New affairs replaced old ones. I had never felt I belonged to anyone except Cyd and Tom and Macbeth and that was more like being community property. Yet even with them, I knew our relationship was human, could end, and I would survive.
None of that was so with Graham.
From the moment our bodies met, it was easy to believe our destinies had been entwined for a thousand years. If we parted tomorrow, I would spend the next thousand years searching for him, in and out of future lives.
I felt my pulses beneath his hands and his mouth. I touched and stroked and kissed him until I knew every texture of his being. Wrapped myself in his arms and around his body until our heartbeats matched.
It wasn’t a matter of satisfying needs, we did that, but I went past passion and claimed him, believed he belonged to me.
When I tried to explain how I felt, he said, “If you are my destiny, eternity won’t be long enough.”
But eternity and destiny are not the same.
CHAPTER 11
The faded gray frame cottage, pressed into a hillside and half-hidden behind the winter red clouds of contoneaster bushes, became my life’s center. The cottage belonged to Graham and me, making us a couple.
I never went over to the U again after that day we met at the Greek restaurant. The U and Graham’s career were part of his other life, one in which he was married to someone else.
We often stopped for dinner out at a number of places around town. He didn’t seem to care if he was seen with me. Which made it easy to believe his marriage was dead and everyone knew it. Occasionally he’d wave to a colleague. Occasionally I’d see a friend.
We were at a Mexican restaurant, lots of flamenco dancers painted on the walls, lots of piñata parrots hanging from the ceiling. Clusters of tables separated the rows of high-backed booths. We were discussing burritos when a familiar voice called, “April! Hi!”
I looked up and saw Tom striding toward us, winding his way through the tables to our booth. He was dressed Tom style in worn jeans and a heavily ribbed sweater. One large wrist was caught in the thin hand of the small dark-haired woman who followed him.
When they reached the booth, he said, “Hey, wondered where you were hiding out.”
Which meant he’d stopped by the apartment several times. Cyd must have told him I was dating a new guy. Typical Tommy, he would have wasted three minutes on a pout and shrug, then found a new playmate.
“Who’s your friend?” I said because he seemed content to let her stand behind him like a pet dog.
“Oh right.” He stepped back so that we could see her. “This is Sandra.”
Graham smiled at them both. “Would you like to join us?”
Tom started to answer, probably to agree because he always liked a tableful. But the woman said quickly, “Oh no, you already have your dinners. Come on, Tom, let them eat while their food is hot.”
“Sure, okay,” Tom said and held out his hand to Graham. They did the guy thing, shook hands and exchanged names and ended with the usual ‘nice to meet you.’
When they were gone, Graham asked, “An ex-beau?”
“An old friend. We knew each other in college.” I didn’t mention that Tom camped out at my apartment whenever he wanted to.
Graham smiled. “A little more than a friend, I think. A lover at one time.”
“Once upon a time,” I admitted.
“But you’re still friends.”
“We’ve always been friends. Anything else was temporary and neither of us ever called it love.” When I said it aloud, it sounded weird, even to me.
I switched the subject back to the burritos we were eating. It’s hard to get in trouble discussing a burrito.
Graham didn’t give up that easily. The actor’s face twinkled with mischief and curiosity. “What do you think of Sandra? I gather she’s a new girlfriend? You’ve never met her before.”
“She looked a bit possessive. Tom’s girlfriends often are.”
“So you’ve met other girlfriends? Do they all cling to him like handcuffs?”
“Gosh, I guess we should have insisted they join us. Then you could have grilled her.”
He chuckled and changed the subject.
It took Tommy no time at all to start dating this new girlfriend, Sandra, so I knew he wasn’t heartbroken. Unfortunately, Cyd also mentioned Graham to Macbeth.
“Well, I had to, didn’t I?” she said later when I asked her why. “Tom knows and so it’s not as though you could keep it some sort of secret.”
No, and I had no reason to keep it a secret. But Cyd had told Macbeth that Graham was a professor and Macbeth looked him up on the internet and saw how long he’d been at the U.
