Lying In Bed (3 page)

Then I inspected the source of the stinging injury.

Carved into my flesh was a clean, curved gash which, as I watched, refilled and then overflowed with blood.

“You’ve cut yourself. C’mon let me help you up,” he said in a voice that sounded like wind through a canyon. Strong, evocative, determined. And concerned. His hands were opened to me. Still slightly dazed, all I could do was stare at them, not realizing that was what I was doing.

On the heel of his left palm was a crescent moon of thickened flesh. Almost the exact same shape as the cut I’d given myself.

How could that be? It suggested something portentous but I didn’t believe in fate. We were not in a fantasy but in New York City, in Soho, on Broadway between Prince and Spring streets, inside the store where I work, called Ephemera, which sells papers and ribbons, stickers, pens, boxes, journals, glitter, glues, scrapbooks and stationery pre-designed or to order.

Grace - the owner, my employer and my friend - and I debated the issue of fate when business was slow. Over cups of take-out cappuccino from Dean & Deluca, the gourmet emporium across the street, she always tried to convince me to pay attention to the signs that the universe presented. An eternally optimistic woman, she loves with an exuberance that I find enviable and am thankful to be the recipient of. Grace believes in magic, several religions as well as parapsychology, the healing power of chocolate and good red wine.

Her belief in predestination was as strong as my opposition to it. And we argued about it, both of us enjoying the fight. She used to be distraught that I didn’t want the comfort her belief system offer but I remained unwilling to accept that I could be locked into a fate that was not of my own making.

But, here was a stranger who
was
marked in an almost identical way to me. Both alike in how we were damaged – at least on the surface, in the flesh.

He would have once felt the very same pain that was flashing through my hand.

I had been spending too much time listening to Grace, I thought. Our having the same shape cut in the same place on our palms didn’t mean anything. Even if the gash was similar, it was impossible that his psyche was ripped in the same places as mine or that the glue that mended me would be the same as had mended him.

Still, I was mesmerized by his injury. Hypnotized and angered by its familiarity. I wanted to rub it off him and erase the coincidence of it, annulling what I couldn’t understand.

No.

I didn’t want to erase it.

In what seemed like an obscenely short amount of time - mere seconds - I knew that I didn’t want his scar to disappear. I was fascinated by it and I wanted to touch it.

Maybe I had been momentarily stunned from getting hurt. Or I was simply curious because of the odd parallelism of the way we were both marked. The why didn’t matter - I was fixated on the scar.

Or maybe Grace, with all her talk about predestination and symbolism and how there were no coincidences had primed me for that moment.

Grace made prophecies. She brought in amulets and crystals and left them on my desk the way someone else would leave flowers. I adored her. She was the older sister I never had. And so I took her offerings and respected her. But I had never believed any of what she told me when she went all “new age” on me.

Or so I thought.

Because the truth was, in that moment, looking down at the scar on his hand, a mirror image of my own fresh one, all I could think about was what Grace would say it meant and how she would interpret my reaction to it.

Maybe the pain in my hand
had
made me hypersensitive to other feelings, or perhaps it was the sound of the man’s voice or the way he looked so familiar in the instant when I’d seen his face, I didn’t know. But my reaction was both completely unexpected and foreign to me. I disliked it. And so I mistrusted the man who had aroused it to me.

I wanted to dissect his scar. Explore it with my fingertip and read it like Braille. Examine its contours and ridges just as I had done to my own cut. I needed to prove how distinct it was from mine, how dry, how healed compared to my open, sharp-edged and wet wound.

“There’s blood everywhere,” he said. The wind now a worry. “How bad is that cut? You might need stitches.” He gripped me by my elbow and lifted me up.

As I stood, shards of broken glass fell from my skirt and hit the tile floor with a high pitched sound that rung out like glass bells.

In one swift motion he pulled my hand toward him, bending over it so quickly that I didn’t get a chance to see any more of his face and instead found myself studying his hair which was burnt umber – a deep brown color I used when I painted - and fell forward in thick curls.

“Are you a doctor?”

“No. But I know about cuts.”

