Another Eden (29 page)

"Kubla Khan?"

"The house Marshall Farley wants now in Newport—I told you about it."

"I remember."

"Sara, I've got to have my work, and I can't do it in New York. So I have to go." She nodded vigorously. "Yes, I see that. You have to go." She started to cry.

"Sara, don't." She tried to pull her hands away, but he wouldn't let go. "I want to touch you, hold you. Can we go somewhere?" She just shook her head. "Servants," she got out finally in a whisper.

He growled a vulgar oath. Because he was familiar with every variety of adulterous intrigue, he understood the need for secrecy. But now he loathed it because it degraded Sara, degraded them both. "Over here," he muttered harshly, "behind the goddamn door."

She let herself be led, and when he embraced her, pressing her against the wall at her back, she let him do that, too. The solid feel of him steadied her, even though they were both trembling. She closed her eyes and held him, and tried not to think that it was for the last time. "Darling, darling," she murmured, and that was for the last time, too. "When will you go?"

"A few weeks."

"Will you build houses like the one in the drawing you showed me?" He nodded. "Good. It was so beautiful."

"Did you like it, Sara?"

"Oh, yes."

"You asked me who it was for, and I lied and said no one. But it was for you. It was the only way I could think of to make love to you."

She let him kiss her—could not have denied him to save her life. Her lips were salty from tears; he tasted them on the tip of his tongue, cradling her face in his palms and moving her head slowly from side to side. His sweetness broke her heart. But her breath caught when his slippery fingers slid softly to her throat, her chest, and then inside the thin lapels of her Eton jacket. He stilled his hands on the sides of her breasts, holding her, while his tongue caressed her mouth open and entered her sleekly. She clutched him harder, moaning, feeling her own helpless seduction.

He had only meant to stop her tears and soothe her. But his need was too strong and he'd buried it too shallowly. "Come to me again," he whispered against her lips. "Let me love you. We can go anywhere, out of town if you like. We'll be discreet, no one will—" She tried to say no, but he kissed the word back into her mouth. "Please, Sara. Just once more. Don't make me leave you—"

"No, Alex. I can't, I can't."

He stopped asking. It was cruel to do this to her. She had always been stronger; now it was time for him to try to help her. "Don't cry." He brushed her new tears away with his fingers and smiled at her tenderly. "I'm sorry, Sara. I'm such a selfish bastard."

"No, you're not."

"Yeah, I am. I've had it all my own way for a long, long time." But he couldn't think of anything he'd ever done that deserved a punishment this hard. "I shouldn't have come, I know it. But I couldn't say good-bye to you on the telephone—"

"No, no, I'm glad you came!" She took his hands and kissed them, pressed them to her hot cheeks. "I'm glad, and I don't care—" She broke off, and jumped in reaction to the distant slam of a door.

"Mummy!"

Alex stepped back and she twisted past him, fumbling for her handkerchief, patting her hair. "I'm in here, darling!" she called, and the forced gaity in her voice hurt him more than anything had. She wiped her eyes in haste and squared her shoulders and barely got the handkerchief back into her pocket before Michael raced into the room, a canvas bookbag banging over his shoulder. His face lit up in pure, guileless delight. "Alex!" he shouted, and made a run for him.

Alex knelt and caught him in his arms, hugging him. A rush of emotion swamped him suddenly and with no warning. He looked past Michael's shoulder at Sara, searching her stricken face for a clue to the unexpected depth of his own feelings for this boy. The skinny arms around his neck loosened and they both pulled back to grin at each other. He might have been looking into Sara's gray-blue eyes, so exact was the likeness. Michael's hair had darkened slightly, but it was still shiny, still as soft as corn silks. "Great heavens, you've grown a foot." He massaged one sharp-boned shoulder through Michael's jacket. "How's that collarbone?"

"All healed up! Is our house finished yet?"

"Not yet."

"Did you get the letter I sent you?"

"Yes."

"Did you like the picture?"

"I loved it."

Michael glanced back at his mother. "I sent him a picture I drew of his house, Mum." She looked puzzled. "His
dream
house. He told me everything it would have, and I drew it. It was a surprise, right, Alex?"

"Right."

"It had stuff like lots of light and ways to get outside and neat colors and everything."

