My Deja Vu Lover (12 page)

  
“You’ve taught poetry too long.”

  
“Cut to the quick!”

  
“What exactly does that mean?” I asked.

  
“That’s the trouble with clichés. We repeat them until they have no meaning. Come on,” he said, pouring coffee into two mugs and handing one to me. “I’ll show you my beach while the house warms up.”

  
The path continued down the hillside, branching off to wind past other empty cottages, turning at odd angles, rounding tree stumps and vaguely following the terrain. Above the beach was a short drop and a grayed and barnacled ladder. I climbed down, my coffee mug in one hand, the other hand clinging to the slick, wet wood, while a clear wind whipped my hair across my face. The sea hissed up the pebble beach, sighed, slid back down, paused, then hissed upward again, a shallow layer of churning foam.

  
We walked above the tideline, following the twisted coast beneath clay cliffs and past hillsides that stopped almost at the water, until we reached a point that jutted out into the water of the high tide, forcing us to turn back into the wind. By the time we returned to the cottage, my hands and face were wind-chapped, my clothes damp with sea spray. The fire logs had settled themselves into a compact smoking heap and the fire had gone out.

  
“I’ll have it going again in a minute,” Graham said.

  
It would take hours for the fire to warm the room. I wasn’t ready to handle hours alone with him. Despite my attraction to him, I knew much of my feelings were based on my assumption that he was Laurence. And what if Macbeth was right? What if those reincarnation ideas were nothing more than wish fulfillment?

  
If I’d had any sense I would have avoided Macbeth and Graham alike, as they both left me breathless with confusion, though for different reasons. At least on that one day I had enough of my wits about me to know Graham could stir more fires than the one in the hearth.

  
“It’s cold here,” I said. “Maybe we should start back.”

  
“You poor dear, you’re shivering! I’m sorry. We’ll leave at once. I know exactly the place to go, and I’ll have you warm again in no time.”

  
We drove to a small waterside cafe where they served us steaming bread bowls of clam chowder that was thick with potatoes and sweet with bacon and corn. A fire roared in a pit-hearth in the room’s center. Candles flickered on the tables and reflected in the dark glass of the windows.

  
Graham talked to me about books and plays and favorite restaurants, anything impersonal. I forgot that he was supposed to be someone I had once known in another life. I lived in the present again, enjoying this new relationship in the way I always enjoyed the beginning of a love affair, when both sides try to be their most attractive and no one has yet made demands or thought up rules or problems.

  
Graham made the rest of life recede. Our surroundings blurred into warm lights and humming sounds, out of focus for me, with only Graham sharp and clear, his face alive with the changing pattern of expressions, his hands accenting his words.

  
Junior high girls who fall wildly in love with rock stars are wiser than I was. They might suffer temporary heartache, but they can’t be destroyed by a person who is unobtainable. And oh yes, Graham Berkold was obtainable, though I didn’t learn that until our next meeting. He was mine for the asking. Mine and anybody else’s.

  
When he dropped me off at my door, he said, “I’m so glad you could go with me today.”

  
“Me, too,” I said. “I love your cabin.”

  
“Reason enough to cherish it forever.”

  
“Anyone would. It must be wonderful fun in summer.”

  
“Wonderful any time you’re there, April. And now I will find it lonely without you.”

  
If I had repeated Graham’s words to Cyd, she’d have said, “Sounds like a character in a soap,” and he did, or at least, his words did. But when he spoke there was always that glow on his face. It was as though he was the world’s last romantic. I thought he was fun and funny, nothing like Laurence after all. No danger. Whenever I wanted to, I could put him out of my mind or my life because who could possibly become obsessed with a soap opera guy, right? That’s what I thought.

  
“Late lunch tomorrow? I’ll pick you up,” he said, and then he leaned across the seat in the car and kissed me, lightly, that quick kiss that means, “For the record, I am working up to an affair with you.”

CHAPTER 10

  
“Saw your note,” Cyd said over breakfast. “Who is Graham Berkold?”

  
“Prof I met on campus.” I told her about following him to the Greek restaurant.

  
“What’s he look like?”

  
“Good looking, great smile, that kind of light brown hair that looks blond in sunlight. Medium height. Great dresser. Kind of resembles the actor I saw in my vision.”

  
“He looks like that Laurence actor?
 
Wow. And you told him so?” She pushed her glasses down her nose to peer at me over the frames.

  
“Unlike some bored guy we know, Graham found the whole story fascinating. Okay, maybe that’s a line. He’s sort of like that, very smooth, very courteous, with a bad boy gleam in his eyes.”

  
“How come you didn’t mention him sooner?”

  
I shrugged and tried to look very nonchalant. Not good at that. “A couple of meals, nothing to tell, Cyd. Probably he won’t call again.”

