Lying In Bed (28 page)

“When did you get those?” I asked. I didn’t remember us stopping at a drug store.

“Gideon picked them up for me and dropped them off on his way home. You were already asleep by then.”

I took the pills from her and then lay there quietly, waiting for them to start working. I didn’t want to talk about Cole anymore. But I also knew that my mother was still upset. She still needed more.

“I snuck around, Mom. There was no way you could have found out. There were so many places to go on the farm. Out past the orchards. Down by the lake. You couldn’t be in all those places at once.”

“I should have sensed something.”

“You couldn’t have. I lied, Mom. I was so good at lying. There’s no way you ever could have guessed.”

“Are you still?”

“Good at lying?”

She nodded.

“I think I have been. But I might be ready to try the truth for awhile. The lies haven’t done me much good.”

In the morning
, there was a note for me, from my mother, in the kitchen, propped up against the coffee maker.

Dear Marlowe,

You were sleeping so deeply, I didn’t want to wake you. I’ve gone back to the hotel to shower and change and can come back in a minute if you need me. Just call. Well, call either way when you wake up. I want to know that you’re all right.

I spent some time with all your collages last night after you went back to sleep. And you’ve really found your art haven’t you? I can see you in each one. Clear and strong and so sure of your voice. I’m very proud of you! Your stepfather and I would love to take you out to dinner tonight – call.

Love,

Mom

P.S. Gideon called. He wanted to know how you were. And asked me to tell you that he’d like you to call him, too, when you get up. We had a nice conversation. He seemed very concerned about you. Why haven’t you mentioned him???

I smiled at the three question marks. My mother was a photographer, not a writer. She always overused punctuation.

My hand hurt, but it was a dull ache. Not bad enough for the painkillers that I knew would make me groggy. Instead, I took two extra strength ibruprophen while the coffee machine worked its magic. And then I poured myself a mug and sat down in the living room, with the sun pouring in through the windows, bathing the room in lemon light, and let my mind go over and over what had happened the night before.

I don’t know what was harder to believe.

That I had gone on such a violent rampage – so suddenly a victim of my own emotions, or that Gideon had been there to stop me, to take me to the hospital, to make sure I wasn’t alone?

I understood what had happened. How seeing those photographs up on the wall, on display, had triggered my fury. Like my mother’s overused question marks and exclamation points, the explosion had been my own punctuation to a long, unresolved conflict.

What, I wondered, had happened at the gallery after I’d left?

I turned on my computer and clicked on the New York Times web site and then went to the art section. It was there. A full column review of Cole’s show.

If I had worried about ruining his night, I could put that to rest. The exhibition had gotten raves and the “incident” as the reviewer had referred to it, would go far, she said, “to explain how incendiary Ballinger’s nakedly erotic photographs are.”

The day before, I might have gotten angry at the idea that Cole’s star had risen another notch. But I didn’t care that much anymore. The fragmented images of me that he’d recorded were only paper reflections a young girl who’d been in love, in her way, him. They were nothing but a record of the past.

Yes, I had lost that part of myself. But not because he’d stolen them. Because I’d given them up. I’d de-accessioned them. Divorced myself from that ripe and willing young woman who was more in love with the idea of love and more aroused by arousal itself than she’d realized.

I’d tried to be with other men since Cole. To find some depth of emotional connection with them. Of course, it hadn’t worked. Not even with Joshua. How could it have worked?

I’d kept part of myself on ice. Removed. Remote. Hidden. I’d disowned my sexual self.

I hadn’t wanted the passionate woman who Cole had known to show up with any of the men I dated afterwards. I didn’t want her to get me in any more trouble.

But it hadn’t worked. She’d scrunched down deep inside me and hidden inside my heart, like a poisoned seed. As long as I was unwilling to accept her, I wouldn’t be able to feel.

I even started to understand why I’d almost been able to come alive with Gideon. He had never been real to me. He was attached to another woman from the first moment I met him. I didn’t have to worry that ultimately he’d reject me if my succubus reared her wanton head.

I poured myself a second cup of coffee.

Gideon wanted me to call. But what would he say? What would I say?

How ironic that I’d finally met someone who really might be able to accept all the different parts of me, only to have him be in love with someone else.

The sob escaped despite how hard I tried to hold it in, and with it came a sense of longing that shocked me with its intensity.

No. I wouldn’t call him. It wasn’t fair to him.

Or me.

Damn.

That wasn’t the truth. And I had to start telling the truth. At least to myself.

I couldn’t call him because I was afraid that he’d hear what I was feeling in my voice. That he’d use that damn sixth sense of his and guess. And then I’d be chagrined. Because I didn’t want to be a soulful woman with longing in her voice, lusting after a man who was with someone else.

