When Venus Fell (44 page)

“Okay,” I said in a shaky voice. “Then I have to explain something else. It’s not bad, but it’s embarrassing.”

“Oh, I like embarrassing confessions,” he said with a trace of jaunty effort. He cleared his throat. “Go ahead. Make me blush.”

“Not you. Me.”

“Wait. I’ll turn on the light.”

“I’m a—” I stopped.

“For God’s sake, Nellie. It’s all right. Whatever it is.”

“I’m—” I stopped again, and took a deep breath.

“You’re a … what? A secret Junior Leaguer?” His voice hoarse, he tried to soothe me with teasing. He looked at me from under his brows, with very solemn concern. “You wear white gloves and bake cookies and host charity balls? No, let me think. You’re an operative for the United Nations’ top-secret New World Order movement. Your goal is to implant innocent Americans with computer tracking chips so that the men in the black helicopters can scan us like canned tomatoes at the grocery store. You know, Ebb and Flo do believe that’s going to happen. They swear there’s a secret invasion code on all of the interstate highway signs. Of course, they also swear they’ve seen UFOs over Grandmother Mountain and a big furry Sasquatch walking Hodger’s Ridge.”

“I bet they’ve never seen a twenty-nine-year-old virgin,” I said flatly.

It was Gib’s turn to be speechless. “What did you say?” he asked, finally.

“I’m a virgin. I mean I
was
, until tonight.”

He sat there, stunned.

There is no stronger woman than a dedicated nun, and I was disciplined by the best. I grew up practical and unyielding because of Sister Mary Catherine. She didn’t need men, sex, or marriage; she was filled with steely dignity that allowed no excuses. So many times I’ve thought of her. How she could look at me with quiet, disappointed, soulful eyes and shame me that way without ever lifting a hand.

As Ella and I got older the subject of my virginity humiliated us both. I was too embarrassed to discuss it with her. It had become part idealism, part albatross, and because of what I went through with the government, a large part pride and self-defense.

I had so little left that was private and innocent. The
ultimate intimacy was a treasure I didn’t intend to bestow lightly. I was too stubborn to have sex.

“If modern society weren’t so afraid to set standards,” I said between gritted teeth, “I would be considered a
role model
. And if the idea of me being a role model strikes you as funny or outrageous—”

“Shhh.” He simply pulled me against him and held me again, stroking my bare back with long, slow, soothing caresses. “See what I’m able to do because of you?” he whispered. He stroked my skin with his damaged hand. “You wouldn’t let me avoid touching you with both hands. We don’t have to hide anything from each other.”

“Then you don’t mind?”

He made a strangled sound that was part laughter and part sympathy. “I noticed that you … there were times when you had a look of absolute wonder on your face,” he said in a low, gentle tone. “Discovery. Surprise. Amazement. However I try to describe it. And every time—it was the most exciting thing, to provoke that look—well, I started telling myself,
damn, I’m good
.”

His wry emphasis jolted a teary smile from me. He kissed me and then we held each other desperately. “You
are
good,” I murmured.

“All that matters to me is that gleam in your eyes. I want to keep it there.”

“Don’t be so
experienced,”
I said. “Not right now. I want to pretend you’ve never touched anyone before me.”

“That’s easy. There’s never been anyone like you,” he whispered.

We didn’t leave the room until noon that day.

The valley was covered in moonlit snow when we arrived at the Hall that night. “Magic,” I said. I studied Gib pensively as he drove up the main road. The Christmas lights were on outside the Hall, casting beautiful crystalline pools on the snow.

“For a lot of months I looked at my own home but didn’t see it,” Gib replied. “Since you’ve been here I remember how pretty it is.”

He carried the crate into the kitchen. “Well, well, the adventurers return,” Ruth said. She had stayed to help prepare for the opening weekend, now only ten days away. “We swore y’all had gone skiing or been hijacked by aliens.”

“I seen some black helicopters a week ago,” Ebb added darkly.

I looked at Gib’s shuttered eyes and nearly choked. “We were snowed in,” he said. “Two days of bad take-out pizza and bad stay-in cable TV.”

“I see.” Ruth looked unconvinced. Isabel and Min gazed at us curiously.

