Acts of Love (41 page)

“Oh, spectacular,” Hermione said as soon as she opened her door. “All four of my favorites. How did you know? Do you know their names?” She walked ahead of Jessica into the house, talking over her shoulder. “Red Beard, Flying Duck, Large Tongue, and Dotted Sun. Sounds straight out of a Chinese espionage novel, doesn't it?” She set the basket on a table before a broad window and turned, holding out her hand. “Welcome. I'm glad to meet you.”

Their hands clasped. In the unsparing sunlight that flooded the room, Jessica gazed steadily at her, giving her a chance to show surprise or dismay. Instead, she saw a wide smile in a long, narrow face bare of makeup, with high cheekbones, black eyes close together beneath heavy brows, and a pointed chin, all surrounded by a flaring halo of frizzy black hair. She was taller than Jessica by six inches; she wore wide black pants and a long, loose, short-sleeved cotton sweater. Gold hoops swung from her ears. Her feet were bare.

“Well, you've had a rough time,” she said, their hands still clasped. “Amazing, isn't it, how vulnerable our poor bodies are to change. What have you been doing with yourself since that train bust-up? Not acting, we all know that, but not directing, either, right?” She crossed the room to an open hutch with shelves of glasses and a built-in sink. She opened the cabinet below. “I have a terrific red wine, if that's all right with you. Then we can stick with it for the
ossobuco.”

Jessica had not moved. She was stunned. No one yet had confronted her so casually with talk of the accident and what it had done to her.

“Red wine?” Hermione said again.

“Yes. Fine.” She could not think of anything else to say, so she surveyed the room. The view through the huge windows was identical to hers, as was the strange collision of blazing sunlight and cooled air. The room was much less crowded than hers—most rooms in most houses would be, she thought—but almost as colorful, furnished with couches and chairs that were deep and inviting and covered in native fabrics from Bhutan and Nepal in earth tones spiked with startling deep blues. The rugs were woven in blues, reds and blacks; the lampshades, startlingly, were fringed. The walls were covered with paintings of old people, lined and craggy, sad, weary and wise, all looking past the viewer, at whatever lay ahead.

“They make me feel young,” Hermione said, and laughed. She handed Jessica a glass of wine. “That's not the main reason. Mainly they remind me that there's a lot of wisdom in the world and if I'm clever and pay attention, I may acquire at least a portion of it before I die.”

“I like that,” Jessica said, startled out of her self-absorption. “What a good thing to believe.”

Hermione raised her glass. “To good beliefs and new friends.”

“I like that, too.” Their glasses touched and the faint chime made Jessica think of the bell that called them to their places on stage just before the play began.

Hermione settled herself in a corner of the long couch facing the windows. A rough-hewn coffee table held platters of
crostini,
mussels, and chicken
satay.
“I'm going to call you Jessie. Do you mind?”

“My parents called me that. No one else ever has. No, I don't mind.”

“Good. Sit down, make a plate for yourself—dinner will be late; I forgot to turn on the oven—and tell me everything. If not everything, at least most of it.”

“You know most of it from looking at me, and talking to Al Murre,” Jessica said bluntly.

“Tell me anyway. If I get bored, I'll let you know.”

Jessica laughed. She filled a plate and took a napkin, and sat in the other corner of the couch, facing Hermione. She felt herself curve into the curves of the cushions, relaxed and suddenly happy. “I like this room,” she said. “I like you.”

Hermione nodded. “Same here. We're going to do well together. But first we have a lot of talking to do. Eat something and then talk.”

“If you will, too.”

“I can talk your ear off if you have the patience to listen. But you go first. Take your time; we have all night.”

They talked for most of it. Their closeness in the quiet room, with the sky darkening and Hermione lighting a dozen candles in ceramic holders on the coffee table, reminded Jessica of the evenings with Luke, hour after hour, enclosed in the safety of her house. But this time it was two women who were sheltered together and it took her back, beyond Luke, to her times with Constance; to a deep, fast friendship that had helped make her what she was today.

