Lunch (15 page)

“I knew this boy, and he told me he had a secret place to get some quick change.”

He sits staring out the window for a few silent minutes, dragging on his cigarette. A terrible dread is growing inside Olivia, akin to mine, and she says nothing.

“You mean M?” she asks finally, because the silence is worse than the knowing.

“Not M. Before M.” He turns to look right at me. A warning. As if I could do anything now, my nerves jangling.

“We'd go the night after the funerals,” Nick says. “No one ever found out, because we were strong, and quick. We'd get jewelry and watches and fence them for a fraction of their value because we didn't know where else to sell them. Once we got a guy with hundred-­dollar bills in all his pockets. That lasted awhile.” He leans back on the pillows, blowing smoke rings. “They were dead, and I was hungry. They didn't know.”

“Go on,” Olivia says, trying to keep the revulsion out of her face. “There must be more.”

He stubs out the cigarette and pulls her close and she lies cuddled in his arms, sinking into him. His fingers find their way inside her, a feather duster, idly stroking, because he can always do that, detached and mechanical, even though the rest of him is miles away. She shudders, not in the pleasure he assumes, but from nervous apprehension.

“I'm not sorry,” he says. “It doesn't matter.”

“I don't believe you.”

“Don't be stupid,” he says, his fingers pressing, insistent, harder, and she tries to pull away but he won't let her go, not now. “What do the dead know?” he asks, his voice blunt. “I can just see you, you know, you and your precious little Frog bastard up there at the gates of heaven so smug and secure, expecting Saint Peter to let you in. Do you think you'll end up there or wherever it is ­people like you go, looking down on all the mourners at your funeral? Or will you be some screaming ghost standing by your grave, scaring off the nasty little boys like me who come to steal the rings on your fingers and bells on your toes?”

She is struggling wildly against him, what he expects from her, what he covets, what she always does, without thinking, because, with him, it has always been that way. He wrenches one of her hands back to feel his hardness. “Does this feel better,” he says savagely, forcing her to stroke him, “better than the cold wet ground? Are you as wet as the cold wet ground? Of course you are, because you know what you like, and you can lie to yourself all you want, and always show up late because you're scared, and guilty, and tell yourself that you don't really care about me or the dead, but the bitter truth is that right now you don't care about anything else except how I'm going to fuck you.”

He shifts his weight away for just a second and she kicks back, wildly. “Liar,” she screams.

He laughs and twists down to the side of the bed, knifing his legs around her so she can't escape, feeling for his favorite whip stashed underneath, just in case, the one he'd had made after I found the Murano vase. The artisan had sculpted a glass handle to fit exactly in Nick's hand, hand-­blowing with intense precision the looping swirls of red and orange, delicate and delicious together, yet far less fragile than they seem. It is an object of exquisite beauty, perversely attached to a sleek implement of pain.

Nick swishes it back and forth in the air, testing his wrist. When Olivia hears the horrid noise she tries to bite him, but her legs are pinioned and Nick quickly turns back up, pushing her face down into the pillows and straddling her, trailing the thin end of the whip down her back, like a snake, watching her body quaver helplessly beneath it.

“You can struggle all you want but you can't get away because you're not dead and buried in the cold wet ground, and I'm not going to steal the precious little ring your precious little Frog bastard gave you.” He whacks her hard across her ass, once, twice, again, the welts so darkly pink on her white skin, rising instantly, slender strips of embossed pain, and she is screaming for him to stop but he won't stop at this, no, not when he can force his way inside her, writhing under his weight.

“It doesn't take you long to beg,” he says. “I didn't think you were such a wimp.”

“Let me go,” she is still screaming, “I'll kill you let me go let me.”

“No,” he says, turning her over so she lies on her back, the pressure on her welts a burning fire, swiftly fastening her hands to the silken cords as he always does, then leaning over to pick up two fat down pillows that have fallen to the floor, propping them gently under her ass, smiling as she winces. “Better?” he asks sarcastically, tracing a finger down her face, her neck, circling her breasts, caressing, slow, so slow, kissing her belly, and slipping inside her again. “I thought you wanted to hear a story,” he says, moving languidly in and out, in and out, probing until she is certain she will go quite mad, but he is not even close to letting her go quite mad enough.

