Private Lies (7 page)

"She's fine, Mrs. Stein," Ken said suddenly. He
helped Carol get into her robe and quickly put on his shirt and jeans.
"Tell her you're fine."

"I'm fine, Mama," Carol said.

Mrs. Stein's response was to bang on the door. After a
while Ken opened it. Mrs. Stein's face was livid with rage, but then Carol ran
into her arms and both women began to sob.

Of course, he felt bad for both of them. Also useless, a
third wheel. He excused himself and went out for a walk. He must have walked
for hours contemplating what was going to happen, what had to happen. Their
lives were obviously out of balance. He went back to his apartment and spent
the next few hours reading his novel, trying to stoke the fires of his
imagination. The characters had become strangers. The story seemed juvenile,
the dialogue trite. It was then that he knew it had to end. For both their
sakes.

That night, when he returned to her apartment, they both
knew it.

"We can't do anything halfway, Ken," she
explained. "That's the problem. Everything has to be full throttle, all
out."

"Maybe after we've made it..." he began.

"When the pressure is off."

Is it ever off? he wondered, thinking suddenly of the
struggle that lay ahead. It was his first realization that success was not
assured, that the dream was, at best, a mighty gamble with the odds stacked
against you. The old obsession came flooding back into his sinews. A writer
writes. A dancer dances.

"I wish it didn't make so much sense."

"Would we want to look back and one day say to each
other: 'We threw it away because we loved each other too much'?"

"And after," he told her, "I'm coming back
to claim my prize."

"You'd better," she laughed.

"I'll be your permanent stage-door Johnny."

"And I'll be your severest critic."

How long had this addiction persisted? He would never be
able to fix it exactly. Two months. Maybe three. Years later it had lost all
context, like an aberration, an episode of madness, a firecracker that had
disappeared as quickly as it flamed.

They parted after a week or so of monumental intensity, sex
prodded by the impending loss of one's love object. There was nothing for it
except to empty themselves, to reach the outer limits of their physical and
emotional resources. They made love as before, around the clock, excited by
tears and vows, determined to leave nothing for anyone who might come after, no
experience that could be superceded by what they did together.

Such energy had to be redirected. They would put their
lovemaking into their art, reach heights beyond imagination, then return to the
source of it all, to each other, the one true love for each.

Well, he sighed now, staring laconically at the
sticky-looking lukewarm pasta, they had had the absolute peak experience, the
highest of highs. Good sense had prevailed, he supposed. In his memory the
ending was abrupt, like taking a single step off a sheer cliff.

The dessert routine snapped him into present tense and he
listened and watched Eliot and Carol interrogate the waiter on his various
offerings, displayed on a cart. The waiter offered a running commentary as he
pointed to each concoction.

"Majolalaine with raspberry sauce; walnut cranberry
tart with orange caramel sauce; the crème brûlée." On and on. Ken could
barely look at them.

"Oh, the crème brûlée," Eliot said. "Can't
be too sweet. Are you sure it's not?"

"Some palates are different," the waiter said.

"And the tart?" Maggie said. "Looks
scrumptious. We could share," she said coquettishly. She looked toward
Ken. "My husband hasn't got much of a sweet tooth."

"Not Carol's cup of tea either," Eliot said.

"Ken likes berries, though," Maggie said,
pointing to the raspberries.

"Not tonight, Maggie," Ken said. He had hardly
touched his pasta. There was more discussion and the dessert was finally
ordered, with Maggie and Eliot opting for café au lait and he and Carol
ordering ordinary decaf coffee.

By then, panic had mellowed to reflection. He had passed
through the one moment that he had dreaded for more than two decades. In an odd
way it was a miracle. Sometimes people who had grown up together in New York and stayed to live there could go their entire lives without ever seeing each
other again.

Ken looked at his watch. The meal was drawing to a close
and still she had not acknowledged him. Nor had he acknowledged her. Because it
was deliberate on his part, he assumed it was deliberate on hers. Nor did he
wish to blow her cover. For whatever reasons she had chosen to lie to her
husband, he had respected them, had allied himself with her in her subterfuge.
Surely, she would appreciate that.

And yet, why had he suddenly groped in his rear pocket and
extracted a card from his card case, palming it in his left hand? A harmless
reflex, he decided. Perhaps, if he gave it to her, it would be a reminder, a
symbolic gesture of their conspiratorial collaboration. Or, if she hadn't
remembered, it might jog her recollection.

