Lunch (18 page)

“W
HAT IS
it, M—­is something else wrong?” Olivia is asking me as I stand in the mews, just outside her studio, holding a small white box. She does not know I have already placed a larger, matching box, packed and sealed by Nick, on the bed in the flat.

I am not supposed to be here. Nick would kill me if he knew I'd sneaked away on this secret errand, but I had to do it, I couldn't sit still with the foreboding, I had to move, driving badly, the bike whining the protest my voice could not.

“Here,” I say, extending the box, my voice echoing loudly in my ears because I keep the visor of my helmet lowered. I don't want her to see my face.

“What's this?” she says.

“It's for you. To wear.”

“To wear when?”

“Tomorrow.”

All she can see is her face reflected, distorted, in my visor.

“He's got some nasty game planned, hasn't he?” she asks. “He's not going to give up without a fight.”

I say nothing, frozen in habitual blankness. She pushes up the visor, before I can stop her.

“I like to see the ­people I talk to,” she says. “You're hiding something.”

“No.”

Her eyes scan my face.

“Are you my friend, M?”

The question surprises me. “Yes,” I say, “I hope so.”

“Then you know.”

“Know.”

“You do, don't you?”

And so does she. Nick will deny it, but he is despairing, an unaccustomed feeling that sits badly on his heart. He asked, and asked again, for him an act of unbearable surrender, and she refused him. Soon he will be shooting the final scenes of
Faust
to applause and tears, I will dismantle the secret gilded flat, erasing all traces of what he did there, we must leave, this is not our home. There is no reason to stay.

No reason except Olivia.

The tickets are sitting in slick blue envelopes atop a pile of scripts McAllister has been couriering over with mounting impatience, and the inevitable cannot be postponed much longer.

“Yes,” I say.

“Can I trust you?”

I want to get down on my knees and clasp my arms around her legs, bury my head in her enveloping warmth like a child begging his mother to save him. I want her to bend down to me, her hair falling in my face, and tell me it's all right, hush, don't worry, everything's all right, I'm here, I won't leave you, hush.

She hasn't moved. Nor have I, the little box still outstretched in my hands. I've never known a woman to manage such stillness.

“Olivier's tour is going to Australia in two weeks. I'm meeting him there.”

I nod, the knotted dread in the pit of my stomach growing, monstrous, global, a horrible knot of pain.

“For how long?” I ask.

“It doesn't matter. Forever.”

A neighbor walks by with her shopping, curious, sensible shoes clacking, round shapes in her string bag, apples, oranges, a leek, bright colors, round shapes, the spots of color on her cheeks, round, the buttons on her woolen coat, round, shiny.

Olivia gone, round, sweet Olivia gone, the color of her hair, the life of her, lunchtimes in the flat, watching her, all gone. Unthinkable.

“I wanted to say this to you in the car the other day, but I just . . . I couldn't,” she says, her eyes boring a hole through my heart. “I have to go to him. Olivier, I mean. And if I don't go now . . .”

“I understand.”

“Nick can't know. He'll try to stop me. If you—­”

“I won't tell him.”

“I'm asking too much,” she says, her features softening. “It's not fair to you.”

“I'd do anything for you.” I hadn't meant to say that.

Her face changes. “Oh, M,” she says, one of her fingers, paint-­speckled, tracing my scars with the briefest caress. No one has ever dared touch me like that. I jerk my head back, my cheek smarting as if it had been slapped.

“I'm sorry,” she says, running her fingers through her hair, and returns to herself. “I never know what to say to you. You certainly don't make it easy.”

I attempt a wan grin, and she sighs. We are still facing each other, the box in my hands, outside in the cold, waiting, she is waiting for instructions, the door ajar, opening just a crack into the haven inside.

“Tomorrow,” I say, “at the flat. Be ready for the Daimler to come at five.” I hand her the box.

“What is it?”

“Open it and see. I don't know anything about women's things.”

She laughs. “But you do know what Nick likes, don't you? Go on, then. I'll be there. And I won't be late.”

