“See anything you recognize?” Tom asked every three minutes. He leaned over my shoulder and looked at pictures until I told him to go find his own book and quit wasting time. He ruffled my hair, grinned at me, and then did as he was told.
When we didn’t find anything useful at Suzzallo, we headed across the red brick quad to the Undergrad library. When it gave us nothing, we trekked to the small collections in several departments in scattered buildings across the campus. Some were closed. A couple were open.
Those two went at research as though they were politicians planning a campaign, finding remote references to compare and argue about. They wouldn’t let me beg off, even though I tried the clutch-my-throat and crumple-to-the-floor act. They said I was their key witness, the main piece on the game board.
Exhaustion finally drove us home.
On Saturday we camped out at the library, all three of us dressed for serious digging, in jeans and sweatshirts and Nikes. Tom and Cyd perched on stools in front of the computers, Tom’s long legs wound around the legs of the stool.
I wandered off to climb the curved stone staircase near the main entrance, trailing my fingers along the gray wall. The stone treads dipped in the centers, worn by how many thousands of feet running up and down? I adored the atmosphere of Suzzallo and felt kind of sorry I didn’t adore equally the knowledge it held.
When I returned to the computer area, Cyd and Tom had notepads covered with numbers and locations of books. They were ready to start sleuthing.
Cyd said, “Damn, wouldn’t you know half of what I want is over in a collection in a classroom building and they’re closed today?”
“The whole building is closed?”
“No, but the room with the book collection is.”
They pulled the few books on silent films that we’d missed on the first search and flipped through them, scanning photos. Most of the shots were of stars, occasionally with bit players in the background. I looked for a face to recognize behind the famous faces of Norma Talmadge, Maurice Costello, Helen Gardner, Mary Pickford, Ronald Colman, Blanche Sweet, Larry Semon.
Cyd read off the names in the captions as she flipped pages.
Larry. Laurence.
“Wait,” I said and turned back the page. No, another dead end. Larry Semon who had starred in a silent version of Wizard of Oz in 1925 was not my Laurence. Definitely not.
“Florence Turner, the Vitagraph Girl,” Cyd read. “What do you suppose a Vitagraph Girl is? Oh look at this one. ‘Mabel Normand stars in The Extra Girl.’ Don’t you love the titles? Wanderer of the Wasteland. That could be my life story. Or Jazzmania. Sounds like a cross between a phobia and a sexually transmitted disease.”
“Anything look familiar?” Tom asked me.
“The clothes, the hairstyles, the cosmetics. Not the faces.”
Cyd gathered up the books and dumped them on the re-shelving area. “That’s that. We’ll have to check out the other collection whenever we can get a weekday off.”
“I could come over Monday morning,” I said.
“You have a job interview on Monday.”
“Get real. They aren’t going to hire me.”
We joked about it, sitting together, drinking coffee in the Hub cafeteria, the center of campus life, never doubting our relationship would go on next week and the week after, nothing changing, best friends forever. And probably me unemployed forever and Cyd and Tom grousing about their boring jobs forever.
But after Monday nothing could be the same again between us, though it took us all a while to realize. Because on Monday, I found Laurence.
CHAPTER 6
When I got off the bus on University Way to walk to the campus, the mist blew across my face in thin veils, clinging to my eyelashes, blurring my vision. I pulled my windbreaker hood forward over my rapidly frizzing hair.
Dashing across the street, up the stairs and over the footbridge past the Henry Art Gallery, I hurried toward the campus. Rain bounced off the red bricks of the plaza.
After cutting down another shallow flight of stairs and along the older walkway that rounded the fountain, I made a run for the building that Cyd had said contained a collection of film history books. By the time I was through the heavy door, my soaked jeans clung to my legs.
I stood dripping in the foyer, wondering where the department library was located or if I even had the right building. Digging into my pockets, I pulled out a handful of change and a soggy bus transfer but not the list of call numbers that Cyd had given me.
