The Secret Keeping

by Francine Saint Marie

  Sharon smiled a ruthless grin. “Because I like it that way.”

  “You like it that way? Watching the clock for two hours and…?” Helaine felt vulnerable in the doorway.

  Sharon grabbed her around the waist and she covered her breasts to protect them.

  “He, Dr. Kristenson?” She pushed the hair from Helaine’s eyes. “Or she?”

  Helaine stared back in disbelief. She had no desire to pursue it. She extricated herself and slipped past Sharon, back into the bedroom for her clothes.

  Sharon was not about to drop the subject. “Why didn’t you come, Helaine?”

  Why didn’t she? Playing all evening, trying to counterfeit her orgasm, trying to get her to come without penetration, brutalizing her– “Why the hell are you here?”

  “Why didn’t you look for me at the flat?” Sharon demanded.

  Helaine snatched a robe from the closet. “Why aren’t you ever there when I need you?” She didn’t like the sound of her own voice anymore.

  Sharon looked triumphant. “I’m here now,” she said defiantly.

  Indeed. Helaine clutched the robe to her chest and sat down on the end of the bed, wrapping it around her shoulders. She studied Sharon Chambers, her magazine grin, her million dollar smile. It was a caricature of the intelligent one she used to have when they had first met. Sharon had changed it, enhancing her lips, improving her teeth, fixing everything she thought was wrong about her. In reality, she had no character left.

  It was gone. In its place was now a terrible perfection, the look of an exotic orchid cultivated indoors artificially, perishable out of its own glass house and incapable of thriving in a garden. The sly smile was now just a bit of a snarl. Her smart looks reduced to nothing more than raw animal cunning.

  Character. It seemed Ms. Chambers couldn’t even distinguish right from wrong anymore. Never apologized. Helaine stared at her, wondering if it might occur to her to do so, but Sharon just smiled that crass magazine grin back at her. The most-beautiful-girl-in-the-world grin.

  Tonight Sharon seemed to be wearing that title with a sort of tired pride. There was something dark lurking in those beautiful eyes, a look of chilling introspection. Helaine shivered. She could feel sorrow creeping up in her again. It came from a heavy womb and flowed into her heart.

  “Sharon, I–”

  The phone rang in the adjoining room. Sharon glanced over her shoulder and back and her eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Shame on you, Dr. Kristenson. You were expecting someone?”

  “Of course not.” Three rings. Helaine rose from the bed to answer it.

  “Why isn’t the machine on?” Sharon snapped.

  “Because I’m here.” Sharon was blocking her exit. “I have to answer it.”

  Sharon beat her there. “Hello,” she said brusquely, holding Helaine off with her hand.

  “Sharon, give it to me.”

  “Helaine?”

  “She’s a little tied up right now. Who’s calling?”

  “Sharon, give me my phone!”

  “Oh, really? Does she need me to call the police?”

  “Who the hell is this?” Sharon demanded.

  “Robert Keagan. That would be esquire to you. Put Helaine on, please.”

  Sharon handed over the phone. “Keagan Esquire,” she muttered.

  “Good evening?” Helaine answered, aware it came out strained.

  “Helaine? Robert here. I see your prodigal brute has returned.”

  “Yes. How are you?” She kept one eye on Sharon.

  “We wanted to invite you out for dinner. Kay loved Frank’s. But I guess you’ll be in hiding for awhile?”

  She could not discuss this now. “You’ll have to call me at the office Monday. I don’t have my appointment book in front of me,” she said in a hollow tone. She watched Sharon pacing like a warrior.

  “Uh, I see. Okay. I should call on Monday?”

  “Yes. That will be fine.” She had lost sight of Sharon. “Yes, Monday then. Monday, Robert. I’ll talk to you then.”

  “I hate that woman. You should see what she does to you.”

  She glanced into the mirror beside the desk. Yes, she saw it.

  “We’re in the middle of something here,” Sharon interrupted.

  “Thanks for calling, Robert. Say hi to Kay for me.”

