a six-foot, three-hundred-pound coquette. “But not this moment. It’s Finlay.”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s a big baby, is what he is. A splinter, well, it’s a pretty big one, in his hand and he won’t let any of the nurses look at it. I tried, but my hands aren’t quite . . . delicate enough.” He waved those sausage fingers, nails painted red, white, and blue. “Would you see to him? After you eat?”

  Cecibel’s shoulders sagged. She hadn’t spoken a word to the man since he tried to get her out on her birthday. “Sure.” At least she’d be where no one—Olivia—would think to look for her. “I’ll go see him after I eat.”

  “You’re a lovely, lovely thing.” Sal bent and kissed her fair cheek. “Tomorrow, your shift ends at three. Don’t worry. I’ll keep you on the clock until four.”

  Dinner eaten, tray returned, Cecibel walked across the dusk-dewed lawn. Finlay lived over the maintenance barn, in a rustic apartment that had once been an artist’s studio when the haphazardly wealthy family had the place built. She’d read about them in a book she found in the Pen’s library. A coal miner from Pennsylvania and his seamstress wife. The diamonds mined and absconded with, the small fortune turned into a bigger one. New-money feuds with old-money snobs who’d been new money only decades earlier. The abundance, and the fall. The suicide of a man first made old in the mines, then older by the Crash. The children left behind. The wife left to fend. It was all very sad. Better to have nothing than to have it all and lose it.

  She shuffled up the steps, knocked on the door. Footsteps on the other side. A whoosh, and Finlay stood there gaping. “Hey, Cecibel. Something I can do for you?”

  “Sal said you had a splinter but wouldn’t show the nurses.”

  Finlay laughed. He showed her his bandaged hand. “He said he wouldn’t tattle if I let him have a go at it.”

  “Well, he lied.” Cecibel peeked around him. “I’ll take a look at it, seeing as I’m already here. If you want.”

  “You don’t mind?”

  She shrugged. He moved aside. Cecibel stepped into the apartment that smelled of old cedar and the ghost of oil paint past. Nothing was new. Nothing was tattered. Homey. Lived in. Clean. She’d never have guessed. Finlay always seemed so disheveled. “Come here in the light.” She beckoned from afternoon’s slanting rays streaming through the window. He didn’t move, only stared, mouth slightly open. If she turned her face, let that sunlight blaze the monster into being instead of the fairy tale she showed, would he cringe?

  Cecibel held out her hand. Waited. Unwrapping the bandage, Finlay obliged. A thick sliver of wood lined the palm of his hand, red and angry-looking already.

  “When was your last tetanus shot?”

  “Not sure. I’m probably up-to-date.” He wiggled his fingers. “Sal got out part of it.”

  “I can see that.” Cecibel prodded gently. “You should really have one of the nurses do this.”

  “Nah. It’ll be fine.”

  Cecibel felt his gaze on the crown of her head. Look up, it said. Just once. “You have tweezers?”

  “Nah. I got a razor, though.”

  “No razor. Jeez, Finlay. You want to lose your hand?”

  “I healed after worse.” His hand fell. “Don’t worry about it. But thanks for trying.”

  “I didn’t do anything yet.” Chancing a glance up, through lashes and a fringe of hair, she caught the slight grimace of fear ripple across his features. “Wait here.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Just wait here,” she called over her shoulder. “And ice it while I’m gone.”

  A pilfered splinter kit, bottle of peroxide, roll of gauze, and tube of antibiotic ointment later, Cecibel tromped up the steps to Finlay’s apartment. The door stood open. She went inside. Finlay stood at the sink, shoulders hunched. An open bottle of whiskey, half consumed, sat on the counter beside him. He wasn’t a big man, or a small one. Neither slim nor stout, clever nor slow, beautiful nor unappealing. Brown hair, slightly thinning. Brown eyes, if she remembered right. Average in every way there was to be so.

  “It’s only a spli
nter.” She tapped the bottle. “Do you really need to get drunk to have it removed?”

  Finlay glanced once over his shoulder. “I’m not drinking it. I’m killing germs. Like in those movies when we were kids.”

  Disco, Star Wars, Pet Rocks. Childhood was so long ago. “Soap and water’d do just fine. Here, let me see. Did you ice it like I told you?”

  “It was a while ago. It’s not numb anymore.”

  Cecibel fished slim ice cubes from the sink. She wrapped them in a paper towel and pressed it gently to his palm. Finlay’s breath wafted warm, and smelled of the whiskey he said he hadn’t drunk. Look up. Just once. Focusing hard on the black line beneath skin, she picked and pricked until the skin gave up its claim. No pus, thank goodness. But it looked sore enough to warrant some.

  “Hold it over the sink.” She poured peroxide on the wound that bubbled white, patted it dry, and did it again. A smear of ointment, a little gauze, and he was good as new. “See the internist tomorrow. I’m not sure who’s on call. You should have a tetanus shot, just to be safe.”

  “Will do,” he said, but he wouldn’t. His choice. His problem if he got lockjaw.

  Cecibel gathered what was left of her pilfering. Finlay stopped her at his door. “We’ve worked at this place a lot of years. How come we ain’t friends?”

  Aren’t friends. “What makes you say we aren’t?”

  “Maybe because this is the longest we’ve ever spent together.”

  “That’s not true at all. We’ve worked together many times.”

  “That’s work, not conversating.”

  Conversing, for goodness’ sake. Cecilia bit her lip to keep yet another correction in her mouth. College got her a minor in English, and a bad habit of silently correcting people’s grammar. How long ago that was. Time wasted. Effort fruitless. She’d never written the novels planned from childhood. Many wanted to be writers. Few actually ever wrote. How sad, she’d become one of the latter. She’d blame the accident, but that would be a lie. She’d switched her degree to nursing long before, and never finished.