She pries off the top to see an exquisite small crucifix studded with diamond-­cut rubies, identical to the heart he's already given her, only larger, on a slender gold chain.

“This is beautiful,” she says, her eyes somber as she lifts it out to catch the light, sparkling gems lit as if on fire, then slips it on where it will hang, coldly beautiful against her skin like gleaming drops of blood dangling between her breasts.

What will she do with it when Nick is gone, I wonder, quite wildly, will she wear it, will she hide it, will she give it to Annette?

I can't imagine her showing it to Olivier.

I can't imagine her gone.

“Is this a bribe?” she says, finally, trying to tease away her anxiety. “Is Nick afraid I'll run away and hide?”

“Just wear it tomorrow. Please.”

“You don't say please very often, do you?”

I nearly smile. “No,” I say, “I leave it to Nick.”

“You leave too much to him,” she says, and turns into her house, ready to nudge the door shut behind her.

“Olivia,” I say, and she opens the door a wide crack, curious. “Listen to me. He loves you, in his way, he does love you.” She cannot imagine the bitterness I am struggling to hide from my voice. “Whatever happens, he won't hurt you. I won't let him.”

I watch the color drain out of her face, and curse my clumsiness. I hadn't meant to scare her. Not like this.

“I asked for this,” she says, slowly. “It should've ended long ago, but I couldn't. It serves me right.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” I say. “It happened, that's all. No one asks for Nick.”

“But we've got him, don't we?” she says. “Or rather, he's got us.” With that she shuts the door.

I walk back to my bike, my hands shaking, shaking too much for me to drive.

I sit there, in the calm of the mews, on my bike, until the rain starts.

S
HE BARELY
sleeps, dreaming of black shapes, masks, she is lost, running in the shifting maze she has painted, there is a panting noise behind her, terrifying, and she awakens with a cry. Seconds ticking, her clock, maddeningly calm, oblivious to her distress.

She lies under the thick comforter in her bed, waiting for dawn. Finally, when she can stand it no longer, she gets up, tidies up her already spotless studio, and tries to sketch, but it is useless, the hours crawling. She tears off her smock and throws it down in a crumpled heap, goes downstairs to change into a baggy sweatshirt, jeans, and scruffy boots, masses her hair under a beret, puts on Olivier's ratty tweed overcoat that smells of oils and peat smoke from their last trip to the country, and walks out into the sharp afternoon air to hail a taxi.

She does not trust her feet to walk her across the park.

The flat is heavily silent in midafternoon. Even the peonies are drooping, petals in a heap on the table I polish diligently with lemon oil after Dulcie swipes a few cursory flicks of a dustcloth over it. Olivia's nervousness charges the sleepy air into wakefulness, expectant, puzzled, especially when she sees the large white box on the bed, her name written in Nick's slanting black script on a thick cream card taped to the top. She opens the envelope to read:

Olivia—­Put everything on exactly in the order you find it. Slowly. Think of me as you get dressed.

Nick

How could she not?

I have not forged his writing this time, and the message is abrupt, useless, explaining nothing, deliberately so. Olivia sits down next to it, unnerved. I sit watching her, my senses jangling.

After a while she cannot bear the silence, so she gets up and flicks through a pile of CDs, one after the other, all Olivier's recordings, she realizes with a jolt of panic, not the CDs she brought over because she thought Nick would like them, or that Nick chose, smirking like a schoolboy, to match her petulant moodiness. These are all Olivier's, his slim fingers poised above the keyboard, his beloved face smiling at her from the photographs on the covers.

This is not the time to think of Olivier.

She sighs with relief when she finds a recording of Ella Fitzgerald in another pile. She brought it over, when was it, she can't recall, only remembering Nick teasing her about something, a song lyric, that was it, and she brought this the next time, a delicious woman's voice, cool and contemporary, singing of lost love, to laugh at over lunch. It barely soothes Olivia's frazzled nerves as she runs a bath, soaking in the bubbles so long her fingers shrivel. She rubs cream, scented of vetiver, in her skin till it glistens, then sits, wrapped in a towel, her hair a wet snake down her back, and stares again at the box.

