Lying In Bed (17 page)

“What is the problem between you and Cole, Marlowe? I should have realized how long it’s been since I’ve seen you two together. Remember when you used to be joined at the hip?”

“It’s nothing. Grew together, grew apart.”

“Nothing is nothing with you Marlowe. You don’t drop people. You’re too sensitive for that. You get inside people’s heads and understand them. You care about them. You’re intensely loyal. You still have friends from grade school. Cole’s your stepbrother. You don’t grow apart from people you love. If anything, you hold on too long, are more forgiving than is good for you.”

“Thanks for the psychoanalysis. When did you give up photography?”

“Sarcastic now? That means I hit a little too close for comfort. What is going on sweetie? None of this makes sense. If anything, you hold onto difficult people too long. You like their complications, their layers. You’re so good at getting beneath their surfaces. And once you do, you understand and forgive.”

“You’re making too much of something that is probably just a bad case of sibling rivalry.”

“Sibling rivalry is for toddlers.”

“Okay then, professional jealousy. Mine. For him. I didn’t like constantly being compared to the more successful artist in the family.”

My mother didn’t say anything. I knew her well enough to picture her. She probably was playing with the catch on her watch. The same one she’d worn since I was a little girl. It had been my father’s watch before he died. And when she was thinking, or upset, she opened and closed the catch on the battered stainless band. I listened hard and heard the familiar metallic snap. I didn’t remember much about my father, who had been a journalist and died when I was four years old. Killed in Israel while covering a story.

“You know, I almost believe you.” My mother said.

“Why don’t you go all the way and fully believe me?”

“Because I’m not sure you could be that jealous. A little resentful. Slightly annoyed. Angry at yourself that you haven’t gotten further with your own work. But for it to all add up so that you stopped talking to Cole or taking his calls? Nope. I’m not buying it.”

I sighed. Not on purpose. If I’d been thinking, I would have held it in.

“Now you are getting me angry,” my mother said.

“Because?”

“Because you’re keeping it inside.”

“My prerogative.”

It was an old expression. My mother was a private person. An artist who became a mother of my sister and I and then two additional step-children. She believed in all of us having a right to our own privacy, and respecting hers and my stepfather’s. The catch phrase in our house was “my prerogative” if we felt someone was intruding when we needed alone time.

Now my mother laughed. It was the sound that had orchestrated the best times when I was growing up. She loved to tell jokes. To listen to us tell them. She teased us and tickled us and encouraged us to be just plain silly. Hearing the peals of her laughter, I thought about how much I missed her.

Since my mother and stepfather had moved to Santa Fe, I didn’t see them enough. When they were only a three-hour drive away, I went up often for weekends and always for holidays. Now it was planning and a plane trip.

“Troy and I are coming to New York in July.”

It was almost as if she’d heard my thoughts. “That’s great. I can’t wait to see you.” I knew why they were coming, but I wanted to hear her say it. “Vacation?”

“Part of it will be, yes.”

I waited. She waited. Finally I said: “The other part?”

“I thought you knew. Cole is having a one-man show at a Chelsea gallery. There’s going to be a big party. We’re invited. You’re invited. He said he sent you–”

“That’s very exciting.” I knew my voice was anything but excited as I interrupted.

“He’s so young to have such an honor. I was forty and Troy was forty-five before we had solo shows.”

I nodded, realized she couldn’t see me, and said: “How long are you staying?”

“What the hell is going on Marlowe? Didn’t you know about the show? Why aren’t you saying anything about it? No matter how annoyed you are at Cole about whatever it is, surely it’s not that serious that you can’t be happy for him about this. It’s an incredible achievement.”

I got up and walked over to the table in the hall where I’d thrown my bag when I walked in. Holding on to the phone with one hand, I fished around until I found my cell phone. Then, using my forefinger, I punched in my own number, waited for it to ring and for the call waiting click to interrupt my conversation with my mother. I let the first one go.

“Mom, listen, I don’t want you to worry about this and–”

The beep of an incoming call sounded over my words.