“Vee!” Ella hurried into the kitchen, brushing snow from the hem of her coat and long wool skirt. Carter was beside her. She was rosy and glowing, pink cheeks, green eyes, and black hair combining to make a stunningly vibrant impression. She halted and stared at the small wooden crate sitting on the kitchen table. “That’s from the warehouse? Is it ours? Oh, Vee.”

I went over and put my arms around her, then whispered “yes” in her ear. I held her because she did exactly what I expected: she trembled and began to cry. She got herself under control and listened joyfully as I told her what I’d seen. She insisted I tell her every detail about the furniture. She called Gib over, hugged him, and cupped his hands in hers. “You’ve honored us so much. You’ve given us back something intangible—not just heirlooms or sentimental belongings.”

“It was my pleasure,” he said with courtly grace.

I took a small book, its old cover frayed and faded, from my purse. I held it out to Ella. “Our grandmother Akiko’s poetry collection,” I said.

She took the book with tearful awe and opened it. “ ‘They tell me I have no place next to you,’ ” she read slowly, “ ‘but the feather follows the spirit of the wind.’ ” She shut her eyes, then pressed the book to her heart.

•   •   •

Just as Gib promised, a moving van showed up a few days later containing the contents of Ella’s and my childhood home—the only real home we’d known until we came to Cameron Hall. She and I spent hours prowling over the belongings, talking and touching and occasionally crying about it all. “You’ll have your choice of furniture for your house,” I told Ella. “Our own furniture, things from our family.”

“Oh, Vee! I can’t take all of it.”

“I only want the piano.”

“When you decide what else you’d like you can pick pieces to take to the cottage.”

“All right.” There were times when I actually allowed myself to imagine the best. I wanted to believe Carter and Ella were a permanent couple.

And I wanted to believe I could stay with Gib, no matter what.

Gib sent everything but the piano to a rented storage warehouse in Hightower. “I want to put my piano in the front room of the cottage,” I told him. “I know I’ll be cramped, but I have to have it there. Please.”

He turned to Carter and Jasper. “Get your back braces and your hernia belts,” he said. I watched happily as they helped Gib ease the old baby grand through the cottage’s door.

That night, when I played my own piano for the first time in ten years, Gib pulled a chair close by and listened for hours, unmoving. Memories were a sweet addiction I had to hear to survive. The piano had suffered. Its legs were scratched, it was woefully out of tune, and the middle-C key stuck sometimes. But that didn’t matter.

I played until I was damp with perspiration and my hands ached. Then I bowed my head against the backstop and slumped in relief and sorrow.

Gib helped me up, then picked me up and carried me into the bathroom. He filled the big whirlpool tub and helped me
undress, then guided me into the tub and sat on the wide rim, rubbing my shoulders. “I owe you a favor,” I whispered.

“Play the piano naked for me on New Year’s Eve,” he said.

I laughed. He simplified the emotional issues, the sexual issues, everything. I loved him for that.

“It’s a deal,” I told him.

Opening day arrived. The sky was full of low-hanging, lead-gray clouds, and the weather forecast threatened snow. The temperature was just above freezing at early afternoon. “Oh, this is a bad sign,” Isabel fretted, looking out the window at the sky as she carried fresh flowers to a desk in a corner of the main hall.

“No one’s called to cancel,” Gib said sternly. He double-checked the dial tone on the desk’s large console phone, as if he couldn’t trust it. Min sat down and spread her hands atop the small wooden box that was used as a file for the guest registry. It was stuffed with alphabetized index cards clipped to credit-card invoices. “I wish they’d all cancel,” she said.

I walked into the music room, adjusting lamps, then fiddling with the cut flowers in a ceramic bowl atop the piano. Olivia and Bea were huddled on a worn leather couch. A large scrapbook lay on Bea’s broad lap. She turned the pages slowly, while Olivia gazed at them. Olivia raised her head and beckoned me with a small, queenly gesture. “Take yourself away from your nervous piddling,” Bea ordered, “and come see what’s important.”

Biting my tongue, I sat down on the couch at Bea’s other side. Olivia planted a fingertip on a scrapbook page filled with snapshots. I caught my breath.

