Love, Alice

by Barbara Davis

  It was strange that she should find herself here now, more than a year after William’s death, when she had never come before. For more than a year she’d been telling herself she wanted—that she needed—to know why William had committed suicide, and yet she had never been able to come to the place he held most sacred. It had been grief at first that kept her away. She wasn’t sure she could stand to look at the place where he had been found. Then, later, it had simply seemed off-limits. With William gone the property belonged to his parents, the key their son had given her no longer hers to use. And yet that hadn’t stopped her from coming tonight. Was it possible she had stayed away on purpose, because she was afraid she might actually find the answers she claimed to want? Answers she might not like? She shook off the thought as she turned the key, cursing Austin for her sudden pangs of self-doubt.

  She was met with inky silence as she pushed inside and snapped the bolt behind her. In the darkness, her sense of smell seemed more acute, the air thick and stale, sharp with the shut-up smells of a sculptor’s studio—dust, clay, metal, stone. William had loved those smells the way actors loved the smell of greasepaint and writers reveled in the smell of old books. They were part of him, not just of what he did, but of who he was, and more than a year after his death they still lingered, like the art he’d left behind.

  She groped for the switch she knew was somewhere just inside the door, squinting against the sudden glare of overhead bulbs. The place was as stark as she remembered, bare brick walls, scarred oak floors, arched windows stretching from floor to ceiling. But there was a sense of barely controlled chaos in the small space now: discarded sketches and unopened mail littering the furniture and floor, crates of dusty books crouching in one corner, tattered issues of The Brooklyn Rail covering the old wooden dolly that served as a coffee table. It was an unsettling sight. The place had never looked like this when she visited. Perhaps William had cleaned up before she came. Or maybe, near the end, he had just stopped caring.

  It was a morbid thought, and one that stayed with her as she moved down the hall, forcing herself to pause in the doorway of the bathroom. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but there was no sign that anyone had died there: no bloodstains, no chalk outline, just a leaky sink and rust-stained tub.

  A few more steps and she was standing in the room William had used for both work and sleep. The bed was a mess, a muddle of striped gray sheets tumbling onto the floor, the way they might after a night of passion. Or of nightmares. Beside the bed was a makeshift nightstand, William’s prized collection of vintage Derrière le Miroir, the issues dating as far back as 1946, stacked and topped with a heavy square of glass. His watch was there, and the signet ring he always wore on his little finger. She had wondered the night of the viewing why she hadn’t seen it on his finger. She just assumed his mother had kept it for personal reasons, but here it was, where he had last taken it off.

  From the corner, a canvas-draped object beckoned, like a ghost waiting patiently to be noticed. Dovie moved closer, circling a metal cart cluttered with supplies—wire loops and small wooden paddles, rolls of heavy-gauge wire, modeling clay wrapped in thin waxy paper—the tools of William’s trade. She was reaching for one of the paddles, caked with a film of dried clay, when she remembered something William once said.

  “The most precious tools a sculptor has are his fingers. It’s how he brings a piece to life, by feeding his blood and soul into the clay. That’s all sculpture is, really, an act of memory.”

  Her eyes slid back to the canvas concealing the work Kristopher had come more than seven hundred miles to claim. William’s blood and soul. And she had no idea what it was. Slowly, and with great care, she dragged off the sheet, letting it slide to the floor in a dusty heap. Her breath caught as the piece came into view—a pair of entwined torsos, all muscle and sinew and raw animal need. Faceless. Limbless. And absolutely stunning.

  She laid a hand against the clay, dry now after so many months, and cool to the touch. She hadn’t expected coolness somehow. Perhaps because the subjects seemed so lifelike. And for good reason. Until meeting William, she never realized that budding artists studied anatomy with all the zeal of a first-year medical student, that they spent exhaustive hours learning muscles and bones, their origins and insertions, their hollows and curves. And in William’s case it had clearly paid off. With eyes closed, she allowed her fingers to wander the satiny contours of belly, ribs, and buttocks. It struck her then, like a faint electric shock running the full length of her spine.

