“Is it serious?” he asked. Didn’t even sound surprised.
“Hard to say. Maybe.”
“Sounds like someone has come back into your life.”
I told him about the job at the ski shop. He laughed and asked me what I knew about skiing.
“Nothing.”
“That’s what I thought.”
I didn’t bother mentioning that what I primarily sold was sweaters.
“Met a nice man,” I said.
“At a ski shop? And have you told him you don’t ski?”
“I think he knew that when he asked about bindings and I didn’t know what the word meant.”
That chuckle twanged my heart strings. “You’re putting me on, right? Because I thought you and I had something special. And now you’re telling me we don’t.”
This had to be worded carefully. Or I would shoot myself in the foot. “Graham, you’re married. I know I ignored that. I know this is my fault. I know I need to stop seeing you.”
Which sounded reasonable to me but Graham took it as a challenge, I guess. He agreed pleasantly, apologized, hung up.
An hour later he phoned again.
“Getting over you isn’t that easy, darling,” he said. “You are constantly on my mind.”
I didn’t answer.
“Could we talk? Just talk? I miss you, April.”
“There’s nothing more to say.” My mind was made up but I guess I forgot to tell my heart.
“Are you crying? Darling, stay right there. I’ll pick you up in twenty minutes.”
He did and I was waiting for him, kidding myself that face to face I could break it off for good. During the drive out to the cottage he turned on the radio and found a good music station, which saved us both from talking. I’d been determined to get it over with, tell him I was through. I had a whole list of reasons.
And then there he was and he took my breath away just looking at him. When he pulled into the parking area above the cottage, he touched my shoulder, leaned across the console, kissed me. All my determination and resistance crumbled. He filled my mind.
I followed him down to the path and he turned several times to fold me in his arms, cover my mouth with long passionate kisses. He must have felt some resistance in me, though. At the front door I paused to look at the Sound and took a deep breath of the heady smell of saltwater.
He said, “You wait right here, enjoy the view.”
While I gazed out at the water, he went inside. A few minutes later he returned with a full wine glass in each hand.
The sky was breaking across the Sound, its dull cloud cover quilted with silver streaks. Standing on the porch steps of the cottage, our hands wrapped around our wine glasses, we breathed in the cold, clean sea air and avoided each other’s eyes. He was wearing his cream colored fisherman knit sweater. I loved him in that.
I didn’t ask Graham the obvious question, how was his trip to Vegas. Wherever he had been, I didn’t want to hear his version of it.
Instead I let him pick the topic and he picked his wife. Barbara Berkold was not a good choice but he didn’t know what I knew. Right. He hadn’t asked me what I’d been doing that weekend when he was in Vegas. He’d only asked about the week after, my week at Elinor’s shop.
“I don’t know what to do with my wife,” Graham said. “The doctor says she should be hospitalized but she wants to go to Mexico.”
“She’s really ill, then?” I forced myself to ask.
“She’s all but destroyed herself. The least infection and she’ll have no resistance.”
“Have you explained this to her?” With great effort I kept my voice steady.
Graham waved his hand toward the horizon, where the mountains were a blue-gray shadow beyond the dark islands. “Might as well talk to the wind. She’ll do what she chooses.”
“That must be hard for you.” I wanted to grab the front of his sweater, pound on his chest with my fist, scream at his face that he was such a liar. But how could I? How could I do it without my heart breaking in a million pieces?
He said, “It’s only hard because of you, my darling. My marriage keeps me trapped.”
A lone bird flapped its way across the sky. Turning to meet Graham’s gaze, I tried to smile. We were both trapped, he in his marriage and I in my obsession.
With an attempt to sound casual, I said, “Was she an alcoholic when you married her?”
His eyebrows arched in surprise. “Not that I knew at the time. Maybe.”
The cloud breaks gilded the sea’s ruffled surface. I held my wine glass to my cheek, felt the condensation on the glass run down my face like tears, and closed my eyes against the glare and Graham. I couldn’t tell him I had talked to her. I didn’t know why he had married her. Loved her at the time, probably. But she obviously was the one with the money and he obviously wasn’t going to walk away from it. The trap of his marriage was a small inconvenience compared to the trap of our destinies. We seemed to be repeating our fates, rushing toward whatever event had ended our last existence.
“This is all so unfair to you, April. I never should have involved you. I’ve no excuses except that from that first moment, when I looked up and saw you standing by my table in the restaurant, I wanted to be with you. And now look what I’ve done to you.”
“What have you done?” Besides lie to me.
“Involved you in my problems, made you unhappy. You never smile any more, darling.”
I forced a smile.
“You used to tell me stories about when you were an abandoned princess under a wicked witch’s spell. I hoped to be the pauper-turned-prince who broke the spell with a kiss, leading to happily ever after.”
He was right. We didn’t laugh together any more. Now that I knew the truth about his wife I couldn’t think of much to laugh about. There was only one question I wanted to ask, but didn’t know how to do it.
And then I did. “Graham, have you done this very often before, had affairs?”
