Glitter Baby (32 page)

He was clean-shaven and dressed almost respectably in jeans and a light blue sweater, but the lines of exhaustion around his mouth hadn’t eased. Neither of them had much appetite, and their meal was tense and silent. She couldn’t get past the feeling that everything that had passed between them was about to be resolved, and there wouldn’t be a happy ending. Loving Jake had always been a one-way street.

Eventually the housekeeper appeared with coffee. She set the pot down harder than necessary to protest the injustice that had been done to her meal. Jake dismissed her for the night and sat without moving until he heard the back door close. He pushed himself away from the table and disappeared. When he came back, he was carrying a fat manila envelope. She stared at it, and then she stared at him. “You really did finish your book.”

He shoved his hand through his hair. “I’m going out for a while. You can—if you want, you can read this.”

She took the envelope gingerly. “Are you sure? I know I pushed you into this. Maybe—”

“Don’t sell the serial rights while I’m out.” He tried to
smile, but he couldn’t make it. “This one’s just for you, Flower. Nobody else.”

“What do you mean?”

“Exactly what I said. I wrote it for you. Only you.”

She didn’t understand. How could he have spent the last three months destroying himself over a manuscript that only she would read? A manuscript he never intended to see published? Once again, she thought of the little girl wearing a shirt with yellow ducks. There could be only one explanation. The contents were too incriminating. She felt nauseous.

He turned away. She heard his footsteps pass through the kitchen. He went out the same back door the housekeeper had used such a short time ago. Fleur took her coffee over to the window and stared out into the lavender evening. He’d written about massacres twice, first a fictionalized version in
Sunday Morning Eclipse
and now the true story in the pages sealed inside the manila envelope. She thought about the two faces of Jake Koranda. The brutal face of Bird Dog Caliber and the sensitive face of the playwright who explored the human condition with so much insight. She’d always believed Bird Dog was the fake, but now she wondered if she’d gotten it all wrong just as she’d gotten so many other things wrong about him.

It was a long time before she could make herself pick up the manila envelope and pull out the manuscript. She settled into a chair near the windows, turned on the light, and began to read.

Jake dribbled toward the basketball hoop on the side of the garage and went in for a quick dunk, but the leather soles of his boots slipped on the concrete, and the ball hit the rim. For a moment he thought about going back inside for his sneakers, but he couldn’t bear to see her reading.

He tucked the basketball under his arm and wandered to the stone wall that kept the hillside in place. He wished he
had a six-pack of Mexican beer, but he wasn’t going back into the house to get it. He wasn’t going anywhere close to her. He couldn’t stand watching her disillusionment for a second time.

He leaned against the rough stones. He should have come up with another way of ending things between them, a way that would have distanced him from her disgust. The pain was too sharp to bear, so he imagined the sounds of the crowd in his head. He envisioned himself in center court at the Philadelphia Spectrum, wearing a Seventy-sixers uniform with the number six on his chest.
Doc.

Doc…Doc…
He tried to make his mind form the image, but it wouldn’t take shape.

He stood up and carried the ball back around the garage to the hoop. He began to dribble. He was Julius Erving, a little slower than he used to be, but still a giant, still flying…
Doc
.

Instead of the roar of the crowd, he heard a different sort of music playing in his head.

Inside the house, the hours slipped by and the pile of discarded manuscript pages grew at Fleur’s feet. Her hair slipped from its combs, and her back got a crick from sitting in the same place for so long. As she reached the final page, she could no longer hold back her tears.

Fleur found Jake
by the garage, sitting on the ground just beyond the reach of the floodlights. He was leaning against a stone wall, a basketball propped in his lap, and he looked as though he’d walked through the fires of hell, which wasn’t far from the truth. She knelt beside him. He stared up at her, the shutters drawn and tightly locked, daring her to pity him.

“You’ll never know how much you scared me,” she said. “I forgot about you and your damned metaphors. All that talk about massacres, and the little girl in the shirt with the yellow ducks…I saw you wiping out a village full of innocent civilians. You scared me so bad…It was like I couldn’t trust my own instincts about you. I thought you’d been part of some obscene massacre.”

“I was. The whole frigging war was a massacre.”

“Metaphorically speaking, maybe, but I’m a little more literal-minded.”

“Then you must have been relieved to learn the truth,” he said bitterly. “John Wayne ended his military career in a psychiatric ward pumped full of Thorazine because he couldn’t take the heat.”

There it was. The secret that haunted him. The reason
he’d erected such indomitable walls around himself. He was afraid the world would find out he’d broken apart.

“You weren’t John Wayne. You were a twenty-one-year-old kid from Cleveland who hadn’t gotten many breaks in life and was seeing too much.”

“I freaked out, Flower. Don’t you understand that? I was screaming at ceilings.”

“It doesn’t matter. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t write beautiful, sensitive plays that look into people’s hearts and not expect to be torn apart when you see human suffering.”

“A lot of guys saw the same things, but they didn’t freak.”

“A lot of guys weren’t you.”