  “Monday. I will. Talk to you then.”

  She put the phone down and turned on the answering machine.

  “He hates me, doctor. Why is that? Are you having an affair with him?”

  Helaine sighed. “He’s my lawyer, that’s all. And an old friend. I have them you know.” Her taut voice. She pulled the robe on the rest of the way and tied it. “You cannot answer my phone. If it was a client–we agreed on that. I do not interfere in your life. Why are you bullying me tonight?”

  Sharon smirked. “You do not have the right to fuck around while I’m away. I will interfere with that. You can count on it.”

  Helaine was taken aback. “I do not fuck around. What about you, Sharon?” She was not herself. “Weren’t you going to brag to me about your Italian excursions?”

  “I did Italy, Dr. Kristenson. How does that feel? You know about it, I hope?”

  Yes, she had heard all about Italy. Yes, she had caught wind of it and even her friends were talking. She knew it all anyway, without having to be told or reminded, without having it thrown in her face. She folded her arms and stared at her feet.

  “You better not be fucking around on me, Helaine.”

  “Sharon? How is it that you can but I can’t?”

  Sharon shook her head and laughed.

  “That is what you’re telling me, right?” Helaine asked. “That I shouldn’t even think of it?”

  “I can because I am the Sharon Chambers. You can’t because you are the Dr. Kristenson.”

  Helaine saw her grin again and looked away. It was a sad confrontation, a poor substitute for what she had been longing. The Sharon Chambers. She searched the woman’s face for her lover, the one that had somehow gotten away, eluded the both of them. Could she still be in there, behind that animal grin? Did she love that animal? Did that animal love her or did it just like the taste of her? It smiled back inscrutably.

  Demons and skeletons, Helaine was thinking. That’s her real essence. And ghosts that haunted the creature by day and night. Here’s a ghost: her father, leaving a wife and a little one to fend for themselves.

  Here’s another one: a beautiful mother. And a beautiful daughter. The Chambers women. They were estranged. How long now, fifteen years? A mother banishing her daughter.

  Two beauties in the same house, in an unholy battle for the illicit affections of the same man. It was not the oddest scenario the good doctor had ever heard about, but it was still quite tragic. Mother and daughter in a battle, youth gaining the upper hand, for a suitor who was taking his pleasure at the expense of both of them. That was Sharon’s cross, an ugly secret that the press would never hear about. No, not that Sharon Chambers’ first paramour belonged to her mother, but rather her broken heart over the resulting loss of her mother’s affections. Probably the only thing her heart would break over. Ugly secrets, everybody had them, but here was a secret so secret that even Sharon didn’t know about it.

  A shudder again. Sharon grinned like a skull does. Involuntary. Of course she did, like a skull hidden by skin, she was hiding from herself and her secret, masked in a brand new smile, disguised in a stranger’s face.

  A smile or a snarl or a sneer. Who cares as long as it’s different than the real one, the one she was born with?

  Couldn’t she be happy now, now that she no longer bore any resemblance to anyone, now that she wouldn’t have to see her mother’s face always glaring back at her in the mirror?

  Sure she could, if happiness, like beauty, was only skin deep.

  Sharon’s expression had softened somewhat. Helaine tried to smile for her. “There is no one, darling.

  Believe me. I wouldn’t do that
to you,” she assured. “Please,” she said, signaling for her to sit beside her.

  “Take this off for me.”

  Sharon slipped the robe off, pushed her backwards into the sheets and pillows. Warily the legs opened again and Sharon lay between them. Weak from struggling, Helaine draped her arms around her lover’s neck and, as was customary, whispered her name to her, sighing it gently into the silky dark hair, sighing with relief when, without hesitation, Sharon finally entered her.

  It took over an hour for Helaine to orgasm. Her lover left shortly after that.

