“She’s going to be all right. All George has to do is put her at center stage and she’s happy.”
“How about you?”
He looked sardonic. “I don’t need the center of the stage.”
Her throat was suddenly dry. “Kit”—unconsciously she leaned toward him—”can you do it?”
“I think so. If I want to.” His voice was soft and very deep. “Is it important to you that I succeed?”
“Yes.” Her voice in return was barely a whisper. “Yes, it is.”
“Mind if I join you?” said George’s cheerful voice.
“Of course not,” returned Mary after a minute, forcing a smile.
Kit turned his splendid raven head toward George and favored him with a cold stare. “You’re up late,” he said disapprovingly.
“It’s Sunday,” replied George mildly, tucking into his plate of scrambled eggs. “My day of rest.”
“Why don’t you go over and hold Margot’s hand for a while?” asked Kit disagreeably.
“It’s not my hand she wants to hold.” George refused to be ruffled by his star’s evident bad temper. Kit gave up trying to intimidate him and turned to Mary.
“How about a game of tennis?” he asked.
“Tennis?” She looked at him incredulously. “You never played tennis before. You said it was a sissy game.”
He grinned a little. “I was being defensive. I didn’t want you to teach me to play because I knew you’d beat me.”
She gave him a long blue stare. “And now you think I can’t?”
“I don’t know,” he returned frankly, “but at least it’ll be a contest.”
“I’ll meet you at the courts in half an hour,” she said.
“Fine.” He smiled pleasantly at George. “See you later,” he said and strolled casually out of the dining room. Everyone present, including George and Mary, watched him go.
* * * *
Half an hour later, dressed in a white tennis dress and carrying her racquet and a Thermos, Mary arrived at the tennis courts. There were four of them, each with a concrete rubberized surface and all four were presently in use. Mary went to sit next to Kit on the bench and looked at him appraisingly.
He was wearing white shorts and a light blue shirt.
“How good are you?” she asked speculatively.
He glanced sideways down at her, his lowered lashes looking absurdly long against the hard male line of his cheek. “You’ll find out.”
“We’re through now,” said Nancy Sealy as she came over to the bench with the girl she had been playing. “You can have our court, Mary.”
“Thanks.” Mary flashed the girl a smile and bent her head to unzip her racquet cover. That look of Kit’s had disturbed her, and as she took the court she tried to ignore the suddenly accelerated beat of her heart.
They warmed up for five minutes, then Kit said, “Shall we start? You can serve first.”
“Okay.” She put one ball in the pocket of her dress, picked up another, and went to stand at the service line. Mary had been playing tennis since she was eight years old. Her parents belonged to a golf and tennis club and she had always spent hours every summer on the courts. She wasn’t a powerful player, but she was extremely steady and accurate. She tossed the ball high in the air and served. Kit returned it deep to the baseline with a hard forehand shot. Mary, who had moved in, missed it. She stood for a minute looking at him in surprise, then went to serve again. This time she put it on his backhand side and his return, while deep, was not as hard. She sent it back with her own smooth, classic forehand and eventually took the point.
She eventually took the game as well, but it took three deuces before she was able to put it away. Then Kit moved to the service line.
The ball boomed across the net and was by her before she had finished getting her racquet back. “Good grief,” she said. “What was that?”
“Was it in?” he asked.
“What I could see of it was.”
“Good.” He grinned. “My problem is that all too often it isn’t.”
It was an extremely strenuous set. Kit made up in power what he lacked in accuracy and Mary’s wrist was aching from returning his shots. It took them an hour to reach 6-6.
“Shall we play a tie breaker?” he asked as he came to the net to hand her the balls.
“Why don’t we quit now?” she replied. “That way we both win.”
“We neither of us win, you mean,” he contradicted.
She made an exasperated face. “You’re so bloody competitive. All right, we’ll play a tie breaker.”
“No.” Unexpectedly he put the balls in his pocket. “No, you’re right. We’ll quit while we’re both ahead.”