  “. . . when it’s all said and done, sculpture is an act of memory.”

  She hadn’t seen it at first, but now, with her fingertips, she finally grasped what she hadn’t with her eyes alone: the telling sameness of the sculpted bodies, angles where there should have been curves, planes where there should have been hollows. An act of memory brought to life. Williams’s memory—and Kristopher’s.

  For a moment the room tilted, and Dovie had to close her eyes against the words crowding into her head. “People keep secrets, Dovie. Some are very good at it. Especially when we help them by looking the other way.”

  Like a house of cards collapsing in on itself, all the signs she had ignored, the clues any fool would have seen, came tumbling down around her. Kristopher’s hostile remarks the day they met. William’s frequent, and often sudden, trips to New York. Mr. Prescott’s inexplicable hostility toward his son’s best friend. They had known, or at least suspected. Which explained Amanda’s persistent lobbying for a shortened engagement. She was afraid William would back out—or worse, come out—before she could get him down the aisle.

  The dizziness came again, worse this time, her throat so tight it seemed all the air had left the room. Squeezing her eyes shut, she waited for the world to right itself, and for the wave of giddiness to pass. She was about to open them again when she felt it—a subtle shift in the air around her, like a ripple of current moving over her skin. For a moment she wondered if she had only imagined it, but then it came again, accompanied by the groan of floorboards, and the skin-prickling certainty that she was no longer alone.

  She turned to meet Kristopher’s gaze. “How long?” she whispered. “How long have you loved him?”

  “Longer than you.” There was no hesitation in his answer, and no shame, only the dead calm that came with finally saying the thing you’ve longed to say. “I’m sorry,” he added. “I know I should have told you, but I needed your help. I was afraid if you knew . . .”

  Dovie glared at him. His words might have trailed away, but his meaning was clear enough. If she had known the truth—that he and William were lovers—she would have been less inclined to help him get what he wanted. He had a point, but it didn’t stop her from wanting to give him a good hard slap. “And after? When you knew the Prescotts weren’t going to give you what you came for—you couldn’t have told me then?”

  Kristopher shoved his hands into his pockets, like a schoolboy standing before the headmaster. “I could have, yes. But I didn’t see the point. I loved Billy, and he loved me. And he loved you, too, in his way. Enough to ask you to marry him. Which gave you just as much right to your grief as I had to mine. Besides, I liked you too much by then to hurt you.”

  “So you just left me to figure it out on my own.”

  “I had no idea you’d come here, or that you’d put the pieces together. You hadn’t up until now.” He stepped forward, running the flat of his hand over one of the clay torsos with almost aching tenderness. “He called it The Agonies. Appropriate, don’t you think, after the mess we made of things?”

  Dovie fought the urge to soften. “Why did you come here tonight?”

  “To say good-bye, I suppose.”

  “To the sculpture?”

  “To everything.”

  “I locked the door behind me. You have a key?”

  “Yes.”

  Dovie paused a moment to diges
t this, wondering how often Kristopher had come and gone without her knowing it. “Did you come often?”

  His eyes skittered away as he nodded, as if the admission pained him. “I never stayed more than a day or two. It was too risky. It was hard being apart, but harder, I think, being together, sneaking around behind everyone’s back, holed up here like a couple of criminals. It was easier in New York.”

  “Why?”

  “Let’s just say people in the South have their own ideas about what a man is and isn’t. Not all of them, but enough. And certainly, the Prescotts. It isn’t like that in New York, at least not in the city. We could be ourselves, go out with friends, entertain. There was no sneaking around. We were just . . . a couple.”

  “How long have you been . . . out?”

  Kristopher smiled, a sad smile that seemed to come slowly to the surface, as if from a great depth. “I don’t think I was ever really in. It never occurred to me to be anything but what I was. It was different for Billy. It never occurred to him to be anything but what his family expected. He wasn’t . . . comfortable in his skin.”

