Dreams Are Not Enough (57 page)

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He opened his eyes to the drab strips of morning light coming through the shutters. Looking around for her, he saw only the familiar buff-colored walls with the three garish prints of the Engadine, the small, fumed-oak breakfast table where he took his solitary meals. (He had been encouraged to use the large, bright dining salon where local adolescents with red, bony wrists showing between their white cotton jackets and white cotton gloves served lunch and dinner. His invariable refusal, or so he believed, was accepted as a desire for solitude, a common enough wish at Chateau Neuchatel. ) His mouth felt packed with dry wool.

He pressed the buzzer. The wizened nurse with the girlish smile came.

Opening the shutters before pouring him water, she held the tumbler while he sucked at the glass straw.

“So, Mr. Stevens, you are a friend of a famous Hollywood movie star.”

No longer under the influence, he got a quick mental purchase on the situation.

“She does look a bit like Alyssia del Mar, doesn’t she?” he said.

“But she’s called Hollister.”

“Yes, this is the name she says. Hollister.” At the corroboration, the wrinkled mouth formed a disappointed grimace.

“She’s very beautiful.

You know, of times we have here theater folk and politicians who make pretend with other names. “

“Come on, you know sailors like me don’t meet movie stars.”

In Kinshasa, Art had found a woman who specialized in fake IDs-she was the Rembrandt of forged papers. And for months now he had been Adam Stevens, American, second officer on the Argo Pride, an oil tanker that sailed under the Liberian flag. During a Mediterranean storm, the vessel had caught fire. Battling the blaze, Stevens had been badly injured.

“Would you like more water?” asked the nurse.

“No thanks. Did she leave?”

“She is in the lounge, resting.”

“I’m not up to visitors yet.”

A thermometer was thrust into his mouth, and thin, wrinkled fingers grasped his wrist.

“The patients who have the family, the friends, the letters, yah? They recover quickest,” the nurse said in her softly guttural English.

“The ones who make no outside contact, ya? They make slow progression. It is a good thing to have visitors.” The thermometer was removed.

“A long operation yesterday,” he said.

“What I need is rest.” While his face was washed, his beard and hair combed, he reiterated that he would recuperate more rapidly if left in solitude.

The nurse’s sole comment was, “For today the doctors have ordered the liquids.”

After he drank the juice of blood oranges—the bright crimson color had never seemed natural to him—and finished his lukewarm chocolate, he drowsed.

He awoke at the creak of the door.

As Alyssia entered, he felt an involuntary surge of relief that she was still on the premises. In less than a second he was planning ways to get rid of her.

“You’re looking more human.” She smiled and touched her jawline

“I

like it, the beard, but it’s a lot darker than I imagined it’d be. The stubble was so fair—I never saw it, just got scratched. “

At this revival of intimacy, he covered his mouth, pretending to yawn.

“I was sleeping. Didn’t the nurse tell you I’m not up to visitors?”

“No, she told me the staff have been worried that you stick to yourself. They’re sending up flares that finally you have somebody.”

“Complete privacy is meant to be one of the features of Chateau Neuchatel, or so I was given to believe.”

“Given to believe,” she repeated with the mischievous, ga mine grin that invariably melted him.

“You’re fuming.”

“No, simply tired.”

“That ultra courteous tone means you’re ready to explode.”

“Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear?”

“Oh, you’re very clear.” The smile was gone, and he felt a sense of deprivation.

“You don’t want me around. But how’s about if you’d be better off shouting at me than taking a nap?”

“That might be a possibility,” he said.

“The name’s different, but you haven’t changed. You still fight by being politer and politer.”

With an effort that stabbed through his upraised leg, he lifted up on his elbow.

“Why can’t you stay the hell out of my life?”

In the past she would have snapped back at him. Now, though, her mouth trembled and she sank into the chair sidewise. Her hair shadowed her face as she bent forward, weeping. The muffled sobs cut into him, and he called on reserves of control in order not to cry, too. His leg pulsed and throbbed beneath the cast.

She dried her eyes and blew her nose.

“I’m sorry,” she said. Her voice had lost its musical undertone: she sounded older—and defeated.

