Lying In Bed (4 page)

He opened the book.

The fluttering inside my stomach could not have been more intense if he had literally pushed my legs apart with his knees

Forcing my concentration back to the desk, the scrapbook, my work and the store, I tried to ignore my body’s intense reaction.

Where was it coming from? Why was it happening? This wasn’t like me – to be attracted to someone I didn’t know.

Men who are attached to other women yet manage to move you, are dangerous the same way a mercury spill is. The mineral glitters and teases attracting with its pretty, slick, smoothness. Looking at it you can almost forget that it is in fact, poison. But you mustn’t.

“Here,” I said, pulling the first letter out from it’s the clear plastic sleeve. “You should look at it the way the person does who gets it. The letters are as much about touch and feel and smell as they are about words.”

I leaned over my desk, awkwardly using my left hand since my right was hurt. His eyes took in my movements and my skin burned where his eyes traveled.

If he looks up at me now, I thought, I’ll ask him about this combustion. If he feels it too. If he knows why it is happening. But he was already looking down at the letter I had succeeded removing it from its cover and handed to him.

The words were written in a vibrant, verdant green ink on parchment paper that I had decorated with pressed flowers, a scattering of pine needles and a border of moss-colored ribbon. An original Victorian vignette of a brilliant red cardinal perched on the crossbar of the large capital H that began the first word.

“You’re an artist,” he said sounding surprised and – what was it? Disappointed? Annoyed? Something I couldn’t figure out.

I shrugged. “This is only how I earn my living. What I really do is create collages.” I nodded towards my wall where some of my personal work hung. “But it’s not easy to make a living at fine arts and garrets don’t appeal to me. Besides there are no garrets in New York anymore.”

“No, I imagine not.” He laughed and looked around my little office now, his eyes taking in the sketches on the wall and the three hanging boxed collages. If people even noticed them, they usually merely glanced at them, but Gideon put the letter down on the desk, got up and walked over to inspect my work more closely. He stood, silently, in front of the first, looking at it for a long time, and then gave the second an equal viewing.

“You have an amazing imagination and great eye,” he finally said and then sat down, picking up the letter again. “So do you design every letter?”

“Yes. Unless someone hires me to be the author. Then they write it out in their own handwriting on their stationery or cards that they can pick out here.”

He ran a finger over the smooth nap of the translucent paper and down the satin border. He touched everything, I realized. My hand, the Band-Aid, the cover of the book. As if he knew it better by touching it. Then, lifting it to his face, he inhaled.

I’d used real pine needles, rubbing and crushing them into the back of the paper infusing it with the green, minty scent. And he was taking it in.

I expected him to read it, of course, but what I hadn’t anticipated, what had never happened in the months since I had started writing Lady Chatterley’s Letters, was that he would read what I had written out loud.

But he did. Unlike his own staccato way of talking, the story had an abundance of words and he read them smoothly and much to my surprise, lushly. His voice was dark and his head was down, so I couldn’t see the expression on his face and he couldn’t see the one on mine. For which I was thankful.

Hearing the music, I thought it was the sound of a brook running through the forest. Smelling the perfume, I thought there were flowers growing deep in the woods. The taste of the air had to be the taste of the trees
.

I didn’t expect you to be the source of both the sounds and the scents and tastes
.

The tree trunk was as thick as two men and hid me well so I stood there holding onto the bark, letting it bite into my fingers while I watched
.

I should be sorry I stole time that we could have been holding each other but I had to watch you there by yourself, I had to see you like that, unaware of me, but waiting for me
.

The bed you had found for us had a canopy of leaves, interwoven, crisscrossed, filtering out all but slim rays of light that fell on your breasts. The headboard was made of rocks covered in soft moss, two inches thick
.

I had never heard anyone read aloud what I had written. Even though I had consultations with my clients so I could tailor the content to personal taste, I composed the letters and stories alone, in my apartment, after I came home from work, dinner with friends, or one of the many disappointing first or second dates that rarely inspired me to accept any more.

