Lying In Bed (2 page)

I found the pen in an antique shop down an alley I am sure I could never find again, even with a map. Serendipities like this are nothing out of the ordinary in Venice but that doesn’t make them any less magical. The city is, like the collages you make, full of unknowns, juxtaposed centuries, cultures, images that surprise, startle, please.

Which is just one of the reasons you and I have to come here together.

I want to take your arm and walk with you down quiet narrow streets at twilight when the sunset shines on the canals like flecks of glass. It will shine off your golden hair and warm your skin. We’ll walk till the night falls heavy and thick the way it does. It will wrap around your narrow shoulders like a velvet cloak. And I’ll kiss you. Oh, Marlowe, how I will kiss you.

Time is out of time here. There is no present, no future. There is just beauty. Just like you.

I know I could call you now. But the phone seems a science fiction artifact here where I am ensconced in this high- ceilinged room in this villa - this fine old palace built more than 400 years ago. And in my room, I am back in that time. Or no time. Or any time.

I wonder who we would have been if we had lived in 15th- century Venice? How would we have met? Would we have been in masks? Making love in dark corners, behind thick silk curtains, waiting to hear footsteps coming down the corridor? Your father? Husband? Other lover?

I’m sorry we fought.

Will you forgive me?

In this serene city of deep intrigue and sensual preoccupation I go over and over what I asked you and the answer you gave… the lie gleaming in your eyes… a lie that I now understand you told for both our sakes.

That I was jealous of your past is not something I can take back. I was narrow-minded. Closed off. Like these serpentine streets of Venice. I could tell from the argument you were having on the phone that you were talking to an ex-lover. I wanted to know who he was. Why he was still calling. What he wanted. How you felt. Why you talked to him so long. What he meant to you. What he still means to you. If he is at the heart of the problems we have in bed.

But now, forcing my emotions to calm, I know that we become who we are because of who we were and who we have known and what we have done. And so. To love you I have to love all the men you have been with. I have to be grateful for every kiss that has been pressed on your lips, every tongue that has slid up your thigh. Every finger touched to your cheek. Every hand that has cupped your breast. Every pair of legs that wound around your back. Every pair of eyes that have seen you naked. Every minute of love that you have made. All of these things – damn – all of these men – have made you the woman I want.

One day, when we are old and weary, I want us to look at each other and smile, alive and young again with all that we did and all that we have been and given to each other. To get there, I have to learn to love what I despise.

It’s late. The night is starting to lighten and the sun is starting to rise. And so I’m putting down this pen, closing this book, wrapping it all up and sending it off to you so that you can write to me here in this book and tell me that you forgive me. So that your answer will be waiting for me when I came home next week.

JOSHUA

The letter had been written on the first three pages of the leather bound journal, which he had sent me, via priority mail from Venice, Italy. It arrived five days after he had left, around 11 a.m. on a Tuesday morning. Two days before he was expected back.

I was reading it for the second time when the phone rang.

It was Grace, Joshua’s sister. Her voice was controlled but tight and I knew something was wrong from just hearing her say hello.

She was calling to tell me that he had been in an accident – a train wreck – on his way from Venice to Florence and that he had been killed.

When I got off the phone, I sat motionless for a long time in the chair in my living room. I did not move. Did not even weep. Not yet. What I did was reread the letter. Over and over. With my forefinger touching the paper, running over the sentences as if something of him would rub off on me. As if he was there in those words, still.

I got to the end.

What he had asked of me came as a shock. The shock I needed to finally make me realize that he was gone. That my idea of my future was gone.

Once again, I read the end of the letter.

He had asked me to forgive him. He had asked me to write him back.

But I no longer would be able to do either.

Eighteen months later

Feb 1st, 2005

“I don’t want
to be in the picture,” I said as I got up from behind my desk, hoping to prevent the photographer from a clear shot of me.

Vivienne Chancey continued to search me out with her sleek silver box. “You’d give the article a more interesting slant. The face of the woman who writes the letters.”

