Photographic (30 page)

Before he could say anything, offer help or ask if she were all right, she was up and out of the room. He flopped back into the couch and covered his eyes with his hand. This probably wasn’t the best first step to build his way back into her esteem.

His rest was still not to come. When it was time for bed, another round awaited. When he cautiously entered the master bedroom, she was there, taking off her earrings, ready.

“Are you the savior? Is that why you’ve come? Here on your white horse. Slay the dragon. Scale the castle wall. Rescue the princess and her babe.” She stood in the far part of the room, on the other side of the bed, pulling out the backs and clinking them in a little bowl on what looked like a make-shift dressing table. Her face was washed clean. He stood on the other side of the bed, his white shirt and light trousers pale in the dim room. 

“I came to see you. Make sure you’re all right. Beg your forgiveness. I'm sorry about before.” 

She gave another short laugh and bent over a little, rocking her head up and down.

What was so funny? Unconsciously repeating a comfort behavior from childhood, he rubbed his left earlobe between index finger and thumb. He sat down on the bed and patted the other side. She looked at the place and lowered herself there slowly. 

“Are you all right?”

“Don’t worry. It’s all in my head.”

“What’s that mean?”

She sniffed and shook her head. “I have pains, sometimes. There’s no cause. It’s psychosomatic.”

“Since when?”

“Since when do you think?” she said, pronouncing each word like a stone dropped in a well. 

He looked down. "It’s me. I did it.”

“Yes. You did.”

They were silent for a moment. She shifted back and leaned against the headboard. He did the same. 

“What have you been doing?” he asked.

“You wouldn’t believe it.”

“Oh?”

“I’ve been following your trail.”

He examined her. “Really. How did you do that?”

She licked her dry lips. “I found the people involved. I wanted to talk to them about it and get a better picture for myself.” 

He stared at her wide-eyed. “You’re kidding.”

There was a contrary amusement in her eyes. “No.”

He blinked as if looking too directly into the sun. “Who did you talk to?”

“Just two people. The important ones. Vaughn and Tor.”

“They talked to you?” He sounded as if he were trying to process this slowly, eating a smashed light bulb piece by piece.

“Yes. They were happy to. Well, not happy to, exactly. But they were willing, after I explained what I wanted to know.” 

“Huh.”

“Yup.”

“Did it…did it help?”

“Yes. I’d have to say it did.”

He cut another short look at her, then gazed off into the middle distance, into space, above their stretched-out legs. He stroked his chin. “I never thought you were coming here for that.”

“I didn’t know it myself, when I first got here, not consciously. I think it was buried deeper than that. But why was it I wanted to come here, of all places? I knew what I wanted to do as soon as I settled in. I had to have answers to some of my questions.”

“What did they tell you?”

Jane shook her head, looking down at Ian’s light brown hand on the duvet cover. She withdrew her attention from his hand and turned her head toward him. “I got a different perspective on the whole affair.” The light bulb wasn’t going down easily. “Tor manipulated the situation. He wanted that result. I think he’s done the same thing in another film. He practically admitted as much to me. It may have been before he was well-known, I don’t know. Of course, he stressed to me that all you had to do was say no, at any time. There’s no getting around that. It’s true.” She searched his face. It was immobile, yet etched with lines she’d never seen. “I found him grotesque. I might be putting it strongly.” She swallowed. “He’s full of a kind of power that is very persuasive. I could see how it might affect someone.”

Ian nodded. “It might.”

“Someone weak enough to fall in with him.” 

Ian’s voice rasped, “Someone like me.”

Jane’s eyes shone darkly in the dim room. “Like you.”

Later, Ian woke to find himself alone on the bed. Jane sat in the chair, watching him sleep. 

“I wrote something.”

“What’s that." He felt dull.

“I wrote something for you. About us. A sort of a poem.”

He said nothing.

“You want to hear it, or not?”

“All right.”

