Lying In Bed (21 page)

“Do you want some of this? Or would you rather have coffee?”

“Wine, please.”

I watched him take glasses out of the cabinet and pour us each deep red burgundy. And then I followed him back into the living area which consisted of two deep cushioned dark brown leather sofas and a slab of glass sitting atop rocks that had been shaved clean to make a base.

“What are they called?” I gestured back to the sculpture.

“The show is called Mirroring. Each of the people is numbered but not named.”

I was still looking at them across the room, not sure of what I wanted to say, or even knowing if I’d be able to express it. “I’m surprised,” I finally offered and then realized how vapid I sounded. “I didn’t expect anything that strong.”

“Because?” He was smiling.

“This is silly. You know how good you are, don’t you? It’s redundant for me to say anything.”

“I know that my work says what I want it to say. And I know that certain people get it. I knew you would. But I try not to worry about whether I’m good or not. That’s a judgment call I’m satisfied to let other people make.”

“Why? How can you be?” I was thinking, damn it, I was thinking of Cole who was so preoccupied with how other people viewed his work, obsessed actually over what they said about it and how they perceived him.

“How can what other people say matter to me? The minute you create something you have a choice – you can be satisfied you’ve been true to your own ethics and aesthetics and judge yourself only on how well you succeeded at creating what you wanted to this time. Or you can give it to the world and let them tell you what to think about yourself and your efforts. I think the latter would be setting yourself up for misery.”

“But what they think makes a difference in how you will be received. On your success or failure.”

“Not in my own eyes. If someone judges my work poorly, I have the right to reject or accept their opinion. I also get to judge them back. If I find them wanting, or uneducated, or incapable of making the kinds of distinctions that are necessary in making an informed opinion, then what they say simply can’t matter.”

“You’re that strong? That sure of yourself?”

“If you want to call it that. I think I’m clear about what I need to do in order to survive as an artist.”

“I’m not sure I understand the difference?”

“Marlowe, I need to create. This–” he gestured toward the sculpture, “is what feeds me and makes me feel alive. So I have to be protective about the place in me where the creativity lives. If I started to take other people’s opinions into account it would pollute me. I know that. I’ve seen it happen with other artists. There are people whose work I admire, who I trust and whose opinions matters. But the random critic or stranger who comes to my work with their own subjective likes and dislikes and prejudices? Nope, I can’t give into that kind of self-flagellation.”

“Well, I’m envious of you. And actually a little bit in awe of you. After what I–”

I had been about to tell him about Cole. About his work and his need for strangers admiration. About his willingness to break faith with me in order to be provocative and ensure attention. I wanted badly to tell someone about the position Cole was putting me in. About how worried I was about my family finding out about us. But I couldn’t. No one knew. I’d kept it secret so long.

What bothered me the most, I realized, as I twisted around on Gideon’s couch to look at his work again, was that Cole had tricked me into being someone I wasn’t. He had seduced me into acting a role that I wasn’t right for. For the wrong reasons, I had gone along with it, and now I was going to have to pay the price, in public.

“You have secrets, don’t you?” he asked.

I nodded. Wondering how he knew, guessing from other instances that he’d read something in my face.

“Ever since I was a kid I wanted to have friends who had secrets,” he added.

“Why?”

“What a funny response.
Why
?”

“I didn’t know what else to say.”

“You didn’t? Or is it that you didn’t know if you should say what you wanted to?”

“Don’t you ever have meaningless conversations?” I asked.

“I try not to. Do you like being bored?”

“It’s better than being in pain.”

“No it’s not. And you know it.”

I sipped my wine. It was rich and heady with a deep taste and a fruity smell. Delicious.

“What kind of secrets did you want your friends to have?”

“The kind that come from taking chances. From trying to do more, to push limits.”

“Did you get what you wanted? Do you have friends who have secrets.”

“Not till you.”

I felt myself blush as heat suffused my cheeks.

He laughed. It was a strong sound. Impenetrable. As if, no matter what happened, to him, he would be able to withstand what was thrown at him.