If it was lost, I would have to start all over tracking down the books we needed. I sniffed, feeling really really sorry for myself. Tendrils of hair had escaped my hood and stuck to my wet face. I tried to brush them back.
A man hurried along the corridor toward me, bent forward over an armload of books and papers. He stopped by the outer door, his head down, and clumsily wrapped his papers in a plastic bag.
His dark raincoat was unbuttoned revealing a flame of red velvet shirt and white jeans above his white leather running shoes. Great head of hair.
He must have felt me watching him because he raised his face and looked straight at me. And smiled.
I knew that smile.
From across a room he would have looked like a student with his light brown hair, arched eyebrows, narrow nose, square jaw, and that line of straight teeth in a smile that made my heart stop. He was average size and moved quickly, giving the impression of walking with his weight over his toes the way dancers do. But it wasn’t only his features that I knew. It was his expression. He had an actor’s face.
When he smiled his whole face moved, so that even the edges of his eyes seemed to lift and a pattern of small lines fanned out beneath the tan, giving away his age as pushing forty. Not that any of that mattered.
All I could think was, that’s Laurence’s smile.
When I stared like a dummy and didn’t smile back, probably had my mouth hanging open, he looked down at his hands, finished wrapping his books, and pushed open the door and left. He hurried along the walk but he didn’t duck his head. The wind lifted his thick hair and the edges of his raincoat, and he bounced with an easy jogging step as though he enjoyed the rain.
I wanted to shout, Laurence!
My throat was so tight, I couldn’t make a sound. Whoever he was, he was the key to something major and I had no choice really. For all I knew, there wasn’t a book collection room in the building, or this was the wrong building, or it would be closed today, anyway. And why chase information that might not be there when I could chase the living, breathing man? I followed him.
It is all very well to argue about free will, as Tom and Cyd were always doing, but what existed in theory could collapse under the fact of circumstance. They’d both agree that I had free will and did not have to follow a strange man. They’d have been wrong. The needle does not choose the magnet. And I was the needle, all right, and to go poetic about it, I was being pulled through the warp of time by a powerful magnet. That man was absolutely out of my past.
The magnet followed changing pathways across the campus, circling the fountain, crossing the plaza, hurrying up a short flight of cement stairs, cutting beneath the bare, gnarled branches of rows of hawthorns. I followed him across lawns and parking lots and finally off campus, kept going along University Way which everyone calls The Ave.
He turned in at a Greek restaurant that was a favorite of Cyd’s. I closed the distance and was maybe ten steps behind him by then, no more.
He dropped his books and bag on a table by the front windows of the restaurant, slipped out of his coat and draped it over the back of a chair, then sat down on the chair next to it. I stood at the opposite side of the table and waited for him to look up. When he did he didn’t seem surprised. Instead, he smiled.
Don’t know what he saw besides a woman in a hooded rain jacket dripping water on his table. Nothing in his face indicated that he knew me or even vaguely remembered me.
He said, “Hi.”
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I wanted to ask him if I could talk to him but honestly, I don’t go around picking up strange males. And that’s what he thought I was trying to do. Written plain all over that face, that very charming face with the Laurence smile. And jaw line. And the tilt of his head.
My voice stuck in my throat.
“Want to join me?” he asked.
“Please.” I felt the blood rush to my face, damn, I was blushing like a teenager. I forced myself to pull out the chair opposite him and sit down.
“Are you in my Shakespeare lecture?” he asked.
“Oh. Are you a professor?”
“Yes. I thought, ah, but if you aren’t one of my students, do I know you from someplace else?” Same line between his brows when he was puzzled.
“Do I look familiar to you?” Stupid, but I blurted it before I could think of something clever to say.
He chuckled, then said, “I’m not much good at guessing games. Why don’t I order omelets for both of us and then we’ll figure out who we are.”
He turned and caught the eye of the passing waitress, held up two fingers of one hand, made a pouring gesture with the other.
