Bells of Avalon (18 page)

He smiled, and it took away whatever seemed new about his face.

“If I’d known a beautiful woman was in my bed… I’d have come home sooner.” He laughed—but she didn’t. 

“Daniel?” she murmured, cupping the side of his face.              

“Yeah?”

“Oh, Daniel,” she sighed.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said in a warm voice, contrary to the statement.

She shivered, remembering the cold.  His smile faded. He cracked his knuckles pertly, removing his coat then squashing the arms of his shirt to his elbows. He draped his thick coat around her body. She felt his warmth still radiating from the lining. An unconscious reflex, her eyes went to the delicate skin on the inside of his arm. He looked down, startled, and pulled the sleeves of his sweater down again.  

“Better?” he asked.

“Better,” she agreed, “thank you.” 

“How on earth did you find me, Katie Webb?”

“Albert, but he had the address all wrong. There was a man downstairs; he knew you.”

“You met Pete?” He laughed.

“There was a woman with him.”

“Her name is Celia,” he said.

“Friends of yours?”

“Yes.” 

“Well in that case, I’m afraid I didn’t make much of an impression.”

“I don’t believe that,” he said and laid his hand over hers. 

“It’s true.”

“Celia? She’s a good girl, a little proud is all. She’s old money, you see. Her mother was an Auchincloss. No, that’s not right…a Havemeyer.  Anyway she escaped Gramercy Park and all that, models for Cavalier magazine. Pete’s a musician…” His voice trailed off, and he looked down sadly.

“What is she now?” she asked.

“Hmm?”

“What is she now—if she isn’t a Havemeyer?”

Daniel smiled and squeezed her hand. Turning it over, he stared into the white flesh of her palm as though reading her lifeline.

“She’s just a girl—like anyone else. No one cares about the social register when you’re south of Waverly Place.”

“I see,” she said

He pressed the palm of her hand into the side of his face. 

“I swear, Katie…I wasn’t going to—”

His voice cut off when she pulled his body to hers. The move surprised him. He laughed softly, rubbing his hand over her back.  She pulled away after several moments of the quiet embrace. She stared at him.

“What?” he asked when he saw the marvel in her face. 

“It just can’t be you...Danny Gallagher.”

He smiled, his eyes mischievous.

“Didn’t you hear?” he whispered.

“What?” Her eyes widened.

“I haven’t been Danny Gallagher…for a very long time.” 

Chapter Eighteen

New York City, New York

1966

She asked him to lock the door behind when they left his apartment. Something about the easy way he complied with her wishes set her on edge. She started to notice other things too. Things she hadn’t noticed in the candlelight. Things she hadn’t wanted to notice. He was thin; not haggardly, but more so than she’d ever seen him. They walked to a bistro with a red and green awning popped over the entrance. In the light of the restaurant, his skin looked sallow. They ordered Caprese sandwiches and red wine, and the waiter mistook them for husband and wife. To Danny’s humor, for the rest of the meal he would only refer to her as Mrs. Gallagher.

She studied him. Looking for some hint that he knew just what he was saying. How painful it was for her to hear his mother’s name in that way—no matter how long she’d been gone. As usual, she couldn’t read him. She thought maybe it was his way of feeling her out—ribbing her for showing up unannounced. But he hadn’t left her much of a choice in that.

He’d kept her talking long enough to disguise the fact that he didn’t eat much. When she reached for the check, he’d already dropped eight dollars on the table to settle the bill plus tip. She put on her yellow coat and followed him out. She wrapped her arms around his waist and leaned into him as they walked down MacDougal Street. Piercing wind mixed with snow flurries blew against them as she hailed a cab and they ducked inside. She shut the door, sealing out the cold. A soft tune played from the radio along with the hum of the engine as they rode back to the Upper West Side. Halfway home, she felt him shift next to her before he laid his head on her shoulder.