Click.Click.Click
.

I was talking to a camera but it wasn’t even slightly disconcerting. My mother is a photographer. So are my stepfather and my stepbrother. I am the only one in the our family who doesn’t look through a lens to see the world.

Click. Click. Click
.

“The letters and stories don’t need my face. They speak for themselves,” I laughed. Hoping she would too. That my levity would deter her.

It didn’t. She was still aiming her machine in my direction.

It was a blessing, I thought, for the sake of the shoot, that I had my father’s last name and that my mother had kept her maiden name. And that my stepfather and stepbrother had different names altogether. If Vivienne knew who my family was, she’d barrage me with questions that would make this session even more uncomfortable. Isabel Swifter was too well known. Cole and Tyler Ballinger were too.

Vivienne is lovely: small and slight with pale blonde hair, cut short and smartly to show off her perfectly oval face. Her hands are the most expressive part of her. Long, strong fingers, unadorned by either jewelry or nail polish. Her fingers danced - they didn’t just move. I knew those hands. My mother’s have the same economy of motion. So do Cole’s, my stepbrother, and his father’s.

“Why don’t you want the people who read the article to see you?”

“Because,” I told Vivienne. “I write letters and stories for other people. Me, my personality, my likes and dislikes have nothing to did with what’s in them.”

She was snapping shots, one after another without a break and the sound punctuated what I was saying. Each click was like a period at the end of my thoughts.

I hadn’t let my anyone take my picture in eight years.

In that last photo I was lying in bed. Naked. 19 years old. I didn’t mind when the picture was taken. I didn’t know how exposed I was going to appear. How naked I was going to look. You think there is only one kind of undressed? There are layers. Innocent nudity. Then suggestive nudity. Then bare and brazen sexual nakedness. And since that day, I have never been that undressed again.

And since then, I have not had my photograph taken by anyone except the NYC driver’s license bureau and the man in the small store in the bottom of Rockefeller Center when I needed a passport shot. And in both cases I was wearing my glasses. Big, round glasses with thin black frames. They are the barrier between me and everyone who looks at me. I could wear contacts but I like the curtain of glass - slightly, ever so slightly tinted blue - that I wear to separate me a little bit from everyone’s eyes.

I didn’t want a stranger to take my photograph even if it would have been good for business. That hadn’t been the plan. The magazine’s art director hadn’t told me she wanted me in the shots when she’d set up the shoot. She’d said the photographer would photograph some of the collage letters/short stories for a pre Valentine’s day issue of New York’s weekly glossy magazine. My work was to be part of a section on perfect gifts for the man or woman who has everything.

“How do you do that? Get out of your own way and keep yourself out of the letters that you write?” Vivienne asked.

“It’s my job,” I told her.

The job we were talking about was writing love letters and erotic stories for other people. Sexy sweet letters. Suggestive stories from one lover to another using their names as the characters. Poignant ones. Seductive ones. Dirty ones. I also decorate them, turning them into exotic collages.

For the few months before the shot, men had been hiring me to write Valentine tales for their girlfriends and mistresses. Women had been hiring me to create fictions out of their fantasies to give to their boyfriends. I worked with people who couldn’t express themselves but wanted to offer words as promises or to immortalize their most passionate wishes and dreams. Sometimes I simply personalized and altered one of the three dozen letters or the two dozen short stories that came with the job - written by my predecessor’s predecessor.

But I also wrote originals for a slightly higher price.

And while I don’t know if I did it better than anyone else – even if there was someone else out there doing it – I do know that I did it well enough to have a steady clientele who had found me via word of mouth. And that gave me the time to work on my own collages that I hoped would someday hang in an art gallery.

Vivienne moved to a corner of my office, looked through the viewfinder, shook her head and then moved to the opposite corner. That angle must have been better because she stayed put and the clicking sound started again.

