Lying In Bed (25 page)

I had letters to write. Clients who wanted to meet with me. There were assignments I’d taken in the last month that were due. And I spent those two days trying to focus on them, trying to use them to push away all my thoughts about Gideon.

I didn’t succeed.

He was inside of me.

It was not that we had made love. It was how we had made love. How we had explored the idea of touching and kissing and examining our erotic selves through my stories. How he had looked at me when I was spinning each story. How his eyes had locked on mine and not let go. What I had opened and given him. How he had taken it. It was how he reached out and, with one finger, touched my cheek and knew everything about me. It was how he had watched me undress. How he had kissed me in the light.

I spent hours looking at my body in the mirror during those two days. Searching for where I had changed. How I had changed. I touched myself – the soft place inside my wrist, the hollows under my collarbone, my thighs – my skin wasn’t the same. How could that be?

No. Nothing had changed, I told myself.

Except it had.

He’d embraced my body with his fingers and his tongue and his lips and his cock and his eyes and it had woken up someone who I’d let go to sleep. Someone who I’d forgotten existed. Who loved to be touched and who reveled in looking and touching and making love to a man.

I shuddered every time I thought about his body, naked, above me, skimming my skin. I’d made his veins throb. I’d kissed the heartbeat that I saw beat harder because of what we were doing to each other that night.

And it was over. Almost as immediately as it had started. What made it worse was that it was my fault. I’d opened for him. I’d taken him inside of me – not his body, not his flesh – but his passionate desire to connect, to explore, to see where we could go and if we could get there together, and we had.

I was a fool.

Gideon called me several times over those two days but I didn’t answer the phone. I finally turned the sound down so when he left messages I couldn’t hear what he was saying.

On the third day, I dragged myself to the office, knowing that I looked exhausted and drawn and that Grace would certainly believe that I had been sick – as I’d told her – when she saw me.

She was working with a client when I got there, but a half-hour later she came into my office with a cup of hot tea laced with honey.

“Sweetie, you look like you should still be home in bed.”

“I know. But I have too much to do. I’m better. I’ll be better.”

“Drink this. You need someone to take care of you. You should have called. I would have come over.”

“I’m really getting better.”

She sat across the desk from me and made sure I drank the tea, which did make me feel slightly less shaky. It wasn’t really a lie when I told her I’d had a stomach virus. I was, by then, sick over what had happened. What I’d let happen. What I’d found out.

“I hate to tell you about this when you are feeling bad… but you need to know about it.”

She put a letter on the desk and pushed it towards me. For a second I froze, afraid it was from Gideon, that he’d gotten in touch with her and that he was complaining about me for not finishing the work we started. Afraid that Grace would ask me what had happened and that I’d have to explain.

I took the letter, opened it, and read it.

It was from a woman named Clara Loomis. She explained that she had met a man named Philip Drawson on a vacation. They’d only gone out to dinner twice and then both had gone back to their homes - 300 miles apart. In the ensuing weeks, Philip had written her several erotic love letters.

I knew Philip Drawson. I had written those letters for him, three months earlier.

Clara wrote that, based on those letters, she had gotten more and more involved with Philip and fell in love with him. Ultimately, she flew out to see him and spend the weekend with him.

The first night she was there, he had become physically violent with her and she’d wound up in the hospital.

She was blaming Lady Chatterley’s Letters, because I had written the letters that her lover had sent her.

I put the sheet of ordinary typewriter paper down on my desk. The letters I’d written for Philip had been artfully designed in red ink on heavy vellum. “I’m having a hard time understanding the reason for her sending this. Is there a threat in here? A lawsuit? What does she want?”

“I wasn’t sure either. I spoke to a lawyer today and he said it’s either a prelude to a lawsuit or someone who is angry and venting her frustration. You aren’t responsible if it does turn out to be a law suit, but we are living in a litigious society and he suggested we amend your contract with clients to include a release, in case anything like this happens again.”