Later at the hotel, she sat beside him on the bed. They talked until he fell asleep. She stayed beside him until his breathing became heavy, his nose shiny and eyelashes thick. She undressed to her panties, covering herself with a sheet before she walked to the windows looking out from the suite’s parlor room. The city skyline was hazy with falling snow. She held her fingers to the cold glass as her chest grew hot. Her breath was short, and she felt the ringing flush to her ears. The lights blurred more against the snow as she shakily backed away from the window. She fell to parlor sofa, struggling to catch her breath. She closed her eyes, willing her breath to return deep and easy. When it did, she looked down to the inside of her arm. She examined the pale skin interrupted by the dotted pucks where it had been sutured. She’d been told a million times to stop covering it. Everyone knew they were there anyway. But bracelets were a strange placebo. People watched for the damn things on screen like a twisted game of
I spy
.  She didn’t want to give them the satisfaction.
You know why she wears those bracelets? You don’t, well let me tell you…
and on and on it went until it became a tidy bit of trivia.  She softly moved her thumb along the scar, always surprised by the lack of nerve sensation. She hoped someday the feeling would return, but knew it never would. Something in the dark corner of the parlor caught her eye: Daniel’s jacket draped over an upholstered chair.

She noted the rumples of the brown leather, the texture like gilded copper. When Colin was born, Max told her that people sometimes bronzed their children’s shoes. She’d never heard of such a thing. Thought it was silly. Now part of her wished she had. She had kept a pair of his shoes in a blue chest. That was all that remained after the nursery had been packed away. Max thought it would be worse to keep more. She’d hated him for that. Even the solid blue lining of the nursery had been changed to taupe. The abandoned dominion of a tiny boy.

She pulled his jacket into her arms and held it against her. The collar smelled of the city, but it mostly smelled like him. She felt the bulk of his wallet and pulled it from an inside pocket.  Privacy seemed like a worn-out notion as she opened the rough leather.  She reached in the first slanted pocket and pulled out a thin card with powder-blue embossment. Daniel’s face looked mildly out to her from his tiny likeness.
Gallagher, Daniel Henrik
, margined the photo in crude typeset.
Grade: Airman, Service No. AD84793022
. Daniel had signed his name in bubbling, upright scrawl on the bottom corner. She ran her thumb over his dour face and returned the card back to his wallet. She counted the bills inside: forty-seven dollars. Pushing the money back inside, her finger glanced over the edge of something else. She stopped, running her finger over it again. It stuck at first to the lining of the wallet as she tried to pull it out. It finally broke free. Her breath caught as she saw her sixteen year-old face on the faded lobby card. She turned it over and saw Danny’s faded handwriting:
Katie’s Airplane Juju
. She dropped the wallet in her lap, feeling a tear run down her nose.

She didn’t ask him to stay. She was sure he already knew what she wanted. At dawn, she left the hotel while he still slept. She walked to a drugstore and picked out cursory selections of male hair tonic and shaving cream, plucking down whatever she thought would suit him.  He was still sleeping when she returned, and she made quick work of putting away the toiletries. Just as she finished, she heard him stir. She rushed to the desk, pretending to look at the stack of bills there. He walked into the parlor, wearing only the pants he’d arrived him. He lazily pulled his shirt over his head, his lean muscles tight under his skin. His complexion seemed less sallow. There was something momentarily fresh and joyful about him when he smiled at her.  He squinted and looked to the window. He held back for a second before walking to the window, still keeping a few inches from the glass.

“
Hey
, you can see the whole park from up here.” he said with admiration.

“Yes, you can.”

No script this time, Satin Doll
, the sing-songy voice devastatingly reminded. But that wasn’t true either. No matter where they were, how old they got…there would always be the notion that the words had already been said, already been written. When she joined him at the window, she knew it would be snowing—that was how the scene went,
wasn’t it?
 

“Nice,” he said softly.

“Yes,” she said, staring at the falling bits of white, “nicer than the Park Sheraton?”

He looked at her, confused.

Not this time, Satin Doll.