“That’s my call waiting. Email me the dates and leave some time for me. I can’t wait to see you. Really.”

After we got off the phone, I retrieved the four pages of white typewriter paper from the printer. Double-spaced. Helvetica, twelve- point type.

Hold it far away from your face, so far that you can’t read the words, and all you see is a pattern of straight lines, curves, circles, and angles. Meaningless black marks in a seeming random order. I couldn’t read the searing words from that far away. It was simply an arbitrary design. But for some reason it calmed me down. My writing was not important. It was simply an escape. In the stories, men and women did things to each other that might disturb them, ignite them, illuminate them, arouse them while I remained safe and secure. Untouched and unattached. Not close to anyone who could reach into me and turn me inside out.

Four days later
, Gideon met me in Bergdorf Goodman, one of New York City’s most exclusive department stores. He was waiting for me at eleven a.m. downstairs in the cosmetics department, at the Guerlain counter.

The carpet was thick under my feet and walking toward him I was conscious of how little effort it was taking to get me to his side. Seeing him again, I felt a catch in my breath and I only knew I was smiling because of the way he was smiling back.

“Good morning,” he said. “I got here a few minutes early. I think I’m on the verge of olfactory overdose. I never realized how serious women are when they shop. This should be more fun than most of these women make it look.”

I laughed. “What you’re seeing is single-minded devotion to a goal.”

We stood facing the large circular counter in the center of the room. Gleaming bottles caught the lights from the chandeliers. With their soft curves and gentle angles, they cried to be held.

The liquid golds and ambers, the sea-inspired blue-greens and gray-blues, the pastels stolen from the petals of the flowers that had inspired the scents, all enticed you to open the jewel-toned or precious-metal caps and touch the perfume to your pulse points.

“Did you send the museum letter?” I asked, as we strolled around the counter.

He hesitated for a few seconds. So short a time I was almost surprised I noticed it. His eyes and mine held. There was only one lost beat of time before he said: “Yes.” And then he smiled. It was a secret smile, suggesting the reaction of the woman who’d received it. I wanted to know more. And at the same time, I didn’t want to know at all.

Suddenly, I was glad Gideon hadn’t told me anything about his lover. If I could picture her, see her in my mind reading my words, it would bother me. Might even freeze me. This, too, was new for me. I’d never been bothered with whom my letters or stories were being sent to. These weren’t mine the way these were.

“So, do you want to hear my idea for this story?”

“I’m breathless with anticipation.”

“That’s the perfume getting to you.”

We laughed and then I launched into the story. “I think a man might bring his lover here to chose the perfect fragrance for her.”

“How would he do that?”

We were starting to play a game. Playing together this time as opposed to the two prior instances when I’d be on my own with an invention that sprung entirely from my imagination. I preferred it this new way, but didn’t allow myself to spend time figuring out why.

The air conditioner was strong in the store. I took my sweater from around my waist and put it on, watching Gideon pick up one bottle after another that appealed to him the most from a visual standpoint. He opened each one, sniffed at it, and then put it down.

“So this is what he does?” he asked.

“Yes. He wants to find exactly the right perfume.”

He picked up a bottle of Annick Goutal, in a cut glass falcon, sniffed, sniffed again, frowned, and returned it to the countertop.

“But it’s difficult,” I continued. “Each is too intense on its own. He can’t tell from how the scent smells in the bottle how it will smell when he touches the liquid to her and it’s warmed by her skin.”

I picked up a bottle of a classic, Shalimar, and handed it to him. Gideon put his head down and inhaled. Then shook his head. “I could never chose one only from smelling them in the bottle.”

He tipped the bottle and wet his fingers with the perfume. then pressed his fingers to my wrist. First there was a coolness on my skin but, after it dried, the sensation of his fingers lingered, the way the scent had burst forth and then lingered, filling me up, overtaking me.

I held my hand out for him and he bent over it the way he had bent over the bottles. As he breathed in, his raven hair fell in his face and brushed against my skin. The sensation made me suck in my breath.

This was not supposed to be happening. I was not supposed to be reacting to him like this.