She reached out for him, but before she could touch him, he stood up and turned his back toward her. “I managed to arouse all your protective instincts, didn’t I?” The words whipped her with their scorn. “I made you feel sorry for me. Believe me, that wasn’t what I wanted to do.”

She stood, too, but this time she didn’t try to touch him. “When you gave me the manuscript, you should have told me I wasn’t supposed to react to it. Did you expect me to respond as though I’d just seen one of your stupid Caliber pictures? I can’t do that. I don’t like watching you drill people full of bullet holes. I liked you a lot better curled up on that cot in the hospital, screaming your heart out because you weren’t able to stop what happened in the village. Your pain made me suffer with you, and if you can’t handle that, then you shouldn’t have given me the book.”

Instead of settling him, her words seemed to make him angrier. “You didn’t understand a damned thing.”

He stalked away, and she didn’t go after him. This was about him, not her. She made her way to the pool and stripped down to her bra and panties. Shivering with cold, she looked into the dark, forbidding water. Then she dived in. The frigid water stole her breath. She swam to the deep end and turned over to float on her back. Cold…suspended…waiting.

She felt a deep, wrenching pity for the boy he’d been, raised without any softness by a mother who was too tired and too angry over the unfairness of her life to give her child the love he’d needed. He’d looked for a father in the men who frequented the neighborhood bars. Sometimes he found one; sometimes he didn’t. She considered the irony of the college scholarship he’d received—not for his fine, sensitive mind, but for a ruthless slam dunk.

As she floated in the icy water, she thought about his marriage to Liz. He’d continued to love her long after their relationship was over. How typical of him. Jake didn’t give his love easily, but once he gave it, he didn’t withdraw it easily, either. He’d been numb with pain when he’d enlisted, and he’d futilely tried to distract himself with war, death, and drugs. He hadn’t cared if he survived, and it frightened her to think about how reckless he’d been. When he hadn’t been able to stop what happened in the village, he’d broken. And despite all those long months in the VA hospital, he’d never really recovered.

As she looked into the night sky, she thought she understood why that was.

“The water’s cold. You’d better get out.” He stood at the side of the pool, his posture neither friendly nor unfriendly. He held a beer in one hand. An orange beach towel dangled from the other.

“I’m not ready.”

He hesitated, then carried the towel and the beer over to a lounge chair.

She studied the racing clouds overhead. “Why did you blame me for the block?”

“The problem started when I met you. Before you came along, everything was fine.”

“Got any ideas about that?”

“A few.”

“Care to toss them out?”

“Not particularly.”

She pulled her legs under her and began to tread water.
“I’ll tell you why you couldn’t write. I was storming the fort. Breaching those walls. You’d built them thick and strong, but this funny nineteen-year-old kid who ate you up with her eyes was tearing them down as fast as you could build them. You were scared to death that once those walls took their first shot, you’d never be able to build them up again.”

“You’re making it more complicated than it was. I couldn’t write after you left because I felt guilty, that’s all, and we both know that wasn’t your fault.”

“No!” She cut through the water until her feet touched bottom. “You didn’t feel guilty. That’s a cop-out.” Her throat was tight. “You didn’t feel guilty because you didn’t have anything to feel guilty about. You made love to me because you wanted me, because you even loved me a little.” A painful lump made it hard to breathe. “You had to have loved me, Jake. I couldn’t have generated all that feeling by myself.”

“You don’t know anything about what I felt.”

She stood shivering in the water, the wet bra clinging to her breasts, the flower necklace stuck to her skin. Suddenly she saw it all so clearly that she wondered why she hadn’t understood it before. “This is about macho. That’s all this is. With
Sunday Morning Ec1ipse
, your writing had become too self-revealing, and then I came along at the same time and all your warning flashers went off. You didn’t stop writing because of me. You stopped because you were afraid to peel off any more layers. You didn’t want everybody to know that the tough guy on the screen—the tough guy you’d had to be while you were growing up—wasn’t anyplace close to the real man.”

“You sound like a shrink.”

Her teeth had begun to chatter, making her words come out in short, broken bursts. “Even when you joke about your screen image, you’re subtly winking your eye. Like you’re saying—‘Hey, everybody, sure it’s just acting, but we all know I’m still one hell of a man.’”

“That’s bull.”

“You started playing the tough guy when you were a kid. If you hadn’t, you’d have gotten swallowed up by those Cleveland streets. But after a while, you started believing that’s who you really were, this man who could handle anything. A man like Bird Dog.” She climbed up the steps, shivering as the air hit her. “Bird Dog’s exactly who you want to be—someone who’s emotionally dead. Who never feels pain. A man who’s
safe.
”

“You’re full of crap!” The beer bottle slammed down on the table.

Instead of accepting that he wasn’t invulnerable, he was lashing out against the closest target. Her. She gripped the railing, her shoulders hunched against the cold, her chest tight with anguish. “Bird Dog’s not half the man you are. Can’t you see that? Your breakdown is a sign of your humanity, not your weakness.”

“Bullshit!”

Her teeth were chattering so hard she could barely speak. “If you want to heal yourself, go inside and read your own damned book!”

