Summer's End (17 page)

“I was just thinking that this is all rather like a honeymoon. Or a very good marriage.”

“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never had either one.”

“Didn’t you have a honeymoon?”

“Not really. We spent it in New York. She was an actress and she was in something off Broadway, so we spent a night at the Plaza in New York. When the play folded, we went up to New England.”

“Did the play have a long run?” She looked admiring, with her big, innocent, green eyes. Ben smiled.

“Three days.” They both laughed, and Ben moved onto his side, so he could look at Deanna. “Were you happy with Marc before I came along?”

“I thought I was. Sometimes. Sometimes I was terribly lonely. We don’t have a relationship like this. In a way we’re not really friends. We love each other, but… it’s very different.” She remembered their last conversation when he had told her not to show her work. He was still the voice of authority. “He doesn’t respect me the way you do— my work, my time, my ideas. But he needs me. He cares. In his own way he loves me.”

“And you love him?” His eyes searched her face. She didn’t answer immediately.

“I thought we weren’t going to talk about things like that. This is
our
summer.” There was reproach in her voice.

“But it’s also
our
life. There are some things I need to know.” He was strangely serious.

“You already know them, Ben.”

“What are you saying?”

“That he’s my husband.”

“That you won’t leave him?”

“I don’t know. Do you have to ask me that now?” Her eyes held an autumnal sorrow. “Can’t we just have what we know we can have, and then—”

“And then, what?”

“I don’t know yet, Ben.”

“And I promised I wouldn’t ask. But I find that increasingly difficult.”

“Believe it or not, so do I. My mind drifts to the end of the summer, and I ask myself questions I can’t answer. I keep hoping for an act of God, a miracle, something that will take the answers out of our hands.”

“So do I.” He smiled at her then and leaned over to kiss her lips again and again. “So do I.”

12

“Ben?” He smiled to himself as Deanna’s voice reached him from his spare room. It was late on a Sunday night, and they were just back from another weekend in Carmel.

“What? Need some help?” All he heard was a shout and a gurgle of laughter. She had been in there for over an hour. He climbed out of bed and went to see what was going on. As he opened the door to the spare room, in which he often worked, she was staggering to hold up a tenuously piled stack of canvases which had started to slide off a mountain of boxes propped against the wall.

“Help! It’s an avalanche.” She peeked out at him, a small paintbrush clenched in her teeth, and both arms held aloft, trying to keep the pile of paintings from crashing to the floor. “I came in here to sign a few that I noticed I had forgotten to sign, and….” She shoved the paintings aside as he lifted them from her arms. Then, his hands still filled with the mountain of her work, he bent his head to kiss the tip of her nose.

“Take the paintbrush out of your mouth.”

“What?” She looked at him with an expression of absentminded pleasure. She was still thinking about two of the paintings she knew she had to sign.

“I said”—he put the paintings carefully aside, and reached for the brush with one hand—“take that thing out of your mouth.”

“Why? This way I have my hands free to look for….” But he silenced her almost immediately with a kiss.

“That’s why, you dummy. Now, are you coming to bed?” He pulled her close to him, and she nestled against him with a smile.

“In a minute. Can I just finish this?”

“I don’t see why not.” He sat down in the comfortable old chair at his desk and watched her ferret through the stack again looking for unsigned canvases. “Are you as excited as I am, madam, about the show?” It was only four days away. Thursday. He was finally going to launch her into the art world. She should have been showing for years. He looked at her with pleasure and pride, as she stuck the end of the brush through her hair to free her hands once again. There was a huge smile on her face. It not only played with her mouth, it danced in her eyes.

“Excited? Are you kidding? I’m half crazy. I haven’t slept in days.”

He suspected it was true. Every night when they went to bed, he looked sleepily into her eyes after their hours of lovemaking, and the last thing he remembered was always that smile. And suddenly in the mornings she was wide awake now. She jumped up and got him breakfast, then disappeared into the spare room where she had put all her work. She had brought her treasures to him, to keep until the show. She didn’t even want them in the gallery until the day before the opening.

Now she signed the last one and turned to him with a grin. “I don’t know if I’ll make it till Thursday night.”

“You will.” He glowed as he watched her. What a beautiful woman she was. She seemed even prettier lately, her face had a soft, luminous beauty, and her eyes a kind of passionate fire. There was a tenderness and a burning about her all at once, like a velvet flame. And their time together had a magic about it, like nothing he had ever known. The little cottage in Carmel fairly hummed with her presence, filling the rooms with flowers, bringing back huge pieces of driftwood which they lay against as they toasted their feet near the fire on “their” dune just outside. She filled his dreams and his arms and his days. He could no longer imagine a life without her.

“What are you thinking?” She tilted her head to one side, and leaned against the stack of her paintings.

“About how much I love you.”

“Oh.” She smiled, and her eyes softened as she looked into his eyes. “I think about that a lot.”

“About how much I love you?” He smiled and so did she.

“Yes. And about how much I love you. What did I ever do before you came along?”

“You lived excessively well and never made your own breakfast.”

“It sounds awful.” She walked toward him, and he pulled her down onto his lap.

“That’s just because you’re excited about the show and you can’t sleep. Wait another month, or two. …” He paused painfully; he had been about to say a “year,” but they didn’t have a year. Only another five or six weeks. “You’ll get tired of making breakfast. You’ll see.”