“Listen, Marlowe, I’m not good at duplicity. What happened in the park is something I’m glad I did. I wanted to kiss you. I want to do more than that. The rest of my life isn’t what you think. I need you to trust me about that.”

My skin started to tingle and I felt pressure building up behind my eyes.

“You’re in the middle of another relationship. Of sending my stories to her.”

“I know you think that I don’t know what I’m doing. But I do. I need you to give me some time.”

I nodded. Stupidly. But said nothing.

“I’d like to continue working with you if you feel comfortable with that.”

“You want me to write more stories?” I didn’t understand.

“Yes. Two more. As we planned. It will be all right in the end. I promise.”

“Sure. We can write off what happened as intoxication from the scent of all those flowers.”

“Even if neither of us thinks for a minute that that’s what happened?”

The pressure increased.

“I don’t understand.”

He nodded, then got up and came over and sat down next to me.

“Just give me today. Tonight. Tomorrow we go back to writing the stories.”

I knew before he did it, what he was going to do.

I didn’t fight him. This was an interlude. Something that I wanted even though I knew it wouldn’t lead anywhere. Even though I knew it had a time limit on it.

Or maybe I wanted it exactly because of the time limit.

This kiss was more complicated than the one in the park. It was not lighthearted or easy. It was not simple. There was no sun warming our skin and no overwhelming perfume. It was dark in the loft, the air was cool, there was the taste of wine in his mouth and the feeling that this was hurting him, that he was fighting himself and me at the same time. This kiss was a bruise.

It battered me too. Buffeted me. I was lost. Not at his mercy, but at my own. Because I knew this feeling from a long time ago. I knew how helpless I was to fight it. How addictive it was to experience passion at this deep a level. How this kind of pleasure had once turned me into someone who was a stranger to me now – a stranger who had embarrassed me. I had abandoned her eight years earlier. Now, I was afraid. Not of Gideon, but of myself and my lack of control. Mostly I was afraid that she was back, and I was not going to know how to banish her again if she got too great a taste of this night’s pleasure.

I was the one who pulled away. Who stood up. Who walked away from him. And facing the window, I was the one who laid the ground rules. Holding on to my own arms, wrapped up in myself, afraid of what I was saying, I spoke in a monotone: “We have two stories left to write. I think that’s what we should do, not this. Not now. Is that all right with you?”

“Of course,” he said. But he didn’t apologize for what had happened.

And I was glad. If he had, I don’t know but I could have gone on.

I picked up my bag, to leave.

“When we’re finished working on the stories, at some point in the future, I’d like to ask you to pose for me. I’d like to sculpt your secrets.”

“You think that you’ll be able to find them?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think you will. And I don’t think I want to pose for you. I’m not a very good model. I’ve had some bad luck with doing that.”

“Maybe it would be different with me.”

I knew we weren’t only talking about my posing. But it didn’t matter. I didn’t want to explain the past or even think about it but I did want to get away from his deep green-and-black cat eyes and his swollen lips and his voice that, like the wind, had blown me off course.

I stood at
the door and reached out for the knob.

“I don’t think you should leave yet,” he said.

“Why?” I turned around.

“Because you’re upset.”

I didn’t say anything but I didn’t open the door either.

“And it’s not only about me. It’s something that being with me is making you think about.” It wasn’t a question. He didn’t ask if he was right. He knew he was.

He came over to me and took my hand and led me back to the couch where I sat down. I was suddenly very tired. I knew what I should do but had no energy to do it.

“Let me get you some more wine. You can tell me.”

“I can’t.”

He didn’t listen. He went into the kitchen and came out with the bottle that we’d started. He poured more in the glass I’d been using and handed it to me. The glass in my hand was the only thing I was aware of. I drank from it as if it were water and I was very thirsty.

“Who did you model for?” he asked.

“Why do you want to know that? Of all the things you could have picked up on from our conversation, how and why did you zero in on that one?”