Something in his face tightened and I almost expected him to shout at me. Instead he smiled, didn’t try to touch me, looked me straight in the eyes. “April. If I had any experience at this, do you think I’d be in such a mess?”
Push on, stupid girl. There has to be an answer. “If I met your wife, would I like her?”
His laugh was abrupt, angry. “Like her? Darling, you have no idea. You’re so sweet, so kind, you don’t know what she’s like. She puts on a good show, my lovely wife. Sober her up and run her through a spa and she’s the perfect hostess. She’d invite you in for drinks, and then she’d tell you I had affairs with half my students. I don’t know. Maybe she believes her stories. But if you met her when she’s on one of her binges, she’d tear you apart. Why? Do you want to meet her?”
He seemed willing for us to meet. Who was lying?
Mind you, he didn’t actually invite me to his house for drinks the next night. Oh right, no drinks at the house, it was a liquor-free zone, according to him. I could have suggested a pizza party to get the three of us together, hash this out, find out who was the best liar. And that would have accomplished what?
He said, “I understand what you’re saying, darling. Not much fun when we can’t plan a future. But please don’t give up on me. We’ll work out something.”
At least he had the good sense to cut the evening short. I wasn’t in the mood for lovemaking and it must have been obvious to him. He took me home, said he’d call in a day or two.
He was maybe a scum, a cheat, a liar. Didn’t matter. He was all I could think about. And yes, I knew perfectly well I was every bit as stupid as Mac thought I was. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
CHAPTER 34
I thought the visions had taken a break. Wrong.
I stopped being April and started being Millie again, in the front hall of the rooming house, the receiver pressed against my ear, and me standing on tiptoe to try to talk into the speaker of the wall-mounted phone. “You said you’d call me.”
�
��I told you never to telephone me,” Laurence said and the sound of his voice made my heart race.
“But that was a week ago and I haven’t heard a word from you.”
“Someone else could have answered. Silver, I will see you when I can, but until then, you have to trust me.”
I heard heels clicking down the wooden staircase, glanced up, saw Esther in a faded cotton kimono. The noise was her mules, silly pink silk things with hard wooden heels. She had a towel wrapped like a turban around her wet hair. Standing silent, I watched her come down the stairs. She gave me a blank look, as though of course she wasn’t listening in, then mouthed the word, “Boyfriend?”
She didn’t know I knew Laurence. I shook my head and she shrugged and went past me toward the kitchen.
I blurted into the speaker, “What about Mabel Clara?”
He didn’t answer, didn’t say anything, and I waited and waited and wondered if he was still there, but I was too scared to ask.
An operator cut in. “You have one more minute.”
“Thank you.” I waited for the click to tell me she was off the line.
He said, “Don’t telephone me again.”
“You said you loved me,” I whispered, my mouth almost touching the speaker.
I ran a finger around its round black edge, tracing it. When we were together I liked to trace the line of his cheekbones or run my fingertips around his neck to trace the edge of his hair.
Did he think about me like that? Did he remember every little detail? Did I have a dress that was his favorite? Did he think about my silver slippers that he’d balanced on his hand?
Because that’s how I thought about him. I thought about the little glass studs he wore in his dress shirt. I thought about how he tossed his coat over one shoulder, hooked to a finger, all casual. And mostly, I thought about his smile and then about his mouth and then about how it felt pressed against me, warm, eager.
When he answered me he sounded sad. “I do love you. I always will. But I can’t see you right now. Please. Don’t make this any harder.”
And then he hung up and I didn’t wait for the operator to tell me my three minutes were over. I hung up the receiver and ran up the stairs to my room and slammed the door fast before Esther could corner me and ask a bunch of questions.
CHAPTER 35
When Graham phoned to say he would be out of town for a few days, his voice was too cheerful. I could picture him bent over the receiver, his face tense with smiling, his fingers restlessly drumming the nearest surface.
I wanted to say, all right, have a good trip, but instead I said, “Where are you going?”
“Spokane.”
“What about your classes?”
“A friend is covering for me.”
“Can I come with you?” I hated to ask anything of anyone ever, but I had to ask now. He heard my despair.
“April, darling, I’d love that. It is going to be impossibly boring without you. I’m driving over with a colleague and we’ll be in meetings the whole time. I’ll phone as soon as I return, I promise.”
He didn’t mention the name of the colleague or the type of meeting or why this had come up so unexpectedly. Perhaps he wanted me to begin to suspect him, so that when he told me he was leaving me, I would be half-prepared.
I’d tried to break off our affair. I’d told him I was dating someone else. And what had he done? Immediately insisted on seeing me. That hadn’t gone too well but it also hadn’t ended in an ending. So what was really going on?
Maybe, being Graham, he wanted to leave all his doors open so if he changed his mind, he could count on me still being available.
After I hung up the phone I sat in the alcove in the apartment listening to the wind rattle the vines against the window. Who was the colleague? Who was going to Spokane with him?
The Vegas trip had been a lie. He hadn’t gone to collect his wife. She’d been right here at home in Seattle. What was he planning?