She wanted to see. She wanted to see for a lifetime, not a month. “I’ll never get tired of this.” She buried her face in his chest, feeling warm and safe like a child. They were both brown from their weekend in Carmel, and her feet were still sandy as they brushed along the floor. “You know what I think?”

“What?” He closed his eyes and smelled the fresh scent of her hair.

“That we’re very lucky. What more could we have?”

A future, but he didn’t say it. He opened his eyes and looked at her as she sat in his lap. “Don’t you ever want another child?”

“At my age?” She looked stunned. “Good Lord, Pilar is almost sixteen years old.”

“What does that have to do with anything? And what do you mean ‘at your age’? Lots of women have babies in their thirties.”

“But I’m thirty-seven. That’s crazy.”

He shook his head. Deanna was looking somewhat stunned. “It’s not too old for a man, why should it be too old for a woman?”

“That, my darling, is very different indeed. And you know it yourself.”

“I do not. I’d love to have our child. Or even two. And I don’t think you’re too old.”

A baby? Now?
She looked at him in astonishment, but he was perfectly serious. His arms were still around her.

“Do you mean it?”

“I do.” For a long moment he watched her eyes and wasn’t sure what he saw. Confusion, amazement, and also sorrow and pain. “Or are you not supposed to have any more children, Deanna?” He had never asked. There was no reason to. She shook her head.

“No, there’s no reason why I can’t, but … I don’t think I could go through it again. Pilar was a gift after the two boys. I don’t think I’d want to do it again.”

“Do they know why those things happened?”

“Just flukes, they said. Two inexplicable tragedies. The odds of that happening twice in one family are minute … but it did.”

“Then it wouldn’t again.” He sounded determined, and Deanna pulled away.

“Are you trying to talk me into having a baby?” Her eyes were very large and her face very still.

“I don’t know. Maybe I am. It sounds like it, doesn’t it?” He smiled and hung his head. Then he looked up. “Do you think that’s what I was doing?”

She nodded, suddenly very serious. “Don’t.”

“Why not?”

“I’m too old.”
And I already have a child. And a husband.

“That is the only reason I categorically will not accept! That’s nonsense!” He sounded almost angry this time, and she wondered why. What did it matter whether or not she was too old for a child?

“Yes, I am. I’m almost forty years old. And even this is pretty crazy. I feel like a kid again. I’m acting like I’m seventeen, not thirty-seven.”

“And what’s wrong with that?” He searched her eyes, and she surrendered.

“Absolutely nothing. I love it.”

“Good. Then come to bed.” He picked her up in his arms and deposited her in the next room, on his large comfortable bed. The quilt was rumpled from where they had lain when they came back from Carmel, and there was only one small light on in the room. The soft colors looked warm and pretty, and the big vase of daisies she had picked Friday afternoon on the terrace gave the bedroom a country air. She did something special to his house, she gave it a flavor that he had longed for, for years. He had never really known what was missing, but now that he had her, he knew. What had been missing was Deanna, with her green eyes and dark hair piled onto her head, with her bare legs peeking out of his bed, or sitting cross-legged with her sketch pads on his deck surrounded by the flowers. Deanna, with her stack of paintings and her paintbrushes stuck into all his coffee cups, with the shirts that she “borrowed” and splattered with paint, and with the countless thoughtful gestures—the ties she had cleaned, the suits she put away, the little presents she bought, the books she brought him that she knew he would love, the laughter and the teasing and the soft eyes that always understood. She had drifted into his life like a dream. And he never wanted to wake up. Not without Deanna at his side.

“Ben?” Her voice was very small next to him in the dark.

“What, love?”

“What if I get bad reviews?” She sounded like a frightened child, and he wanted to laugh, but he didn’t. He knew how great her fear was.

“You won’t.” He put his arms around her again, beneath the quilt. It had been a present from an artist’s wife to his mother, years ago, in New York. “The reviews will be wonderful. I promise.”

“How do you know?”

“I know because you’re very, very good.” He kissed her neck and trembled at the feel of her naked flesh against his legs. “And because I love you so much.”

“You’re silly.”

“I beg your pardon?” He looked at her with a grin. “I tell you I love you, and you think I’m silly. Listen here, you. …” He pulled her closer and covered her mouth with his, as they disappeared in unison beneath the quilt.

She woke at six the next morning and instantly disappeared into the spare room. She had remembered a painting that shouldn’t be there. Then she thought of another that was probably not in the right frame. After coffee she remembered two more without signatures, and so it went for the remaining four days. She was in a frenzy of nervousness over the show. Through it all Ben smiled and loved and cajoled. He took her to dinner, dragged her to a movie, made her join him at the beach; he forced her to go swimming, kept her up late at night making love. On Thursday he took her out to lunch.

“I don’t want to hear it.” He held up a hand.

“But, Ben, what if—”

“No. Not a word about the show until tomorrow.”

“But …”

“No!” He put his finger to her lips, and she moved it aside with a fresh burst of worry. But he only laughed. “How is the wine?”

“What wine?” She looked around, distracted, and he pointed to her glass.

“The wine you’re not drinking. How is it?”

“I don’t know, and what I wanted to ask you is …”

He put both fingers in his ears, and she started to laugh at him. “Ben! Stop it!”

“What?” He smiled happily at her across the table. She was laughing.

“Listen to me! I wanted to ask you something about tonight!”

He started to hum gently, his fingers still in his ears. Deanna couldn’t stop laughing. “You’re horrible and I hate you!”