He has the triumphant grin again, propped on his elbows, brushing her hair gently out of her face even as he goes on, relentless. “And then do you know what I did?” he says.

She shakes her head no, unable to speak, her chest heaving.

“We got a job working for a crook in a funeral parlor. And after the viewing, when we were supposed to be loading the body into the hearse, we'd open the casket and grab whatever we could.

“One time there was this guy and we were trying to get this big fat diamond, a really nice diamond, tons bigger than yours, off his big fat finger.”

“Stop,” she says. “Stop.”

“He was fat, that bastard, a greedy fat pig, and he was dead dead dead, but we really wanted that ring and we only had a minute to get it off. In my pocket I had a jar of hair grease, the same gunk they'd put on the stiff's hair, but it didn't work, and we didn't have time to get anything else. So I took out my knife and cut off his finger.”

Moving on her, cruelly persistent, his fingers stroking her body, teasing, his eyes on hers, not letting her go, she asked for it, and he is going to watch her when she hears it.

“Do you want to know what happened?” he asks, his voice softening, so tranquilly at odds with the revulsion of his story.

“No,” she says, turning her head to the side. He turns it back.

“I sold the ring,” he says, whispering, his lips so close to her ear, kissing her cheeks, her eyes, kissing her, endless kisses till she whimpers, hooking her legs around him, desperate to pull him closer, she needs him close, there, just there. “Diamonds are forever.”

She laughs, she can't help it, this can't be happening, it is a dream, a perverse, surreal dream, her head is spinning, there, don't tell me anymore, don't talk, just kiss me, there.

She doesn't even realize she has spoken.

“I sold the finger, too,” he is saying, sweat dripping into her eyes, salt, like tears, blinding her to all but the hypnotic drone of his voice and the feel of his body on hers, a captive audience. “It was worth more than a ring. A lot more. A lot. A lot,” he says, biting her lips until he can't bear it anymore, and he grinds into her, ecstatic, for the briefest of seconds, transported away from all memory of what made him.

H
E LOOSENS
her arms and kisses her sore wrists, then strips off one of the satin pillowcases and dips it in the ice water of the champagne bucket he always keeps by the bed, delicately wiping the angry welts he'd inflicted only moments before.

“Is that really the worst thing you ever did?” she asks, trying not to flinch at his touch.

“What do you think?”

“I think not,” she says slowly.

“Well, what about you?”

“The worst thing I've ever done?” she muses. “The worst thing you can do is deliberately hurt someone you love.”

“Is it?” He pulls away, wads the pillow, faintly smeared with pink, into a ball, and throws it in the corner. “Is it?”

She turns around to face him, wincing, and sees the same terrifying emptiness robbing all character from his features.

“The worst thing is no love,” he says, his gaze locked into some primal memory, blinded. “The worst thing is when you do it because no one's ever loved you.”

He is talking to a ghost.

I can't watch this.

Olivia's face is troubled. Does she love him or simply pity his pain, does it matter, and if she does why can't she say it, what will happen to her if she does, what more will he demand of her? She should be flinging her arms around him with no hesitation, holding him tight, she should be smothering him with kisses, deeply reckless, she should be saying I love you I love you till there is no speech left inside her.

Instead she is lying on the bed, sore and stinging, with tears filling her eyes, wondering wildly what to do, she must say something, something real, put into words the ineffable moments of their time together. But it's not real, she tells herself, these fantastical interludes in a secret gilded hideaway, created of lust, of amusement, and no more substantial. That's why she can be here. She can shut the door behind her and it no longer exists. There is nothing to hold on to but a sketch in her studio, his portrait long gone, crated up and shipped away to the house in the hills, nothing to remember save a fading scar on her leg, the faint imprint of the lash, or the bruises, brightly colored horrible blossoms slowly fading into greens and yellows, soon to disappear as he will back across the ocean.

Does she love him, does it matter, it's not possible to only love him at lunch, that's not what love is, it isn't love.

She has to think before she speaks, and that is answer enough for me.

It's too late, anyway.