He came and knelt at my feet. Reaching up, he touched my cheek with his fingers, tracing the line a tear would take if I had let it fall. This more than the kiss, more than anything that had happened so far with us, touched me in a place that I had forgotten existed inside of me.

“When you told me, your eyes filled up. I saw you blink them back. You succeeded. But you couldn’t stop the initial emotional reaction. It has to be very powerful to do that to you. So far you’ve proven that you have very good control over your emotions.”

I felt defeated. And elated. And brazen. It didn’t matter anymore. “My stepbrother asked me to model for him.”

I’d never said it before and it came out so much more easily than I’d imagined it would, and much more violently. It filled the room with a dark fog that had a putrid sulfur smell, and I had to put my hand up to my mouth to stop from gagging.

Gideon got up and sat down next to me.

“When?”

“When I was seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen.”

The expression on his face was a mix of horror and an effort to hide that horror. “Your brother?”

“No. My stepbrother. My mother remarried when I was fifteen. Her husband had two children. A son who was two years older than me and a daughter four years older. Cole and I were never siblings. We never lived together in our parents house for longer than a few months at a time.”

“Is he a painter?”

“A photographer. You actually saw his work. In the museum last week. Cole Ballinger.”

He thought about it and then nodded. “Did he photograph you?”

“Yes.”

“Was the photograph in the museum you?”

I shook my head.

“But there are photographs of you.”

“That’s an understatement.”

He was looking at me but I turned away. I had never taken anyone where I was leading and I didn’t want to. It was all too complicated. I got up I walked over to the desk where I’d left my bag and saw the corner of an envelope under a stack of papers. I noticed the stamp and stared at it, the way you do when you are unfocused. There was something about it, but I was too distracted to focus.

“What happened?”

I turned on him. Like he had something to do with what had happened to me.

“It all happened a long time ago. It doesn’t matter any more.”

“Except it does. You’re still angry about it. What did he do?”

“Why? What will you do if I tell you? Say how sorry you are and I didn’t deserve it? It won’t make it go away. I won’t get myself back. The photographs are still out there. He’ll have his first show opening in a week. And there I’ll be. At least in black and white. Everything he stole from me. Up on the wall.”

He came up to me and took me by the arm and brought me back to the couch and then he pushed my head so that it was laying on his shoulder.

Neither of us said anything for a while. I was smelling his cologne and still tasting the wine, and listening to him breathing and thinking that if things were different it would be so easy to be there with him.

“I don’t understand,” he finally said. “What is it about the photographs that make them so awful?”

“My mother is
a photographer,” I told him. “Mostly landscape work. Lush, evocative work. When I was six my father died.” I thought I was repeating myself but I wasn’t sure. I could only tell the story in sequence. Like a litany.

“When I was fifteen she remarried Troy Ballinger A Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist. He had two children and was divorced. We never lived with his children who were both older than my sister and I were. But his son, Cole, spent a lot of time with us. Vacations, summers. We lived in Vermont, a large, old farm. I had a crush on Cole. From the minute I saw him. He was a bad boy, the kind that is irresistible to teenage girls. Irreverent, arrogant, sure of himself, and he was a photographer like his father. But he wasn’t going to work in journalism. He was enamored of the artistry and cutting edge imagery of Helmut Newton and Chris Von Wagenheim. He wanted to push boundaries. His photography was all about sex. My mother used to say he’d grow out of it. That it was merely hormones. His father fought with him and urged Cole to get a job with a newspaper and get some news experience. But Cole was rebellious. And the summer I was sixteen and he was eighteen, I was part of his rebellion.”

I was sitting in Gideon’s living room, but I was seeing the farm.

The air was redolent of the smell of cut grass. The strawberries were fat and shiny and, as I picked them, I couldn’t resist eating some. A fresh strawberry, warm from the sun and just plucked, is not like anything you can buy in a store. My fingers were stained red and I’m sure my lips were too. I was wearing shorts and an old shirt - open - with a tank top underneath and I’d smeared the juice from the fruit on my chest while trying to chase away mosquitoes.