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“What do you mean?”

“I mean.” Vaughn hesitated for a moment. “What happened wasn’t a reality that should affect you like this.”

“You don’t think the fact you had sex with my husband should affect me?”

Vaughn puffed her lips out in an exhalation. “When you put it like that, it doesn’t sound too good.”

“No, it doesn’t.” They sat there for a moment with that between them. Jane felt a quick wave of the nausea that had swept through her at intervals ever since she had known, when she thought of the sheer physical fact of it. Now, sitting here next to her, it was that much more real. It was a bitter medicine she took in swift gulps. She would feel it, feel it all. Every bit of pain and realness she would absorb and know, until it didn’t hurt, or turned into something else. No more would she turn away from shadows, trip blindly in false light, believe herself floating in imaginary perfection, deny the dark edges beating their way in. Now, the periphery, a feathery tunnel brushing at her cheeks, pinpointed the light in the irises of Vaughn’s eyes.

Barely able to speak, she said, “What I want to know is, why did you do it?” She stopped. “I really want to know.”

Vaughn shifted, uncrossing her legs and dropping both feet to the floor. She ran her hands through her hair. With a thoughtful tap to the end of her nose with one finger, she came to some decision. Pushing herself into the back of her chair, spine erect, she wiped her face clean of expression. She was so theatrical. Jane recognized the signs.

“I’ll show you. Watch.” As she looked at Jane, her expression changed, eyebrows rising, mouth softening, eyes drooping in concern: worry. Then her eyes warmed, growing brighter until delight shone in them: joy; then, another incarnation; she tucked her chin, eyes beckoning behind lowered lids: a siren call of desire. From seduction her expression took on a rosy look of satiation. Everything smoothed out at last as her green eyes relaxed into the calm radiance of love. Then a slow awareness, a fear. At last, the isolation of despair.

How she could express all this without words was a testament to her skill. Jane felt strange thrills run through her as she watched Vaughn, who had conjured real feeling with her mastery of feigned emotion. Without speaking, Vaughn had told a story, perhaps even given her defense. Or explanation. Her reason for doing something beyond the bounds of professional and personal ethics. She had left those limits for the chance to feel, or to project the feelings, she had shown Jane. That was how Jane intuited what Vaughn did.

They sat for a time, each with her own thoughts. Vaughn smiled briefly, pulled her hat on, got up and walked away to the back of the café, to the restroom, Jane assumed. She was a while getting back.

Vaughn had done it for the emotional ride. Was that what Ian had been trying to tell her he had experienced? But was what Vaughn had shown her the real thing or its counterfeit? Was it the character? When Jane turned around she saw Vaughn talking to a couple of people who looked like fans. The hat wasn’t an effective disguise, apparently. A 5’10” blonde was hard to camouflage. 

She found her way back to the table.

“Does it bother you?” 

“That? No. It’s nice, mostly. Don’t care for the mopeds with the telephotos, but what can you do. Of course, I don’t have it like Ian, that’s for sure.”

Jane felt herself one sentence away from getting emotional so she said nothing. She didn’t know how it was for him, anymore. They didn’t go out the kind of places where she could judge how it really was for him. She didn’t know the life of her husband. She wasn’t with him on location, at his work. She wasn’t with him when he had to be in Los Angeles. She wasn’t with him when he was in New York. They didn’t take trips anywhere anymore, because she couldn’t leave. This was the first trip she’d taken in six years. 

He might not miss her anymore, he’d been so long without her. How could she blame him, if he didn’t? He’d had to function on his own, just as she had to function without him on the farm alone. She didn’t want to, but she did. 

It was almost as if she were a widow. Not exactly that; then, there was no chance of ever seeing your spouse again, unless you believed in heaven. It was like she had a husband missing in action. He might or might not be back. He did not serve his country; he served a much more abstract and hard to quantify group and mission: to entertain and move the masses. Through him they feel, love, lust, cry, do all the things they dream of doing, wish they’d done, are grateful they’ve never done—it will all happen to him in place of them; he is their surrogate, their sacrificial lamb, their Judas goat, their ideal man, their dream lover; all things to all women and men. He is the mirror reflecting it all back. Their lives, if each life had the chance to be different. 

