Acts of Love (31 page)

The terrace was silent. The birds were still, the waves barely whispered as they rolled onto the beach, not even a breeze stirred the air. Hope sat motionless beside Jessica, waiting for whatever came next. “No,” Luke said at last. “If you think I've been living a lie, you'd have trouble believing anything I say. The problem was, I didn't know how to begin. I did know what to expect, you see, when I rang your doorbell, because I'd seen you the last time I was here.”

“Seen me? You never came to the house.”

“Partway. You were in the garden, cutting roses. I watched for a few minutes and then left. I assume Robert told you I'd come to see you.”

“Yes.” Slowly, she repeated it. “You watched for a few minutes and then left. Of course you did; why wouldn't you? You were appalled by what you saw. What you saw sent you scurrying. So that's what happened; Robert and I were wondering. You read my letters and thought, for a kick, you'd track me down, but then, when you did, you were so revolted you couldn't even come up to the front—”

“Stop it! I wasn't revolted; I was surprised. I have never been revolted by you. No one would be. Is that the certainty you've been living with all these years? It makes no sense.”

“How do you know what makes sense? How can you have the faintest idea of what makes sense for me?”

“Well, exile doesn't.”

“It does. For me.”

“Because you're afraid of the look on people's faces when they see you.”

She winced.

“That's it, isn't it?”

“Part of it.”

“And the rest?”

She was silent.

“Let me guess. You imagined every director saying no when your name came up for a new play. You imagined every producer turning thumbs down. You imagined playwrights sending plays to all the top actors' agents except yours, and all your colleagues refusing to share a stage with you. And you didn't even trust Constance enough to share those terrors with her.”

“It wasn't a question of trust,” she cried, stung. “Her heart wasn't strong, and she already worried about me; why would I make her worry more? I'd written a couple of letters telling her how awful things were—” She saw Luke's face change. “But of course you know that. You read them.”

“I couldn't get them out of my mind. Your despair was so devastating—”

“And that's what happened to Constance. She couldn't get those letters out of her mind. She lay awake at night worrying about me. She called me and wrote me—she thought I was about to kill myself—”

“She had reason to think that.”

“I know, I know that. I should never have let myself go, but she was all I had and I loved her—”

“And you were sick and lonely and you needed her. You shouldn't be ashamed of being honest with her; if love is about anything, it's about that.”

“Except that she was sick, too, and weak. And I couldn't bear the thought of her working herself into a panic over me. Even when I stopped writing about my injuries and therapy, she still worried. She worried about my being alone, and being unhappy, and leaving the stage, and coming here to live. I wanted to make her believe there was nothing to worry about.”

“And so—” Luke walked toward her. “You made up a life.”

“No. I wrote about the life I have: a home and a garden, a job, friends, a dog.”

“And going to a bookstore in Seattle. But you never went there. You made it up.”

She met his eyes with a fierce challenge. “Those letters were for Constance, no one else. I was talking only to her; it was
between us.”

“How could it be between you when you were keeping the truth from her? You made up a life for yourself; you created your own fantasy. It was for yourself, not for her.”

“That is not true!”

“Then tell me what is true. You didn't go to Seattle, to that bookstore.”

Her eyes did not waver as she flung her answers at him. “No.”

“You didn't make friends all over the island.”

“No.”

“And helping to direct
Pygmalion?”

“A little. I made notes on the director's script and we talked on the phone almost every day.”

“But you never went to the theater in Friday Harbor?”

“Twice. I sat in the audience and made notes. And I went to opening night.”

“How did you know about everything that happened backstage?”

“The director told me, when it was all over.”

“And the sculptor? The man you met digging clams?”

“My God, don't you forget anything?”

“Not much, when it's important.”

She gave a small shrug. “Richard is a friend. We've visited each other's studios.”

“How often do you see him?”

“Not often. But we're friends.”

“Did he take you to rehearsals in Friday Harbor in his boat?”

“Yes, those two times I asked him, and he took the time to do it. And we went to opening night together. Some of his sculptures are in my studio; if you're interested, I'll show them to you. Have you had enough?”

“Not quite, but first I think we should sit down.” He touched her arm. “Please.”

She shrugged his hand away, but she turned and walked back to the table. Hope padded between them and lay at Jessica's feet, looking up now and then to make sure that the loud voices would remain subdued.

“I'm trying to understand this,” Luke said. “I'm not attacking you and I don't want to hurt you—my God, I would never hurt you—but I need to make sense of it.”

“Why? What difference does it make? Why do you care?”

He started to say something, then stopped. “I'll answer that another time. I promise I will answer it, but right now I want to finish this. Why did you do it? Why go to all that trouble? You could have convinced Constance that there was nothing to worry about without those elaborate scenarios  . . . by the way,
was
she convinced?”

“Not completely. She was very smart.” Their eyes met in one of those moments when they were in perfect harmony, understanding Constance, loving her, longing for her to be with them again. Uncomfortable with that harmony, Jessica turned away to reach for her glass. The water was tepid and she thought of getting up to add ice to the pitcher, but she did not move. The air was electric with their intensity, charged with tension as they ricocheted from clashes to closeness and back again, and she felt pinned in place by it, and by the turmoil within her. Just as she and Luke swung wildly from one set of emotions to the other, so did her thoughts. On one side, it was very peculiar to be with someone who was almost a stranger yet knew so much about her; it was peculiar and distasteful, and whenever he quoted her or showed how much he knew and remembered, she wanted to tell him to take his prying eyes and get out.

But on the other side, she was beginning to feel at ease with him. At some point in the past twenty-four hours something within her had relaxed, like a knot abruptly coming apart so that all the taut cords sprang free, and she found herself settling into the comfort of talking about things that no one else knew, things she had thought were forever locked inside her, never to be shared.

