Acts of Love (19 page)

“I think I do.” He stood and walked to the taped border of the stage. “Abby, are you really angry with Daniel at this point? Why would you be?”

“Good Lord, Luke, he's not paying attention to me! He's thinking about this girl he's met instead of treating me with respect and love.”

“So, he's distracted. How does that make you feel? Aside from angry, I mean.”

She looked up at the ceiling, one hand rubbing the back of her neck. “I might be confused.”

He nodded. “Because he's behaving in a way that you didn't expect. You thought you knew how the world functioned, but now your world seems to be turned upside down.”

After a moment, Abby said, “You think I'd be bewildered.”

“That makes sense to me.”

“Well, now. Bewildered. Yes, I could see that. She's an old woman; she wants her world to be predictable. Well, we all do, don't we. But at her age it's harder to accept not understanding. Let me think about that. It changes everything, even the way I move. I'd move toward him, trying to understand, instead of away from him in anger.” A slow smile spread across her face. “We'll try it. Right now. Cort, if we could go back to your entrance . . .”

Luke returned to his chair as the cast took their positions and began the scene again. “I love you,” Kent whispered. “You're a genius. Will it cause consternation if I kiss you?” He leaned over and planted a kiss on Luke's cheek. “How did I get so lucky?”

“Shhhh.” They watched Abby work through the scene. At first she was tentative, and Luke ached to have Constance up there. But in a few minutes she began to find her direction: she showed puzzlement, then uncertainty and bewilderment, and also, Luke saw with growing excitement, just a hint of fear. “She's got it,” he murmured, and he saw the others change their behavior to mesh with hers. Luke and Kent looked at each other and grinned, and Monte said, “God damn, it's just right. What'd you do to Abby? Hypnotize her? She's usually such a terror.”

“She loves the play,” Luke said.

“And you know how to handle her. Good job.”

“Tell her you like it when we break.” Luke sat back, filled with the kind of deep satisfaction that came only with such a breakthrough. The feeling was powerful enough to stay with him all afternoon, and beyond, to the evening, when he drove Tricia to Amagansett for the weekend, a date they had made weeks before.

They were guests in Monte and Gladys Gerhart's starkly modern house and they had been given a wing with a sitting room and bedroom facing the beach, and two baths. “My, doesn't Gladys know how to do things,” Tricia said, inspecting the rooms as she pulled off her clothes to dress for dinner. “And there's never been a breath of scandal about her. Him, either. Can you imagine a producer married to the same woman for thirty-four years? It violates all the laws of the universe. Luke? Do you agree?”

“About what?”

“The laws of the universe. Are you all right? You're mysteriously silent.”

“I'm sorry.” He pulled off his shirt. “You know how involved I am when we're this far along with the play.”

“The play. Sometimes I think the play becomes a mighty handy excuse for everything. Have you found another lady?”

He shot her a glance. “You'd be the first to hear if I was seeing someone else. And write about it.”

“True, but it has just occurred to me that something might be going on besides the play.” There was a silence. “So you won't tell me.”

“There's nothing to tell.”

“Well, there is, but I'm damned if I know what it could be.” There was another pause. “Claudia is still seeing Peruggia; did you know that?”

“No. It hasn't been in your column.”

“Luke, do you really read it? I mean, more than now and then?”

“All the time.”

She came up to him and kissed him. She was naked, her skin tanned and warm in the slanting rays of a setting sun. “And do you approve of it?”

I can't imagine how someone can make a living putting rumors and outright lies into newspapers where readers will assume that it must be true. What an awful way to live.

“I don't, and I tell you that every time you ask. But what difference does it make? You have hordes of devoted fans and almost no one in Hollywood makes a move without wondering what you'll say about it. That ought to be enough for you.”

Distancing herself from him, she picked up a silk robe and slipped into it. “I like to think you admire me.”

“I do. You've made your own way, with no help from anyone, and you do what you've chosen to do very well.”

