Falling in Love (8 page)

Laine was thirty-six years old and was
still capable of having children.

“
Yeah, well.” Laine
happened to know that Mark had checked her out as well.

It would be wise never to let him knew
that she knew—had known, everything she needed to know, before ever
setting foot in the place.

In the fog of war our training takes
over.

Mark must have been very
confused, and yet he knew what he wanted to happen. He knew what he
needed, what he must
have
if he was to go on.

To simply go on.

For surely there must have been times
when he didn’t want to go on.

He’d told her that in the late hours,
just before the bright and bitter dawn came. He gave it all up,
holding nothing back.

There were times when he prayed to be
taken, taken by God or taken by death. There were other things
too.

Somehow his instincts for survival
took over and he found a strong female figure—and then he threw
himself at her. His explanations were all very
analytical.

Mark had a strange way of looking at
things.

But it really was kind of
sweet.

Not that you ever needed a reason,
really.

Love has its own logic, and sometime
that means no logic at all.

Time and Place

Jayne Fumbled for Her
Spectacles

Jayne Dickson fumbled around in her
purse for her close-up spectacles, thick of lens and frame. She
used them for reading and sewing but had so far resisted the need
for bifocals or even trifocals. She cheerfully admitted that it was
pure vanity. At her advanced age of twenty-nine, (and a half) it
didn’t make much difference anyway. Not these days. The notion that
she might once have had a love life was a cruel, nagging
joke.

Simply put, her eyes weren’t very
good. They never had been. Why over-analyze?

At least the people in Byzantine
mosaics had all their clothes on. Some of the early Renaissance
painters had some sort of fixation with rendering flesh, which was
fine in the academic sense but also a painful reminder, sometimes,
that she was but flesh too.

If only.

That’s the way it felt
sometimes.

The highly-pitched and rapid-paced
voice of their tour guide Maurice Abdullah pattered away in the
background. She’d never been this close to a real mosaic, Byzantine
or otherwise, in her entire life. So far, they’d all been on the
ceilings or high up on the walls. It really was beautiful, and yet
the tour was at such a fast pace, eight countries in eleven days.
On a whim of some previously unsuspected masochism, she’d counted
up the stops listed in the brochure, forty-seven prime attractions
in all, and they’d only done about seventeen or eighteen of them so
far. She was dead on her feet. The temple was typical, with
well-maintained walkways and specially-cleaned exhibits in some
areas, and other parts were in ruins and off-limits, the tourists
kept back by poles and chains and signs on the wall.

There was one cancellation so far. She
bit her lip and moved slightly to the left, out of the soft,
indirect light to avoid throwing glare and shadows on the image.
The old place smelled a bit musty, all dry stone and a thousand
years of time. They always did the feet and the sandals the same
way. There were maybe two different types of sandals that she had
seen so far. In her limited knowledge, she didn’t know how
significant that was.

The cancelled stop was put down to an
attempted suicide just down the block, and all the streets around
their hotel were barricaded during that particular time-slot. That
was in Ravenna, three days ago.

She’d studied Byzantine
Art on a whim, while majoring in English Lit and Creative Writing
in university. It was an easy elective credit, a bird course, until
all of a sudden she threw herself into it on some kind of
love
thing. For some
reason, she wanted to do really well. It was like she realized her
own potential, for the first time in her life, and then wanted to
impress someone special with it.

Professor Malloy, the resident
Byzantine expert—and every university had one, was the most
fascinating thing in the world, for about a semester. She’d even
fantasized about him physically once or twice. He must have been
getting up near fifty-five, maybe sixty years old. An oddly
compelling man, perhaps it was the simple authority of the
teacher-student relationship. He was gruff but kindly, with big,
strong peasant hands.

She recalled those penetrating blue
eyes.

She bit her lip, moving on to another
small mosaic.

She supposed she looked good in her
simple sun-dress, sleeveless and cut just above the knee, vaguely
Greek in form, and done in a simple off-white that set off her
newly-acquired colour. She’d been doing a bit of involuntary
tanning, especially when she made the mistake of sitting on the
sunny side of the tour bus. Jayne absently fiddled with the black
glass rosary beads around her neck, a nice touch and oddly
effective as jewelry.

Jayne had an introspective streak, and
lately, the time to indulge it. At one time she would have done
it—the professor and her in bed together. She’d really believed it,
wanted it at the time. She might very well have done it. What a
whack-job she must have looked back then. Perhaps that accounted
for her personal reservations about love and sex ever since. That,
and the simple passage of time, and the setting in of middle-aged
inertia. All of this at twenty-nine. And a half.

The nerve it would have taken, in
actually doing it—going off to some exotic place, halfway around
the world of course, and studying art, cataloguing art, classifying
and dating it. There was always some handsome man involved with
those fantasies, pure feminine lechery, all narcissism it
admittedly was. It had taken her a long time to grow up, in
retrospect. Like many of her fads, this one too had passed. That
was how she thought of it. But she had a propensity for dreaming
the impossible life. It was like one of those lovely, dreamy old
books on the top shelf, set front and center. The book you sort of
read every year when winter sets in, comfort food for the lonely
heart and jaded mind. It was the kind of book that you look forward
to. It was her book, a private book, one she would never lend out
for fear of not getting it back. It was an imaginary book, a book
of dreams.