  _____

  It was a terminally ill relationship. No saving it. The middle-aged couple seated before her quarreled as if Dr. Kristenson wasn’t even there, each adamantly digging deeper into their positions. She gazed over their heads at the woman who had just appeared on the fifteenth floor. She was holding herself as she was prone to do this time of day, standing heroically and staring off toward the harbor. Helaine sighed with happiness at the sight of her up there and the sound of it contrasted so sharply with that of the grumbling couple that they ceased their discourse and looked at her quizzically. She smiled back as if she had been with them the whole while and they glanced accusingly at each other and then waited for the good doctor to speak.

  She had written the book on all this, which they both claimed to have read. If so, then surely they knew they were in the final chapter. She instructed them to continue their conversation, avoiding, if they could, the use of the word “you” all the time. “Say, ‘I feel’ or ‘I think.’ It’s less accusing.” They tried that for a few seconds.

  Their issues were not too exceptional, the usual garden variety stuff. His wife was his infidel. Her husband just needed to get over it. Both of them were heavily entrenched and in serious denial about the unfavorable future disposition of their marriage. In a way, Dr. Kristenson mused as they picked up their debate where they had left off, his wife was more right than he was. He probably should just get over it since she was unlikely to sacrifice her extramarital meanderings, counseling or not. She wondered how the woman would feel if he actually did, if he actually woke up one clear day and took a look around him and saw her at last, who she really was, and quietly walked away.

  Dr. Kristenson kept one eye on the woman up in the window across the street. Her name, she had learned last Friday night at Frank’s Place, was Lydia.

  She overheard the couple attempting to discuss some of her theories about “working it out” but, in truth, it was rather too late for that. He had the right to quit on her anytime if he could find the strength to do it.

  She watched Lydia and listened to their pitched voices, nodding encouragingly at all the right times, urging them to continue whenever they halted their discussion and glanced in her direction.

  Lydia.

  It was the husband who persisted with these sessions. His perfidious mate only attended in order to placate him, to bury him alive in false hopes and deceive him into believing she was trying to reform. It was clear that this would never happen. She had already wasted a great deal of his time and good faith in this effort to suspend his disbelief. And his money. His money was probably the only thing about the man that his wife still found attractive.

  Dr. Kristenson lamented her decision to follow Lydia to Frank’s Place. Not only because it was undisciplined and against the rules to do so, but because seeing the dark-haired woman up close had caused a kind of crisis in her which had yet to subside.

  She rose up with the conclusion of the couple’s session and booked them for another one the following week. In her journal beside the entry concerning them she wrote “impassioned” when what she really meant was “impasse.”

  _____

  She was Lydia. That was all she knew of her. She was Lydia in the fifteenth floor window of the huge investment firm of Soloman-Schmitt. Lydia applying her lipstick. Lydia at happy hour. Lydia with blue eyes.

  Lydia at Frank’s Place just down the block where, by coincidence, Helaine liked to eat anyway.

  Dr. Kristenson’s day had ended and she was unsure of what to do next.

  _____

  She was fabulous in bed. If she wanted to be. But even at the start it was in a distinctly mannered way, technical and adept, as if she didn’t actually care to touch or be touched, except in appraisal. Foreplay, too, was a bit of a performance. She kissed very little, almost never held hands, and didn’t have the patience for sweet nothings. At times she emoted so little warmth during the act that it seemed likely she had left her body completely, was floating somewhere above the two of them, hanging up there to get a better view of herself, to see how good she looked at it, or how good she was doing. It was, if Helaine thought about it too much, unnerving to have Sharon always watching like that. There was something strangely voyeuristic about it, a perfidy that went beyond her chronic unfaithfulness.

  Still, there was nothing implicitly wrong with the lovemaking and Helaine was never left dissatisfied. It did not usually pay off well to criticize a lover so she never did. Besides every lover was different. It was wrong to compare them. She was optimistic that Sharon’s quirks would eventually be cured, was willing to overlook the minor shortcomings.