I had dinner
with my mother and Troy.

It was awkward at first, Troy didn’t know what to say, or how to act, until I told him that I didn’t expect him to apologize for his son. We worked at it through the meal and, by the time desert came, we were okay. I knew it would take more time to heal, but we were clearly going to be all right.

I was tired when I got home and didn’t even turn on the lights. I undressed in the semi-darkness and, as I got into bed, saw the blinking light of the answering machine.

There were three messages.

“Marlowe, it’s Gideon. I’d like you to call me. I need to come clean. I wasn’t fair to you and now I’m paying the price. I think that by trying to give you – give us a chance – oh, this is so ridiculous. Talking to your machine instead of you…”

There was a pause and the machine, which operated on a system that cut off after a certain amount of dead time, disconnected him.

The machine’s beep sounded again and the second message started.

“Marlowe, its me again. Listen, I hired you to write stories for a woman who was writing me – letters that were making me fall in love with her. And then I started working with you, I listened to you at the beach, spinning that story…” he had stopped talking again.

The machine shut off again and I couldn’t help myself, I laughed, thinking of how frustrated he must have been.

The third message started.

“I got it now. I can’t take any long pauses on this machine. Okay. Let me get this out - short and sweet - and fast. So I realized that you were writing the letters Vivienne was sending me. It wasn’t that much of a coincidence. I’d seen her photos of your work in that magazine. So I called her after that day at the beach and broke it off with her. I was going to tell you at the museum. I didn’t. I don’t know why. I think because I wanted to spend time with you, the letter writer, the woman behind those words. I wanted to tell you a dozen times, to stop the charade. But I sensed that you wouldn’t let me in if you knew the truth. I thought that the way I was doing it would give us a chance to get to know each other without the false expectations that relationships create.”

There was another pause. The machine cut off again.

Even though I was angry, no, furious at the lie he’d told and the game he’d played, I smiled in the dark, at how the machine had hung up on him a third time while he was trying so hard to explain what had happened.

I sipped at the now lukewarm coffee and thought about the deeper meaning of what I’d just heard.

Gideon hadn’t been unfaithful. He hadn’t cheated on anyone with me. And all the things I’d felt, he’d been feeling too.

Continuing to lie about there being a woman might have been dishonest. But… I remembered something I’d tried to explain to Joshua two years before,
there is no glory in honesty if it is destructive. And no shame in dishonesty if its goal is to offer grace
.

There was another beep on the machine and then Gideon’s voice returned.

“I’m clearly not having any luck with your damn machine. So I’m not going to try and explain the rest of it. Except to ask you to call me when you get in. Or come over to the loft. Either. Please. And oh, one other thing. I don’t know if this will make any more sense to you than anything else or any difference – but I know what the shells were saying on the beach: ‘I can love the darkness in you.’”

There was a click as Gideon hung up his phone.

I lay in bed, thinking through what I’d heard. Not understanding it all.

I hadn’t told him what it had sounded like the shells were saying when we’d stood by the ocean. In the story I’d made up something else.

But he’d known.

I had to make a decision. To trust him – to trust someone who seemed to know me better than anyone else ever had, who didn’t seem to be afraid to know me and all the darkness that was part of me.

Or to stay away and protect myself from being hurt again.

I put my hand on the phone. I left it there for a minute. But I didn’t call.

I couldn’t.

Instead I got up and walked over to my desk.

I looked down at the array of pens. The antique glass stylus from Venice that Joshua had sent me so long ago. The curved black lacquer Waterman. The thick and sleek Mont Blanc pen.

I chose a simple fountain pen I’d had before I’d started to write for clients.

Then I began to rifle through the papers.

None of the vellum or rice paper or rare marbleized sheets was right.

I wanted white paper. Clean and pure and plain. This wasn’t for a client. Not for a husband or wife or lover. This wasn’t a story I was creating for someone else, trying to keep myself out it.

This was a letter
I
was writing.

For myself and for the man I was writing it to.

This was my heart, in words, on paper.

An invitation to a man who I’d met and who had gotten inside of my head and helped me get inside my soul.

And for that, I didn’t want artifice or artfulness or fancy colors.

I’d never written a love letter in my life. I’d never answered Joshua’s apology. I’d never written for my own pleasure or to satisfy my creativity. Every word I’d inscribed with ink on paper until that night had been for someone else.

I’d disappeared into an eroticism that didn’t belong to me while I tried to pretend that my own eroticism didn’t matter. That my own feelings were immaterial.

But I’d been lying. To myself.

And so I started to write my own letter.

From me.

To him.

Dear Gideon
,

I began, and then the rest flowed.