  There was truth in that. William had often grumbled about his parents’ expectations. They’d always had very clear ideas about what their son should do with his life—and with whom. He had resented them for it, but had resented his propensity to conform to those ideas even more. It was Kristopher who had given him the strength to follow his dreams—and his heart. No wonder the Prescotts hated him. And loved her—the woman who would return their wayward son to the fold of respectability. Sadly, their calculations had proven disastrous.

  Dovie met Kristopher’s gaze, still reeling. She needed to understand, to know it all. “You said before that William loved you. He told you that?”

  “This wasn’t some kind of fling, Dovie. We’d been together almost two years when you entered the picture.”

  “You must have hated me.”

  “I did. To a gay man, the other woman isn’t something you typically have to worry about. But then, Billy wasn’t typical. When he told me, I didn’t know how to deal with it—with the idea of you and him. I didn’t mind so much at first, or pretended not to, as long as I didn’t have to see the two of you together. I knew you were in the picture to get his mother off his back, and it worked for a while. But things weren’t moving fast enough for Mrs. Prescott. She must’ve gotten nervous, because she started in again, talking about honeymoons and grandchildren. I told him it was time to break it off, that what he was doing wasn’t fair to you or to me, and he agreed. So you can imagine my surprise when I came across a little velvet box in his dresser drawer—an empty box. That’s how I found out he’d asked you to marry him. He swore nothing would change between us, that he could. . . . love us both.”

  Dovie stood staring at him, trying to imagine a more surreal conversation. She couldn’t. Instead, she sank down onto the edge of the bed. The tears came then, silent and stinging, until Kristopher’s angular frame began to blur. He moved toward the bed, holding out a crisply starched handkerchief. She stared at it as if it were an apparition.

  “A gentlemen never leaves home without a handkerchief,” he said, easing down beside her. “Poor thing. You didn’t deserve any of this.”

  She blinked up at him through damp lashes. “And you did?”

  “At least I knew what was going on. You got blindsided.”

  “I’d say we both got blindsided.”

  He nodded, his eyes shiny-wet. “I called him a coward,” he said finally, his voice hoarse with emotion. “I told him I wasn’t sneaking around with a married man. In fact, I was tired of sneaking around, period. I meant it, too—or thought I did. I laid it on the line. I told him if he didn’t give you up and come out to his family we were finished. When he said he couldn’t do it I told him to leave. To this day I still don’t know if I was bluffing.” His gaze slid from hers, creeping toward the entwined torsos in the corner. “I wasn’t going to settle for half a relationship. Look what I got instead.”

  Dovie closed her eyes a moment, trying to get a handle on her whirling emotions, to isolate, label, and somehow bring them to heel. But there were too many to deal with at once: shock, anger, betrayal, all warring for center stage, until they bled together into a kind of numbness. And yet through that numbness came the disconcerting awareness that she wasn’t alone in her pain. Beside her, Kristopher sat very still, hands hanging over his knees, eyes hollow.

  “Kristopher, you said it yourself. No one’s to blame for William’s death but William. He made his own choice.”

  “I was talking about you when I said that, Dovie. I meant you weren’t to blame. I can’t say the same for myself. I pushed him into making a choice I knew he couldn’t make, and that’s why he killed himself. I have to live with that now. So do you. And so do the Prescotts.”

  Dovie shook her head as the weight of it all began to sink in. “So many things are beginning to make sense now that didn’t before, things about William’s family. Like why his mother was so anxious to move the wedding up, although I’m not sure what she hoped to accomplish. A wedding ring was never going to change what William felt for you.”

  “No, it wasn’t, but she had to try. People like the Prescotts can’t let themselves believe what William and I had could ever be real. Because if it turns out that love is just love, everything they believe gets turned on its ear. It’s easier to hold tight to their beliefs and just keep throwing rocks at things they don’t understand.”

