Lying In Bed (27 page)

Jeff didn’t argue and in his silence was a worse indictment than if he had.

He was right, though, I thought, after we got off the phone. And Gideon had been right, too. I couldn’t run away from this, too. I had to deal with Cole, finally.

The gallery was in Chelsea, about a dozen blocks from my loft, so I walked. Slowly. It was the second week of June and the sun had starting to drop, bathing the streets in its glow. People were going home from work or going out for the night and, as I passed through their groups, I wished I could walk up to them and ask if I could join and go where they were going, become part of their lives for this one night so that I didn’t have to be part of mine.

Desperately slowly, I walked the last two blocks. Wishing something would happen so that I’d have a good excuse for turning back. My cell phone didn’t ring. A police car didn’t come careering down the street knocking, me down.

Step after excruciating step, I got closer, until I was standing in front of the gallery.

With great trepidation I peered in through the large plateglass windows, wanting to see the photographs on the wall before I stepped inside, to reassure myself that Cole had been telling me the truth, that there were no shots of me.

But there were too many people milling around: I couldn’t see the walls.

I noticed my mother in a peach-colored jacket, white shirt, and black pants. She was standing with my stepfather. If I could catch her eye maybe she’d come out, so that I wouldn’t have to walk in alone.

While I watched, I saw Cole walk up to them, smiling and gesturing with his hands. He was in his element, with all the attention on him.

Two people I didn’t know approached from the south and looked at me strangely as they passed me on their way to the door. It must have looked strange. I was, like the poor little match seller, standing outside looking in.

How long could I wait? Until the crowd thinned out? Until the party ended? Until tomorrow?

And then, like an answered prayer, my mother did notice me. Smiling her broad grin, waving, gesturing to me to come inside. But I couldn’t move. She frowned then, gestured again. And finally seeing that I wasn’t making any progress, she excused herself from the people around her and came outside.

“Marlowe,” she cried as she hurried over and enclosed me in a big hug. Oh, how I wanted to stay there, safe in her arms, pretending to be six or seven years old, having her take care of me.

“What are you doing outside? This is so exciting. Come in. Come in. We’ve been waiting for you. It’s so wonderful. Everyone’s here.” And then she rattled off a list of names: dealers, collectors, critics, old friends of hers and my stepfather’s. The who’s who of the photography world. It was a proud night for her and for Cole’s father who both had stood on this same precipice years before.

My mother was usually more sensitive to my emotions, but her own were too high to notice that something was wrong with me, and I was petrified. Taking me by the hand, she pulled me inside.

The air smelled of all the different colognes and perfumes and fresh flowers arranged in large vases around the wide-open space. The crowd was thick, and I almost lost her as she led me towards my stepfather.

I could see the back of her jacket and followed, clearing the crowd. Troy took me in his arms and kissed my cheek. And it was when he finally let go of me that the people in front of us moved, revealing, at last, the wall beyond.

That’s when I got my first glimpse of Cole’s photographs.

Breaking away, I walked closer, toward a black and white shot of a woman’s naked torso, twisted in obvious passion, sweat glistening on her skin.

Her skin.

Not mine.

I took a breath that felt like my first in awhile. And then, more quickly I began to make my way around the room, almost racing as I looked at each photograph just long enough to check.

Not me.

Not me.

Not me.

I’d done two walls of the front room and started on the third.

Not me.

Not me.

And then, there I was.

Me; half of my naked torso thrust out in a blatantly sexual pose.

The heat rose to my face. My cheeks burned. I was afraid to take the next step, to look at the next photograph.

But I did.

My mouth. Open. Waiting. Ready. The lips pouting. The tip of my tongue the center of the shot. Damn. I moved on.

In the next photo, a woman - from mid-hip level - naked, standing in a thicket of daylilies. The flowers all open and full. My legs were partially covered by the leaves. My thatch of pubic hair was half hidden by blossoms. So suggestive.

I spun around and found my mother in the opposite corner of room. Had she seen these, looked at them, studied them? Of course she had. And yet she hadn’t guessed?