She felt a tear roll down her cheek. By turning her head to look at the pastry display she was able to catch it with her hand and wipe it away unseen. All things to them, and what was he to her? What was she to him? Pieces of him, the real man, were missing from her life. He wasn’t the husband she needed, and she wasn’t there for him as his wife. The crumbling had happened and she hadn’t noticed until she was standing on the edge looking down from the precipice. No. Until she had fallen to the bottom, broken into pieces.

Vaughn had looked the other way, giving her a moment. Jane got herself together. Some tension broke between them.

“It shouldn’t have happened.” Vaughn didn’t elaborate.

“No. Tell me what did happen.”

“Well.” Vaughn looked truly uncomfortable for the first time. “I’d say it wasn’t much like sex. More an exorcism.”

“Exorcism.” Jane examined the backs of her hands, folded in her lap, trying to understand this use of the word. She looked up. “Whose?”

“His.” Vaughn shifted. “I don’t know if this is helping.” 

“Yes. Jane tore a tissue to pieces. “Because I have to exorcise you. To do that I had to see you.” Jane noticed Vaughn’s momentary surprise; a drop in the mirror-like perfection of the pond. “You have to understand, your description is very different from Ian’s.”

“Oh?”

“He found it very emotional and affecting. It was a profound experience for him. He described it as cathartic.”

Vaughn nodded slowly. “An exorcism is cathartic, right? Getting rid of demons.” She reached for her purse and dug around until she pulled out an e-cig. After a deep inhale she held it stiff in one hand. “Trying to quit. Men and women maybe experience these things differently. That day was a strange one.”

Jane nodded. “I have visions in my head, flashes of it. It’s very real.”

Vaughn’s clear eyes examined her. “It’s like you’re watching us.”

“Yes.” Jane gave herself up to Vaughn’s cat eyes, stared into their metallic depths.

“Can you feel what it’s like in the cave, what the mood is?” Vaughn’s words were measured.

Jane felt the sick feeling in her stomach that came over her whenever she had the visions. “Intense.”

“Yes.” Vaughn leaned forward. “Intense…what else?”

Jane swallowed and a sickening wave sank through her, as if he’d just told her. “Passionate.”

“Passionate.” Vaughn’s voice grew low and soft. “The question is, what sort of passion have we between these two lovers? Do they feel the same for one another? Is it passionate love they feel? Or are they at odds in their desires? By fortune, a mortal who Calypso passionately desires washes up on her beach. She knows he loves a mortal woman. This is her last night, of all those years she kept him away from his love. It’s her last chance to take what she wishes he gave her freely. It’s not very likely another Odysseus will come her way.” Her voice hypnotized Jane, like her eyes. 

“Then there is Odysseus. All those years longing for his wife, but by night lying with Calypso, his captor. He must take pleasure in this, as well, no? They have a kind of bestial attraction, but it palled for him long ago. It benefits him to do what Calypso wants. How would he feel about a woman, even a goddess, who gives him pleasure, forces him to give her pleasure, and keeps him from his one true aim?” 

Jane was silent.

“Well?”

“I don’t know. He would…he’d have mixed feelings.” Jane felt disoriented, her thinking muddled. “He wouldn’t like it. She’d stand in the way.”

Vaughn leaned back, smiling a wintry smile. “Exactly.” She tucked the substitute cigarette away in her jacket and reached for her forgotten cup of tea. “And that’s how it was in the cave that day.” After sipping, she placed her cup on its saucer and took a lipstick out of her bag, applying it with the aid of a small mirror. Her lips grew red as she passed her finger over the lipstick and then ran it carefully back and forth over her mouth. “You know, there really is a word for what she’s doing to him. Not a very nice one.” She clicked the mirror shut and capped the lipstick. Tossing them in her bag, she still ran her index finger over her lower lip, massaging the color in further. “And all that is why I’m a mirage.” 

“You’re not a mirage. You’re real. Why couldn’t it have been acted that way, just as well? You made yourself real when you had sex with him. You betrayed my trust.”

“Let’s get it straight. He did. I didn’t make you any promises.”

“It’s basic decency. Haven’t you been cheated on?”

Vaughn was still. She nodded once.

“So can you imagine having a conversation with the third party, what that would feel like? You’re an expert in emotions.”

“Um, yeah. Yeah.”

“What about the feelings Ian had? It was an epiphany. What was the epiphany?”

