Acts of Love (23 page)

He was clenching the wheel as he slowed down, looking for a sign with a picture of a fountain. And he found it where the forest was most dense, hiding whatever might be within or beyond it: a beach, the water, a house. The sign was a wooden rectangle, darkened by rain and sun, with a deeply etched fountain that matched the one on Jessica's letters to Constance. There was no numbered address and no name.

Luke parked the truck off the road and walked down the trail of packed earth and forest grasses, barely wide enough for a car. The trail curved and he saw the gleam of water and then a low house of stone and wood. A woman was in the garden that stretched along one side of the house. She was cutting roses, moving in and out of sunlight and shadows, laying each rose in a basket that hung on her arm.

Luke's heart was pounding as he strode toward her. Then, abruptly, he stopped. He was hidden by flowering bushes and a large spruce tree, and he stood there in the dimness, puzzled and let down. This wasn't Jessica; he obviously had the wrong house.
Unless it's her housekeeper. Or maybe a friend.

He stood still, less than twenty feet from her, frowning as his eyes grew accustomed to the sudden shifts in sunlight and shadow through which the woman moved. She was not tall, or perhaps she was, but her back was stooped and she limped, leaning heavily on a cane. Her face was thin and drawn, deeply lined and so pale it was almost colorless. What could be seen of her hair beneath her brimmed woven hat was pale silver-gray, cut short, leaving her frail neck exposed. She wore a simple white cotton dress that almost reached her ankles; it had a scoop neck and short sleeves, and when she reached out to cut another flower and Luke saw the curve of her arm, the strong, mobile wrist above her gardening glove, and then looked again for a long moment at her face, he knew that of course it was Jessica.

A shadow of Jessica. A faded image. A photograph, dulled and brittle with age. But she was not old. She was forty.

He stood there for a long time, his thoughts in turmoil. His expectations and certainties of what he would find had been so vivid that he felt as if he had been betrayed. He remembered how he had envisioned this moment when he was on the plane to Seattle. He had finished looking at Jessica's books and had lain back, half-asleep, imagining himself ringing her doorbell, being greeted by the woman whose pictures he had been poring over so recently, hearing again the vibrant musical voice that he had never forgotten. He had seen himself giving her the carton that was now in the back of Robert's truck, sitting in her house and talking about Constance and then about herself: about what had brought her to Lopez and when she might come back to New York. He had imagined hours of conversation filled with the intelligence and passion, the wit and sophistication, that had filled her letters.

Instead he had found a woman so plain she was almost homely, as insubstantial as a mirage, looking far older than her years, moving clumsily, without grace or vitality. He watched her limp around the corner of the house and out of his view, but he continued to look at her garden and the strip of beach and the bay beyond. Her roses were magnificent, tall and strong, their colors intense, and Luke thought their velvet richness had made her look paler still. He tried to remember what her eyes had looked like, but they had been hidden by the brim of her hat, even when she'd looked in his general direction. But he had seen enough of her face to know that there had been no passion in it, and, though she had been absorbed in her flowers, it was a quiet absorption, without fervor, that of a recluse who did not smile very much or string words together into conversations. She was a woman to whom he would never give a second glance if he passed her on the street. She was so unlike the woman of his imagination that he could not fathom now what had so captivated him in her letters. In fact, he could barely remember what she had written that he had found interesting or intriguing. What had led him to make this crazy trip?

He turned and almost ran back to the truck. Turning around in Jessica's driveway, he used Robert's map to find roads through the center of the island that would bring him to the inn in the shortest time. He saw Robert and Chris in the garden behind the house as he retrieved his suitcase, but he did not talk to them; he wrote a brief note, enclosing money for his one-night stay, and left the inn. Halfway down the driveway he remembered that he had no way back to the village. But anger and confusion kept him going along the road until he found himself beside a row of small houses facing a narrow beach cluttered with seaweed. He stopped at the first house and asked if he could use their telephone to call a taxi.

Within twenty minutes he was at the village and had called the seaplane. He had over an hour and so he walked the three miles to the airstrip. On the way, one of the men who had greeted him earlier stopped and asked him if he wanted a ride.

Luke shook his head. “Thanks, I'd rather walk. I'm catching the seaplane.”

“Well, they take their time. You look pretty angry, friend. Robert's truck break down on you?”

“No. It was fine.” He walked on; then, aware of his rudeness, he turned around. “I've got some problems to work out. Thanks for asking.” Wallowing in my anger, he thought. Couldn't even return kindness with simple politeness.

But why was he so angry? He stood looking out over the water. Why so much anger?

Because he felt cheated. He'd come to this island to find Jessica Fontaine, whom he hadn't been able to get out of his mind since he'd begun reading her letters, whom he'd decided, in some kind of wild illusion, that he was in love with, and instead he'd found . . .

A different Jessica Fontaine, almost unrecognizable. Not the one he wanted. Nothing like the woman he wanted. Nothing like any woman he'd ever wanted or even looked at twice.
Damn it, I knew her. I knew how she sounded, how she felt about things, what she did with her days, the people she saw and worked with . . .

I saw her pictures. I knew how she looked.

Except that I was wrong.

He pictured himself standing there, rigid with that sense of betrayal, watching the sky to see if the plane were coming, and he knew he was being petulant and shrill—
like a kid who didn't get the Christmas present he expected—but
he could not control it. Disappointment coursed through him; he felt he could not breathe with the pressure of it. He had to get away from here, from the images he had carried in his mind all these months and then had built to a full-blown fantasy.
As if I'd written a play and begun to direct it with one person missing  . . . and when she showed up she was someone else.

