The Ruby Tear (6 page)

Temptation

J
ess had a drink at Anthony Sinclair’s apartment after rehearsal. His obvious loneliness had touched her, and a nervous vulnerability that he usually concealed better. He was a high-strung man.

While their Director talked about the improvements he saw, he could sweep them all into his own enthusiasm. Afterward—as Jess and Anthony had agreed over a light meal when the session finished —seen in a colder light, what it boiled down to was more work, harder work, for the actors, and more expected of them.

The play hinged, naturally, on the interaction between the two leads, Marko and Eva. He was the elder son of the powerful family on whom leadership fell with the death of his father. Eva, though essentially a sort of spirit, was also his niece, returned home from a wandering life. She brought with her word of what that family’s interests had wrought against poor and helpless people elsewhere; and what price must be paid in return.

Others in the cast cheerfully encouraged Jess and Sinclair to spend time together, on the theory that this would help to create a strong undercurrent of feeling between them on the stage. They both went along with it, only partly in jest.

Jess found herself attracted to Sinclair’s air of world-weary vulnerability combined with a surprising playfulness. There had been no man in her life since leaving physical therapy. Maybe it was time there was.

It’s like being a widow
, she thought; here she was, slow-dancing to mellow jazz in Anthony Sinclair’s living room at two o’clock in the morning. Anthony was not-so-subtly coming on to her. He hummed a counterpoint to the sax melody, and the warm contact of his body was making her bones feel softened.

He was a well-built man, experienced, demonstrative, probably a dream as a lover—the first few times, anyway. Real-life but short-lived romantic liaisons were not uncommon in productions of plays about intense emotions and family bonds. And she was needy tonight, she realized, in a way she couldn’t recall having been for a long time.

Working with a handful of excitable, dedicated professionals on a passionate play, day after day for hours at a time, had roused her sleeping senses and the appetites of her healed body.

Still, she told herself (even as her arm tightened around Anthony’s shoulders), she wasn’t some dewy-eyed ingénue fresh out of drama school. She knew better than to believe that she, from among all women, would be the one to permanently win Anthony Sinclair away from his wife’s side—assuming that she wanted him on that basis, which wasn’t all that alluring an idea to begin with. Most theatrical men—like their female counterparts—were fickle, nervous, egotistical people; they had to be, to be able to do their work.

It didn’t make for stable home-lives.

Jessamyn had sown some wild oats (so to speak) of her own, so she didn’t hold a weakness for sexual adventurism against her fellow professionals. Forever at risk of public failure, rejection, and ridicule in their work, they sought approval and acceptance wherever they might find it.

Sally Sinclair was currently featured in a musical on Broadway. It was said among the crew at the Edwardian that if an opening that suited him appeared in that show’s cast, Anthony would find a way to get out of his obligations in “The Jewel” and go join his wife.

Jess didn’t need to get any nearer to someone who might be that unreliable.

“Anthony,” she said, leaning lightly against him in apology for what she was about to say, “Anthony, I don’t think—”

“Hush,” he murmured, turning her in a swift circle with expert and elegant assurance,” of course you don’t, but let an old man dream a little, won’t you?”

“Dream on,” she said, “but it’s getting pretty late, Methuselah, and we’re both up for a big scene tomorrow.”

* * *

“Just as well,” he said, stepping away to reclaim his half-finished drink from a side table by the sofa. “Anything more than a friendly dance and Sally knows about it, somehow. Then there’s more hell than ever to pay. I do not know how the woman does it. She’s some kind of genius—the evil kind.”

“Come on, Anthony, you love her to pieces, and it’s mutual; who are you trying to kid?”

He looked at her sadly. “That’s how it looks to you, my dear, but remember—Sal and I are
actors.
”

She gave his stubbly cheek a quick peck and turned to gather up her coat and scarf. “That’s a hell of a better line than ‘My wife doesn’t understand me.’ Listen, I’m going to get out of here before we both end up in trouble, okay? Have you seen my shoes?”

Sinclair raked his fingers back through his thick, graying hair and yawned. “Look under the sofa. I think I kicked something in that direction a few minutes ago. I’ll take you downstairs.”

“Don’t be silly. I’ve taken self-defense classes, you know, mostly to fend off unwelcome fans.”

“Exactly,” he said. “You’re a beautiful girl, and at this hour only a certain type of professional woman is supposed to be out on the streets all by herself!”

She sputtered a laugh. “Come on, in New York?”

He frowned. “Yes, in New York. Seriously, Jessamyn, I can’t help worrying. Anita told me about the marbles someone scattered on the floor of your dressing room. You could have taken one hell of a fall! That’s more than a prank.”

“Yes,” she admitted, “I don’t like it either, but I’ve put up with nastiness backstage before; we all have. If I don’t make a fuss it’ll probably go away, or at least dwindle to scribbling rude words on the wall.”

In fact she’d been considerably shaken up by the incident. But the last thing in the world she wanted was to give the unknown prankster the satisfaction of a big public reaction. Besides, she had too much riding on this par to allow someone’s malice to distract her.

So she and Marie had gathered up the marbles and said nothing (or maybe not quite nothing, since Anthony and Anita and presumably, by now, the entire company plainly knew about it).