All my life I’d faced rejection at different times, everyone does, but I had never been rejected by anyone who mattered to me. I’d never let myself love anyone enough that they could hurt me. And now I had put myself in this position to be hurt. I didn’t know what to do.
What if I was wrong, what if Graham really was on a business trip? Why should I imagine he was starting a new affair? He dealt with other women every day, faculty and students. That didn’t mean he was having affairs with them. I was laying guilt on Graham. Was it nothing more than a culmination of my knowledge about Laurence?
I needed to separate the two men, accept that one was a memory and the other was real and now.
I needed to think through everything I had heard, from his wife Barbara, from Cyd, from Macbeth. And from Graham himself. It would be nice to believe that love is a form of trusting. Nice, but incredibly naive.
The phone rang and I picked it up, mumbled an hello.
“Darling? I won’t be leaving until tonight, so why don’t we take a short run out to the cottage? I left some papers out there that I need to pick up, anyway, and you may as well come with me. We can talk.”
“Yes, all right.” What did we have to talk about, I wondered. But I washed up, dragged a comb through my frizzy hair, put on a clean sweater, and was ready for him when he arrived.
He didn’t say much on the way to the cottage, or actually, he did, talked about all sorts of things, a book he was reading, a concert he’d attended. Nothing I cared about. The early afternoon sun couldn’t make it through the cloud cover.
If a person stares at a white object for a period of time, the darker surroundings disappear. That’s what I did, that last afternoon in Graham’s cottage when I had to find a way to make the world disappear. In a corner near the bookcase wall was a wicker chair that had been spray-painted white and then left to fade and peel, the paint flaking around its cracked edges. I curled myself in a tight ball on the musty couch, drawing my feet under me until I sat on them, wrapping my arms across my body so that my hands clasped my opposite elbows, and I stared at the chair.
Graham knelt on the floor, ruffling through a box of papers. “Are you all right, darling? There should be a bottle of wine under the sink.”
“I’m fine.”
As my eyes went out of focus, seeing the chair as a white blur against indistinguishable darkness, my mind withdrew. It was as though I could feel my conscious self slipping deep within the protective shell of my body where no one could reach me.
Graham’s voice came from some outside reality that I refused to recognize.
“April, we need to talk.”
Yes, that’s what I had presumed this was all about.
He stood up, walked over to me, sat down on the couch, covered my hands with his hands. “Darling, I thought I could work something out. I thought my wife was getting better and that I could finally leave her. April, I love you so much.”
He paused, waited, expected me to answer. I didn’t. I kept staring at the white chair.
“Darling, I had to believe. I wanted so much to be with you. Listen, please understand. It’s started all over. She has to be hospitalized. She could go on like this for years.”
Don’t think so. He could have told me she had embezzled all his money. Could have told me she’d threatened to deny him access to their son. Could have told me any number of lies about her behavior. But he made a big mistake when he said she was an alcoholic about to break down.
Obviously she had been good to her word. Hadn’t told him we’d met. If she had, he would know I knew his wife might be anything at all except alcoholic and chronically relapsing.
I had looked up Barbara Berkold on the internet and yes, she did the things she claimed, was on the boards of three non-profits and worked for several others.
Against the glare of the white chair I could see no images, no memories. My imagination could not compete with it. My mind drifted, the only condition that was bearable.
“It’s not fair to keep you now whe
n I have no future to offer you.”
The brittle branches of the shrubs, with their blackened leaves clinging to them, scratched the windowpanes, stirred by an incoming storm. I couldn’t turn my gaze away from the chair to look at the window. If I did, I would absorb his words and my heart would stop beating. I felt the skin tighten on my face and I could imagine myself turning into a stone statue.
I finally managed to say, “Why didn’t you tell me this the last time we were together? Why today?”
“Three days ago I thought I could work this out. I even talked to my lawyer. I’d give anything to be free to marry you, darling. I thought it might be possible. It isn’t.”
Why had he driven me all the way out to the cottage to tell me? Did he need time away from me to sort out his feelings for me? Was that what this trip to Spokane was about?
“I’ve never been worthy of you,” he said. “You deserve so much more.”
Oh please, at least think up an original line, I thought. For a few seconds my eyes focused and I saw the man behind the words. Had he brought me here because he knew, probably from many past experiences, that no one could be as stupid or innocent as I appeared to be. Did he expect me to make a scene?
I considered shouting obscenities at him. I could give him rage. I could scream and pick up the nearest table lamp, or maybe a chair, and hurl it at him. Or I could throw myself against him, tear at his face, rip the mauve silk shirt, rake my nails across familiar flesh, leave welts. Then he could later bathe and bandage while assuring himself that he was right to end a relationship with someone so unstable.
“It’s for you, April. You’re the one bright spot in my life. But darling, I want to do what is best for you.”
I dug my fingers into my cold arms. The muscles in my abdomen cramped. While his voice went on, a drone of sound without meaning, my mind clutched at fury, churning thoughts, then letting them slip away to be replaced by other despairs, until finally there were no feelings left in me.
When I was so numb I could no longer accept one more possible reaction, I straightened my legs, put my feet on the floor, and slowly stood.
My Deja Vu Lover Page 18