He would not call her, he promised himself. He hadn't tried
in twenty years. Not that he hadn't wanted to. It was no small feat to suppress
his urge for her, but time had repressed it finally, then he had met Maggie.
For a long time he had believed that the past could be buried.

Until now.

After dinner, they wrapped themselves in rain gear against
the storm which had diminished to a light drizzling dampness. Under umbrellas
in front of the restaurant they said a final good-bye. Only it wasn't really
final.

"We'll do this again, Eliot and Carol," Maggie
chirped. Eliot kissed her cheek; she held out her hand to Carol.

"It was lovely," Carol said.

"See you in the morning, Maggie," Eliot reminded
her. "Promptly at nine."

"The man's a slave driver," Maggie laughed. She
looked toward Carol. "We must do this again."

"Absolutely," Eliot said, obviously speaking for
both of them.

This was not the end of anything, Ken observed, gripping
Eliot's hand in farewell. Then he turned toward Carol. Nothing. Not the tiniest
hint that she had ever known him.

Two can play that game, he decided, but he did not turn
away. Not yet. He had moved the card into his right palm, then, reaching out,
their hands joined.

"So very nice to meet you," he said. She squeezed
his hand lightly and the card passed, but her face revealed nothing. She had
turned away quickly. He watched Eliot and Carol dash into the street to flag a
passing cab. Then they were gone.

"Weren't they wonderful?" Maggie said. "I
told you the evening would be interesting." Ken turned to look at her.
Everyone to their own truth.

"Very," he said.

THEY WEREN'T BIG lies, Carol thought, merely a series of
little ones. So she had pared her age by ten years. What did it matter? She
could have passed for an even younger age. Why not? It had taken hard work to
maintain such an illusion. As for her other vital statistics, she had
embellished her past achievements to give Eliot the satisfaction of having
married a woman of some accomplishment, a traveled, broadened woman. Where was
the harm in that?

Of course, Ken knew that she was lying. But she had every
right, she told herself. He had no business disturbing her tranquillity, no
business appearing from nowhere like a burglar. The fates had conspired against
her. How was she to know that this woman, this Maggie whatever, was the wife of
Ken Kramer.

Surely he understood, had sized things up, gone along with
this re-creation of herself. She supposed she owed him her gratitude for
remaining silent, perhaps even an explanation. Dare she open that compartment
of her life again?

Why all this turmoil about self-justification? False
pretenses were, after all, a strategy for ... if not survival ... upward
mobility. Economics! It had all come down to economics.

To snare Eliot, the Yalie blue blood whose father was a
member of the Society of Cincinnatians, descendants of officers in George
Washington's army, whose mother was an active committed member of the DAR, had
required a pedigree of achievement, if only to catch his initial attention.

She hadn't realized that such a contrived cultural lineage
could be so smoothly institutionalized into a system of beliefs. Eliot doted on
her "accomplishments." Nor had he required press clippings. To
inquire would have been, in his view, slightly vulgar.

Ballet, from the time of the Medicis, was an amusement of
aristocrats, a refinement of the culturally sophisticated with great snob
appeal for the rich. Her contrivance was right on target and he was quick to
accept it hook, line, and sinker. It validated his choice of her as his wife,
made her a kind of trophy.

She could even delude herself into believing that she had
been, really, a ballet star in Sydney, Australia. With that background,
teaching had status. She was the ballet master imparting the wisdom of her
acclaimed experience. And how far was Le Roc from Stein, which meant
stone
in German? And the little royal prefix had its own cachet in Eliot's world,
with its clear implication of royal ancestry. Life had taught her the value of
such a provenance.

One might say that her meeting Eliot was more coincidence
than calculation, although when the opportunity had arisen to embroider the
truth she had certainly been quick to respond. She had met him in the most
prosaic way—in the City Center watching a performance of the Ballet Russe de
Monte Carlo.

Until that moment ballet had not been overly kind to her.
Considering her early dedication to it and the years of her life thrown away on
its behalf, it had been, well, a catastrophe.

Until Eliot.

She had come up from Philadelphia for the performance, the
single ticket being a "gift" from Miss Perkins, who ran the Ardmore
School of Dance on the Philadelphia Main Line. Carol knew it would hardly
qualify as a gift, since the frugal Miss Perkins was sure to include it in lieu
of cash as part of her two weeks' severance.

Not that Carol was being fired. It was early May and the
end of the school year was fast approaching. By then Carol had experienced
eight years of ending dance-school years. What, after all, was a failed ballet
dancer qualified to do? Or, for that matter, even a successful ballet dancer?