Alex nodded, confirming it. "You did a beautiful job. I could almost build it just from the drawing." Michael beamed. "I've got a surprise for you, too."

"You do, really? What is it? Is it here?"

Alex rose and went to the sofa, on which rested a small, square box of varnished wood. Blowing her nose, Sara saw that the box opened with a padlock through a metal hasp. When Alex took a key from his pocket and handed it to him with the box, she thought that it hardly mattered what was inside, and wondered how he could have known that Michael's favorite things in all the world—this year, at least—were boxes with locks that opened with keys.

But what was inside proved even more wondrous. It was a set of child-sized drafting tools: T-square, a compass, triangle, protractor, templates in all shapes and sizes, lead holders, brushes and erasers, even a miniature slide rule.

"Oh, boy!" cried Michael, and immediately began taking them all out of their neat velour receptacles. "Alex, it's wonderful. Wherever did you find it?"

"I had someone make it." He screwed up his face suddenly. "Botheration," he cursed—for Michael's benefit. "Forgot drawing paper. Could you get him some, Sara?"

"Yes, of course. Tomorrow."

He crouched down beside Michael again. "Not sure when I'll be seeing you again, pal," he said lightly.

"Where are you going?"

"Out to California."

He didn't look up; his tone was casual. "Are you coming back?"

He couldn't bring himself to say no. But he couldn't lie and say yes. "Not sure," he repeated. "Could be."

"Can I come and visit you?"

Alex looked up involuntarily, and Michael followed his glance. Sara's eyes were too bright, her face flushed again. Michael looked away quickly, but she saw with her mother's knowledge that he already understood much too much. Politeness and an innate delicacy would keep him from saying anything more to Alex about visiting, for he would rather die than embarrass anyone. When she could speak she said, "California's a long way away. Maybe Mr. McKie wouldn't mind if you wrote to him."

Michael's voice was subdued now. "May I, Alex?"

"I hope you will. I'll write back. We could send each other pictures, of houses or whatever we want."

"Yeah. And now I can
build
your house for you—you know, a model."

"That would be great." He reached out and stroked Michael's yellow hair, then cupped his hand around the back of his thin stalk of a neck. "Take care of your mother," he instructed softly.

He took it as seriously as it was intended. "I will." Suddenly he threw his arms around Alex and hugged him. Sara saw tears squeeze past his tightly closed lashes, and she had to look away. A second later she went out of the room.

Alex found her in the foyer a few minutes later, waiting for him beside the door. Neither spoke. What was left to say? Only one thing. "I love you," in a whisper.

"I love you, Alex."

"Be safe."

"I will. I hope…" She trailed off He put his hand on the door knob. Why were they putting each other through this again? Still, he delayed, and she was glad.

"I'll send you my address when I'm settled."

"Send it to Michael."

They smiled fleetingly, looked away.

"If you ever need me, Sara—"

"I know. And you."

He nodded.

She put her hand over his just for a second, whispered, "Good-bye," and stepped back.

"Good-bye, Sara." He pulled the door open and walked out.

She closed it immediately, not watching him out of sight. She stood still for a moment, then turned away to find Michael.

She woke up disoriented, cold, and cramped, with a crick in her neck. It was morning, and yet the light was on—Michael's light. Then she remembered.

She'd fallen asleep in his bed hours ago, after soothing him free of the terrors of his latest nightmare. "Don't go till I'm asleep, okay?" he'd begged, and they'd drifted off together in the midst of her own yawn-punctuated story of the Pied Piper. The last thing she remembered was Michael murmuring in unison with her, "Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats…"

She sat up, careful not to wake him, and pulled her robe more tightly around her shoulders, shivering a little. Only his face showed above the covers, serious as always, as if he had weighty matters to ponder even in his sleep. She ran a finger lightly across the satin hem of the blanket under his chin, recalling the halting details of the dream he'd sobbed out to her last night. They were all—he, she, and Ben—in the garden at Eden. She and Michael were picking flowers while Ben sat at his desk and talked on the telephone. The new maze was finished; Michael was dying to try it. "Go on in," said Ben from his desk. Michael ran toward the maze, excited—but suddenly he stopped.