“He’s a couple of decades older than you,” Mac said to me the next time I saw him.
“No. Don’t think so.”
“So how old is he?”
“What, you think I asked for his driver’s license?” I sputtered. “All right, I’d guess late thirties.”
“Divorced?”
The standard complaint about attractive men in Seattle was that they were either gay or they were married. I snarled at Macbeth, “You know what? That’s kind of nervy of you, looking up my dates on the web. Don’t ever do it again.”
Macbeth started to say something, then closed his mouth. He couldn’t say why he was angry with me because he had no right to judge and he knew it.
And I knew I needed Graham and the cottage. While I was at the cottage, I didn’t have the terrifying nightmares that woke me in the dawn hours at the apartment.
CHAPTER 12
Graham and I walked the winter beach huddled into our windbreakers, with Graham’s long silk scarf lifting in the wind. He quoted poetry, often with lines written around my name, his hands waving to accent every line, almost as though the sea and the gulls were his orchestra and he the conductor.
“Didn’t know there were so many poems about April,” I laughed.
“I could do almost as well for you if you were May or June, but I’m glad you aren’t named February.”
“February Didrickson. I never would have learned to spell it. I’d have flunked kindergarten.”
When we were thoroughly chilled, we climbed the ladder and the path back to the cottage. Sitting on the couch, with its tangle of afghans and cushions, our feet stretched toward the glowing hearth, our arms wound around each other, we traded fantasies. Neither of us had life stories we cared to relate.
I told him, “I was born a princess, but a wicked witch cast a spell on my parents at my christening so that they forgot me and went off on separate hundred-year quests.”
“Isn’t there supposed to be a good fairy godmother in that story?” Graham asked.
“Oh yes. But she wasn’t as powerful as the witch. The best she could do was leave me a very small bag of gold, enough to pay for a couple of nonproductive years of college and give me a mini-income. That is as close to my life story as I have ever told anyone.”
“Coronets weigh heavy on young brows.”
“Yeah, it’s tough to be royalty. Now tell me your life.”
“Reverse the tale, my love. I was born to paupers.”
“Impossible,” I said because it was. He was Prince Charming right down to his toes. I knew every inch of the man, including his toes, and they were charming, too. “No, you were a queen’s son, stolen by jealous enemies and left on a doorstep.”
“I like that idea. From now on, it goes on my resume.”
But we couldn’t always avoid ourselves. Or maybe Graham could, but I couldn’t, because as much as I tried to forget whatever Cyd had told me about him, it wasn’t possible. The more I loved him, the more important the truth became to me.
I had to do it, had to ask him straight out and with no lead-in or buildup, my face turned to the fire because I couldn’t look at him when I asked.
“Graham, are you still in love with your wife?”
“I am in love with you.”
“Does she
love you?”
“Probably not.”
“Then why don’t you get a divorce?” My voice rose more than I had meant it to do. Now I sounded like Macbeth, probing into other people’s lives.
He said, “Because she needs me and I can’t leave her, not yet.”
“What do you mean, she needs you? I need you.” I could hear the tears in my own voice and that surprised me. I had spent so many years not letting myself care about anyone too much. So now I didn’t know how to handle the emotions Graham had awakened in me.
He pulled me closer, bending his head to press his face against mine. “April. Darling. I love you. You must believe me. And someday this will all work out. But for now, I don’t have a choice.”
“Why?” I whispered, afraid of crying.
“My wife is an alcoholic. She’s very sick. She’s been in and out of treatment. Always starts again. Her doctors tell me she’s killing herself. I suppose she is. I can’t abandon her, can I?”
“I thought, oh. I’m sorry,” I mumbled, confused, because he’d told me about the ski instructor and other infidelities, not that she was ill or addicted. If that was true, that was different and explained their estrangement.
“I’m sorry, too, but I’ve learned to live with it,” he said.
“But she’s always going on trips.”