“I had to write to her,” she said slowly. “I loved her so and she was my connection with the world. I waited for her letters as if they were treasures—well, they were treasures—and I read each one over and over, until the next one came, and in between I wrote to her, and when I did that I was filling the silence of my house with our conversation. And then of course we had the telephone. She was always part of my life. The trouble with that was, that by keeping her with me, I kept my past alive. She
was
my past; we were so intertwined that sometimes I had trouble keeping us separate in my thoughts. So while I was trying to bury my past, every time I wrote a letter, or read one of hers, I resurrected it. So I tried to fill my letters with things that were different from anything we'd ever shared, and I thought that would help her, too, since she
was
ill and would be better off not worrying about me. So, after a while, I. . . .”

“Filled in the spaces,” Luke said when her words trailed off. “Some shading, some coloring, a mosaic of small pieces.”

Her eyes were wide with surprise. “Yes, exactly. The empty spaces.” She gave a small smile. “There were a lot of them; I really had so little to talk about. So I filled them in and pretty soon it was as if I were in a play about Jessica Fontaine that would convince her I was doing all those things she kept urging me to do.”

“And did that help fend off the past?”

Again he had surprised her by using the word she would have used. “Sometimes.”

“But you said Constance wasn't convinced.”

“I think she wasn't sure. About a year ago, she wrote that I shouldn't cut myself off from the world that I know. She said it was my nourishment, my life and my being.” Again she gave that small, bitter smile. “I thought I was writing those fantasies for both of us, but neither of us completely bought them.”

“You mean you weren't taken in by them.”

“Of course not. Did you think I was? I liked writing them; it was fun to pretend a life, like Walter Mitty dreaming himself into a dozen heroic poses to deny the person he really was. But I never thought it was anything but a game.”

“There was something in the way you wrote about that life . . . a kind of coolness. As if you were distancing yourself from it”

“Is that true?” She frowned. “I thought I was being so careful. Maybe that's why she never fully believed it. Maybe she always wondered if it were just a game.”

“If so, she would have known it was a game you liked to play. It really was a fantasy for yourself as much as for her.”

Her eyes hardened. “Do you always have to beat people into admitting their weaknesses? Can't you let them keep just a few illusions if that seems important to them?”

Luke's gaze turned inward, and there was a long silence. When he looked at her again, his face was bleak. “I think that's exactly what I do. I suppose I always have. No one has ever pointed it out so precisely. I'm very sorry, Jessica. I didn't mean to do that to you. I won't do it again.”

“Why do you do it at all?”

“I don't know. I detest pretense, the masks people wear  . . . No one can be a great actor without first understanding himself or herself—you and Constance knew that better than anyone—and I suppose I've been pushing my actors for so many years, I do it with everyone. Maybe. Or maybe I just like to control people and I do it by pounding them into submission.”

“A little breast-beating there,” Jessica said drily.

He laughed, and the tension was broken. “Actually I was paraphrasing my grandmother. She thought I overdid the need to be in control. I assume she told you that, too.”

“Yes. But not maliciously. She worried about you.”

“It seems she worried about both of us.”

“Not all the time, but enough to talk about. She always wanted . . .”

“What?”

“I'll tell you another time.” She saw the quick line that appeared between his eyes. “No, I'm not doing that to get back at you for keeping things from me. We each have our reasons.”

Luke sat back and looked at her thoughtfully for a long time, and she did not turn away, though her hands were clenched tightly in her lap and she had to hold herself still to endure his scrutiny. She looked beyond him, at filaments of clouds trailing across the clear sky, and a sailboat tacking just beyond the bay, but all the time she was aware of his eyes on her.

“I'd like to take you to dinner tonight,” he said at last. “Can you recommend a good place on the island?”

She met his quiet look. She knew the two of them were still springing back and forth, from tension to harmony, like bumper cars in a carnival, but she knew, too, that she did not want him to leave, at least not yet. She had been lonely for a long time and now the air was filled with a clamor of things to talk about, unresolved questions to settle, and the promise of companionship for dinner, and she was unwilling to let any of that slip through her fingers. “The Bay Cafe,” she said, “if you don't mind something very casual. But I need to work this afternoon; is eight o'clock all right?”

“Fine. I'll pick you up.”

“No, I'll meet you there. It's in the village, very small, you even have to look hard for the name. But it's easy to find.”

After a moment, Luke nodded. “Eight o'clock. If you need me before then, I'll be at the inn.” He stood up. “But I'll do the dishes before I go.”

She was about to refuse that, too; she wanted to be alone, to think about everything that had happened, and to work at her drafting table through the afternoon hours, with music in the background and no one to intrude. But he was already stacking plates, and she remembered the easy way they had worked together the day before, and she did not tell him to stop. She watched him clear the table and carry everything on a tray into the kitchen, and when she joined him there he was rolling up his sleeves. He smiled at her. “I can do this myself; there's not very much. And you did the cooking.”

She took a clean towel from the drawer. “We'll do it together,” she said.

The Bay Cafe had no view of the bay, or indeed of anything but the wide, empty street that ran through the center of Lopez Village. The restaurant was small and spare, with a bare wood floor, simple wooden tables and chairs, white tied-back curtains in the windows, and a flowered curtain hanging in the kitchen doorway. It was not a place Luke would have chosen, had he glanced inside seeking dinner, but it was Jessica's choice, and he was waiting for her at a table in the back when she arrived.

“I'm sorry I'm late,” she said. She wore a blue denim dress with long sleeves, a skirt that came almost to her ankles, and a narrow leather belt, and for the first time since Luke had been there she wore jewelry: a necklace of embossed silver beads and silver figured earrings. She sat in the chair he held for her, at right angles to his own. “I wasn't paying attention to the time.”