“And it's worth doing.”

He chuckled. “No, but your tenacity is remarkable.”

“Don't laugh at me. I do the same thing all those talk shows do on television that get millions of people watching. We give people information they want.”

He nodded. “You're right. But from what I've seen, people watch those shows and read your column with a kind of malicious glee, and the only way I can figure it out is that watching or reading about a person having his guts scraped out makes them feel safe. It's as if they believe there's only so much agony floating around and if all those other people are suffering, there won't be any left to touch them. ‘Serves him right,' they say, or, ‘She asked for it,' or, ‘Good looks didn't get
her
very far.' Passing judgement on pain that's usually quite real.”

Tricia turned to gaze out the window at an occasional runner on the empty beach and the lazy waves of the sound, lapping the sand with little sucking sounds. In another part of the house, someone turned on a radio and a jazzy beat filtered into the room. “I could ruin you with my column.”

“I doubt it. But why would you? Is that your goal?”

“Power is.” She turned to him. “You know that.”

He nodded, understanding again why he still was attracted to her. She was the most direct woman he knew, the most unsparing in her dissection not only of society, but also of herself. She often seemed naive, but in fact she was as tough and knowledgeable as an army general planning an assault on a fort he had studied for years.

“Anyway, I'm having fun,” she said dismissively. “Let's stop, shall we? It's getting far too serious for me. Do you care if she's still seeing him?”

“You mean Claudia?
Care
if Claudia is seeing someone? Good Lord, I'd do cartwheels if she found a man she could marry. I'd give the wedding. I'd give the honeymoon. If I could find someone for her, I'd arrange it myself, but you'd put it in your column. ‘What Broadway director is playing matchmaker for his ex-wife?' ”

Tricia laughed. “I like that. I think I'll do it. I'll make up someone; it always adds spice. Not a director, though. I don't put you in my column.”

“Yet.”

She contemplated him. “Maybe never. As long as we're friends, anyway. I may have another item about Claudia, though. She and Peruggia are gambling a lot; she took him to the Phelans' and I'm told he's become truly rip-roaring, especially at roulette, more cautious with cards. If he keeps losing, I'll have to do an item on him. How could I ignore so much drama?”

“Why haven't you so far?”

“Well, you stopped that one item I was thinking of running. And he and I had a fling once and I did like him—well, no, not like: I was fascinated. Besotted, you might say, until I woke up. He's not a good guy, Luke. Some people say dangerous. Claudia should watch her step.”

“I'll tell her that.”

“I didn't know you still see her.”

“Now and then. Trish, I'm going back to the city early Sunday morning. If you want to stay here for the day, I won't mind.”

“No, I'm sure you won't. What's happening in the city?”

“I have work to do before rehearsal on Monday.”

“You're two weeks from opening out of town. How much more can you have to do?”

“Sometimes most of the work is done in the last two weeks. I'm sorry, I know there's a brunch or something and you wanted me to go.”

“Some people I thought you'd like to meet.”

“Another time.”

She untied her robe and let it fall to the floor, standing on her toes to put her arms around him, her breasts crushed against his bare chest. “This isn't to convince you to stay,” she murmured, her lips close to his, “because I don't do that and anyway it wouldn't work. It's just because I want to.”

“So do I,” Luke said.

But by Sunday morning Tricia had orchestrated a chorus of guests and their hosts all urging him to stay for the full social schedule, including brunch for fifty and a cocktail party for two hundred just before they returned to New York. “Not this time,” he said. “Another time. I'm sorry.” Tricia stayed behind, to return that night with Monte and Gladys. Her eyes were cold and alert as she watched Luke leave.

He reached the city at noon and went first to the rehearsal studio. His footsteps echoed in the large bare space as he walked through parts of the second and third act on the makeshift stage, referring to a diagram as he shifted boxes and wooden chairs, working out new paths between them and a new pattern of movement. Better, he thought, studying it. Of course they'll have to like it, feel comfortable with it, but it adds to the tension and that should keep up the pace. He spent two hours drawing new diagrams, noting all the moves with crayons, one color for each actor. And then he became aware that he was famished.