“I’d rather give it to you.” She opened a small notebook on her lap, took out a folded piece of paper and stood up to hand it to him. “I’ll leave you alone." She left the room. He unfolded it and read:

The focus, the light, 

the whispers, the night

all the magnification.

Careless the light 

shines ceaseless 

shines bright.

You bring it all 

I can’t keep it away.

I stand in the sun 

and let the burn come.

For falseness has stripped 

and bereft me.

He looked at the words for some time after he read it the first time. They ran together on the page. Rubbing his eyes he read it again, trying to figure it out. Only a few words scribbled on a page, but it felt for a dizzying moment as if he were pinned there, in that few words, and what his wife was willing to give, or give up, for him; a promise, or a retraction. It was important that he understand this. He would take it line by line. 

The focus. The focus had pretty much been on him, as far as the outside world went. Not much to argue over about that. In the marriage, he hoped it was more balanced than that, that she felt important and an equal member. 

Light. In his job the light had been on him, no doubt about that. But as a couple they had found light and joy together when they met and married. There was no monopoly on light for one or the other, although he had more light shed on him as an individual. Attention. Accolades. Endless praise partnered with endless criticism. She was dragged with him into the light, the harsh light of public examination, whether she wanted to be or not.

The night, that was their time together, their secret, the whisper in the dark between the two of them. There had never been anything wrong with that. 

Had he been careless? Ceaseless…she could be referring to the press attention he had been receiving. Or, some part of the attention she couldn’t control. 

He brought it all. So all the things she was referring to were part and parcel of him. Part of the cost of being with him. Also she had no control over these things. It implied a great responsibility laid at his feet. 

She takes it all. Letting the burn come. The pleasure of bathing in the light? Or letting herself be sacrificed to it?

The last line he decided not to think about. 

He found her in the kitchen. Neither of them mentioned the poem. Instead they discussed the photographers outside. 

“Now I know what they’re doing out there. They were waiting for you to show up. I don’t know why that didn’t occur to me. I was stumped, thinking, 'Why are they out there, they’ve got our pictures a dozen times over.' Stupid.”

“Let’s get away.”

“You mean go back home.”

“It doesn’t have to be if you don’t want to. They’re going to be wherever we go, now. They’re all worked up.”

“They used to leave us alone at home,” Jane grabbed a rag and wiped the kitchen table.

“That was when things were quiet and they had other stuff to write about. Right now it’s us.”

She draped the rag over the kitchen faucet. “You mean you.” She opened a cabinet, took down a stack of magazines and papers from a high shelf and held them out, “So I’ve read.”

“Christ, Jane,” He threw his head back and smacked his forehead with his palm. “Not you.” 

She sat down with the stack in front of her. “I’ve learned all kinds of things.”

“Bloody hell.” He scanned the headlines of the papers she had splayed out on the table.

“Rumors. People write all kinds of things. It doesn’t mean I believe them. They wrote I was living with a mystery man—that we left the flat separately to avoid being seen together. That was Beezer, Marta’s friend who stayed here a couple of days. We left at different times because we didn’t know each other—we had different lives. They can assign any meaning they want to behavior to slant it in a wicked direction. Now that I’ve been a victim of it, it helps me understand what happens to you.”

“Why are you reading it?”

Jane looked somewhat abashed. “I saw it as I walked by the little shops in the Underground. I bought one paper and I got hooked. Had to have them all.”

“Has it…” His eyes slewed away from her.

“What?”

“It’s changed what you think of me.” He didn’t say it as a question.

She shot him a look. “You managed that pretty well on your own. But as for all that.” She looked at the colorful pile. “It’s possible, I suppose. I didn’t think it had. It changed what I thought people think of you. Not people in general necessarily; the tabloid press. They have you in a particular box and that’s how they sell you, like a brand. Pictures of you with certain types of headlines. Maybe they monitor sales and the type of stories that sell, then write more of those. It must be how it works. Now they’re all about us getting a divorce. They’re getting a lot of mileage out of Tam and me coming to England. They thought it highly symbolic.” She stopped. 