He gazed at a sailboat gliding through the harbor. Beyond it was the ferry from the mainland, and beyond that the tiny speck in the sky that was his plane, sunlight glinting off it so that it looked like a star and then a spotlight that grew larger as he watched. He kept his eyes on it, but what he was seeing in his mind, what, in spite of himself, he was reliving over and over, were those long moments when he had stood in the forest, watching Jessica cut roses and lay them gently in her basket.

The Magician
opened to a sold-out house in Philadelphia on a rainy night in early September, nine days after Luke returned from Lopez Island. They had spent two days in dress rehearsals, for the first time with costumes, full sets and props; Luke had calmed Rachel's terrors at the idea of a real live audience, settled a tiff between Cort and Kent, and taken Abby to dinner because, she said, that was what her directors always did. And then it was opening night. The audience filled the theater and the lights came up on stage for act one.

Luke stood at the back of the theater beside Monte and Kent. He had focused on this night every moment since returning from his trip, except for the brief act, on his first day back, of stowing the box of Jessica's letters in a closed cabinet in his library. From then on, he had plunged into every aspect of the play, resolving the problems that still cropped up, soothing frayed nerves, refining the way his cast delivered their lines. Even so, at odd times, images kept intruding: the dark shape in a dark sea of Lopez Island from the air, forests and farms from the high front seat of Robert's truck, a weathered sign carved with an engraved fountain beside a faint path that led through dense trees to a house, a beach, a rose garden . . . But each time he would wrench his thoughts away, as he had wrenched the wheel of Robert's truck to turn from Jessica's house, and will himself to see nothing and think of nothing but his play.

Now, in Philadelphia, it seemed that Lopez and Jessica were as remote from him as were Tricia and Claudia and New York's hectic social life. In the darkened theater he leaned forward, tense and watchful as his actors moved past their initial hesitation and stiffness and settled into the rhythm and interlocking emotions of their lives on stage. Halfway through the act, Luke met Monte's eyes and they smiled.

At intermission the three of them mingled with the crowd in the lobby and those smoking outside until the bell rang to announce act two. “They love it,” Monte said as the audience trickled back to their seats. “Good vibes all around. Nobody's bored and as far as I can tell nobody's leaving.”

Kent came in with the audience, a beatific smile on his face. “They like it.
They like it.
Some of them were trying to guess how it would end. Can you imagine? They were talking about Lena and Daniel and Martha as if they were people they knew, trying to figure out what they'd do next. God, there's nothing like that in the world.”

Luke watched the house fill up again. He felt the aura of anticipation as people took their seats, he saw the expectation in their faces, and he knew this was the true magic of the theater. The second act began and, as in the first act, he made mental notes of corrections and changes to be discussed with the cast and crew the next day. But then the energy of the audience and the actors swept him up and from then on he watched and listened uncritically, buoyed by the exhilaration that came only at such rare moments of accomplishment and fulfillment. From the corner of his eye he saw Kent smiling and crying at the same time, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. “Can't believe it, too fantastic,” he said softly to Luke. Luke put his arm around his shoulders and gave him a quick hug. “Great play,” he murmured, and then they watched the final scene unfold before them.

“Bingo,” Monte whispered as the sound of sniffling came from the audience. Luke saw men as well as women fumbling for tissues and he knew Monte was right. Bingo. The jackpot. To lead an audience into another world and to make them believe in it so completely that their emotions were those of the characters on stage.

I can't imagine more power than that . . . as if nothing is closed to me, as if there is nothing I cannot do.

The applause began the moment the stage went to black. The critics ducked out to write their reviews for newspapers and television, but the rest of the audience stayed in place, their applause filling the theater and washing over the stage as the cast took their curtain calls. After that everyone went to Roland's, where the air was charged with a volatile combination of satisfaction, gaiety and tension that was like mild hysteria; the noise level rose as gaffes were relived and lighting, props and costumes critiqued as if for the first time. Luke had predicted that, and he knew that the next day, when they came together for another rehearsal, most of what was being intoned tonight would have been forgotten.

What he had not predicted was that Abby would propose a toast to him—“To Luke, a director fully as good as his reputation, and a pleasure, a
supreme
pleasure, to work with, putting all my doubts, my
grave
doubts, to rest.”—or that Cort would tell him that now he, too, wanted to be a director and he was sure Luke would help him get started, or that Kent would walk around all evening in a kind of daze, uncharacteristically quiet, even modest, as he accepted congratulations and responded to the one question that everyone was asking, saying that, yes, he'd started a new play, and, yes, Luke had seen some of it and liked it, but he couldn't say anything else; he couldn't talk about it because things that got talked about usually didn't get written.

And neither had Luke predicted their reviews—everyone in the theater knew that was bad luck—so he fell silent with the others as the early editions of the newspapers arrived, and shared with them the rush of excitement when Abby read the reviews aloud, dramatizing their praise and dropping her voice to a sepulchral murmur when she came to anything negative.

The rest of that week in Philadelphia was much like the weeks before it: they rehearsed every day as audience reactions revealed weak spots or lines that did not get the reaction they had expected. Each afternoon, in the quiet time before the performance, Abby read novels, Rachel wrote in her journal, Cort napped, Monte and Fritz and the lighting director played poker, with Kent watching. And Luke walked.

He knew the streets of Philadelphia from other out-of-town openings, so he walked with barely a glance at his surroundings, lingering only among the faded red brick buildings where the United States had been born, but even there letting his thoughts float free.
After we open
came again and again, drifting through other images, lurking behind his actions so that when he stopped for a red light or glanced into a shop window, there it was.
After we open in New York.

Well what? What happens after we open in New York?

Something different, he mused. Something new.

The thought had been there since his grandmother's death, fueled by a recurrent restlessness and impatience. He wanted  . . . something. And after they opened, he would find out what it was. And go after it.