How was that possible? I was her daughter?

But she didn’t know what my eighteen-year-old body, my nineteen-year-old legs, my seventeen-year-old mouth, looked like out of context and in such lascivious poses.

A mother doesn’t know her children naked as adults, or their features suffused with desire.

Three walls done. One left.

Damn you, Cole.

The next wall was all me. Eight separate shots of my bare breast. A sequence of a headless female taking off her bra, then touching herself, exploring, arousing, brazenly showing off for someone beyond the frame.

I went to the first in the sequence. 18 by 24 inches.

Simple, two-inch, flat black wooden frames.

A single sheet of glass.

They were hung at eye level.

I only had to reach a little to pull the first one off of the wall. It was in my hands, I was holding on to it. I never thought about being strong or weak until then. Lifting it as high over my head as I could, I took a deep breath and threw it down hard on the floor at my feet.

I watched it fall, saw my own breasts flying through the air and then landing and saw glass shatter across the shot. With my foot, I kicked at it, and then took three steps and stood on it. Feeling the heels of my shoes breaking through the paper, hearing it tear.

I don’t know how many people turned and looked, I didn’t care. I had moved backward and was pulling the second photograph off the wall. Now smarter, not bothering with throwing it on the floor, but instead, taking it with both hands and smashing it against the wall. I reached for a shard of glass and ripped at the photograph with it, slashing my torso into thin irregular strips, turning my breasts into torn paper and meaningless pulp.

If anyone one was speaking, I couldn’t hear them.

I pulled off a third photograph. Like all the others, it was black and white, but there was red on the glass. I didn’t stop to wonder where it had come from; it didn’t matter. I had to destroy this one, too. This one most of all. My hands holding my breasts, offering them to him as if they were food. I dropped it. Stomped on it. Heard cruel music, like ice breaking, felt my feet sinking into the paper.

“You’re hurt.”

I didn’t stop.

“Marlowe. You’ve cut your hands. Stop. You are bleeding.” The voice was like wind in a storm.

I looked up.

Gideon was standing in front of me, pulling the fourth frame out of my hands, letting it drop to the floor, gently taking my hands and inspecting them. Then quickly, no longer gentle, he grabbed my sweater off of my shoulders and wrapped it tightly around my right hand, making a tourniquet. He worked fast and was done in seconds.

I heard the screaming now: a deep lion’s roar, so loud I wondered how I had not heard it before.

“You crazy lunatic bitch…” Cole’s voice was coming from somewhere in the background.

Gideon wrapped the sleeve around my hand once more.

“How dare you? Who do you think you are to come in here and do this to me?” Cole was only inches away from me, screaming.

Gideon pulled at both sleeves, using them to tie a tight knot.

“You think you ruined my show? You think I don’t have the negatives?” His words were like a crazy rain coming down on me but not bothering me at all. I was dry. Protected from him now. But still he yelled: “This will make everyone want to see them more.

Gideon finished making the knot. There was blood seeping through already. He had me by the arm, walking me quickly towards the door. I saw faces, astonished, frightened, fascinated. None I knew. Where was my mother? Gideon was on the phone, talking about an ambulance, saying yes, yes, we’re on 26th street.

“We are close enough to get there in cab. They said it would be faster,” he told me and my mother.

We approached the door. Behind me Cole was still screaming. At my back. I turned. Looked at him. Fought off Gideon’s pull. I had something to say. The blood was immaterial to me in the face of this confrontation. “If you don’t take the photographs of me out of the show. If you put one of them back up, I’ll tell everyone how old I was. I’ll tell everyone the truth.” I was hissing. A voice I didn’t recognize. Not mine. But a fearless voice. The voice of someone very brave who didn’t care who knew about her. Who knew that it didn’t really matter anymore.

I’d taken back whatever Cole had taken from me. It was all mine again. He hadn’t really ever touched me, had he? Hadn’t taken anything that was precious or real. It was all my perception. I’d allowed myself to be shamed by what I’d done.