"I wanted to go in, but then I got scared. Dad kept saying, 'Go in, go in,' but I wouldn't go in and he got madder and madder and he started yelling. So I went in, and I was in it, and there were these monsters waiting around all the corners. I wanted to run back and get out, but Daddy wouldn't let me. So I kept going because there was a lady at the end who would get me and save me." His swimming eyes widened. "It
was you"
he realized as he said it. "But I never got to the end, I never saw you, I just kept running and running from the monsters and Daddy yelling."

"It was just a dream," she'd told him, "just a terrible dream, and now it's over." She'd had no other words to console him, and she'd tormented herself then as she did now with the thought that she would never know if she'd helped him or hurt him by sacrificing herself to her pitiful burlesque of a marriage. But for as long as she could be the lady who would save him, she would never give him up to Ben, and ultimately it didn't matter how much of herself she lost in the process.

But she hated what she couldn't change, and she hated what was happening to Michael. Another child might react to his situation with rebelliousness or aggression; but Michael only paled, rarefied, grew more attenuated, more exquisitely self-effacing. It was his way of saving himself, she knew—to become invisible. But how she longed to see him throw a truly vile tantrum, or shout out some vulgar curse of his father's!

She got up from the bed and stretched stiffly. "Mummy?"

"Go back to sleep a little longer. It's Saturday, you can stay in bed late if you like." She kissed his eyelids closed gently, straightened, and tiptoed out of the room.

Silently passing the closed door to Ben's bedroom, she slowed and then stopped, arrested by a sound. A voice. Not Ben's. Something clicked in her brain, a fatal, premonitory certitude. She could hear the slow pounding of her blood in her temples. She went closer. Forehead touching the door, looking down at her bare toes.

She heard a woman's high, rising moan, and now Ben's gruff voice, low-pitched, asking a question. She saw her hand go out to the doorknob and begin to turn it.
Really
? a voice inside asked, eerily calm.
Is this what you're going to do
? The turning knob stopped. She could either turn it silently back and steal away, or she could press on the handle and push the door open. The significance of the choice paralyzed her because she knew it would change her life.

The voices beyond the door rose, high and low, taking turns, the exchange growing more rapid, the intervals of silence shorter. She wouldn't have understood that double cadence or known so well what it betokened before the night she'd spent with Alex. Her hand on the knob began to shake. Without a sound, her straightening arm pushed the door ajar an inch, two inches, three.

Enough to see the lovers in Ben's bed in three-quarter profile, oblivious to widening doors or anything else except each other. Tasha's dark hair streamed across her shoulders, hiding her face as she gazed down at Ben, her arms braced on either side of his pillow, and urged him on with vulgar, harsh-voiced inducements. The grip he had on her breasts looked painful. "Want this, little whore?" he grunted, thrusting up in her, powerful thighs straining. "Do it, yesss," she hissed, riding him, grinding herself against him. She threw her head back and bared her clenched teeth, grimacing at the ceiling, while his hands slid to her hips and squeezed until his knuckles turned white.

Sara watched them with an altogether odd impassivity. Revulsion was her dominant emotion, not distress. Anger would come soon, but for now this shameful betrayal couldn't touch the core of her; she might almost have been watching the passionate acrobatics of strangers for all the power this act had to cut her.

Tasha thrust her hands under Ben's buttocks, humping him violently and grunting her explicit demands. But her stallion had gone lifeless beneath her, and at last she craned her neck over her shoulder to follow his slack-jawed gaze. She gasped, but almost immediately a subtle look of sly, vindictive triumph replaced the shock in her face. Curiously, that didn't surprise Sara, either.

She might have gone on observing the frozen tableau, waiting with detached interest to see who would speak first, but a noise behind her made her turn. Michael was coming toward her, scuffing along in slippers and bathrobe. If she'd been talking to Dad, maybe he could too, his smiling face as good as told her, especially since this time he hadn't heard any voices raised in anger between them.

She jerked the door closed on a reflex, slamming it, and moved toward Michael purposefully. What happened next was unpremeditated, her words unscreened, for once, by any mental censor.

"Listen, Michael, remember when you and I went to the Berkshires last year and stayed over-night with the Dearborns?"

"Sure."

"You just took one little suitcase and you packed it yourself, remember?"

"Yes."

"I want you to pack that same suitcase now—it's in the back of your closet—and put in enough clothes for a day and a night. Don't forget underwear and socks. Do it now, Michael, right now."