And so hearing Gideon read my story disoriented me. Listening to the phrases that until that afternoon had existed only as thoughts inside my head or in calligraphy on paper, filtered through his voice, was a violation of my privacy. Invading without invitation.

Who was this man to walk in to Grace’s store to buy one thing and instead steal something else?

I wanted to reach across the desk, grab the book and tell him to go away the way I might tell a man I didn’t know well to leave the room if he had accidentally walked in on me while I was getting undressed.

Instead, I crossed my legs over each other, moved my arms into an X on my chest, shifted in my seat enough so that I was facing away from him, bit the inside of my cheek and waited for him to finish. I didn’t ask him to stop reading even though it was what I wanted to do. Instead I convinced myself I was overreacting and waited him out.

Grace had taught me how to treat clients, to be polite and respectful even when I didn’t feel it they deserved it. So I sucked in my outrage and tried to think of something – anything – else so I wouldn’t hear his articulation of my secrets.

But I couldn’t.

You were naked, your skin dappled with the yellow light that sneaked through the trees. A single beam flashed off of the flute you held up to your lips as you pressed a kiss to the opening
.

It was like watching you take another man in your hands and into your mouth. And I was jealous that you would treat an inanimate object so intimately: coaxing melody from its shaft the way you coax pleasure from mine
.

There were leaves woven into your hair, caught up in the curls, and flecks of earth on your bare back and legs. Wide bracelets made of soft willow branches braided together decorated your wrists and ankles
.

It was difficult, in that low, green-tinged light to know where you began and where the forest ended
.

I tried to stay quiet and still but the moan escaped of its own volition. And when you heard it over the music and turned, when I saw how happy you were to see me, I wasn’t sorry anymore that I had stolen those five minutes to watch you when I could have been with you, on you, or inside of you. I would have missed the expression on your face if I had. And that, would have been a shame
.

Finally he stopped
reading, slipped the letter back into its plastic sleeve and turned to the next page. But I couldn’t just sit there and watch him read another. I got up.

“I feel sick…” I mumbled and I walked out of my office.

I used to know what it was like to be stripped bare in front of a man but I had no interest in experiencing anything like it again.

It was only when I stepped out onto the floor that I knew I was looking for Grace. To ask her to take over for me with Gideon Brown. To hope she would read something in my mood or my inflections or my eyes that would encourage her to take me in her arms and hug me and tell me that everything would be all right. To be, for a few minutes, the recipient of the motherly Grace that was the best she offered.

I’d never walked out on a client before. But she and I had talked about the possibility of needing to when I first went to work for her. She warned me that it was conceivable for a man or, for that matter, a woman to come in ostensibly to hire me to write a letter, but to take advantage of our being in a room alone together. The fact that I wrote erotic letters and stories for hire might not be that far a leap for someone to make and assume I would perform for them in some erotic way also. So we had a protocol set up: an alarm button under my desk that I could press without anyone noticing and hat would alert her and most of the rest of the sales staff.

I’d never had to use it. I’d never been in danger with a customer. And the kind of danger I felt from Gideon was not like that. It was inside my head.

I’d forgotten to use the button. My need to get away from him quickly had been that urgent.

In front of me was the central, wide-open aisle that branches off into all the different areas of the store. Grace might be working in any one of them.

First, I walked through the ribbon department where Debra, a saleswoman, was working with a customer in front of the kaleidoscopic wall of ribbons, arranged row after row by color.

Debra was taking out spools of different blues, holding them against a sheet of foil wrapping paper, waiting for the customer’s yea or nay, and then putting them back. Ephemera stocks more than 500 different ribbons which sell by the foot or the yard. The most expensive, at fifty dollars a yard, was made of hand sewn lavender florets surrounded by leaves.