And so she began by talking about Constance, going all the way back to the beginning, when she was sixteen. Answering Hermione's questions, she told about those parts of her career Hermione did not know, and at last she came to the train wreck, and Arizona, and Lopez. “I was fine on the island; I was settled and busy, and I thought I was resigned to it. But it wasn't enough. I did like what I was doing and I guess I could have gone on doing it forever, but it never would be anything like the theater.”

“Meaning passion.” Hermione looked at her closely. “No passion in anything you've done since the accident. No theater . . . and no man? Good God, six years with no man? Did you decide that a limp and gray hair made you sexless?” When Jessica did not answer, she said, “Not beautiful, no sexy bod, therefore, a sexless woman. Right? Oh, wait,” she said after another silence, “somebody came along and changed all that. Am I close? Where is he now?”

There was a pause. “New York.”

“And he wanted you to go with him and you said no. You said you weren't the clinging type and what would you do in New York? Of course you could have decided to be a director in New York, too. How come you didn't? Why Sydney? Jessie,” she said gently, “you did promise to talk.”

“He's a director,” Jessica said briefly. “I'd rather not talk about him, at least not now. Maybe later, when I . . . Oh, I don't know. Probably not at all.”

“Well, you poor darling, you're crazy about him and you sent him back to that zoo of single women and then came all the way out here to make your own name again. Are you writing to him? That's the last question; I won't ask any more.”

“No.”

“Does he even know you're here?”

“That's another question.”

“It's part of the first. Are you writing to him and, if not, does he know you're here?”

They laughed together, and it was a good sound. “No. Now it's your turn. I want to know about you.”

“I'll check the veal; we should be close to dinner. Have some more wine.”

Jessica divided the last of the bottle between their glasses and sat back, nibbling on
crostini.
Beyond the window, the clouds in the night sky glowed from the lights of Sydney. Lights glimmered on the water below, where ferries and water taxis plied their routes, and in houses and apartments in North Sydney, across the broad expanse of the harbor. Like a fairyland, Jessica thought, just as it is from my house.

It was the first time that she had used those words. My house. My city. My friend. And, maybe, soon, my work.

“Getting there, but it'll be another half hour,” Hermione said, taking her place on the couch. “Therefore, salad in ten minutes. Can you wait that long?”

“Yes. I'm fine.”

“Well, then. I'm sixty-two, divorced once, widowed once, two sons, one in the U.S. at Harvard, one in the U.K. at Cambridge; they're smart and fun and I miss them, but off they went with nary a backward glance, thank God, because I would have worried about them more if they hadn't. I was born in a dusty little town in southern Illinois; my father had a small grocery store with a hardware store in the back room—barrels of nails and screws and hinges that I'd play with by the hour; they don't have those wondrous things anymore—and he sort of made a living until a supermarket opened nearby with nails and screws in neat little plastic packages and that just about finished us. I'd hated the town even before we got to be dirt poor; I'd spent my childhood pretending I was somebody else living somewhere else—almost anywhere else. I was taller than the other kids and I read a lot and used long words and we were the only Jewish family in town, so they had lots of reasons to think I was odd, sort of foreign, and therefore untrustworthy, and they were always either ganging up on me or giving me the cold shoulder. So naturally I became a hellion at school and at home: some minor shoplifting, building booby traps, scaring my schoolmates—once I put a live frog in every desk in the classroom, including mine; you should have seen the action when thirty kids opened their desks to take out their books and pencils. Oh, my, what a happy memory. I've always wanted to use it in a play, but the frogs would get into the audience and some people might not be amused. Anyway, I was staging productions even then, hoping I'd drive my parents crazy and they'd send me to boarding school or the army or anywhere. They didn't, so I did the next best thing: I got married. Fifteen years old, to definitely the wrong man, but it got me out of Illinois, which was the whole idea. We split in New York a little before my sixteenth birthday and I got a job cleaning bathrooms in a couple of hotels, and that's where I met a terrific woman, the wardrobe mistress for a British repertory company in town for a month, who asked me if I'd like to be her assistant. I went to London with her, graduated college, got married again and had two sons, and when my husband died and left me with a modest pile of money I decided to be a producer. Got started in London, but Sydney was more fertile territory, so I settled here. It's getting tighter now, but I still do my best to shake it up. Is there anything else you'd like to know?”