“I’m dying of thirst,” she confessed as they walked off the court together. They had been playing in the full sun and her face and hair were damp with sweat. She looked at Kit and saw that his shirt was soaked. “I brought a jug of water with me,” she said, gesturing to the Thermos tucked under the bench. “I’ll share it with you.”
They sat down together on the bench in the shade and Mary poured the water. She had only one cup so she drank first, refilled it, and passed it to him. “You always think of everything,” he said as he accepted the cup.
“Well,
I’ve been playing tennis for a lot longer than you. If you ever get more consistency on that first serve, though, you’ll make mincemeat of me. It’s vicious.”
“Yeah. When it goes in.”
“You’re not missing by much. You just need more practice. You could use a little more work on your backhand too.”
“Mmm.”
She hooked several wet tendrils of hair behind her ears and smiled ruefully. “My wrist hurts. It was like returning cannonballs.”
He didn’t answer for a minute and she poured herself some more water. She could feel his eyes on her. “What we need is a swim,” he said at last. “What do you say?”
She thought of the cool clear lake. “I say that sounds good.”
“Great.” He stood up and picked up both their racquets and the water jug. “Let’s go change into bathing suits.”
“Okay.” She fell into step beside him, her own long lithe stride almost the equal of his. A little voice inside her said she oughtn’t to be spending time with him like this, that it was dangerous. Nonsense, said Mary silently to that uncomfortable little voice. There will be a million people around the lakefront. How can it possibly be dangerous?
They didn’t go to the school lakefront. When she came out of her cottage dressed in a suit and terry-cloth cover-up, she found Kit sitting on her front steps.
He wore bathing trunks and an ancient gray college sweat shirt that she recognized. “Good God,” she said before she thought. “Do you still have that thing? I should have thought you’d have some designer sportswear by now.”
“There’s nothing wrong with this sweat shirt.” he returned amiably. “There aren’t any holes in it, are there?”
“No.” She smiled at him, unaware of the affectionate amusement in her eyes. “In some ways you haven’t changed at all. You never did give a damn about clothes.”
“I like them clean and comfortable. As long as they meet those two requirements, I’m satisfied.” They had begun walking down through the woods and at this point he veered off into the pines. “I’ve found a nice spot on the lake—a little cove. It’s on college property so we won’t be trespassing. Come on.”
“But Kit,” she protested as he plunged off through the trees. “I don’t want to ...”
He stopped and turned. “For God’s sake, stop acting like a nun about to be raped. Come on!”
“Don’t be crude,” she snapped in return, but she followed him off the path and down through the woods. After about five minutes they came out of the trees and there they were on the shore of the lake. “Oh Kit,” she breathed. “It’s lovely.”
“Great for fishing,” he said with satisfaction. “I was out here at five this morning and it was beautiful.”
“Did you catch anything?”
“You’ll be eating it for dinner,” he replied with a grin.
He dropped his towel and stripped his sweat shirt off. She began to do the same. “Daddy certainly made a convert out of you,” she said, her voice muffled by her cover-up as she pulled it over her head. “Nothing, but nothing, would get me out of bed at five in the morning.”
“Does your father still have the boat?”
“Yes.” She looked away from him to the sparkling lake water. Kit had loved to go out with her father on those early-morning fishing expeditions. She had thought sometimes that he enjoyed her father so much because he had never really known his own.
“Race you in,” he said.
“Okay.” They both headed for the lake at a run and their diving bodies went into the water at almost the same instant. The two sleek black heads emerged close together and they yelped simultaneously, “It’s freezing!” The lake here dropped off steeply after the first few feet, and though they were not far from shore, Mary found she was over her head. She treaded water and looked around.
They were in a small cove, protected from the college waterfront by a promontory of pine trees. Mary could hear some of the students shouting and laughing as they played volleyball, but they were hidden from her view, as she was hidden from theirs.
They swam for perhaps ten minutes and then, by unspoken mutual consent, headed back to the shore. Mary picked up her towel and silently watched Kit as he dried himself vigorously. He was not watching her, he was looking off down the lake, and so she let her eyes linger on the smooth brown expanse of muscled shoulders and back, the strong brown column of his neck. He finished drying himself and spread out the towel on the patch of grass that grew beyond the trees. He lay down, put his hands behind his head, and closed his eyes against the sun. “Tell me about Hamlet,” he said.