Some ribbons were edged with gold, others were wired so that once the bows were formed they would hold their shape. There were heavy satins and silks in every hue, in several different thicknesses, from a quarter of an inch to three inches. Grosgrain, chiffon, tapestry, patterns, and solids. We even stock a ribbon made of real silver so thin you could use it to sew with.

Grace wasn’t in the decorative paper department either. We offer a selection of more than 100 different designs from all over the world. Large sheets, 24 inches by 36 inches, hung over wooden dowels the way newspapers were sometimes displayed in libraries.

We had more than two dozen different marbleized papers all made in Florence, Italy. Flames of gold, oranges, reds, or swirls of turquoise, azure and purple. Other papers came from China and Japan, some made from rice with petals of real flowers woven into their fibers, or printed with vibrant colors, repeating patterns of fans, butterflies or wisteria blossoms.

You could also find paper in several sizes in every solid color from rustic browns to shimmering sea green. Most had envelopes to match.

Continuing on, I glanced at the wooden glass-fronted cabinets that display a wide assortment of writing instruments – from expensive lacquer Mont Blancs to unusual, old fashioned fountain pens that need to be dipped in ink wells. But she wasn’t working there. Nor was she at the showcase of antique seals or two shelves of sealing wax in brilliant shades.

Crisscrossing through side aisles of arts and crafts items, greeting cards, the pre-made stationery, journals - some covered in alligator, others in suede, date-books and photo albums, I kept looking for her. Usually walking through this Ali Baba’s cave of delight stimulates my senses. Normally I stopped to look at the ribbons, the papers, the imagery on the stickers to hunt around the hundreds of rubber stamps and get inspiration on how to decorate the letter I was working on.

But that afternoon, I could only see the afterimage of Gideon Brown sitting at my desk reading my work and feeling as if he was rifling through my underwear drawer.

No one had ever requested a letter that I hadn’t been able to write. But I was sure than no matter what he wanted, it would be beyond my ability, so I wanted Grace to intercept. To go to him and tell him I’d gotten a phone call, or gone out into the street for a cigarette and been struck down by a car, or arrested, or taken away in an ambulance. Anything.

I found my boss, working in the personalized stationery area near the front with an elderly woman dressed in an expensive gray linen suit.

From the number of sample books on the table in front of them, it looked as if the appointment had been going on for a long time. An effort that would exhaust me energized Grace. She is an artist with type and color and paper, and so good with people she never cares how long it takes to match the design to the occasion.

She looked up when I approached and read my face in an instant.

Grace Greene is thirty-eight years old, with a rounded physique that Renaissance painters would have loved. Her reddish blonde hair, thick and wild, sets off her heart shaped face like a baroque frame around a fine oil. Her clothes are vintage from the ’40s or ’50s and she wears them with antique paste jewelry that blazes with rubies, emeralds, or sapphires. She’s a work of art in progress, someone you notice, who makes you smile, because she so clearly enjoys herself and her life. The eternal optimist, the most supportive friend I’ve ever had and someone who has never failed to offer me the best advice. As long as she doesn’t tell me she divines it, I try to pay attention.

Her parents had first opened Ephemera as an art supply store named Greene’s Arts in the early ’70s at the same time that SoHo was being claimed by artists who were attracted by the old, rundown warehouses that offered huge spaces with cheap rents, great light, and a law that granted them the right to live as well as work in these previously commercial buildings.

In the early ’90s, along with the help of their two children, Grace and Joshua, the Greenes had morphed the store into what it was now. They’d also opened two other branches, both farther uptown.

Grace has been managing the SoHo store as well as the amazingly successful Ephemera website since she graduated from Wharton Business School and, until he died Joshua had been the buyer, traveling all over the world, searching and selecting the papers, ribbons, journals and albums, pens, and other unique items on the shelves.

“Are you okay?” Grace smiled as she looked up at me and pushed her hair out of her eyes.

“I didn’t know you were busy.”