In August she would once again send out résumés to dance
schools everywhere. If anything, she had mastered the art of the résumé and her
credentials were quite impressive, including one year at the Paris School of
Ballet where she had been, her résumé validated, a teacher. In fact, she had
been only an assistant, but the tiny white lie had carried her halfway around
the world, to Australia, Japan, and Guam, of all places, where she had actually
been in charge for two years.

She no longer brooded over her lost career. The truth of it
was that she had never really had one. Economics was her priority now. How to
survive on an itinerant dancing teacher's wages had been the mission of her
last eight years.

Yet she had made do with ambition and aspiration. Her
mother, to the day she died, had blamed it all on that writer fellow. Poor dear
woman. Carol's failure had been her ruination, yet nothing could convince her
that Ken Kramer hadn't ruined her daughter's career. If she had lived she might
have spread the blame around.

There had been other men. Not many. But enough to have
provided her with the possibilities of marriage, although she never gave
herself the chance to explore them beyond a certain point. After Ken, she had
deliberately hidden behind a psychological armor plate of her own invention.
Discovering her vulnerability had frightened her, and the habit of discipline
had protected her from herself, from unproductive distractions. That was before
the dawning of greater truths, that there was life after failure and that not
all relationships with men required emotional upheaval or sexual frenzy.

One could find lots of excuses for her failed career, she
supposed. That was the year the men were too short and she was too tall. Or she
was too eager, which had caused her to suffer injuries. She had had to dance
through pain frequently. That was it. Her technique was superb, but her body
not quite up to par.

Carol blamed no one but herself. She wasn't good enough.
Oh, she was dedicated, single-minded, focused. Just not as good as the others
who were picked. That was the only way to live with it, face up to it. It was
pointless to flog yourself forever.

She had tried her hand at the musical stage, and for a year
or two had made it into a number of road shows. She had actually toured in
Fiddler
on the Roof
for six months and did play in
A Chorus Line
in Atlanta, Georgia. Not as a regular. She had been called in when other dancers suffered
injuries.

The strange fact was that she had never lost her drive or
her ambition. Even when she had failed at ballet and was teaching, she was
pursuing dancing auditions as if her life depended on it, saving all her energy
for the possibilities of her career. Unfortunately, by twenty-five she knew it
was over. Her parents had died, which may have had something to do with it. She
hadn't married and she was broke.

But she could count at least one blessing. She had acquired
the habit of bodily discipline. Not a day went by when she didn't work out,
keeping her body youthful and tight. It was the habit of years. A Spartan diet
and plenty of exercise. Whenever she could, she exercised at the bar. Her legs
were still good, her figure shapely and firm. She had been thirty when she had
met Eliot. Even then she looked at least ten years younger.

They had been watching
Orpheus
, Stravinsky's ballet
about Orpheus charming the god of the Dead to let him into Hades in order to
bring back to Earth his beloved wife, Eurydice. Orpheus had promised not to
look at her until they had reached Earth again, then broke the promise, thereby
sending Eurydice back to Hades.

"Quite good, don't you think?" Eliot had said
when the performance was over. They were, after all, strangers sitting together
by the accident of seating. His words, spoken move to himself than to her,
could hardly be construed as a flirtation. She had noted that he was well
groomed and distinguished-looking, with gray sideburns, craggy features, and
steel-blue eyes. Her response seemed at the time merely a reflex. Later she
would recognize it as the fateful moment that changed the course of her life.

"I've seen better," she had replied, adding
quickly, "but I did like the vision of Hades. All that lashing and forced
labor."

They were moving out of the seating row. He did not speak
until they had reached the exit aisle.

"Yes. Hades. If it was my wife I would have left her
in Hades where she belonged." He turned to look at her suddenly. "My
ex-wife, that is."

She absorbed the information with an odd sense of inner
goading, as if an antenna in her head had picked up distant signals.

"I prefer his
Firebird
. I'm a sucker for happy
endings."

"My God, was that wonderful," Eliot said as they
trooped up the aisle to the lobby. "I saw Tallchief do it. Chagall did the
scenery and costumes. Balanchine choreographed. Stravinsky used the old Russian
legend about a stupid prince who triumphs over more clever foes." He
continued as they drifted together out of the hall, telling her the full story
of that particular performance. Francisco Moncion as Prince Ivan, "dashing
and wonderfully stupid," Tallchief was "in her zenith."