“I’m serious,” I said. “I really don’t want to be in the shots,” I moved out of her line of sight.

I was annoyed but also amused because I knew first hand how incredibly obstinate photographers can be.

My mother would respect our wishes when my sister, Samantha, and I stamped our little feet and told her we were done, that we wanted to play or watch television or get away from that single, never tiring glass eye, but not until she got off one more shot. And I never minded when I got a little older and Cole, my stepbrother, began to photograph me.

Until I minded too much.

Once Vivienne couldn’t find me in the frame, the sound stopped. She lowered her Canon and looked for me with her eyes. Spotting me standing almost behind her in front of a large flat file case where I keep supplies and samples, she grinned at my game of hide and seek.

“Do you care that my editor is going to be unhappy?”

“Yes. I’m sorry about that. And I’d be happy to make it up to you. If you ever want me to write a letter for you, you have an IOU for one at no cost.”

Her eyebrows raised. “Really?”

I nodded.

“You
really
don’t want your picture in the article.”

“You guessed!”

We both laughed. I liked her and wouldn’t mind writing a letter for her for free if she ever claimed it.

“Okay. Let’s look through some of the letters,” she said. “You will let me shoot the letters, right?”

I smiled and pulled out one of the drawers.

Vivienne came over but she didn’t glance down. “Here, look at this shot. Are you sure you won’t change your mind?” I thought she’d given up.

She shoved the digital camera in front of my face so that I had little choice but to see the photo she was showing me.

The woman had straight hair, parted in the middle, skimming her shoulders. Brown streaked with gold. She was tall – almost slim but not quite, wearing a plain white tailored shirt with a starched stand-up collar. Her shirttails were untucked and hung lose over khaki pants. A black sweater was tied around her waist.

Through my oversized, round glasses, I looked at myself in my oversized, round glasses.

“I look like a tall, colorless owl.”

“No. A smart owl. Beautiful too in a non-traditional way” she said. It wasn’t a compliment but rather a statement made by a professional assessing what she saw in the camera.

“Thanks,” I said quickly. “Now, can I tempt you with some love letters?”

Finally she looked down at my profferings.

There were more than a dozen letters and stories in the file. Each was a collage combining words, pictures, fabrics, papers, and various other ephemera. They glittered and shined, bits of metallic paper or gold picking up the overhead lights. The inks were greens, purples, turquoise; ribbons and bits of lace, velvet, satin or silk decorated the sheets of prose.

Vivienne picked one up: deep fuchsia colored ink covered a rich vellum paper that had petals of roses imbedded in its weave. She read it silently to herself and over her shoulders; silently to myself, I did too.

Your skin is what I think of when I close my eyes. How it warms me when I slip into bed beside you, cold from the outside. You take away the freezing air. Heat me up. With what?

How do you manage to start the process as soon as I walk into the room?

In the darkness I feel your eyes on me. Can just make them out, orbs of luminescence, stroking me from eight feet away. My hands reach out before I have reached you - my hands have a memory of you that they trick me with when I am out in the world
.

I touch a silk tie and feel your skin. Pick up a glass and think it is your wrist. Run my fingers down a line of figures on a sheet of paper and they are running down your thigh as you lay on the sheets under me. And the sensation, for one second, takes my breath away
.

When she put down the letter there was a faint blush on her cheeks. The same color as the rose petals.

Three months later

May 16th, 2005

“Are you hurt?”

I looked up at the man who belonged to the voice. A quick impression of dark hair, strong features and a beard. Then he reached down to help me up.

I’d fallen. Cut myself. My reactions were slower than usual. Instead of getting up I stared at his hands for a moment. They were heavily scarred. The older cuts showed as pale lines, almost impressions of wounds, whereas the recent ones were deep red and raised.

The pain throbbed in my own hand and I grimaced. A few seconds, before I hadn’t even known I’d cut myself. I bent my head and sucked on the heel of my palm, the fount of the nuisance. It tasted sweet.