She is sitting exactly where Nick had hoped she would, on the edge of the bed, and she is perfectly in focus.

I cannot tear my eyes away.

She feels a twinge of dread, imagining what is inside, that awful anticipation mingled with a strange calm of wondering how Nick will try to force her out of her known, familiar self. She only knows that, because this is truly the last time, he will make her struggle, that he expects her to struggle, what he'd done to her in the airport was a mere warmup, his movements belying the practiced precision of a professional, and that he will relish this opportunity far more than any other because he has begged her to do it, and has been thwarted even by her consent.

And then she understands. She understands what the game is to him, that in the playing he means to have her and hurt her, that for him pain and fear are the purest expressions of his love, inextricably interwoven into a visible token of the qualms she has made so palpably alive.

She understands that whatever he's planned for her will happen this once, and never again, he knows she is leaving, has left him already, and so they can both risk it, their selves, he daring to sell his soul, Faust embodied, she daring to surrender to his will, to his deliberate, dark impulses he knows she despises and yet cannot control.

She understands that nothing in her life will ever again equal this sensation now, damp and shivering on this bed, the ormolu clock ticking, Ella's voice singing to her, blithely unaware that Olivia is sitting alone in the deepening shadows, so naked, so thrilled with her terror, so enslaved to a fleeting transient delight of the flesh.

She understands that she will never again face such an inescapable abyss of perversity and pain tangled so deeply with pleasure, and that she would, willingly, leap into the void if Nick asked her to today, holding firmly on to his hand, not knowing how long her body would float next to his, suspended, until it hit the ground.

T
HE
SOFT
layers of tissue paper in the box are a delicate mauve, the color of hyacinths.

There is a lovely small jeweled handbag on top in the shape of a miniature panther, encrusted with jet crystals and rhinestones, his eyes glowing green emeralds, lined in ultramarine velvet, a small pouch inside filled with makeup: porcelain foundation, black mascara and eyeliner, deep crimson lipstick. She applies it carefully, her face an ashen mask with darkly stained lips, then dabs on perfume from the tiny vial also found in the pouch, a strange, pungent scent, invigorating and bittersweet, she has never smelled before. She replaces it and the pouch in the bag, knowing he means her to carry it with her.

Next is a bra, long enough almost to be a bustier, of the finest shimmery black silk like velvet against her skin. Its only peculiarity is the straps of the narrowest strips of silk, detachable, she notices, bound in leather. It fits her perfectly. Olivia marvels at the fine stitches, fingering the meticulous workmanship, wondering whom Nick paid to make such a beautiful, odd thing, wondering how he took her measurements quite so precisely, not just the bustier but the panties in matching black silk, no more than whispers embroidered with black roses, and the silk garter belt, edged in the same narrow leather, with leather garters.

It is such a cliché, this outfit, she tells herself as she rolls up the smooth silk stockings, trying not to snag them on her fingernails, and she finds herself laughing unexpectedly in nervous reaction. It is all so typically over the top, so much like Nick, this drama, so fragile and so tough, like the strange perfume, and as undeniably erotic as it is ridiculous.

The shirt is a simple white Egyptian cotton button-­down, the kind Olivier had starched by the dozen, crisply ironed, and folded into neat piles in a cardboard box by the Chinese laundry around the corner, except that it is sleeveless. The skirt is equally simple, lined black silk, flowing fluidly down to her calves, fastening with one large button at her hip.

Down at the bottom of the box is a thin black leather belt, coiled snakelike in its mauve tissue paper, its buckle glistening with the same black jet beads of the panther bag. The shoes are butter-­soft and slender, with heels higher than any she has ever worn. They make her much taller, her calves painful slim knots, and she wishes she could kick them off, wishes she could run barefoot down the stairs and into the street, run barefoot across the frozen dull grass of the park, run down Queens Gate, around the corner, tripping over the slick cobblestones of the mews, her body shivering, her feet cut and bleeding, leading her home, into her studio, locking the door behind her as she slides down to her own floor, exhausted, panting for breath, home, alone, safe.