She’d never done a thing
with either English or art, although she liked books. Jayne really
enjoyed art, in the general sense, in her own unpretentious way.
She had some pretty and even kind of expensive water-colours on her
walls back home. They were by an artist that was considered trendy
at the time, and still worth collecting five years later. She just
loved the pictures, and the artist himself, for their own sakes.
Her mother had hated the fact that Jayne spent three hundred and
fifty dollars, of her own money for crying out loud, on one piece
in particular, no more than eight and a quarter by ten and a half
inches. Perhaps it was an expression of her independence. Maybe it
was the love. Mother was,
had been,
dependent upon her, far more than Jayne needed
Mother. Of course she loved her mom and probably depended on her in
some ways, all of which were emotional ties and not based on any
real physical needs such as food or shelter. She wasn’t a child,
yet mothers couldn’t resist treating their adult children like they
would never grow up and didn’t know a darned thing in their own
right.

Jayne was the one paying all the
bills.

Thank God, but all that resentment was
gone now.

The heat was much reduced in there
after the boat ride and the long walk from the jetty. Her thick mop
of medium-length blonde hair was wet up around the rim of her
forehead. Her feet were a bit squashed in the shoes. Thank God
she’d decided on flat heels rather than spikes. Maybe she could
wear the new shoes later, bought especially for this trip. They
were supposed to be going to some kind of disco club if she
remembered correctly. She would love to dance—again there would
have to be some kind of compromise with the shoes. She pushed up
her glasses, slipping down a bit on her nose, and carefully
examined the way the thing was put together. She really was
enjoying all of this, she decided abruptly. It was funny how things
worked.

All the wrong sort of men, married
mostly, and all of them looking soft and pudgy or old before their
time, were paying her all kinds of attention, and yet the odd
handsome stranger was always sort of lurking off in the background.
The few of them that were about were looking very shy for some
reason. She was scaring them off somehow, now there’s a cheerful
thought.

There was a fellow named Bartholomew,
not the best-looking one of the bunch, but at least he spoke
English. He was downright awkward, and there was this feeling that
he was somehow failing to scrape up the courage in spite of a few
awkward signals of her own.

It just didn’t seem worth it
sometimes. A man should be able to make up his mind.

Years ago, invited out for a wine and
cheese party at a downtown gallery at a very prestigious address,
she’d sort of taken a shine to Edouard, her water-colour artist,
although he was married and had three adult children. One of them
was only a couple of years younger than her. Edouard was handsome,
but it was his way of talking that got her. She still sort of
referred to the incident internally, and quite often. He had such
passion, for life, and work, his family and his art, all of which
were inextricably entwined in one mad, swirling ball of wax and
love and total commitment.

She was managing an insurance agency,
simply one of a nationwide chain. It could have been any insurance
agency, but the thought of moving, even for twice the money, simply
didn’t gnaw at her sufficiently to ever do anything about
it.

The education hadn’t hurt her any, but
maybe she should have specialized in something technical. Her
salary, though good, didn’t go too far in a city where an
apartment, anything even remotely worth having, would set you back
a couple of grand a month, and now with mother gone she had some
thinking to do on that front. She had a big old apartment loaded
with stuff she was afraid to let go of, and yet so little of it was
her own choosing.

When her mother died, after a long and
agonizing bout with pancreatic cancer, Jayne had endured six months
of the most intense emotional experience ever. Coming after two and
a half years of struggle, the grief, which she had expected, was
stronger than she could have ever believed.

All that love, love which worked both
ways, was gone.

All objectivity, the passive
acceptance, the submergence of self, which had been so necessary in
care-giving as best one could, was gone. For a time, she honestly
believed she was having a breakdown. Her well had run dry. She had
nothing left for herself. The only time she wasn’t grieving was
when she was at work. Even that had become a kind of hell. The
thoughts and the memories never left, and it just ate at her.
Without her mother to take care of, her own life didn’t seem to
amount to much.

She was too self-sufficient. She’d
been on her own for too long.

When her friend Melanie, good old Mel,
pestered her into taking a trip somewhere, on some kind of a whim,
mentioning this special charter, a real bargain when she thought
about it, sheer desperation to escape from all the suffering led
Jayne to agree.

When her friend suggested Rome,
Ravenna, Venice, Istanbul, and then on to Jerusalem, Jayne had
reluctantly agreed that it might be just the thing. Now of course
she was glad she came, but at the time, even the trip of a lifetime
brought doubts. She felt so horrible. There was no way she could
ever enjoy it, and inevitably she would sort of spoil it for
Melanie.

Off in the background somewhere,
Maurice droned on and on and on.

The next saint, all black, blues and
gold, with lovely fresh skin tones, not stiff at all but very
expressive, was off in a corner in a side chapel. He had a
strangely modern face, one not without warmth and intelligence. The
work was very good, and had recently been cleaned. The fellow
reminded her of her Uncle Leo. The resemblance was uncanny. He had
the same long head, the same long nose. There was something
familiar about the shape of the eyes and the humorous, sensual
mouth. Even the beard, the hair, the mustache were the same. She
grinned for what seemed like the first time in days. Maybe even
weeks.

Jayne agreed with the experts that
Byzantine mosaics were the highest artistic achievements of the
culture, and, were as equally worthy of being considered a fine
style as the Baroque, or French Expressionism for
example.

She might not be able to put it into
the proper words, but she probably knew as much about this stuff as
their guide, who had no doubt read up on it and committed his spiel
into off-by-heart memory. He was there for the money and the tips,
living a life she had once contemplated.