Authors: Phoebe Matthews
“That’s why you stay with her? Because you can’t afford a divorce?”
He shook his head. “No, I can live with poor. But what do I do about her? I’m her support. My job covers her hospitalization. Without me, she’d be sitting on a barstool until somebody carted her off to a drunk tank. I know this all sounds very unromantic, my dear, but life is. And I feel responsible. Somewhere along the line I must have missed a chance to help her. I keep turning it over and over in my mind and I keep thinking that at some point in our marriage, I failed her.”
He knew this when he first started seeing me. No, not fair, I’d been the one who followed him into the Greek restaurant one day, and wound our fates together by telling him about Laurence.
Graham hadn’t come looking for me. He hadn’t stopped me on the street or even tried to pick me up the first time we saw each other, me dripping water in the entrance of the building where he had his office, him pausing to tuck his papers into a plastic bag before going out into the rain. That’s when we’d first met, our eyes had met, he’d smiled. And I had been too stunned to smile back because I knew his smile from my memories of Laurence.
So maybe it was me who had failed him by involving him in my life. I leaned into his arms, wrapped myself around him, kissed his throat, caught his face between my hands, pulled his mouth down to mine, claimed him, covered him with kisses until stumbling and laughing, he pulled me back into the cottage.
With every bit of passion in me, I told him nothing mattered, nothing at all, except that he love me. He could be married to a harem, I didn’t care, because he belonged to me, was all mine.
“Harem?” he whispered much later, and I realized I’d said that aloud. “How big a harem?”
I had this odd thought. Was I doing the brain dead in bed thing like Tommy? Okay, we weren’t in bed, we were stretched on top of the rug and under the afghan.
“How many do you want in your harem?” I asked. Graham, my head on his bare shoulder, my hands stroking him, following the line of his body, across his chest, his ribs and down the inner curve of his hipbone.
“Just one. Just you. And you’re more than I can handle.”
And then we stopped teasing, stopped talking, melted into each other. He whispered to me. I caught a few words, my name, endearments, but most of what he whispered was so soft and low I couldn’t make it out easily and didn’t want the distraction of trying. He wasn’t saying all those words for me, I rather suspected, but for himself, talking to himself, recording memories into his own mind.
So much later, when the fire turned to ash and the sky went black outside the windows, he whispered, “I am going to find a way, darling April. Give me time. Don’t leave me.”
Huddled under the afghans, we pulled our clothes back on and then we sat on the dusty old Persian rugs in front of the fireplace and Graham poked at the ashes until flames shot out. While he refilled our glasses, I stood and walked over to the window. With my forehead pressed against the glass, I stared out at the ever moving water.
The rain wove patterns on the cottage windows, a single drop sliding down the glass between the other clinging beads, and then another striking the pane to glide through the maze until it found a place to cling. Beneath the flat gray sky the Sound was a darker gray.
“What are you dreaming about now, my darling?”
“I’m not dreaming, I’m watching the sea. There aren’t any gulls.” I turned away from the window.
“No air currents. They’ll be out again when the wind rises.”
Sitting back down beside him on the floor, I held out my hands to the low flames. “I’d like to float across the sky like a seagull.”
“With your hair floating around you like an amber cloud.”
“I think I’ll skip the hair part and be a plain old feathered seagull in my next life.”
“Then I’ll have to be one, too.”
“Will you?”
“Whatever you are in our next thousand lives, I’ll be there to love you,” he said against my mouth.
I wanted with all my heart to believe him. He touched me and I came alive, and that sounds like he was a perfect lover. He wasn’t. Oh well, he knew the moves and certainly I enjoyed him, but he wasn’t amazing or athletic or anything like that. He was good because lovemaking is as much in the mind as in the touching. And he filled my mind with his whispered endearments, his charm, his ability to overwhelm all my senses with firelight and the sound of the gulls and the scent of his skin and the brushing of his hands across my body.
CHAPTER 28
Maybe leaving him would have been the thing to do, but I couldn’t and again, it was Graham who left me. A day later he phoned to tell me he’d be out of town for a few days.
“Where are you going?”
“Not off chasing past lives.”
That should have shut me up, but if he thought I was easy to intimidate, he was only half right. “Oh, it’s a secret, is it? And you’ll tell me all about it when you get back?”
“Not a secret. Just depressing. Darling, I’m flying to Vegas to collect my wife and take her, oh I don’t know where. The last clinic didn’t do her much good. Anyway, I’ll phone you as soon as I get back.”
“Yes, all right,” I said, ashamed of myself for adding to his worries. “Good luck. I’ll be thinking about you.”