“What?”

“Of course, curse them, it was. They can’t always be wrong.”

“Screw the tabloids, Jane. Why are you reading them
now
?”

“You weren’t here. I just wanted to keep abreast of the situation.”

He looked at her sitting there with the papers and magazines spread around in front of her, a rainbow of melodrama and hype dissecting their own lives, now seemingly made for consumption by his own wife.

“You’ve got to be joking.”

Jane went pale. “Don’t you dare tell me how I should get information about what’s going on." She spoke in a low voice that shook. "Forgive me if I don’t trust you as my number one source.” She pushed back from the table and stalked upstairs.

She gave him the cold shoulder all day. After dinner and telling stories, Tam tucked in bed, Ian followed her into her bedroom. She turned around and sat on the bed, looking at him steadily. He stopped and stood where he was, as if he’d hit an invisible force field. They communicated without words, one expression to another. Then he reached out a hand and said, “Pillow?” She tossed one to him. Clasping it from the air, he bowed his way out of the room with only a faint downward turn of the mouth and wandered around downstairs until he found, with some surprise, a third bedroom.

In Jane’s eyes the patching up of their damaged marriage was proving more difficult in actuality than in theory. She had begun to feel, before he arrived, that now she knew the worst: the healing could begin, pain would lessen, knowledge of each other increase. With the weaknesses identified in each of them they would sweep into a whole new level of understanding as individuals and as a couple. A breakthrough was burgeoning, only waiting for the right moment to be identified and experienced.

And yet, now that he was here, she felt a kind of rising panic at unexpected moments, a blind fear that if she let any vulnerability show it would only lead to more pain. She thought she’d worked through the most tortuous stages. She’d seen Vaughn, accepted her as a person—a fact, not a bad dream. That had been important. What happened had to be real. Yet somewhere at the bottom, still, she thought, that it’s a fact doesn’t help. It’s a fact and a fiction. And that it’s fiction doesn’t matter. It’s a betrayal. Where was the ground beneath her feet? Would she ever be able to feel security in her marriage again? She thought through all the things about herself, her own history that had contributed to this state of their marriage. All that she wanted to tell Ian. Her own life had matched up with his when they married and ran alongside it, their two lives parallel lines that ran closer together or farther apart depending on time and circumstance. What she was before she came to be in this marriage affected where she was this very day, to an extent she had not allowed herself to think about before speaking to Tor. 

Before she left home all she could think of was how Ian had willfully destroyed their relationship. It wasn’t so clear anymore.

 Both sides of the story, his and hers, were true. She’d thought her side much more righteous. Now she didn’t feel so righteous. She just felt ill. What she had to live with was a physical symptom, a pain in her stomach. It didn’t make any of her conclusions less pertinent. When it passed, if it did, then they would supposedly be in a different, healed relationship. Or this pain wouldn’t go away. It would destroy them. 

Her mind whirled deep into the night. She thought of him beneath her, alone in his bed. It was right this way. They were alone in mind and body now. Tomorrow they could speak of tonight’s thoughts. At last she slept.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

T
AM
WANTED
TO
stick to her Da like glue, for which Jane couldn’t blame her, but since grown-up time was of vital importance, Jane said it was either the nanny and the park, or Tam entertaining herself in her room. Jane ended up hiring the same nanny, Marie-Renée, whom Tam liked, to get some DVD’s for the two of them to watch on a little portable DVD player in Tam’s room. Until Marie-Renée arrived, Tam, Ian, and Jane played cards together on the kitchen table. Tam was a fierce competitor and watched them with eagle eyes to keep everything fair. She was bored of Crazy Eights and Kings on the Corner, which they often played, and asked to learn poker. Ian was starting to show her five-card draw when the nanny arrived.