“I didn’t mean to shout at you,” he said quietly.

“But I really would prefer to be alone.”

She nodded.

“I can understand that. I’ve screwed things up for you all the way round. Your life, your career. And since I got here, I’ve made you reinjure your leg so you needed another operation.”

“I take credit for screwing up my life and my socalled career. And as for the leg, hamstrung men shouldn’t go hiking in the rain.” He paused, gathering his strength of will.

“But this is my chance to start over again. A new life.”

“Are you worried about Lang?”

He had been pulling on the metal bar in an effort to shift his leg. At her question, his grip slackened and he fell back into the tough Swiss bolster.

She said, “He honestly believes you’re buried at the relief center.”

“He does?”

“Yes, he’s positive you’re dead.”

“7 knew he tried to have me blown away, but how can you know it?”

“He told us.”

“Us?”

“Barry, Beth, PD, Maxim. And me.”

“You’re saying that Robert Lang sat down with the five of you and conversationally mentioned he’d set hit men on me?”

“It wasn’t exactly like that.” She looked down at the wadded tissue she held.

“I’d had a—well, a sort of sight of you at the memorial—did you know they had a memorial for you on Stage Eight, then showed Baobab?”

“I read something. What do you mean, a sight of me?”

“Don’t laugh, but I saw you there. Looking the way you do now. The beard. Wearing that white ski parka. I mean, it was so real that I hired a detective. That’s when Lang called us together. He knew there was an investigation, but he wasn’t positive who was paying for it.

He’d narrowed the choices down to us. He wanted it stopped. “

“None of this makes sense.”

“Lang was already furious at going over budget—he put the entire blame on you, especially after you knocked him down. But PD says it was the article that Barry did for The New Yorker that really set him off. You never saw it, did you? Well, it read as if you were throwing Lang’s money away with both hands. Lang felt you’d made him into a public jackass.”

“I have no problem buying that Lang would try to dispose of me. What I don’t understand is why he’d let all of you in on it.”

“It was a warning. Telling us exactly how you’d died was his way of saying that if any of us made waves, one or all would get the same treatment.”

“So that’s how you found me? A detective?”

“I was at the villa in Bellagio,” she said, as if this answered his question.

“Maxim. And the others. What did they do after they’d heard?”

She shrugged.

“Nothing?” he asked.

“They thought you were dead.”

“Christ!” He grimaced bitterly.

“I get swatted like a fly and that’s the end of it?”

“They had no reason not to believe you were dead. And Lang is very dangerous.”

“How about giving justice a try?”

“Hap, they were broken up. Especially Maxim. He’s been a mess since it happened.”

Desolation swept him. He pressed deeper into the mattress, breathing shallowly until he could pull himself together.

“I read about your little girl,” he said awkwardly.

“It was a rotten break.”

The small muscles below her cheeks worked, and for a moment he feared she would start to cry again.

“The baby’s not dead, either,” she said in a controlled voice.

“It was a little boy and he’s with Beth and Irving.”

“Your baby?”

“They’ve adopted him.”

“You gave up your baby?” he asked incredulously.

“This way he has a better life.”

“Because of the divorce?”

“I can’t talk about it.”

“But you wanted her—him—so much. It doesn’t make sense” -She cut him off by going to the door.

“It was wrong of me to come here,” she said.

“I’m truly sorry for making things worse for you. But that’s me all over. I never did know when to give up on people. But I’m learning, I’m learning.” She smiled.

Long after the door closed, he was haunted by that despairing little smile.

He went over the entire conversation, accepting that she had been fully honest with him. She had confessed that she had cared for him enough to search for him even when it had appeared impossible that she find a living man—even when his own brother and the cousins once as close as siblings to him had been frightened off by the clanger—she had persevered.

Why can’t you stay the hell out of my life?

How could he have shouted that at her? He deserved those unrewarding stints with bitches like Whitney; he deserved his marriage to Madeleine—blonde, smiling, ultra sociable Madeleine.

He thought about Lang and wondered what the odds were that top purveyors of the hard stuff—busy men—continued their vendettas beyond the grave. Probably negligible. That is, if the deceased keeps a low profile.