“What do you like?”

“Good food, especially when I remember to turn on the oven, red wine, late Mozart and Beethoven, the Bach masses, all of Schubert, most of Poulenc. Biographies, novels, and history, adventure movies but no spurting blood—it gets so boring after a while—opera, ballet and everything in the theater.”

“No sports?”

“Sailing. I like to race. And riding; I board horses with friends about an hour north of the city.”

“No men?”

“Not at the moment. They come and go. The supply gets smaller and less interesting the older one gets. Anything else?”

“What don't you like?”

“Alfonse Murre, people who talk about money all the time, exhibitionists who are always yelling at the rest of us to notice them. People who don't feel a responsibility to their neighbors, anybody who makes a virtue of not thinking. A simple list: stupidity, arrogance, pomposity and pretense. I'm sure there are more, but that gives you an idea.” She stood up. “Let's eat.”

They talked through dinner, through dessert and coffee and port in the living room, through the hours that bracketed midnight. “Oh, no,” Jessica said when she finally looked at her watch. “I've stayed far too long.” She reached for her cane. “I had no idea how late it was.”

“It's not late for me, and I'm having a good time.” Hermione was still lounging in her corner of the couch. “Unless you're too tired to stay. Are you?”

“No, but you must think I'm—”

“I'll tell you what I think. I think you're starved for friendship, especially with a woman. I think you've been a lonely little sparrow flitting around Sydney, trying to find something to make you feel at home but not having anybody to talk to. I think you miss your New York director and you haven't found anybody to make you feel good about yourself, or about the world, until tonight. And I think you ought to stay and have another glass of port and tell me why you want to direct plays.”

Jessica leaned her cane against the arm of the couch. “Thank you for understanding all that.”

Hermione leaned forward and filled their glasses. “And you want to direct because—”

“Because I can't go back to the stage.”

“Why not?”

And for the first time, Jessica spelled it all out, even more harshly than with Luke. “People are uncomfortable looking at me. When I'm on stage, when any actors are on stage, we create an intimate relationship among ourselves, but at the same time we're speaking to the audience, sweeping them with us into our story. We're characters and storytellers at the same time. No audience would be able to identify with my character, or be swept up in my story, if all they can think about is how unpleasant it is to look at me.” She gave a small laugh. “That sounded like a lecture on acting. I'm sorry. What I meant was—”

“I know what you meant. Have I seemed shifty and evasive, tonight? Generally uncomfortable? Was your New York director uncomfortable when you were together?”

“It's not the same thing. Neither of you paid money to be entertained, to be lifted out of your daily life to another place, some magical place that actors create for you.”

“Well,” Hermione said drily, “I'll wager your director felt you'd created some magical place for him.”

Jessica drew in her breath as the pain of loss stabbed her. It had been magical. And he had said so, so many times.

“Forgive me,” Hermione said. “That wasn't kind. We all have demons to wrestle with and I shouldn't question yours. Let's go back. You've told me why you can't act anymore, but you haven't said why you want to direct.”

“Because I know good theater. I know how to bring a script to life. I know how to work with actors. I know how to create mystery and reality at the same time so that audiences believe absolutely in what they're seeing. I've done all that on stage. I can do it from backstage, too.”

“And besides, you're so hungry to get back to the theater it's driving you crazy.”

Jessica gave a short laugh. “Put in its simplest terms. You're right. I don't know any other way to feel truly alive.”

“You're sure you can do it, but you never have. Is that right?”