Nick does not even know that he's been waiting for her declaration, only that the emptiness is so habitual he no longer expects it to be filled.

Only Olivia came close. Not the real Olivia lying here beside him, the woman fearful of the truth he'd see if he looked upon her face as I do now. The dream Olivia, the Olivia who is coming with him when he leaves, although he has not yet asked her. The dream Olivia knows instinctively, and will oblige him, whatever he says, and wherever he goes.

H
ER BODY
is throbbing as she walks quietly back across the park, her feet dragging with lassitude over the frozen grass, her breath puffs of white smoke in the dull sky, her hands clenched deep in her pockets, replaying the unbelievable scene they have just enacted, in slow motion.

He didn't say he loved her, and she is glad, grateful for the words unspoken, and the silent, immeasurable chasm that will always keep them apart.

 

Chapter 18

I
would drive along the coast, just after dawn, lost alone in a world dissolved in mist, the fog obscuring the waves, the world condensed in gray droplets. Early in the morning, when the sky is that peculiar damp blue threatening never to fade into the brightness of day; early in the morning, when only the garbage trucks and the hangover and the displaced of the earth are moving, when even rats and roaches are expected to sleep; then, early in the morning, I would get in the black car and drive, just drive, up the coast, drive a little too fast, too fast for the Harley that would only be skidding on the dew-­soaked asphalt, concentrating on nothing but the rhythm of my foot on the clutch and my fingers on the stick, caressing the knob, shifting, hit the clutch, shift, move forward into the murky air, mind empty of all thoughts and pain, wide and vast as the ocean crashing soundlessly to my left. It was as if I were still, stranded in place, and the world were unrolling through my window, rushing past me, I could not stop it. If I saw the horsemen of the apocalypse galloping past into the enveloping mist it would not be surprising. Only when other cars began to creep into view would I turn back home to where Nick lay sleeping, legs entwined with a blonde still blindfolded, she too exhausted to dream, yet eager to resume whatever contortions he demanded of her.

I cannot drive in London, I cannot breathe this damp air of a landscape so contained, as if the very hills were squashed down into the earth. Nowhere here can I imagine the endless open vistas of the desert, shimmering mirages and land parched into empty salt flats and twisting alluvial canyons. I should have driven to the moors, bleak, cold, and enshrouded in gloom, seeping into your skin, the moss oozing, alive, the wet pulsing, a wild creature skulking just under the surface, wanting to eat, waiting to devour anyone who dared step over it.

I want to be hot in the desert breathing deep the dry clean scent of heat, driving, sweat gluing me to the seat, the wind a sauna in my hair. I want to leave this place, I wish we'd never come.

It will end in tears, Olivia said. It will end in tears.

It will end.

I cannot drive because Nick has forbidden me to leave for longer than a few hours, now, and then only on days when he is so preoccupied with the scenes to shoot that I am dispensable. Those days are rare, he needs me by him, he needs me.

“I close my eyes and I see her,” he says to me. “I see her everywhere.”

And so I give in to his needs, as I have always done, because there is nothing else to save me from it.

Toledo thinks this preoccupation clouding Nick's eyes is an even deeper concentration because the end is near, and he pushes Nick, harder, because it is so visible, and so good. What he cannot envision is that Nick's eyes are haunted all the time, seeking knowledge he knows he'll never find. All Toledo sees is Nick on the set, inhabiting the character of a man so like and yet impossibly unlike himself, living and breathing as this creature daring to take a journey in the hopes that his heart might awaken, daring himself as he wonders if he will indeed be able to embrace death, the rightful death he has challenged, with a willingness of spirit, and a swiftly murmured prayer for his soul.

What Nick started as a whim and a dare is now the only railing separating him from the plunge into the abyss where obsession calls him, echoing endlessly the sound of her name.

S
OMETIMES
I
still wake at dawn, the sky the color of stale milk, and sit on the balcony at the hotel and watch the world awaken, barges down the Thames, stirring the mud, worms of cars and trucks attacking the traffic circles, clouds scuttling like the smoke rising from my cigarette, wondering what visions came wandering, unbidden in the night, fluttering gently behind Olivia's queer gray eyes, clenching tight her muscles, and disturbing her dreams.