My Deja Vu Lover (31 page)

  
He said, “It’s only hard because of you, my darling. My marriage keeps me trapped.”

  
A lone bird flapped its way across the sky. Turning to meet Graham’s gaze, I tried to smile. We were both trapped, he in his marriage and I in my obsession.

  
With an attempt to sound casual, I said, “Was she an alcoholic when you married her?”

  
His eyebrows arched in surprise. “Not that I knew at the time. Maybe.”

  
The cloud breaks gilded the sea’s ruffled surface. I held my wine glass to my cheek, felt the condensation on the glass run down my face like tears, and closed my eyes against the glare and Graham. I couldn’t tell him I had talked to her. I didn’t know why he had married her. Loved her at the time, probably. But she obviously was the one with the money and he obviously wasn’t going to walk away from it. The trap of his marriage was a small inconvenience compared to the trap of our destinies. We seemed to be repeating our fates, rushing toward whatever event had ended our last existence.

  
“This is all so unfair to you, April. I never should have involved you. I’ve no excuses except that from that first moment, when I looked up and saw you standing by my table in the restaurant, I wanted to be with you. And now look what I’ve done to you.”

  
“What have you done?”
 
Besides lie to me.

  
“Involved you in my problems, made you unhappy. You never smile any more, darling.”

  
I forced a smile.

  
“You used to tell me stories about when you were an abandoned princess under a wicked witch’s spell. I hoped to be the pauper-turned-prince who broke the spell with a kiss, leading to happily ever after.”

  
He was right. We didn’t laugh together any more. Now that I knew the truth about his wife I couldn’t think of much to laugh about. There was only one question I wanted to ask, but didn’t know how to do it.

  
And then I did. “Graham, have you done this very often before, had affairs?”

  
Something in his face tightened and I almost expected him to shout at me. Instead he smiled, didn’t try to touch me, looked me straight in the eyes. “April. If I had any experience at this, do you think I’d be in such a mess?”

  
Push on, stupid girl. There has to be an answer. “If I met your wife, would I like her?”

  
His laugh was abrupt, angry. “Like her? Darling, you have no idea. You’re so sweet, so kind, you don’t know what she’s like. She puts on a good show, my lovely wife. Sober her up and run her through a spa and she’s the perfect hostess. She’d invite you in for drinks, and then she’d tell you I had affairs with half my students. I don’t know. Maybe she believes her stories. But if you met her when she’s on one of her binges, she’d tear you apart. Why? Do you want to meet her?”

  
He seemed willing for us to meet. Who was lying?

  
Mind you, he didn’t actually invite me to his house for drinks the next night. Oh right, no drinks at the house, it was a liquor-free zone, according to him. I could have suggested a pizza party to get the three of us together, hash this out, find out who was the best liar. And that would have accomplished what?

  
He said, “I understand what you’re saying, darling. Not much fun when we can’t plan a future. But please don’t give up on me. We’ll work out something.”

  
At least he had the good sense to cut the evening short. I wasn’t in the mood for lovemaking and it must have been obvious to him. He took me home, said he’d call in a day or two.

  
He was maybe a scum, a cheat, a liar. Didn’t matter. He was all I could think about. And yes, I knew perfectly well
 
I was every bit as stupid as Mac thought I was. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

CHAPTER 34

  
I thought the visions had taken a break. Wrong.

  
I stopped being April and started being Millie again, in the front hall of the rooming house, the receiver pressed against my ear, and me standing on tiptoe to try to talk into the speaker of the wall-mounted phone. “You said you’d call me.”

  
“I told you never to telephone me,” Laurence said and the sound of his voice made my heart race.

  
“But that was a week ago and I haven’t heard a word from you.”

  
“Someone else could have answered. Silver, I will see you when I can, but until then, you have to trust me.”

  
I heard heels clicking down the wooden staircase, glanced up, saw Esther in a faded cotton kimono. The noise was her mules, silly pink silk things with hard wooden heels. She had a towel wrapped like a turban around her wet hair. Standing silent, I watched her come down the stairs. She gave me a blank look, as though of course she wasn’t listening in, then mouthed the word, “Boyfriend?”
 

  
She didn’t know I knew Laurence. I shook my head and she shrugged and went past me toward the kitchen.

  
I blurted into the speaker, “What about Mabel Clara?”

  
He didn’t answer, didn’t say anything, and I waited and waited and wondered if he was still there, but I was too scared to ask.

  
An operator cut in. “You have one more minute.”

  
“Thank you.” I waited for the click to tell me she was off the line.

  
He said, “Don’t telephone me again.”

  
“You said you loved me,” I whispered, my mouth almost touching the speaker.