I nodded. I knew I should be focusing on what she was saying but it was the word “release” that had stopped me. I was thinking about my old love letter that Cole had insisted to Gideon was as good as a release.

Could my letter to Cole, written when I was 17 years old, agreeing that of course he should show the photos he took of me to his college professor, hold up in court if I were to sue him?

“Marlowe, you really aren’t better yet are you? You don’t have any color. I want you to get out of here. I’ll handle your clients. Go home.”

“No. I’ve been out for two days. I can handle it.” I picked up the letter and stared down at it. “The poor woman…”

“I hate to sound like a cynic, but we don’t know anything in this letter is true.”

“I never thought there was anything wrong with what I was doing. Facilitating romance never seemed like a serious offense. But suddenly it seems false and dangerous.”

“Something else is going on, isn’t it?”

I didn’t have the energy to explain to her about Gideon and Vivienne Chancy and how, in my attempt to help them express their feelings for each other, I’d played with their emotions and allowed them to pursue a relationship that was partially based on lies.

“I don’t feel well,” it was actually the truth.

“Go home, please. The releases can wait till next week, okay?”

I nodded.

I’d send them, though. Send them to everyone but Gideon. I couldn’t write to him. Couldn’t contact him. He’d already called me at home again that morning. This last message had started out less concerned and more terse, asking again why I’d run out of Starbucks. And then he’d said, “If this is about Cole and those photographs, you can’t let them bother you anymore. You were a kid. You were in love. You didn’t do anything to be ashamed of.”

Even if the photographs had been the reason I was avoiding Gideon, it wasn’t because I was embarrassed by them.

I had loved posing for Cole. Loved being sexy and provocative and having him take my photograph. I was in love with him, and it seemed to me that everything we did was fine. I didn’t know any better. In my naïveté, I’d thought that posing was part of how I was showing him how I felt, and that he was reciprocating by taking the pictures. It had never occurred to me that when I’d finally had enough of the photographs, he would have had enough of me.

I’d been so hungry for Cole that I’d fed his addiction and I’d wound up starved.

And even now, years later, the part of me that had been ripped apart had not completely healed. The exuberance I’d felt with him when we made love turned sour and until I’d met Gideon, I hadn’t ever imagined I could feel it again.

I’d shown Cole everything about me that he’d wanted to see and rather than enjoy it and take pleasure in it, he’d turned it around, regardless of what it would do to me. And now it was possible he was going to reopen the cut he’d made in my psyche.

How stupid I’d been not to see that all I’d been to him was another body to use for his oh so precious art.

His art
.

“Maybe what I’m doing here is wrong?” I blurted out to Grace who was about to walk out of my office. She turned.

“What you do is an art form, Marlowe.”

“If that’s true, if even a little bit of that is true, then its even worse.”

“Why?”

I wanted to explain it but I didn’t know how. It was all complicated in my head. What part was Cole, what part Gideon, and what part Vivienne?

If Grace didn’t know what had happened, if I didn’t tell her, then to her I was still who I’d always been. So as long as I could keep it from her, I could remain myself, and maybe I’d be okay.

I couldn’t answer her question. She came back and sat down again at my desk.

“What you’re doing isn’t wrong. But how your clients use the letters can be dangerous.”

“But how can I know that when someone comes to me?”

“You can’t.”

I sighed.

Grace put her hand on mine. She was wearing a huge amethyst ring, surrounded by light green peridots, that sparkled on her finger.

“It’s not only that you are sick, is it?”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re lying.”

“You’re wrong.”

“Something is bothering you. Tell me.”

“Did you get an invitation to the opening for my step brother’s show?” I was sure she had, she and Jeff were good friends and I was certain he’d put her on the guest list.

“Yes, I got it.”

“Are you going?”

“Jeff asked me to go with him. He suggested we bring you. I was going to ask you about that. Why?”

“Do you have to go?”

“No. Would you prefer if I didn’t go?”

I nodded.

“Can you tell me why?”