I was quiet while he studied my hand. A customer in the store who had come to my aid. A stranger who I had no reason to notice. He was much taller than me, wore blue jeans and a black turtleneck. He was lean and gangly and almost disheveled but not quite.

I was aware of his strong fingers on my skin. Where we made contact, my nerve endings pulsed. Similar to the throb of pain, sensation spiked and retreated and then repeated itself.

It made me uncomfortable and uneasy. I was too aware of his touch. The accident had made me nervous.

“This cut isn’t deep enough for all this blood. You must be hurt somewhere else.” He picked up his head and looked at me. “Are you?”

Once he wasn’t bending over my hand anymore, I examined his face while I explained that what he thought was blood on my clothes and the floor was only ink and how I’d been kneeling, searching on a low shelf for a box of gold leaf paper, heard the phone ring, rushed to get it, pulled myself up using a shelf above me, but somehow yanked out and spilled a box of six bottles of vermilion ink in the process. How all of them had broken around me, sending glass and splashes of red liquid everywhere.

“Something else is wrong though. What is it?” he asked when I’d finished.

“What?”

“Something other than the pain is bothering you.”

“How did you know that?”

He shrugged. “I can see it in your eyes.”

“But you don’t know me.”

“That’s true. But I do know what concern looks like. And you’re concerned?”

I couldn’t tell him about all of the reactions I was having to him. So I chose the most innocent. “It’s only that you look like someone and it was driving me crazy who it was.” I’ve studied art and painted for years and still look at people as if I was going to draw them. I forget that it’s rude, intrusive and confusing. I forget people on the other end of it find it disconcerting.

“So who is it? Have you figured it out?”

I nodded. “You look like a man in a painting. A fresco in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Roman. 3rd century BC.”

And he did. The same dark wavy hair, wide, almond, intelligent eyes: deep set and harboring a haunted expression. The same arrogant high cheekbones, aquiline nose and long neck.

I pictured the portrait that I’d stopped in front of a dozen times on my way in or out of the Egyptian wing because the man’s gaze – even though it was only pigment on stone – demanded it.

“Only your toga and crown are missing.”

He tilted his head and looked at me as if he was figuring something out. Then he smiled. “I’ll have to go see him, then. I’d like to see how I look in a toga. And the idea of a crown is very appealing. I haven’t been to the Met in too long anyway.”

“It’s a wreath really.”

“Build up my ego and then dash it to bits in mere seconds. You’re heartless,” he joked.

I don’t know what it was that gave me the feeling he was so secure, but listening to him, I didn’t think anyone could dash his ego. Except it wasn’t egotistical or obnoxious. It was a good thing that this man was sure of himself. It was as if he wore an invisible cloak that kept him slightly removed from the dangers and weaknesses that could attack the rest of us mere mortals.

Or was I projecting what I felt about the man in the painting on to his 21st-century double?

Some people’s faces are open. Their expressions easy to read, all their features following in a certain logic. Their lips and eyes and their facial lines declare the same emotion at the same time.

This man’s face did not fall into one easy-to-read communication. Yes, he was smiling – his lips moved, the left side lifting a little higher than the right, and the grin showed irony and humor. But his eyes retained something more serious and deeply curious. At the same time they were rebellious. As if he didn’t only accept what he saw but challenged it.

As he continued cradling my hand in both of his, I was aware of where we made contact but I didn’t know why.

It was unexplained.

And the unexplained troubled me.

It occurred to me, standing there, in the store, with a man I didn’t know but felt as if I did, that it would be better if I disengaged my hand, stepped back, excused myself and asked Grace to help him.

But I didn’t. Didn’t pull away. Didn’t run away.

Instead I let him continue to hold my hand as a shiver of – what? recognition? pleasure? fear? – shot up my arms and down my neck and pushed my pulse into overdrive. How long did it last? Probably thirty seconds? Maybe ten minutes. A day? Two nights? I didn’t seem to be thinking straight.

“Do you have a first aid kit here?”

I said there was and that I’d clean up the cut.

“You won’t be able to do it with only one good hand. Show me where the kit is.” He wasn’t asking, he was mandating.