“He can’t really pick out the perfume on his own, can he?”

“No. He has to ask one of the saleswomen to help him test the perfume. He picks one who he thinks looks the most like the woman he’s in love with. She’s happy to help. But something starts to happen as they test out the perfumes. He smells more than the scent. He smells her. The earthiness of her beneath the synthetics, and the oils and he’s attracted to that smell. More attracted to it than anything he’s ever smelled before. It’s as if he’s known her primeval essence all his life without being aware of it. He wants be enveloped in it, in her.”

Gideon’s eyes were on me now, and he was nodding. Not overtly, but subtly. Just enough of a movement to let me know that he was slipping into the story with me, falling deeply into the fictive dream. The same way I was.

“The saleswoman doesn’t mind. She likes showing off the scents for him. And she likes the feeling of his hair, so soft against her skin when he bends over her, almost as if he is praying, to take in her smell. But they’ve run out of room on her wrists and so when he tries out the next scent she takes his hand and instead of pressing his fingers to her lower arm, she puts his hand up behind her ear, under her hair, in a private place on her body that is not exposed.”

“Even though he knows he shouldn’t, he leans toward her. Taking her shoulders in his hands, he holds onto her and puts his–”

Gideon’s hand was lifting up to my neck, he was moving my hair, and then he stopped. The look on Gideon’s face probably mirrored the one on mine as we realized the same thing at the same time. Which one of us had warned the other off?

It didn’t matter, the moment was broken as surely as if it had been one of the crystal bottles of perfume dropped on the glass counter, shattering into a hundred slivers of broken light, stinking up the air despite how fragile and gentle and sensual the scent was in the right proportion.

“Well, this won’t work. I can’t have you send a letter about someone seducing a poor salesgirl when his lover is pining for him.”

He laughed. “Definitely projecting the wrong thing.”

“I’m sorry.” My own laughter sounded tight and nervous. “That’s the way the story started developing.”

“Not to worry. It was a great story. It’s amazing how you slide into telling them. Like you’re putting on someone else’s shadow.”

I shrugged. I didn’t want to tell him, didn’t even want to accept it myself, but this was atypical for me. Stories didn’t usually come to me this easily. And I didn’t normally disappear so deep into them.

And I didn’t normally find any inspiration in my clients.

We were both
headed downtown and so we walked east together to take the subway.

Sitting next to him, as we were whisked through tunnels under the city, we were quiet. When the train jerked to a stop at 42nd street, our legs banged together. I was aware of the two inches where his jeans touched my khaki’s. There was a patch of heat that sizzled through the fabric. And for a few moments I couldn’t figure out whether or not to move. I knew I should have. Or he should have. But neither of us did.

Everything around us disappeared. There were no other people across from me or behind me or in front of me. The sounds of the subway dissipated. All sense of the rest of my body left me. I simply was that one connection point.

There was no precedent for how I was supposed to act in this situation. I wasn’t dating this man. I was working for him. Even worse, I was helping him seduce a woman he was interested in. And yet we occupied another realm when we were together. A confusing landscape that engaged my senses and my imagination in a way that was unusual.

We got out at the Spring street station. I was going to Ephemera and Gideon was going to his studio. Both were in the same direction and we had three blocks to walk together.

He was taller than me by at least five inches and with such long legs, he walked much faster than I did. I was hurrying to keep up with him for the first block but then he realized and slowed down.

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you in a hurry? Do you have an appointment?”

“The owner of my gallery is meeting me but not for an hour. He has a buyer for a piece that I am finishing up.”

“I really would like to see your work.” I was surprised at myself. I’d already brought this up without getting the reaction I wanted. Now I was being pushy and overstepping my bounds. But it had simply slipped out.

If I was honest with myself, I’d admit that I was more than curious. The night before, I’d wanted to look him up on the internet and see if any of his work was online, but had forced myself to hold back. I didn’t want to give in to the urge to scope him out. It was too much like being a high school girl with a crush waiting outside a boy’s house and pretending to bump into him.