I knew that I should refuse his offer but as I could barely think, let alone speak, I peeled off my wet jacket, hung it over the back of the chair and then sat down and waited. The waitress put a full coffee mug in front of me. I stared at it while he made the decisions. He ordered for both of us.
Then he said, “Shall we start with names? I am Graham Berkold. Want to tell me who you are?”
“Do, uh, does the name Laurence, um, were you ever called Laurence?”
“I’ve been called numerous names, but never Laurence. Oh! I see. You mistook me for someone named Laurence. Lucky Laurence. But you must not know him very well.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Is there some reason why you prefer not to tell me your name?” He gave me an amused glance from under those arched eyebrows while he stirred sugar into his coffee.
“Not really. No. I was hoping you’d remember Laurence. Umm, can I ask you something?”
“Beautiful ladies who share my table may ask me anything at all.” There it was again, that Laurence smile.
“Is there anything about me that looks familiar to you?” Stupid, April, stupid, stupid, but I wasn’t clear headed like Macbeth or clever like Cyd.
Tilting his head back, Graham Berkold gave me a long scrutiny, his eyes narrowed, the corners of his mouth twitching, and I could have sunk under the table. Trouble was, I’d have to come out sometime.
He must have seen my embarrassment because he leaned forward, put his hand over mine on the tabletop and said, “Darling, if I’ve forgotten that we’ve met before, I deserve any insult you want to toss at me. I do beg your forgiveness.”
I mumbled, “I thought you were someone named Laurence. It’s me who is rude. I shouldn’t have bothered you and I am terribly sorry, Professor Berkold.”
Still holding my hand, he said, “Call me Graham, will you, because I will never remember to answer to Laurence. And don’t apologize. For the rest of my life I shall consider it my great good fortune that on a particular winter day a particular trick of light made me resemble someone named Laurence. Lucky me, that brought into my world a mysterious lady of unsurpassed beauty and no name.”
Okay, I had to laugh at that. I pulled my hand away from him. “My name is April Didrickson.”
He said, “April Again in Avrille.”
“What?”
“It’s a line from Millay. I teach poetry.”
“Can you recite that poem?”
“Yes, but I won’t. It’s your turn, April. Tell me who you are and who this lucky Laurence is and why you’re looking for him.”
The waitress set huge platters before us, heaped with toast wedges and mushroom omelets. The steam rose in fragrant spirals. I hadn’t even thought about being hungry, but that did it.
How could I be anything less than honest with a man who ordered such a great meal for me? I really do love eggs.
Over lunch I explained that I was an unemployed dropout.
“What an enchanting self-description,” he said. “You need something better if you’re filling out job applications. I know, be sure to say you are a strawberry blonde.”
“I’m what?”
“It’s from an old song about the band playing on. Sorry, bad habit. I quote poems, songs, anything. You go ahead, April, tell me your story.”
The explanation of Laurence would have been impossible with any other strange person. Within a few minutes, Graham made me believe he was my oldest, dearest friend. He was cheerful and encouraging and amused and pleased by everything I said. That was the teacher, I suppose, putting a student at ease. Whatever the source of his talent, he was really good.
I told him everything, at first slowly and then in a rush, from my first terrifying vision of the crash to my memories of that day on the set.
“And so you were an actress named Silver and I was an actor named Laurence, and now fate has drawn us together again?” he said.
“Do you believe me?”
“I believe that you believe every word you say.”
“But you don’t believe in reincarnation? I don’t know any other explanation.”
He looked at me for a moment, pursed his mouth as though he was thinking very carefully about his next words. Guess he was. He asked, “They were very much in love, this Silver and Laurence?”
“I think so. Though Silver loved Laurence more than he loved her.”
“Than this Silver couldn’t have been you. No man could possibly love you less than you love him.”
Hmm. I thought I’d heard a lot of lines but that was a new one. “Now you’re teasing me.”