“No. I’m fine.”

I had assumed he’d drop my hand and walk off. But he didn’t. He just stood there, his continued presence as clear a communication as if he’d spoken.

“Okay, its this way.”

I led him to the restroom, where I pulled out the first aid kit from under the sink and handed it to him. After gently rinsing out the cut and looking at it closely for a long time to check there was no glass in it, he poured peroxide over it. It stung and I winced, involuntarily jerking my hand away but he’d anticipated that and held on.

“I know. Hurts like hell doesn’t it? It’ll stop in a minute.”

He was right. By the time he’d finished dressing the wound, the sting was gone

Done, he gently ran his finger around the edge of the Band-Aid to make sure it had adhered.

“Cut still throbbing?”

“A little.”

“But it’s not stinging anymore is it?”

“No.”

We were still standing in the small white-tiled room, by the sink. I put the first aid kit away and he followed me out into the hall.

“You were right.” I said.

“I never mind being right.” He grinned - and the corner of his mouth titled upwards again. “But right about what?”

“It would have been hard for me to do that with my left hand. Now, how can I help you? Can I find something for you? Obviously you didn’t come into the store to play doctor.” I cringed at the double entendre, surprised that I even noticed it. Hoping he hadn’t. “But thank you.”

He nodded.

“So… what can I help you with?” I asked.

“Marlowe Wyatt, is she here?”

He wasn’t joking.

“I’m Marlowe.”

A frown creased his forehead and I felt as if I’d been dropped from a high distance and was in a free fall.

It occurred to me to ask him why he was disappointed that
I
was the person he’d came to see. But I didn’t. Partly because his face had relaxed so quickly that I was no longer sure I’d read his expression correctly.

“Marlowe,” he repeated my name as if he was getting used to it. “I called earlier. Someone named Grace told me that you’d be here and I didn’t need an appointment.”

“No, you don’t. Except for the eight weeks before Valentine’s day.”

“Yeah, I read about you and Valentine’s Day gifts a few months ago. That’s why I’m here.”

Since the article had run I’d been incredibly busy. Sending lovers, husbands or wives sexy letters or stories had become a popular gift. I’d gotten more than thirty clients. Including the woman who’d shot the photos for the article, Vivienne Chancy. First she’d taken me up on my free offer and then hired me to write three more letters for her. She was on the road, working on a travel book and was trying to keep a new relationship going while she was gone. The long distance, she said, wasn’t working in her favor.

I’d been surprised she’d needed to try so hard. She was a talented, successful woman, not someone who I imagined needed the help of erotic letters to attract anyone.

When I told Grace what I thought, she said her soul swam in shallow water and it would stop her from succeeding at the kind of relationship she craved.

How did she know? I asked.

Grace had winked - code for the spirits, the stars, and magic.

“Grace told me someone had called. Mr. Brown, I think she said. Is that you?”

“Gideon,” he said as he extended his hand and then withdrew it. “Forgot about your hand.”

“Thanks again. For helping me. For walking in when you did.”

I opened the door to my office and he followed me inside.

“So,” I said. “How can I help you?”

“How many of
these have you written?” he asked me after I’d handed him the heavy scrapbook of my samples. On the front, in hand-tooled gold letters read: Lady Chatterley’s Letters.

“I don’t know. Maybe a few dozen originals… a hundred personalized from pre-existing stories.”

Examining the cover, Gideon ran his long fingers over the letters, tracing their outlines. I responded as if he were drawing them on my bare skin. The L slid down my spine, turned and then swaggered halfway across my waist. The C curved in a smooth semi- circle under my breast.

When he stroked the smooth leather cover, I felt his hand glide between my thighs.

“You aren’t sure?”

“I never counted.”

I had an insane desire to tell him that the number was immaterial, that the only thing that mattered was the one letter I could never write because there was no address to send it to. Of course, I didn’t. I had never discussed that last letter from Joshua asking me to write him back and forgive him. Not with Grace or any of my other friends. I certainly was not going to disclose it to a stranger. That I’d even had the thought astounded me.