“Fucking unbelievable, you’re so wrong.”

“Read your book and try to feel a little compassion for that poor, brave kid who’d had his nerves burned raw—”

He jumped up from his chair, his face white with fury. “You missed the whole point! You don’t get it! You didn’t see what’s right in front of you. This isn’t about pity!”

“Read your book!” she cried into the cold night. “Read about the kid who didn’t have a single person in the world who gave a damn about him!”

“Why can’t you understand?” he shouted. “This isn’t about pity! This is about
disgust
!” He kicked away a chair that stood in his path and sent it crashing into the pool. “I want you to feel disgust so you
get out of my fucking life!
”

He stormed toward the house, and the gates of the
couvent
slammed shut on her for the thousandth time. He walked away like they all did, leaving her stranded, cold,
and alone. She sank down on the concrete, shivering and numb. The old cedars around the house groaned. She grabbed for the orange beach towel and wrapped herself in it. Then she rested her head on her pillow of ruined clothes and drew up into a ball. Finally she let herself cry until she had no tears left.

Jake stood next to the window in the dark living room and looked down on her crumpled at the side of the pool. She was a beautiful, shining creature of light and goodness, and he’d dragged her into hell. Something swift and sharp tore at the backs of his eyelids. He wanted to take on her pain as his own. But he didn’t go to her—wouldn’t let himself go. He’d given her the book. He’d written it just for her so she’d understand why he couldn’t offer her everything he wanted to, everything that exquisite creature deserved, everything he was too weak—too unworthy—to give.

He remembered the night he’d walked in on her when she and Kissy were watching
Butch Cassidy.
Redford wouldn’t have ended up lying on a cot curled up like a fetus. The Doc wouldn’t have cracked up. And neither would Bird Dog. How could she love a man who’d ended up as he had?

He turned away from the window. He shouldn’t have brought her here, shouldn’t have let her back into his life, shouldn’t love her so goddamned much. If he’d learned anything by now, he’d learned that he wasn’t cut out for love. Love tore down the defenses he needed to get through the day. Because she was so strong herself, she didn’t want to accept that he was weak. The other guys hadn’t cracked up, but he had.

She’d scattered the manuscript pages around the chair where she’d been reading, and in his mind he could see her sitting there, those long legs tucked up under her, that big, beautiful face creased in concentration. He walked over to the chair and knelt down to stack the pages. He was going to build a fire and burn them before he went to bed. They
were like live grenades lying around, and he couldn’t sleep until he’d destroyed them, because if anyone but Flower ever found out what was in them, he might as well put a pistol to his head and blow out his brains.

He walked back over to the window. She was quiet now. Maybe she’d fallen asleep. He hoped so.

He returned to the chair where she’d been sitting, and his eyes fell on the top page. He picked it up and studied the layout, the quality of the type, the fact that he’d run the right margin too close to the edge. He took in all those separate, unimportant facts, and then he began to read.

Sometime during the night Jake carried her inside. He bumped her head trying to get her through the guest room door and cursed, but when he laid her down and whispered good night, she heard a horrible tenderness that made her pretend she’d fallen back to sleep.

Emotionally dishonest.
That’s what she’d told Kissy about him, and she’d been right. She’d had enough pain in her life, and she was bailing out. Loving a man who batted around her heart like one of his basketballs had grown too awful to bear.

Early the next morning, she found him asleep on one of the couches, his mouth slightly open, his arm dipping into the puddle of manuscript pages scattered on the floor beneath
him. She located the key to his Jag and threw everything into her overnight case as quietly as she could. His truck was parked in the garage, so she wasn’t leaving him stranded.

The car started right away. As she slipped it into reverse and backed around in the drive, the morning sun struck her in the eyes. They were still swollen from the night before. She reached into her purse for sunglasses. The driveway was steep and rutted. Jake and his insecurities. He’d made the approach to the house nearly impassable, all so he could guard his precious, stupid privacy.

She started to crawl down the drive. A movement in the rearview mirror caught her attention. It was Jake running toward the car. His shirttail had come undone, his hair stood up on one side of his head, and he looked as if he wanted to murder someone. She couldn’t hear what he was yelling. Probably just as well.

She hit the accelerator, took the next curve too fast, and felt the car bottom out on one of the ruts. She overcompensated by jerking the steering wheel to the right. The Jag swerved. Before she could straighten, the front wheel was hanging over a ditch.

She turned off the ignition and rested her arms on top of the steering wheel, waiting for Jake and his anger, or Jake and his wisecracks, or Jake and whatever other facade he’d decide to throw up between them. Why couldn’t he let her go? Why couldn’t they finally take the easy way out?

The driver’s door swung open, but she didn’t move. His breathing sounded as ragged as hers had on that Fourth of July night six months ago. She pushed the sunglasses higher on her nose.

“You didn’t take your necklace.” His voice was higher-pitched than normal. He cleared his throat. “I want you to have your necklace, Flower.”

The morning glory pendant slipped into her lap. She felt the warmth of the metal from where he’d clutched it in his hand. She stared straight ahead through the windshield. “Thank you.”