“She goes off, yes. She always comes back. Somebody always gets her back here. And so far, I’ve always been here when she needs me. I have to be. She doesn’t have anyone else.”
In one way, I was relieved. Sure, there was a shadow of doubt, which is why I didn’t tell Cyd. I knew she would blast right through his story. I wanted to believe him. I wanted him to be that kind of person, a man who wouldn’t desert a sick wife. It gave him qualities of loyalty and compassion.
In another way, I hated it that he had such a good reason to keep him bound to her, to be part of her life. It meant he was not wholly my possession. The nightmares reached out from the past toward the present.
CHAPTER 13
The next episode hit a couple of days later, when I was home alone. Maybe the alone thing caused it, I thought, like depression. The answer was to get out and go someplace. And then I remembered almost passing out on the corner of Pine and Westlake. So location maybe didn’t matter.
When Silver wanted to break through, I didn’t know how to stop her. I became her.
The girl next to me at the dressing table, Esther, leaned toward the mirror and painted a cupid’s bow on her upper lip. Turning, she smiled so that only the edges of her upper teeth showed. “There, what do you think, Silver? Do I look like Billie Burke?”
“I guess so. She has such round eyes.”
“I know,” Esther said with a sigh. “Not much I can do about that. If I put any more color on my eyelashes, they’re going to stick together. Hey, did you see the painting Rosco did of her on that magazine cover?”
“What magazine?”
“Theatre Magazine, I think that’s the name. It’s really expensive, thirty-five cents. I looked at a copy but who can afford that? Oh well, they review a few photoplays but mostly it’s about Broadway gossip, you know, New York City. ”
“Stage acting is really different, I mean, you’ve got to have a really big voice.” My voice didn’t carry well at all.
We were in the makeup corner, hunched on stools in front of badly lit mirrors, trying to brush up a bit.
“You’ve got lipstick on your teeth, Silver,” she said. “Jeepers, this lipstick is awful, isn’t it, smears like anything. I used to think it was only back in New York that people handed out stuff at parties, but I guess there’s a lot of that around here, too.”
“What stuff?”
“They hand it out at the swish parties. A person would be a fool to try it. Look at his wife.”
I could feel perspiration across my forehead. The lights always made my forehead perspire under the makeup and made the color run. Not that perspiration showed on the screen, but if my mascara ran, it would ruin a take and I wouldn’t get another chance from this director.
“Whose wife?” I rubbed at my front teeth with the edge of my finger.
“That Laurence. Handsome, isn’t he, but poison.”
I didn’t know Esther very well. This was the first time we were working in the same picture. She rented a room down the hall from mine at the boarding house and I’d seen her lots, running up and down the stairs to use the telephone in the front hall. Always on the telephone or going out with some man, she’d been too busy to talk to me until today.
“Are you a friend of Laurence’s wife?” I asked.
“Me? Lord, no. Have you ever seen her sober? She mixes that stuff with alcohol, wait and see, it’ll kill her. That or that man.”
That man. She didn’t know I knew him. And I was afraid to ask her anything more. What if she got wise? He’d dump me so fast.
“If she drops dead, you wait and see, he’ll get all the sympathy talk, they always do, the men, and the big coverup in the magazines. They’ll make out like she died of some tragic illness, you know? Be good publicity for him, I guess. I hear he supplies her.”
I held my powder box up and hid behind the puff so she wouldn’t see my face because, honestly, looking in the mirror, I could see my reaction to his name as plain as day. I couldn’t keep it off. If I was a good actress, it wouldn’t show all over me. My friend Ruth said my ears practically wiggled when anyone mentioned him.
“He walks in the room and you light up like a candle,” she once told me.
What was Esther saying, that Laurence intentionally gave his wife drugs? Hollywood was wall-to-wall rumors, all those gossip columns, all those lies. It made me so mad, I wished I could tell her the truth about him, how sweet and gentle and considerate he was.
Esther said, “Your nails are a mess, kid. You need to quit chewing on them.”