"Where're we going?"

"We're going on a little trip, just the two of us."

"Where?"

For the first time she faltered; she had no idea where they were going. "It's a surprise. Just do it, darling, and don't ask me any more questions or it'll spoil the surprise."

His gray eyes clouded with worry—she could never hide anything from him. "Is it a good surprise or a bad surprise?" he asked anxiously.

"It's an adventure, and we don't always know what to expect from adventures. Now, hurry." She kissed him, turned him around, and gave him a little push. "
Hurry."

He glanced back uncertainly and then scampered for his room.

Doubts swamped her as soon as he was out of sight. What if she was cheating him out of a choice he had the right to make himself? But he was only a child! He was sensitive, yes, uncannily acute, and probably wiser now than she would ever be—but he was still a child, and she had to take responsibility for him. Walking past Ben's closed and now silent door, she remembered with photographic precision the scene that she'd just witnessed, and it hardened her shaky resolve. She was leaving and she was taking Michael with her.

Fear and excitement pumped through her in equal measure as she pulled a small trunk out of her own closet and began throwing clothes into it at random. She felt like an escaping criminal—guilty, terrified, and exhilarated all at once. Where would they go? If only Lauren were back from Europe, they could stay with her. The elderly Hubbards would welcome them, of course, but Sara was reluctant to impose on them without Lauren being there. Well, no matter, they could stay in a hotel, at least until— "What do you think you're doing?"

She jerked up, startled in spite of the fact that she had known he would come, had even been expecting him. He filled the doorway, already dressed, his florid features blotchy with anger—or perhaps it was residual passion. "I'm leaving you," she said steadily. "I'm taking Michael with me."

"No, you're not."

"I'm divorcing you, Ben."

He laughed. "Like hell. For what?"

"Adultery. At last I've got a witness: myself" He came all the way into the room, his bulky body seeming, as always, to dwarf it. She didn't flinch or back away. But she was gripping a green tulle petticoat in both hands as if it were a shield. Through her teeth she asked, "Did you sleep with her all summer while I was in Newport?"

"None of your business. You might as well put that stuff away, you're not going anywhere."

"You're mistaken."

"It doesn't matter what you saw, no one's going to believe you."

"This time I'm willing to take the chance to find out."

She thought his face couldn't get any redder, but it did. Instead of shouting, though, he took a different tack. "You know what kind of a scandal this'll cause once it goes public? If you really care about Michael the way you say you do, you won't put him through that."

She hurled the petticoat on the bed. "You ruddy hypocrite! You don't give a damn about Michael's feelings and you never have. You don't care how a scandal will hurt him, you only care about how it'll hurt
you
." Her lips curled spitefully. "Think about it, Ben—millionaire tycoon caught by his own wife in bed with a Jewish seamstress. How do you think they'll like that at the New York Club?"

"You goddamn bitch—"

He moved toward her and she shrank back, hands raised for protection. "If you don't want a scandal, then don't fight me," she said fast, trying not to stammer. "It doesn't have to be ugly, we can do it quietly in another state, on grounds other than adultery. If we both—"

"Not on your life."

Again anger overwhelmed her fear of him. "Bastard! Bloody, hypocritical—"

"Who's a hypocrite?" he raged, hands clenched into white, murderous fists. "You try to do this to me, Sara, and I'll ruin you! I'll countersue on the same grounds!"

"What do you mean?"

"I know about you and McKie!"

All the blood drained from her face; her legs gave out and she had to sit down hard on the edge of the bed. Once again she let the chance slip away to deny it. Her mind was a jumble of nightmare dread. What did it mean? How would he use this new weapon against her?

"I've known for months," he crowed softly, fleshy lips curving into a smile.

"Months." She stared down at her limp hands. Revulsion twisted inside her. "You've known for months." He and Tasha were two of a kind, then, incapable of honest feelings or of straightforwardness about anything. She marveled at their
coldness
. She wanted out of this murk. "You don't deserve your son," she said quietly. "I'm taking him from you."

"No, I'm taking him from you."

"Hi, Dad."

Ben whirled; Sara shot to her feet. In the doorway Michael grinned uncertainly, dressed in his Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers and holding his suitcase.