  
Even if Graham Berkold really was the reincarnation of Laurence, he had no memory of his life as Laurence. There was nothing he could tell me to help me understand what had happened when I was Silver, or why the memory popped up now to terrify me.
  
“Sure, he’ll call again,” Cyd said.

  
“The thing is, he’s picking me up this noon. Not sure I want to go.” I shrugged. “I tried looking up his name in the phone book last night to call and cancel. There’s no Graham Berkold listed.”

  
“He’d need an unlisted number.”

  
“What?”

  
“Nice professors do not their students make,” she said in singsong.

  
“I am not his student.” I stared at her, tried to figure out what this was all about.

  
“He thought you were.”

  
“And he bought me lunch. Maybe he’s basically a do-gooder. Feeds hungry students.”

  
“He’s a forty year old prof,” she said. “They’re all married.”

  
“Okay. So now he’s divorced?”

  
“Yes, sure, have you asked him?” Cyd gave me one of her narrow-eyed stares.

  
“I can’t call him if his number is unlisted, can I? So I’ll see him today and then that will be the end of it.”

  
“The end of what?”

  
There was nothing between Graham and me to end, nothing more than a couple of casual hours together and a possible eternal destiny.

  
Vaguely remembering something Tom had once said, I asked, “If eternity goes backward, does it have to go forward, too?”

  
Her forehead wrinkled. “Say that again?”

  
I laughed. “I don’t think I can. Never mind, it doesn’t matter.”

  
But it did matter, and had I known the answer, I would have bought a Greyhound ticket to the farthest destination I could afford and never returned to Seattle.

 
 
When Graham picked me up, he asked if I would like to go out to the cottage again. Because the questions I had to ask him could not be asked in a restaurant with waiters interrupting, I said, “Yes.”

  
“I hoped you would. I’ve a picnic packed in the trunk.”

  
“What would you do if I said no?”

  
“Spend tomorrow feeding my stale picnic to the seagulls.”

  
“Pathetic. Okay, I’ll spare you that fate.”
 

  
We ate the picnic on the floor of the cottage, seated on the threadbare Persian rugs that overlapped each other, while the January sun, low in the frosted sky, streamed through the windows and sparkled on the champagne glasses. Graham’s idea of a picnic was a visit to a pricey deli and included barbecued Cornish game hen, a loaf of Swedish limpa and a container of anchovy salad, served on Limoges plates, plus Irish crystal, all packed neatly in a wicker basket with linen napkins.

  
“Poor seagulls, missing this,” I said.

  
He refilled my glass.

  
“Do you have an unlisted number because you’re married?” I asked.

  
His eyebrows rose but he met my gaze. “Did you try to call me? Sorry, darling, I should have told you. You can leave messages for me if you use my cell phone number.”

  
“You aren’t answering my question.”

  
Leaning against the legs of the wicker chair behind him, he looked at me as though he was trying to memorize my face. With the fire in the grate and the sun on the windows, the room was pleasantly warm. A steady wind sighed through the fir branches outside.

  
I waited.

 
 
He said, “I’ll give you my phone number, April. It’s unlisted because I don’t want students phoning my home with questions about glasswork.”

  
“Then you’re not married?” I persisted. By now he must really regret inviting me to a picnic.

  
If he was annoyed, he did a good job of acting. Oh right, he was the reincarnation of an actor, according to my memories.

  
“I’m married. I have all sorts of contracts and community property to prove it. And that’s about it.”

  
“What does that mean?”

  
“We lead our own lives.”

  
Uh huh. I wasn’t clever like Cyd, but even I could see through that one. Tracing the pattern in the faded carpet with my fingertips, I said, “Hate to be picky, but does your wife know you are here with me today?”

  
“Pick away, darling. My wife is in Colorado sharing her ski chalet with her ski instructor.”

  
I looked up at him and wished I hadn’t. His eyes widened, catching me in their shadows.

  
In a voice so small I could barely hear it myself, I asked, “Are you separated?”

  
“We’ve never been together enough to be separated.” His hand closed over mine, stopping my nervous fingers. “Why did you want to phone me?”

  
“To tell you I couldn’t, uh, I didn’t want to see you today.”

  
“April. I’ll take you home now.” His voice was barely above a whisper.

  
We both knew he wouldn’t. I didn’t have to say no, that I would stay, because as my voice died in my throat and the rest of the world ceased to exist, I could see the same emotions in his face, until he was too close to see. Against my mouth he said my name, told me he loved my hair, my fragrance, the way I tasted. I tried to separate us in my mind, keeping myself whole and detached, so that when we parted we would be exactly who we were before we met, two complete people.