She was, of course, impressed by his knowledge, but was
unprepared for his verbosity. He seemed to revel in providing her with
everything down to the last detail without seeming to draw a breath. Finally,
as they walked down the block, he stopped and looked at her pointedly.
"I'm talking of the early sixties. But, then, you're much too young to have
seen that particular performance."

Young? It was a feedback of his impression of her. Yes,
young, she thought. She certainly would not deprive him of that illusion.

"You have a remarkable memory," she told him,
certainly honest and well-placed flattery.

"A curse and a blessing," he replied with a kind
of charming arrogance, as if the compliment were an obvious tribute. She could
see he was pleased.

"Is ballet a hobby?" she asked.

"One of many, I'm afraid. I'm a practicing
generalist."

She wasn't quite certain what that meant, and didn't
respond. He seemed to take it as a signal to continue to explain himself.

"Although I do have some specialties. Like the planet
and its preservation." This set him off on a compressed dissertation on
the warming of the planet and the ecological disaster ahead.

An intellectual, she decided. A bit talky, but
entertainingly so. Concentrating on her attitude, she hoped she looked
responsive, searching herself for some operative mode of behavior, deciding
finally on deference. She listened, and the more carefully she appeared to be
listening, the more expansive he became.

It was a pleasant spring evening, and when they approached
Fifth, they headed toward the Sixties.

"We seem to be going in the same direction," he
said with an air of Old World gallantry. "Do you live on Fifth?" he
asked.

"Madison," she said quickly. It would be the
first of many tangible lies employed in the reinvention of herself. A test,
really. She had wondered how far she should go. Thankfully, he didn't ask for a
specific address on Madison. Actually, she had booked a room at the
Twenty-third Street YWCA.

"And you?" she had asked.

"Would you believe I've lived on Fifth all my life, in
the very same apartment in which I grew up. With Mother and Father gone now,
alas, it's become a family heirloom."

She supposed it was the way he had said "Mother and
Father," the intonation and the nasality of it, redolent of a certain way
of life and station. Old money! Her nostrils twitched as if she were sniffing
it.

Later she would determine that she must have been laying
down a scent. They had stopped at the Sherry-Netherland's bar. Why not, she
remembered thinking when he had invited her in.

Deference had turned out to be a lucky call. Apparently, he
needed an audience, needed a good listener. For her part, she sifted through
his words for information. In her former incarnation, her life up until then,
she had not been exposed to such a type. Moneyed. Upper crust. With the
economic freedom to pursue his inclinations and intellectual hobbies. Clearly
this was an opportunity.

He did not turn the floodlight on her until the end of the
evening. By then she had decided on her role, had toted up her assets and
liabilities and rearranged the balance sheet in her mind.

Dance the ballet in your head, she urged herself. Show him
the illusion. She was twenty-one, she volunteered with subtlety. Ten years
lopped off. Ballet had been her life and her living. The Ballet Company of Sydney. The star, of course. She cut short her fictional career with an injury. A
tradition in the family. She invoked a long line of Le Rocs. Her father was a
viscount, but never could bring himself to use the title. Not America. A branch line used it in Paris.

She could see the equivalent of a standing ovation flashing
in his eyes. He was buying it, mesmerized. And all the time she was dishing it
out, she was thinking: Enough of being alone, enough of a third-rate life, of
furnished rooms, fastfood dinners, balcony seats, secondhand cars, recycled
clothing, bus and subway travel. Enough of dead dreams. This was one dance in
which she would defy gravity.

All right, so she had pushed fate a bit. Because it was
there, the mountain climber would say to explain his passion to ascend. Eliot
was there, a goal and a challenge.

Analyzing it later, after she had brought Eliot to bay,
wore his marriage ring, and shared, as they say, his bed and board, she
attributed this achievement to the lessons learned from her failure. She had
molded herself, like Eve, from Adam's rib, to become what he desired, what he
expected.

Not once had she wavered from her original purpose, which
was essentially financial security and creature comforts. She approached it as
a role in a ballet, in full costume, listening carefully to the music until it
became second nature. Deference was the theme. Devotion the subtext. She was
the good and faithful wife of his imagination.

Eliot's first wife had been the traditional choice, a
product of matched breeding with little interest in anything but horsemanship,
yachting, tennis, and cocktails. And no interest in Eliot's intellectual
passions and causes, none whatsoever. Nor, in the end, did she have any
interest in the two children they had bred.