The pictures were of Mom and Pop at the opening of Cameron Hall. The page contained a gallery of images from the stories Gib had told me about that special weekend—Pop seated at the piano, with Mom standing beside him, smiling as she sang some song I wished I could hear. I stared at a photo of Mom in her yellow sun-hat, breezy polka-dot blouse, and pedal pushers, posing in the Hall’s sunny courtyard with five-year-old Gib standing straight and stoic beside her. Ruth pouted from her seat in a toy wagon Gib pulled. Mom cradled Isabel—a brown-haired baby—in her arms.

“Nice,” I managed to say around the knot in my throat.

Olivia wrote on a notepad:

“I intend to,” I said stiffly. She had even enlisted my dead parents in her determined efforts to preserve her family, her home. I’d never admit it openly, but maybe my service to her and my devotion to Gib were the only way Mom and Pop could rest in peace.

“Pray, Venus de Milo,” Ruth ordered. “We need all the help we can get. Even yours.” Everyone was gathered for a benediction in the library, with Hoss and Sophia officiating. It was noon; there wouldn’t be time for any more family meetings after guests began arriving.

I leaned close to Ruth and whispered, “I’ll pray for you to stop bellyaching and predicting this weekend will be a failure. Are you sure you’re not Emory’s secret daughter? You
sound just like him.” I leered at her melodramatically. “That’s it, isn’t it? You’re Emory’s secret love child and Joey is your
twin
.”

Ruth glared at me. “Why, look who’s suddenly become the Cameron cheerleader. Now
there’s
a phony transformation if I ever heard one. You should take a lesson from your sister. If you’re going to pretend to care about this family, at least be consistent about it.”

I opened my mouth to barbecue her with a few choice words, but Sophia waved her ring-decked hands for attention. She pointed to Hoss. He cleared his throat. “Let us bow our heads,” he intoned. But as Hoss recited the benediction I peeked across the room at Gib, who also gazed at me while everyone else’s eyes were shut.

He gave me a look that made me want to find some private place with him and pull the window shades. Even as Hoss somberly invoked divine support for the inn and the family, Gib and I traded the silent, reckless music of our alliance. We were wild, besotted with each other, and during the past week we’d used that obsession to avoid worrying about the future. “I can either concentrate on the inn or on you,” he’d said one night after we’d dragged ourselves to the cottage following a brutal day of last-minute chores. “But not both, thank God. Right now all I want to do is lock the door and get us both naked.”

“I’ll lock the door,” I said. “I’ll take your clothes off. Then you can undress me. Voilà.”

Now, while replaying the explicit details of that night and others we’d shared, I glanced at my sister’s angelic face. She clasped Carter’s hand. Her lips moved along with the prayer. Carter had his eyes closed dutifully, but he circled the tip of his forefinger atop Ella’s hand with sensual intent.

I frowned at him and Ella but fought a tide of guilt, all too aware that I was a hypocrite for condemning their impulses when I’d given in to my own.

•   •   •

At two o’clock, we were all spruced and polished, waiting for the imminent arrival of the first guest. I wore a gold blouse and black slacks, the most demure outfit I’d owned in years. Gib had put on a pin-striped shirt and gray trousers. He had gained some weight back and no longer needed the leather suspenders he wore, but he knew I liked them.

Min paced the front hall. Gib and I waited with her. She was trembling. “I’m not ready,” she said. I patted her hand and didn’t admit my own stomach was full of butterflies.

Gib put his arm around her, though he didn’t seem relaxed, himself. “Minnie, did I ever tell you about the time the President’s teeth fell out?”

“No. I’m sure I’d remember
that
.” We both gazed at Gib with wan curiosity.

“We were in Moscow. We’d left the President’s hotel, we were in a motorcade headed to the Kremlin. The President was about to go on Russian television with Yeltsin and give a major speech. His partial plate popped out. All four of his upper front teeth. He couldn’t get the partial back in. The leader of the free world was about to make a major television appearance in Russia, and he looked like an old boxer who could spit watermelon seeds.”

“What did you do?”

“I said, ‘Sir, I can find ways to stall this motorcade for thirty minutes while we get some dental cement.’ He said, ‘No, son, give me your glue.’ Because he knew I always carried a little tube of heavy-duty household glue. To make a long story short, I glued his false teeth back in place and the Russians never knew the difference. Now
that’s
grace under pressure, Minnie.”