She spread her own towel next to his, sat down and rummaged in her canvas bag for a comb. “What do you want to know?”
“I find him hard to figure out. He vacillates so— one moment he’s full of energy, vowing to avenge his father’s murder, and the next he’s in a blue funk, unable to do anything at all.”
Slowly she combed the tangles out of her wet hair. “That’s the Hamlet problem in a nutshell. It’s not the typical Elizabethan revenge tragedy at all. The conflict in
Hamlet
is within the hero, not outside him.”
“As I understand it,” Kit said, “according to the code of the revenge tragedy, Hamlet is supposed to murder his uncle because he’s discovered that his uncle murdered his father. An eye for an eye and all that. And he doesn’t seem to question the morality of the code. He seems to think he ought to murder his uncle. God knows, he has reason enough to hate him. Aside from killing Hamlet’s father, he’s stolen the throne from Hamlet and married his adored mother. Hamlet keeps
saying
he hates Claudius, that he wants to kill him, but every time he has a chance, he flubs it.”
Mary finished with her hair and returned the comb to her bag. “Haven’t you talked about this with George?”
“Yes.
He’s inclined toward the Olivier interpretation, that Hamlet’s feelings for his mother are what get in the way. But I think there’s something more.”
Mary wrapped her arms around her knees. “He’s a terribly complicated character,” she said slowly. “He doesn’t know himself why he is incapable of acting. I think it stems from his state of mind, myself.”
“The first soliloquy, you mean.
Oh God! God!
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of the world!
Kit’s beautiful voice lingered on the words, drawing out all the vowel sounds in a way that sent a sudden shiver down her spine.
“Precisely,” she said after a minute’s silence. “What is the point of acting in such a world?
It won’t bring his father back, it won’t make his mother chaste, it won’t restore the innocence of his love for Ophelia. Yet consciously he feels he
must
act. The contradiction puts a terrible strain on his mind.”
“He can be a nasty bastard.”
“Yes. He’s dangerously close to the edge at times. And yet, there is a basic beauty and goodness about him that shines through all the torment.”
“Hmm. I can see why he’s considered such a challenge.”
“The ultimate challenge for an actor, it’s said.” She turned a little to look at him. “Are you afraid. Kit?”
His eyes remained closed. “Yes,” he said. “To do it well I’m going to have to reveal myself as I’ve never done before. Yes, you could say I’m afraid.”
She didn’t say anything but kept looking at his quiet relaxed face. She had told him he hadn’t changed, but that wasn’t true. There were faint lines at the corners of his eyes and a look about his mouth that hadn’t been there before. He looked older. He looked as if he had suffered. She was conscious of deep surprise as she thought this and his eyes opened and looked into hers. “Lie down here with me,” he said softly, and her heart began to hammer in her breast.
“No,” she said. She dragged her eyes away from his and turned so her back was to him. “If you start that, I’ll leave.”
“Will you?” He reached up and caught her arm, levering her back with the strength of his wrist until she was lying beside him on the spread towels. In a minute he had rolled over and pinned her down, his mouth coming down on hers in a hard, hungry kiss whose intensity pressed her head back against the striped towel and into the ground. At the touch of his mouth all her defenses melted. She was hardly aware of when the tenseness left her body and her mouth answered to the demand of his.
“Mary.” His voice was a husky murmur in her ear. “I love you. Don’t you know that?”
“Do you, Kit?” She looked up into his face so close above her own. “I don’t know what I know anymore,” she said and lightly ran her finger over his cheekbone.
He bent his head and kissed her throat. “Come back to California with me.”
She closed her eyes. The urge to give in to him was tremendous. “I can’t,” she whispered. “It isn’t my kind of world, it never could be.”
“You can bring your own world with you,” he said and sat up.
At his withdrawal she felt alone and bereft. After a minute she opened her eyes to gaze up at him. “What do you mean?”
“I mean there are universities in California—damn good ones too. Why couldn’t you teach at one of them?”