“You’re always on my mind,” he said before he broke the connection.
It wasn’t until late that night, at home and alone in my room, that the present left me and Laurence and the life in Hollywood came rushing back, an overlay of memories, the whispered promises in my ear, the hands stroking me.
***
“Of course I love you, Silver. Of course I want to spend my life with you. But how would it look? We can’t be seen together yet.”
I’d had to sneak down a back alley and through the back door. Laurence met me there to lead me through an empty hallway and up the back stairs to his small apartment. He stopped at every turning, looked around, listened for any sound, as though we were burglars.
The apartment was one big room, really, with a bed at one end hidden behind a curtain, and a sink and hot plate tucked into a space the size of a closet.
A smarter girl wouldn’t have said it. I knew it would anger him but I had to know. “What about Mabel Clara? People tell me you’ve been seen around with her.”
He rose up on his elbow to look down at me on the bed. “Don’t listen to ‘people.’ Listen to me. The studio set that up, me and Mabel Clara at a couple of posh places. For publicity shots. I’m going to be in her next moving picture. This is big. The director is a friend of Cecil B. De Mille.”
“Jeepers, is this picture for Paramount?”
“No. But her next one might be. So you can see how important this is for me.”
Dim light filtered through the brown paper shades, casting the shadow of the metal headboard on the wall. Sunrise in another hour, and the room would turn hot. This was probably the coolest time of day, with the fresh smell of morning in the air coming through the opened window behind the shades.
I had to look anywhere but at him. He was so handsome, if I looked at him, I couldn’t ask questions.
“There’s nothing else between you?”
“If there was, do you think the director would let us be seen together? So soon after my wife’s death? You’re making me feel guilty about being here with you, Silver.”
I could hear the irritation in his voice. He never shouted or talked mean. But he’d leave as quick as snapping my fingers.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be a tease,” he whispered in my ear. His mouth trailed down my neck, traced my collarbone. “Treat me nice, Silver.”
Maybe I should have asked him more about his wife’s death, because Esther had said some terrible things and maybe he should be warned, but I couldn’t. What if he thought I believed all that stuff about him killing his wife?
I stroked his hair and kissed his forehead. He kept whispering my name and all sorts of promises.
If I said another word, he’d get up and tell me to get dressed and then send me away. Probably I’d never be with him again, never hold him, never kiss him. If that happened, I couldn’t stand it. I’d rather be dead than lose Laurence.
CHAPTER 29
I woke stretched out on the floor of our apartment, sweat-drenched, shaking. Rain pattered on the dark window above my bed. The other bed, Cyd’s, was empty and I vaguely remembered she had told me she would be staying over at Mac’s place tonight.
Crawling on all fours across the room, I found the cordless phone, lifted it out of its cradle, rolled over on my back and lay there staring at the dark ceiling.
It was maybe three in the morning, a terrible time to ring anybody. I wouldn’t call his house because the bell would wake his parents, but if he had his cell turned on, please, Tommy, please, please. I punched in the number. It would ring three or four times, I didn’t know how he had it set, maybe turned off, and then it would take me into his voice mail which would be no help at all.
Ring. At three in the morning of any morning, my defenses are gone and tears rule. Second ring. I bit the inside of my lip. Third ring. I’d rather bleed than cry.
“Hmmm?”
“Tommy?”
A very long silence and then he said, “Can I listen without opening my eyes?”
“You can go back to sleep if you want to. Try not to drop the phone,” I told him. “I’ll keep talking even if you don’t but it would be really nice to be able to imagine you at least holding your phone sort of somewhere near your ear.”
“Ummm.” I could hear his breathing, that slow rhythm with a slight hum on each exhale. Odd way to identify somebody. But I could. I’d heard Tommy sleeping on my couch many times, and I had listened to him in the other bed in the dark hotel room in Minnesota. I knew his sleep breathing almost as easily as I recognized his voice.
“That’s okay,” I said softly into the phone. Because it didn’t matter if he heard me. What mattered was I could hear him and he was real. “I thought all this would stop, these stupid visions, now I know who she was and where she died. Now I know it’s all in the past and can’t be changed. See, for a little while I thought maybe I was supposed to change something, only there’s no changing the past, right? So maybe I am supposed to change the future. Because otherwise everything keeps happening over and over.”
He didn’t answer but I could still hear his breathing. He’d be lying in his bed, probably on his back. He’d told me that when he tried to roll over the move pulled on his ribs. So he’d be on his back, his long legs stretched out, his knee rigid in the brace. Probably he had one hand thrown up over his head. He slept with his arms over his head. His other hand would be loosely wrapped around his phone.