The melody behind the sing-songy voice became dissonant, filled with the ominous sound of a chapter play’s cliffhanger.

“What?” he asked, his expression confused.

She searched over his face for the punchline lurking around his eyes or mouth. “The Christmas special, you know—”

Daniel’s eyes went dim and dreamy, no signal of recollection. He looked back to the snow. She’d seen the look once before. The face of her father’s mother—or at least she’d thought it was because it hadn’t been Nan.  The cataract, fish quality of her eyes looked right through her as her grandmother called her by her sister’s name. 

“No, Mum, this is the youngest,” her father had said.               

“Why, what have you done with her hair, Milton?”

“Hair? Nothing, of course. It’s the same as it ever was—yellow as a cowslip.”             

“Is that so?” her old force trailed off, “sure I was it was black as a raven’s wing,” and then she’d done it, made that same face, that
not knowing
face.

Fear filled her eyes. She roughly turned his jaw until he was forced to look at her.

“Danny—the Sheraton—Jimmy Dorsey…your socks on the radiator, remember?”

“I don’t remember much.” He smiled.

“You taught me to play Parcheesi on the plane—to calm me down.”

“Now Parcheesi, that’s a game.”

“A boring game.” She pouted.

“You were just bugged I kept winning. I had to play with Mistlewort the rest of the flight. Not the sharpest eye, but the guy was alright. If it weren’t for him, I’d have never gotten into your room that night.”

She felt her cheeks blush and tried to restrain the girlish way her lips wanted to curve up.

“I thought you said you didn’t remember?”

“I don’t remember much.” He smiled again.

She looked to the half-hearted flutter of snowflakes in the distance. She felt him touch her hair. He held a few strands of it in his fingers.

“I saw you in a movie over there. They’d changed your hair. It was damned near white, cropped against your neck like Jean Harlow or something. I said to myself, ‘that can’t be Katie…my Katie’s hair is long and yellow.”

“They made me peroxide it,” she said sadly.

“They were always changing things that don’t need fixing. I bragged to my buddies that I knew you. They didn’t believe me.”

“Now all they want are redheads and coquettish brunettes—but back then I was never blonde enough.”

“Your voice was different too.”

“They make me do American accents now,” she said with a doleful smile.

He came behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist. She leaned into him, feeling the stubble of his cheek as it rested against hers.

“Always after changing things that don’t need fixing,” he whispered in her ear.

They lived behind the great balustrades of her hotel for two weeks—and three days. She knew because she’d taken to counting again. The façade of sleeping apart was the first boundary to crumble. Even awake, they stayed in bed, staring at the ceiling, disregarding the stream of steady phone calls to her room. They drank liqueur from cordial glasses in dark bars. They walked Central Park in circles. They did a lot of pretending. They pretended for how it might have been—if only things were different. They did a lot of ignoring—not only the telephone… but the sing-songy voice and the world at large.

Time was drawing to a close. A clock ticked down the minutes left in their fool’s paradise. Mrs. Gallagher’s grandfather clock against the wall. The clock in Danny’s haunted house. Soon the bells of Avalon would ring three times…urging them back to a world where time passed too quickly. A bit of Katie’s desperate dreamscape chipped away every time she blamed bad lighting for the sick hue of his skin. Every time she woke beside him, saw dirty room service dishes piled on the nightstands, felt his fevered skin.

She stopped pretending on the fourteenth night. The night she learned he had dreams. He had them like her now. He woke screaming and wouldn’t stop until she shook him to reality. His eyes darted over her face and, for one moment, she thought there was the memory of something very important inside. She felt the clammy sweat sheen of his brow then pulled him to her and begged him in a familiar refrain.
Jesus, Danny, just tell me what’s happened. For once don’t make me beg.

I can’t,
was his inexorable response. That was how the script was supposed to go. It was how the lines had to be read: 
I don’t want you to go,
followed by a pregnant beat of time, then—I
won’t
. Those were the words that marked the end of the scene. The final revision that could never be undone.