But I couldn’t tell her. To talk about it, to draw attention to it, would only make it worse. “Cole and I don’t get along. You know that. I don’t know what kind of lies he tells. About me. It bothers me that he’ll tell them to you.”

“I can tell the difference between the truth and a lie. Why don’t I walk you home? We can stop and pick up some soup. I’ll heat it up for you. Get you into bed.”

“I don’t need you to do all that.”

“Yes, you do. Come on. The store can spare me for a while.”

She took my umbrella and we walked out.

First she ushered me across the street to Dean & Deluca to pick up some ready-made food. We passed the long marble table in the window and I saw the ghostlike image of me and Gideon sitting there that day, when he found me seemingly by accident.

The store wasn’t too busy yet, it was only 3:30, and we made our way down the aisles, getting a seven-grain bread, some corn and crab chowder, a bottle of Stewart’s Lime soda, a box of glistening strawberries, and a package of chocolate dipped butter cookies. Comfort food.

Back out on the street, Grace carried the bag. I held the umbrella over us. We didn’t talk until we were back in my apartment, both a little wet from the overwhelming rain.

“You get undressed and get into bed. I’ll heat this up.”

“You don’t have to do that. It’s early. I’m not ready to eat. You don’t have to hang around here.”

“No. I don’t have to. But I want to. If you’re really not hungry, how about some more tea?”

I nodded.

She came back a few minutes later with steaming mugs of strong green tea. “Don’t you think it would help if you told me, finally, what Cole did to you and what’s wrong?”

“It won’t help.”

“Do your parents know happened?”

“No.”

“Did you tell Joshua?”

“No. But we fought about it. It was the only thing we fought about. And I never got the chance to explain it to him.”

“You can’t blame Cole for that.”

“That’s not what I blame him for.”

“Okay. Don’t tell me. But you need to tell someone. You can’t hold on to whatever it is. It’s destructive.”

“What I’m doing is deceptive. Writing these letters for other people.”

“You changed the subject.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it.” I laughed sardonically. “I guess I don’t know what’s bothering me more. Cole and his show or that I’m doing something wrong with the letters. That I’m setting people up for disappointment”

“People are disappointed all the time. What you’re doing is the opposite. It gives people a chance to express themselves in a way that they can’t.”

What would be easier - to tread into unknown waters telling her about Gideon and examining parts of myself that I wasn’t interested in exploring?

Or explaining about the past and Cole?

At least I knew the terrain.

The next morning
I didn’t go into the store again because Grace called first thing and told me to take one more day to stay home.

“Work if you want, but I want you to rest, too.”

I worked though the day, from early in the morning, without taking a break on a collage that I had started before I’d met Gideon or found out about Cole’s show. I didn’t shower or get dressed but threw on a big shirt, pushed up my sleeves, pulled my hair back, turned on the stereo and filled the CD changer with classical music, and worked.

The collage consisted of words, ripped up and arranged in the shape of a flower which was placed inside the silhouette of a woman standing in a park with leaves raining down on her.

The whole thing was cut in half - the right piece was turned upside down and placed the left.

It was awful. One of the worst things I’d ever done and after slaving on it for the whole day, I took a pair of stainless steel scissors, cut it into pieces, and threw it all in my wastepaper basket.

At six I splashed some vodka over four ice cubes and sat down on the bed, clicking through three dozen channels before settling on an old black and white movie - “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.” I had seen it before. At least three times. That was even better than if I hadn’t. I wanted something that was familiar and sad and that would keep me from thinking about my own life.

The buzzer rang at seven and I got up, pressed on the intercom button, and said hello, fully expecting it to be some delivery - of pizza or Chinese food - for a different apartment.

“Marlowe? It’s Gideon.”

I didn’t say anything but I felt his voice in my stomach and behind my knees.

“Marlowe?”

“Yes.”

“Can I come up?”

“No.”

There was a silence on his end but I knew he was still there. I could hear the traffic in the street below.