***
The scene faded into shadows and the smell of carpet.
I woke in a curled lump in the bay window, my face pressed into the carpet, my sinuses blocked and aching, one knee twisted under me where it felt paralyzed. I thought about stretching it out, flexing a bit, and then I remembered what had just happened. I lay still, trying to remember Esther’s exact words.
And who was Esther? And did it matter? Someone on the set, another wannabe, another silly girl who ran away from the midwest, heading out to California, sure that she, too, could become a famous face on the cover of a magazine, a bright portrait tacked up outside a theater, a name on a marquee.
Laurence’s face, the odd look in his eyes, halfway between wanting me and laughing at me, my mind filled with the memory of a man I didn’t know and wanted to forget. Sometimes, when I wasn’t with Graham, I remembered words he said, but I never heard his voice in my mind.
With Laurence, I could hear his voice, low and sexy like a caress, a brush of lips against my throat, definitely his voice saying, ‘Treat me nice. Don’t be a tease. Be wonderful.’
From the doorway Macbeth say, “What are you doing on the floor? Are you okay?” And then, naturally, he flipped on the light and I closed my eyes against the glare.
“Come on, babe,” His hands slid under my arms as he pulled me to my feet. “When you start falling asleep on the carpet, oh hell, look at you.”
“What?”
“Your nose is running. You’ve got dust all over you.”
I gave a moment’s thought to rubbing my nose dry on the front of his disgustingly clean shirt, thought better of it and headed into the bathroom. By the time I came out, washed and combed, he had the coffee brewing.
“You forgot to turn the heaters up,” he fussed. “What’s with sleeping on the floor?”
“Didn’t mean to,” I admitted, then added the lie, “I sat down in the window to watch for Tom and I guess I fell asleep.”
This was scary, this whole thing, because I had no memory at all of what had happened, or where I had been earlier in the day, or why I had returned home. The sc
ene with Esther was so clear, so real, I should have been waking up in that dressing room, talking to Esther.
The kitchen, with the bright lights and Macbeth fussing, that was the dream, the unreal. I tried to focus on holding the coffee mug, sitting down at the table, not asking Mac the time or the day because then he’d go ballistic.
‘I can’t make it different but you’ll be okay. You’re terrific, Millie Pedersen. You’ll be a star. You don’t need me,’ Laurence’s low voice said in my mind.
And then I got it and I said, ‘Are you dumping me?’
The mug crashed to the floor, coffee flew, Macbeth swore, and his hands caught me, held me. Somebody was sobbing, I felt Macbeth’s arms around me, then heard Tom’s voice asking, “What happened?” and Macbeth saying, “I don’t know, come on, get her in here,” and then somebody picked me up and put me down into softness, pillows. Someone wrapped a blanket around me.
Against my closed eyelids I saw Laurence. He was furious but hiding it, saying, ‘No, of course not,’ his beautiful face tight, frowning, trying to hide the truth. No, that couldn’t be the truth, he loved me, he’d said so, hadn’t he? Leaving me, he was leaving me. Why?
The tears turned cold on my burning skin.
“Hey, lovey,” Tom said. “Bad day, huh?”
“Don’t think she has a fever,” Macbeth said.
“Probably skipped lunch again,” Cyd said.
“Go on, I’ll stay.” Tom’s voice.
No point opening my eyes. If I looked at them, they would ask for explanations and there was nothing to tell them. I had no idea what was happening. Scenes slid in and out like half-dreams just before waking, except that nothing impossible happened, the way it does in dreams. Elevators didn’t turn into windows, Cyd didn’t become a crowd, people didn’t turn into frogs, none of that usual dream morphing stuff. I heard Laurence and Esther and Ruth, who was Ruth? I saw Graham, felt his touch, and in between I heard my friends talking softly.
After a while I heard Mac and Cyd arguing about whether or not they should go out to wherever they’d planned to go, and Tom telling them to go ahead, he would stay with me, and then the hall door closed behind them.
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