He had stopped speaking and stood there staring at me. And, finally, he looked afraid.

I laughed. Gideon, his hand still on my arm, ushered me out and into the street where he hailed a taxi and rushed me the eight blocks to the hospital.

The cut on
the fleshy part of my forefinger was deep enough to require dozens of stitches, but I hadn’t done any nerve damage.

While the doctor worked on me, Gideon stood beside me and watched. I didn’t. I looked at Gideon. And then, while the doctor was still working on me, my mother arrived. She stood behind me with her hand on my right shoulder. I could hear her rapid breath.

When the doctor was done, he gave my mother instructions on how to take care of the wound. “I’d like your daughter to stay here for another half-hour. I’ll let the nurse know. And then you can take her home.” He focused on me. “I’m going to give you a scrip for pain killers. There’s an allnight drugstore about three blocks from here. You’re going to need them.” He wrote out a prescription and held it out toward me. Gideon took it.

After the doctor left, my mother introduced herself to Gideon and then she turned to me.

They’d given me something and I felt lightheaded and sleepy. I tried to concentrate and connect to her emotional words but couldn’t.

“I don’t understand,” her eyes were filled with tears. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Gideon stood up. He looked from her to me. “I’m going. You two need to talk.”

“I…Mom, I can’t…not now…” There was too much for me to figure out. Gideon getting ready to leave. I didn’t want him to go until I found out why he had been there. He had been at the gallery. It was astounding to me. I hadn’t seen him there until he was standing next to me taking the photograph out of my hands. Why had he been there?

My mother was watching me, waiting for me to answer her. I didn’t. Instead I asked Gideon: “I don’t understand, why were you there?”

“I’ll explain that to you when you’re feeling better. Call me, tomorrow, when you wake up. I’d like you too. Please?” He put his hand on my shoulder, bent down, and brushed the top of my head with his lips.

“I will.”

“Does it hurt much?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“It will. It will throb later. Don’t suffer with it. Take the meds.”

I nodded.

“The other pain, it’s gone now, isn’t it?”

I couldn’t answer but there was no question what he was talking about. The release I’d felt while I was smashing the photographs. I didn’t have to ask him how he knew. I was used to him knowing by now. But I didn’t understand what I was supposed to do about him. A man who wasn’t free was the one who’d gotten under my skin and opened me up. Where did that leave me?

My mother took
me home, tucked me into bed, and let me sleep.

I woke up at eleven and she was still there. Working at cleaning the piles of papers and magazines, and trying to bring some order to the mess. I watched her before I said anything. It was just so comforting to be there, my head resting on the pillow, the covers pulled around me, with her there, taking care of me.

“You don’t need to do that,” I finally said.

“No. But it was something to do. Are you hungry?”

“Thirsty.”

She came back with a glass of ginger ale for me and a glass of wine for herself, and then she climbed onto the bed and sat beside me and we finally talked to me about what had happened all those years ago that she hadn’t noticed.

“Don’t blame yourself. We were very good at sneaking off by ourselves,” I told her.

“But it never occurred to me to even worry about the two of you. He was such a wonderful older brother to you. Showing you how to do so many things you didn’t know how to do–” she broke off realizing what she’d said.

I laughed. She looked horrified. “Mom, it was so long ago.”

“But he took advantage of you. Terrible advantage of you. And I didn’t even know what you were going through.”

“I wasn’t going through anything until we broke up. For three years I thought I was in love with him.”

“He hurt you,” she said, her voice cracking now. My mother didn’t often cry. She was strong and always the reasonable, logical one. “Your father was the first person I was in love with. Did you know that? I was seventeen. I wish you could have had a first experience like that. One you’d look back on without regret.”

“I don’t regret it. Even now, knowing I wasn’t… that it wasn’t him at all… but who I was with him… I’m not sorry about it. Not anymore.” I looked down at the bandage on my hand. The Novocaine was starting to wear off and the throbbing was beginning.

My mother noticed the expression on my face. “Do you want some of your pills?”

I nodded and she got up, reached into her purse, pulled out the painkillers.