Moving his butt an inch, it occurred to him that he hadn’t told Alyssia how he had escaped from the “accident.” This lapse in her knowledge seemed to hold a promise of return.

She’ll be back, he thought.

When the wizened nurse carried in his lunch tray—broth and tea-an envelope lay on the napkin.

His pulse jumped, and it was all he could do to wait until the old woman left to open it.

As usual, the joined block letters touched him profoundly. Years ago, in a cruddy Hollywood motel, Alicia had traced the central hairs of his chest, admitting that in her peripatetic education she had never learned cursive script.

Whatever its emotional connotations, the writing was highly legible.

He read the few lines in one glance.

was a mistake barging in on you. If I’d given up on the relationship years ago we’d both be happier, and none of the recent rotten events would have taken place.

On the other hand, it makes me so glad to have seen that you are (more or less) FINE. You are the most decent, most generous human being I have ever known.

Have a wonderful life, and do all the good things you are capable of.

Goodbye and God bless.

Holding the paper in his bandaged hand, he turned his face toward the ugly buff wall. He knew a farewell letter when he saw one.

Three months later he was limping off the ferry in Bellagio.

He had never been here in the middle of winter. Iron shutters hid the tourist shops, the narrow alleys swooping down to the lake were empty and the outdoor cafes along the shore were deserted except for a pair of bundled-up women.

Reaching the curve of benches, he halted to look out at the dancing line of wavelets that reflected the large, pale sun. His expression was brooding.

At the beginning of his slow recuperation from the repair surgery, each time the door was pushed open he would turn, hopeful that it was she.

Convinced of the reality that she wasn’t coming back, though, he retreated into himself. I’ve lost her, he would think in a continuous refrain. I’ve lost her. Whole days would go by when he spoke less than a dozen sentences.

In his silence he brooded about his brother’s betrayal of him, and his cousins’ betrayal. He was indeed dead, but without any of the advantages of forgetfulness.

He had a fourth surgery, an unsuccessful and exceedingly painful attempt to lengthen the tendons behind his knee.

During this convalescence he began to think of going to her. He used the thought sparingly, in much the same way that he doled out codeine pills to himself. At night, when the worst pain smothered him, he permitted himself to conjure up fantasies about their reunion.

Although he had retained his faintly forbidding air of command and confidence with the staff, the loneliness and the pain had done damage to his spirit: those inner uncertainties always present within him had multiplied. For the first time in his life he felt unworthy.

Then one sunny afternoon Hans, the red-faced German orderly, wheeled him onto the porch. Possibly it was the magnificent view, or the jovial tinkling of a horse-drawn sled coming up the hill, or the cold clear mountain air.

It no longer seemed a pipe dream to see her again.

Now that he had a goal for recovery, his natural excellent health asserted itself. Within the week he was back on crutches, riding the big elevator downstairs to scrutinize the most recent London Times and Paris Match—his French was excellent from working in Zaire, where, despite independence, French had remained the official language because there were at least eighty different Bantu dialects. From the week-old papers he learned that Alyssia del Mar was an Oscar nominee for Best Actress (he also learned Harvard Cordiner was receiving a posthumous Oscar for lifetime achievement) but not one clue of her whereabouts.

In the past he could have embarrassed himself by phoning his father to discover where she was. (In his reading, he hadn’t come across any mention of Desmond Cordiner’s paralyzing stroke. ) Or he could have called Maxim or PD. He could have crawled to Barry.

But Adam Stevens must search for himself.

She had told him she was at the Bellagio villa, but that was three months ago and wasn’t it highly improbable she would remain there? On the other hand, he didn’t know where else to begin his search.

The ferry, with a series of mournful hoots, was pulling away from the dock. He rose from the bench. At the taxi stand, two drivers in heavy black coats were gesticulating to each other. Briefly he considered asking one to take him to the villa. But Adam Stevens’ account in Zurich’s Swiss Credit Bank had been opened with money from the relief center: though he had been the center’s main contributor, he never thought of the money as his, so whenever he considered extras like wine to pep up Chateau Neuchatel’s blandly soggy meals or this taxi ride, pangs of conscience would assail him.