“Lunatic business,” he muttered, scowling at himself in the hall mirror and setting his tie straight. “I wish Nick hadn’t named those dogs of his after the Scottish play. It’s never wise to tempt the Fates. We’re so much at their mercy as it is.”

Jess noted that even in complaint, Sinclair avoided saying the actual name of “the Scottish play” out loud. It was really too bad that Walter had let slip that Nick’s dobies were named Mac and Beth.

“I’ll be all right, Anthony. Whoever it was has probably worked off their hostility with those marbles. Trust me, he or she is sitting around tonight feeling all shocked and horrified at the thought of what might have happened because of their spite.”

“Well, I think you should take precautions,” he said. “What about that pretty pendant you wore to rehearsal tonight? Take care of it. It fits your Eva so well—you don’t want to tempt some sneaky bastard to walk off with it.”

“It’s locked up safely,” she said. “After all, it’s not really mine. I expect whoever sent it to show up any minute and ask for it back.”
Or for something else instead; but that was best left unsaid.

She held the apartment door open while Sinclair checked his appearance one more time in the hall mirror.

“So you have a mystery admirer,” he remarked, showing himself first one profile and then the other, “and now a mystery attacker, too. It’s too damned much mystery, on top of a play that’s about a mystery as well.”

He meant the mystery of how the family treasure, a gorgeous emerald, had come into the possession of Marko and Eva’s forebears. This was a subject of intense argument in the play, and the play’s resolution hinged on the revelations of the truth.

The central question was whether these characters were now reaping the vengeance sown by their ancestors’ evil actions, in which case they had best bow their heads and accept their punishment; or whether they were being persecuted by greedy villains upon whom they could justifiably wreak a treacherous revenge of their own.

And then, of course, came the question of what to
do
with the emerald and the wealth it represented, regardless of its origins. These questions worked themselves out amid bombardment and deprivation, creating an allegory of virtue and violence with much wider application than the ever-strained politics of eastern European.

It was satisfying to work in a play that had resonance to major issues. If not for the marbles in the dressing room and the Nick’s opposition, Jess would have been completely happy to be back at work again—this part of the work, anyway: the crucible of preparation.

On the way downstairs her foot hit a child’s rubber ball that had been left on the steps. It bounded down ahead of them. Startled, she clutched the banister.

“Life imitates art,” she said. “Anthony—what if the marbles were a code version of ‘Break a leg’? Maybe somebody was just wishing me luck, in a bizarre sort of way.”

“Somebody crazy, maybe,” he muttered, peering down the remaining flight of steps as if he expected to see a hit man lurking in the foyer.

He waited outside in the cold with her until she got a cab. It occurred to her to wonder, briefly, whether he would have been so gallant if she were heading home from his bed instead. An ungenerous thought, but appropriate to dozens of actors of both sexes whose beauty sleep was more important to them than either love or courtesy.

Putting this uncharitable thought firmly away from her, she thanked him for his good company and said good night. He gave her a chaste, bourbon-scented kiss and waved her off.

When she looked back through the cab’s rear window, he was still standing there, his shoulders hunched against the cold. She felt a stab of sympathy. There was nothing to stop a man from being truly lonely, even if he would fly back home to his one true love if she so much as crooked her little finger at him.

A far cry from
my
one true love
, she thought tartly.
It would serve Nick right if she had stayed with Sinclair tonight. Oh hell, oh hell.
She dug a Kleenex out of her purse and blew her nose.

Oh, hell.

Her own apartment, across town, was warm and dark and blessedly quiet. She locked the front door with a sigh of relief;
should have come home hours ago!
Wrapped in the fleecy robe her aunt had brought to her in the hospital, she wandered into the small front room, stirring hot milk and cinnamon with a dash of vanilla. It was her favorite bedtime drink. She had even converted Nick to it.

Oh, Nick.

She sat on her bed, pawing through a pile of photos from the bedside table drawer.

Here was Nick, tanned and grinning and hugging his arms across his chest in boyish pride after a sailing race. Only he wasn’t a boy, he was a man with the long, sliding musculature of a runner or a swimmer; an experienced and well-traveled man who would still gladly crew for someone else in a boat race to Bermuda. Couldn’t keep his own boat, he always said; too much trouble and expense, and he was never home long enough to get much use out of it.

And here he was again, fixing a loose board in the porch of his house; he swung a hammer like a skilled workman. And here he was sitting in the gazebo out back with a book in his long-fingered hands, grinning at her around the cigarette butt trapped between his teeth.

And here he wasn’t, at Jessamyn’s side in her apartment—not any more. So much for the romantic notion, staple of a hundred films good and bad, that if two people came through a disaster together they were bonded for life.

Crawling into bed, she thought of his youthful beauty, a kind of sunny good looks radiating the confidence that had carried him through a hundred dangerous situations in far-off places. Jess could still feel—or imagined that she felt—the pressure of his warm, solid hand on hers.

She was used to the interest of attractive men, but Nick had always been different: completely straightforward and direct, not busily trying to express himself in the most effective way possible so as to charm his current audience. He had allowed her to see him clear and plain, candidly offering his true self for her inspection, without wiles.

But not anymore. Now he was cold and opaque, a stone man.

I should have stayed at Anthony’s. Next time, maybe I will.