  
I ran a finger around its round black edge, tracing it. When we were together I liked to trace the line of his cheekbones or run my fingertips around his neck to trace the edge of his hair.
              

  
Did he think about me like that? Did he remember every little detail?
 
Did I have a dress that was his favorite?
 
Did he think about my silver slippers that he’d balanced on his hand?

  
Because that’s how I thought about him. I thought about the little glass studs he wore in his dress shirt. I thought about how he tossed his coat over one shoulder, hooked to a finger, all casual. And mostly, I thought about his smile and then about his mouth and then about how it felt pressed against me, warm, eager.

  
When he answered me he sounded sad. “I do love you. I always will. But I can’t see you right now. Please. Don’t make this any harder.”
 

  
And then he hung up and I didn’t wait for the operator to tell me my three minutes were over. I hung up the receiver and ran up the stairs to my room and slammed the door fast before Esther could corner me and ask a bunch of questions.

CHAPTER
 
35

  
When Graham phoned to say he would be out of town for a few days, his voice was too cheerful. I could picture him bent over the receiver, his face tense with smiling, his fingers restlessly drumming the nearest surface.

  
I wanted to say, all right, have a good trip, but instead I said, “Where are you going?”

  
“Spokane.”

  
“What about your classes?”

  
“A friend is covering for me.”

  
“Can I come with you?” I hated to ask anything of anyone ever, but I had to ask now. He heard my despair.

  
“April, darling, I’d love that. It is going to be impossibly boring without you. I’m driving over with a colleague and we’ll be in meetings the whole time. I’ll phone as soon as I return, I promise.”

  
He didn’t mention the name of the colleague or the type of meeting or why this had come up so unexpectedly. Perhaps he wanted me to begin to suspect him, so that when he told me he was leaving me, I would be half-prepared.

  
I’d tried to break off our affair. I’d told him I was dating someone else. And what had he done?
 
Immediately insisted on seeing me. That hadn’t gone too well but it also hadn’t ended in an ending. So what was really going on?

  
Maybe, being Graham, he wanted to leave all his doors open so if he changed his mind, he could count on me still being available.

  
After I hung up the phone I sat in the alcove in the apartment listening to the wind rattle the vines against the window. Who was the colleague? Who was going to Spokane with him?

  
The Vegas trip had been a lie. He hadn’t gone to collect his wife. She’d been right here at home in Seattle. What was he planning?
 

  
All my life I’d faced rejection at different times, everyone does, but I had never been rejected by anyone who mattered to me. I’d never let myself love anyone enough that they could hurt me. And now I had put myself in this position to be hurt. I didn’t know what to do.

  
What if I was wrong, what if Graham really was on a business trip? Why should I imagine he was starting a new affair? He dealt with other women every day, faculty and students. That didn’t mean he was having affairs with them. I was laying guilt on Graham. Was it nothing more than a culmination of my knowledge about Laurence?
  

  
I needed to separate the two men, accept that one was a memory and the other was real and now.

  
I needed to think through everything I had heard, from his wife Barbara, from Cyd, from Macbeth. And from Graham himself. It would be nice to believe that love is a form of trusting. Nice, but incredibly naive.

  
The phone rang and I picked it up, mumbled an hello.

  
“Darling? I won’t be leaving until tonight, so why don’t we take a short run out to the cottage? I left some papers out there that I need to pick up, anyway, and you may as well come with me. We can talk.”

  
“Yes, all right.” What did we have to talk about, I wondered. But I washed up, dragged a comb through my frizzy hair, put on a clean sweater, and was ready for him when he arrived.

  
He didn’t say much on the way to the cottage, or actually, he did, talked about all sorts of things, a book he was reading, a concert he’d attended. Nothing I cared about. The early afternoon sun couldn’t make it through the cloud cover.

  
If a person stares at a white object for a period of time, the darker surroundings disappear. That’s what I did, that last afternoon in Graham’s cottage when I had to find a way to make the world disappear. In a corner near the bookcase wall was a wicker chair that had been spray-painted white and then left to fade and peel, the paint flaking around its cracked edges. I curled myself in a tight ball on the musty couch, drawing my feet under me until I sat on them, wrapping my arms across my body so that my hands clasped my opposite elbows, and I stared at the chair.

  
Graham knelt on the floor, ruffling through a box of papers. “Are you all right, darling? There should be a bottle of wine under the sink.”

  
“I’m fine.”

  
As my eyes went out of focus, seeing the chair as a white blur against indistinguishable darkness, my mind withdrew. It was as though I could feel my conscious self slipping deep within the protective shell of my body where no one could reach me.