“Really, no, and to prove my sincerity, I will check with a couple of my film buff colleagues in the drama department. Maybe someone will remember an actress named Silver.”
“Are you in the drama department?”
“No. English. My office is in that building. They keep rearranging building space and moving me around. And I am afraid that I am not very knowledgeable about old films. However, I can e-mail you anything I learn. Or better yet, I can phone you if it’s something significant.”
Which was why I gave him my phone number. Or maybe I gave it to him because I knew, despite his doubts, that he was Laurence and I had loved him in another lifetime. And I had been so crazy in love, the memory followed me. Or maybe there was something I was supposed to do about that memory.
Or maybe, really, I couldn’t resist giving my phone number to a man who called me beautiful and then described me as a strawberry blonde.
Tom and Cyd agreed that no one could change the past. Fair enough. But maybe I was supposed to change something in the future. Or maybe I was lying to myself all over the place. The man was all charm, maybe too much charm. I could walk away from charm. The killer touch was his smile.
He pushed away his cleared plate and tossed down some bills. I started to pull out my billfold, hoping I had enough cash, but he said, “No, no, I invited you, and thank you so much for accepting. I wish I could stay and chat longer but I have an appointment. I’ll call you if I learn anything.”
All right, he wasn’t hitting on me or he would have stayed. I sat at the table finishing my coffee. He hurried out into the light rain and I watched him through the window until he disappeared down the street, watched the tilt of his head, the swing of his shoulders, the easy stride of his legs in those white jeans.
Nice man but I would never see him again or hear from him again because he was probably hurrying away thinking, “God, what a fruitcake.”
CHAPTER 7
Tom lost the bet and Mac lost the argument and Cyd got her way.
We went to our first Reincarnation Through Hypnosis session together, the four of us, as we did everything together that year. All right, Macbeth did endless complaining, but he caved and decided we needed him as ballast.
“I don’t believe in this sort of stuff,” I said for the umpteenth time.
“Reincarnation or hypnosis?” Mac asked.
“Because if it’s the hypnosis thing, I phoned and asked about it and nobody gets hypnotized individually,” Cyd said quickly, with a glance at Macbeth.
From that glance, Tom and I knew Macbeth had insisted on that phone call.
“It is a kind of group thing, nobody looking at the leader. It’s really more suggestion than anything. You can turn it off yourself whenever you want.”
“I’m not sure I even want to do that much,” I said.
I hadn’t told them about Prof Berkold. What for? All that encounter amounted to was a free lunch and oh yeah, a chance for me to dump all my worries on a stranger.
“Then why are you going?” Tom asked.
“Because Cyd thinks it will be fun.”
“I don’t know,” Cyd said. “I don’t know anyone who has been to one of these sessions except Lisa. She said she’s done this several times and she’s found out all sorts of stuff about her past lives.”
“Has she? What has she learned?” Tom’s intense dark eyes peered at her.
“Um, well, she had a life as a pioneer, and another life the leader hasn’t identified yet but she can clearly see herself and a husband and she thinks it was maybe in Jerusalem during the time of Christ.”
“Ask a dumb question,” Macbeth said.
“Listen, you guys don’t have to go with me,” Cyd said.
I said, “Maybe I’ll find out I was Cleopatra. Before I was Silver Whoever.”
Macbeth said, “Or maybe you were the asp, babe.”
Tom looked doubtful but he came along anyway because that’s the way we were, the four of us always together. We were kind of inseparable, all very neat and romantic except when Tom met some other girl.
His most recent was Caroline Something. I met her, didn’t think they’d make it through the winter but was surprised when he ended it so fast. His flings always put a short break in my Tom sightings. Never lasted.
A couple of times I met other guys. They didn’t last, either, so I guess we made anybody else get that outsider feeling. Not on purpose. And Macbeth and Cyd? In some ways they were worse than Tommy and me because they never bothered dating other people and at the same time, they were more friends than lovers.
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