  “No matter who they hurt along the way.”

  “I’m afraid so. But then, I’ve caused my share of pain in the last week or so, wouldn’t you say? I come here and dredge up all your grief, then turn it into something else, because I forgot I’m not the only one who misses him.” He shook his head as he stared beyond the darkened window. “I never meant to, by the way—hurt you, I mean.”

  “No, you just lied to me, then used me to get what you wanted from the Prescotts.”

  “It didn’t seem like lying in the beginning. Or maybe I just rationalized it that way. Would you rather I told you the truth that first day, standing over Billy’s grave?”

  She glared at him through narrowed eyes, remembering that first day, and the parade of emotions he had aroused in her—confusion, irritation, even a peculiar sense of possessiveness—and wondered if some part of her had sensed the truth even then.

  “I really don’t know,” she said as she pushed to her feet and headed for the doorway. “I don’t think I know anything anymore.”

  The faintest of smiles tugged at Kristopher’s mouth, humor mingled with regret, and perhaps a little bitterness. “I don’t suppose there’s much chance of us getting together for that drink now.”

  Dovie did her best to return the smile. “I think we’ve had our fill of each other, don’t you? No need to pretend we’re old friends.”

  It was Kristopher’s turn to stand. “No,” he said, squaring his shoulders. “I suppose not. Still, I’m glad I met you, Dovie Larkin. And the crack about you being prettier in your pictures—don’t you believe it.” He bent down to plant a kiss on the top of her head. “I was just being catty.”

  Dovie stiffened at his touch, but managed a nod. “Be sure to lock up when you’re through. Do what you want with the key.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Dovie hugged her paper coffee cup with both hands, savoring the fading warmth against her fingers as she stared at William’s headstone, the dark sun around which her life had seemed to orbit for the last thirteen months. She was exhausted, and chilled to the bone.

  A storm had blown in sometime around three a.m., rattling the windows until she’d finally gotten up to open the blinds. She wasn’t sure how long she sat there in the dark, watching the lightning flash and listening to the rain lashing the marshes, but she’d done a lot of thinking. When dawn finally came she got dressed, left a message for Jack that she wouldn’t be
in, and grabbed her keys.

  Now, sitting on a chilly bench, huddled against an even chillier wind, she wondered why she’d come at all. Habit, she supposed, a default setting somewhere in her brain that said this was where she went, this was what she did. Only there was no reason for her to be here now, no reason to sit vigil, no reason to pay penance, and no more answers to seek. She had her answers, and they had turned out to have very little to do with her.

  Without warning, a pang of anger struck her full force, like a wave slamming her from behind, driving her under. She hadn’t felt one of those in a long time, perhaps because she’d trained herself to stop feeling them. After William’s death, she hadn’t let herself be angry. It had seemed wrong, somehow, to be mad at someone who’d been in so much pain that the only way out was a handful of pills. And so she had stuffed it down, focusing on her guilt instead. It was better that way. Anger was a selfish emotion. Guilt, on the other hand, was allowed. Guilt was pure. Guilt was selfless. Even if you didn’t know what you were guilty of.

  And then, suddenly, she understood why she had come. She had come to cry, to rail, to rage, to surrender to the emotions she’d been keeping in check because she didn’t believe she had a right to them. Now, finally, she was giving herself permission not just to feel her anger, but to throw open the floodgates and allow it swamp her, to let it come with all its fist-clenching fury and break her wide-open.

  She had no idea how long she sat there, rocking and crying in the eye of the storm, but when she finally wiped her eyes and looked around, Josiah was heading in her direction. She was still blotting her cheeks with her sleeve when his shadow fell over her.

  “Don’t go mopping up on my account,” he said matter-of-factly. He was wearing gloves today and a heavy gray jacket. “You ain’t fooling no one with that face.”

  Dovie sniffled and gave him a watery smile. “Hey, Josiah.”