Time to go home, he thought. Still some more work to do. The Sunday
Times.
Twelve children's books to read. And Jessica's letters.

Dear Constance, this island is no place for people who like to wander; it takes advance planning and some effort to get on and off it. One could own a private plane or boat (both terrific when the weather cooperates), but most people don't, and so their lives must harmonize with ferry schedules. This means lining up in one's car about an hour before departure, traveling for close to an hour to the mainland, then driving eighty miles south to Seattle or forty miles north to Bellingham. It makes grocery shopping quite a project! There is a very nice market in Lopez Village, but for the kind of selection we had in the city, the mainland beckons. However, it does not beckon to me because I have no desire to go anywhere. I'm completely satisfied to be solitary amid waters of a thousand colors—midnight blue, gray, silver, turquoise, blue-gray, dark green, jade—depending on the sky and the clouds.

Isolation is a big part of what makes Lopez beautiful: the pine forests wilder, the beaches more secluded, the cliffs more dramatic. And the island is very private, because most of the houses are tucked away in pine forests, invisible until you're practically at their front door.

My own house is finished. It's not large, but so bright and open it seems to merge with sky and water, serene and self-contained in its own world. I have an attached painting studio much like the one I had in Connecticut, and I've begun a garden. I've left most of my land wild, but a landscaper graded around the house and set down stones for walkways and helped me plant, so now I look from my windows upon overlapping circles of rhododendron, azaleas, blue blossom, fourteen kinds of iris, foxglove, roses . . . and a couple of dozen more I can't recall offhand. (By next year I'll have learned them all by heart.) My driveway and the road beyond it are lined with Scotch broom and when the bushes are in bloom they're a solid mass of yellow flowers that are so vivid it's as if they've absorbed the essence of yellow and left the rest of the world a little paler. I can almost watch everything grow here, the climate is mild and there's plenty of rain and sun. I never had a garden and I like the feeling of being connected to the earth when I work in it. I've planted a few vegetables, nothing very ambitious, though I may venture into more exotic varieties soon. The first time I ate a snowpea off the vine I had the most extraordinary sensation, as if I'd just discovered the absoluteness of food, instead of getting it third or fourth hand in plastic bags at the supermarket.

I hope you got the books I sent you: two novels I've enjoyed and my latest book for children, called
The Secret Room.
There's some talk of turning it into a movie or even a live musical, but none of that interests me. Anyway, it's such a long shot I'm not going to waste my time thinking about it.

Baffled, Luke shook his head. She wrote as if Constance were a casual friend, as if they had no history going back twenty-four years, as if they had not been as close as two women could be. And not a word, so far, to explain her exile—because that's what it sounded like—on Lopez Island.

And what about the man she'd met?

Dear Constance, I stayed awake last night, thinking about your letter. I'm sorry you think I sound remote and indifferent; you must know I never feel that way toward you. The truth is, I'm having a harder time adjusting to being here than I thought I would. Sometimes I sit in my garden, facing the beach and the blue-green water of this tiny cove, and it seems to me that I'm so far from everything and everyone that I hardly have any reality. (I know I said I liked the isolation, but my moods swing up and down with the wind or the hour or the angle of the sun.) All my connections to the people and places and things that once defined my life are gone. There was so much joy in my life that it's hard now to look around and find nothing to remind me of that other Jessica except my memories and occasional items about New York in the Lopez or Seattle papers.

So I feel disconnected. It's as if that train in Canada tore through the center of my life, ripping a huge chasm between then and now, and it changed everything so much that there's no way I can bridge the chasm and go back to what I was. When you ask how I feel, that's one of my answers: disconnected and truncated. Nothing lasts.