  But in her silent consent their love life developed into a practiced ritual with Sharon Chambers performing the rites, a consummate priestess in the bedroom. Lots of bedrooms, unfortunately. Sex, it’s just sex, she insisted, a necessary evil, a tool for achievement. Helaine’s objection to her persistent infidelities was always rebuked with that argument. He means nothing. She means nothing. Career, career, career. As if Sharon was the only woman who ever had to work. Helaine had grown tired of debating it. It was something she was expected to grin and bear.

  Fate smiled on Sharon in much the same way, permitting her to succeed over it, as well. Her career skyrocketed; there was now, as far as Helaine could see, no reason for the promiscuous behavior to continue.

  Yet it did, as if by a sick compulsion.

  The legendary over-sexed Sharon Chambers. Her new position: She was simply maintaining her mythical reputation.

  Myth then she would be.

  In their bedroom, however, Sharon no longer desired to be made love to. She only wanted to fuck Helaine. This version of lovemaking claimed the rest of their sex life and by the time that Helaine finally came to grips with what had happened to them it was impossible to change it. As impossible as getting Sharon to be faithful. Helaine saw herself immobilized, standing in a falling rock zone, her lover wandering recklessly on a path to disaster.

  Sharon had had a fine day in the sun, better and longer than most people get out of living. All too soon, Helaine tried to counsel, it would be over and at the rate the model was going she would be destroyed by it in the end. She gently advised her to settle down. But Sharon Chambers did just as she pleased even when it was unpleasant and regarded every near miss as the proof of her indestructibility.

  The fiasco in Italy had hit all the international papers even before Sharon had thought to return. Her off-color comments about the controversy as she was departing from Rome, suggesting derisively that her critics were guilty of being “too Catholic,” had bristled a great many shoulders, and, unfortunately for Sharon, many great shoulders as well. There were plenty in the industry who didn’t care for the super-model as it was and she had already begun to stretch her friendships within it a bit too thin.

  Sharon lay low for months before leaving town again. During that time Helaine watched as she further alienated herself from the people she needed with her angry long distance diatribes and equally bizarre conspiratorial accusations. To make matters worse, she impulsively fired her longtime agent and she did not know nor trust his replacement. Her extracurricular activities had earned her the added attention she coveted, but the press did not drool over her in quite the same way as they used to and she had frequent run-ins with the paparazzi that now and then trailed after her. She resented the declassé treatment, offended not so much by the ugly co
verage, but how it hindered her lifestyle.

  That was a surprisingly good excuse for Helaine to keep a low profile, too. She refrained from visiting the waterfront flat since she did, after all, have her own reputation to consider. The handful of clandestine visits that Sharon made to her place did not accomplish much in alleviating the hostilities between them and by the time that Sharon had left for California, Helaine was so fatigued and unhappy that she really didn’t miss her lover for weeks.

  “I’ll call you,” Sharon had lied. “Don’t go frigid on me, Dr. Kristenson.”

  “Don’t worry, darling. It’ll never happen.”

  _____

  With a prurient expression the good doctor watched Lydia through the blinds walking to Frank’s Place.

  She was shocked to see herself doing this all the time, concerned by Sharon’s insinuations and the methods she had employed against a mere suspicion. In the past few months she had gradually come to the alarming conclusion that, no matter what the circumstances were between them, Sharon would never permit herself to be replaced. There would never be a successor. This had been both implied and expressed in a number of horrifying ways. So it was with great apprehension that Helaine observed herself observing. And in her observations this Friday afternoon she had to finally accept that her heart was not her own anymore. That she did not recognize it as belonging to Sharon, either. That a foolish thing had happened to further complicate her life. Something she must run from or reckon with somehow.

  She saw Lydia disappear into Frank’s and her stomach growled. She laughed out loud at the sound of it. It actually growled! She was clinical. The hunger was obviously psychological. Great, and now she was even thirsty! She had to admit that her throat felt dry. She laughed at herself. It was almost funny, finding oneself at the mercy of an unheard bell, seeing herself like Pavlov’s dogs, panting.

  It wouldn’t be funny if she fell in love with that stranger, she warned. Her heart leapt at the thought of it, stimulated by its own dilemma.