“I don’t know. Who knows what he was using for his part. I used the character’s situation, and that’s what I played and felt. We weren’t there as Ian and Vaughn, as far as I was concerned. That wouldn’t have felt right for me. Maybe it doesn’t seem like much. There’s a clear distinction in my mind. We were our characters just as much, only in a more intimate circumstance than normal.”

“You felt physical pleasure.”

Vaughn was silent.

“Who was feeling good? You or Calypso?”

“Does Ian know you’re here?”

“Why? Do you talk to him?”

“No!” Vaughn looked upset. “My God, Jane, it’s not like that. There’s no relationship. There wasn’t before and there isn’t now. It was work.”

“Sex work.”

“Why aren’t you grilling Ian? I’m not married to you, Jane. He’s married to you.”

“Not for long.”

“Really? You’re going to break up?”

“Would you stay?”

“If I loved the person. If that person loved me. Yes, I would.”

“Love isn’t enough. You need trust.”

“He should have talked to you before.”

“You think I would have given the go-ahead?”

“Everybody’s relationship is different. There are all kinds of marriages that work.”

“Ours isn’t like that. Or it wasn’t.”

“You’ve never wandered outside the bounds?”

Jane shook her head.

“It’s a hard life, Jane. It sounds ridiculous, because there’s loads of money and we’re the lucky few. But it’s a lonely, lonely life. It’s isolating, it’s disconnecting, it tends to make you feel like a freak and apart from ordinary life. It makes you think you deserve some comfort where you can get it.”

“You’re contradicting yourself. You said it was in character.”

“I wasn’t talking about that. I was talking about fooling around when you’re away from home. It honestly, honestly wasn’t fooling around for me. Did I feel some pleasure? Yes. But it was just body parts. He didn’t…it didn’t go until the point of no return. It was a little more than the simulation we do anyway--that gets pretty damn intimate. It was one step further than that. He doesn’t care about me. He doesn’t love me. He loves you.

“Yeah. I was his Penelope.”

Vaughn’s face was stricken.

“I don’t know how Tor got two actors to agree to this. It’s not something that happens. It’s outside the boundaries. Why? Why did it happen?” Jane tried not to let her face betray her as she asked the questions she had to ask, that she had flown across an ocean to ask. 

Vaughn didn’t respond right away. She looked out the window at the passersby, the paleness of her complexion illuminated by the watery sunlight pouring through the bow window. She looked like a Waterhouse painting: siren or Lady of Shalott.

“I don’t know how Tor chose us or thought to do what he did. It’s not like he ever exactly asked us. I don’t know how it happened. Maybe there was something about the combination of the three of us that made it possible. You’re right; it’s not something done in our world. I can’t explain myself, and I never thought I’d be sitting with Ian’s wife trying to do so. If I had known I’d have to someday, maybe I wouldn’t have done it. It was something that evolved organically. A kind of intimacy, you could say, and then also, the opposite, this oppressive feeling, like a shadow, when you’re cold suddenly and you don’t know why—you look up, and the sun’s disappeared behind a skyscraper. He has that kind of power, Tor: spreading a shadow. Even so, beautiful things spring up next to the place where he presses his thumb. I don’t know if I can explain it better than that.”

Lulled by the dreamy images Vaughn conjured, by her growly, sing-song voice, Jane was sure Vaughn’s words contained more information than she could immediately understand. She would have to tear apart all Vaughn had said, later, when she was alone. 

She forced herself to ask. “Who brought the condoms?”

Vaughn froze; her lips parted. 

“Someone had to have planned ahead.” She would get the the grim details. She had to know. 

“Tor had them. It was Tor.”

“Thanks.” 

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.” She didn’t tear up, or give false sympathy. But regret was written plain enough on her face now she was face to face with Jane. Could one be cuckolded by a woman? Jane had attended enough of Ian’s Shakespearean plays to become familiar with the term. Their eyes met and there was a flash of understanding between them. For a bizarre moment Jane felt as if she were Ian, looking out of Ian’s eyes, and she could see why he could do what he did with this woman before her. She nodded, acknowledging Vaughn’s apology. She turned her head away to squint into the window, eyes watering at the light knifing into her eyes, facing the unlikely brilliance of a sun-shot London morning.