Forever in Blue (18 page)

Suddenly she felt an insidious suspicion. She saw this version of Brian in the eyes of the world, and she saw herself, too. Did people think he was basically a moron? Did they laugh at her for being with him?

Tibby hated herself for this cruelly disloyal thought. But who in the world has a brain she can force to think only the acceptable things?

Do I hate him? she wondered about herself. Did I ever really love him?

On that fateful night they’d had sex, it seemed to her that she’d fallen asleep one person and woken up another. She couldn’t remember the hows and whys of who she used to be. It was bewildering. Like hypnosis or a magic spell or a dream that had broken on her waking.

“Then we should say good-bye,” he said.

Her head shot up. She could see by his face he understood now. She could see it in his eyes. They were no less hurt, but they had stopped questioning her.

“Y-yes. I—I guess,” she stammered. If anything, he had gotten ahead of her.

She hadn’t pictured him storming away, though she might have wanted that. But neither had she figured on his sticking around for a proper eye-to-eye good-bye.

“Good-bye, Tibby.” He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t hopeful. What was he?

“Bye.” Stiffly she leaned in to kiss his cheek. It felt wrong, and midway through she wished she hadn’t done it.

He turned and he walked toward the subway, carrying his worn red duffel bag over his shoulder. She watched him, but he didn’t turn back to look.

He walked in a way that struck her as resolute, and she recognized that she was the one left standing alone and confused.

She realized all at once the deeper thing that bothered her, the thing that made him not just irritating but intolerable: how he kept loving her blindly when she deserved it so little.

Lena realized a strange and comforting fact of life: You could get used to almost anything. You could even get used to lying naked on a ruby-colored couch under the gaze of a young man you hardly knew while he painted you. You could do that even if you happened to be a Greek virgin from a conservative family whose father would die if he knew.

For the first hour, Lena agonized.

Sometime in the second hour, her muscles began to unkink, one at a time.

In the third hour, something else happened. Lena began to watch Leo. She watched him paint. She watched him watch her. She saw how he looked at her different parts. She kept track of which part he was working on, feeling a thrill in her hip when he painted that and along her thigh when he got there.

As much as she ordinarily dreaded being looked at, this felt different. It was a different way of looking. He looked at her and through her at the same time. He only held any one image long enough to get it onto his canvas. It was like water through a sieve.

His intensity built and she began to relax. His relationship, she realized, was with his painting. He was relating to his version of her more than to the actual her. It freed her mind to wander all around the apartment. Were all relationships this way, to some extent? Whether or not they involved any artistic representation?

She liked the way the diffuse sun felt on her skin. She began to like the way his eyes felt on her skin as she became free to wander.

He put on music. It was Bach, he said. The only instrument was a cello.

In the fourth hour, he looked at her face at a moment when she was looking back. They were both surprised at first and looked away. Then, at the same moment, they both looked back. He stopped painting. He lost his way. He looked confused and then found his way back.

In the fifth hour, she stopped taking breaks. She was under a spell. She was languorous. Leo was also under a spell. They were under different spells.

In the sixth hour, she thought about him touching her. The blood that came to her cheeks was a different blood. It came for a different reason.

He put on more Bach. It was music for solo violin this time. It sounded raggedly romantic to her.

He was painting her face. “Eyes up,” he said. She looked up. “I mean at me,” he clarified.

Was that really what he meant? She looked at him.

And for the next hour, he looked at her and she looked back. And like in a staring contest, the stakes seemed to rise and rise until it was almost unbearable. But neither of them looked away.

When he finally put down his brush, his cheeks were as flushed as hers. He was as breathless as she. They were under the same spell.

He came over to her, still not breaking eye contact. He put his hand lightly on her rib cage and leaned down and kissed her.

In the past when Bee was overwhelmed or depressed she took to her bed. But this was too awful even for her bed. This was a more active misery, a hunt-you-down-and-find-you kind of pain. In her bed she’d be a sitting, lying duck.

Barefoot, she walked from the dining tent. Once in the clear, she spit her mush of Frosted Flakes into the grass. She was afraid she might throw up what was in her stomach as well.

She was so grateful she had left the Pants on her cot. She didn’t want them to see her like this.

She walked from the camp and kept going toward the sun. She would just keep going. If you set out for the east, you could walk practically forever. To India, China.

She walked and walked and her feet grew sore. How sore they would be when they got to China.

Sometime later the sun passed over her head and she realized she was walking away from it now. She didn’t want to walk away from it, but if she walked with it, she would have to turn back around, and she couldn’t turn around. She shivered. Was it cold in China?

She felt like a reptile, relying on the sun to warm her blood. She didn’t feel the capacity to generate her own warmth.

She had known almost from the beginning that Peter was married and had children. There had been nothing new divulged this morning. That wife and those children were no more real now than they’d ever been. But now she’d seen them. That was what destroyed her peace.

Out of sight, out of mind. How could she allow that of herself? That was for people with amnesia and brain damage. That was for newts and frogs. What was wrong with her? Why couldn’t she hold things in her mind? There was no comfort to be taken from her inability, no excuse.

This was a different game she was playing. Not a playground challenge or a warm-up or a scrimmage. It was real and it counted. Peter was an adult. She was an adult. They had real lives to make or lose.

She could flit around and show off in front of the married man. She could kiss that married man and pretend it was all big, mischievous fun. But it wasn’t.

As she walked she shuddered. It was time to grow up. She looked ahead of her and saw the crest of a hill. That crest stood for growing up, she decided as she willfully crossed it.

She stood up her straightest, to her full woman’s height of five feet and ten and a half inches. If she didn’t take her life seriously, who would? She was becoming the person she’d be for her whole life. Each thing she chose contributed to that person. She didn’t want to be like this.

Carmen liked being in the theater. Even the longest, crankiest late-night rehearsal was preferable to being in her dorm room. Andrew Kerr could take her down with a look, but even at his scariest he was friendlier than her roommate.

Carmen had transformed from invisible to visible in the eyes of everyone on campus except for one person. For two long weeks, even though they shared a small room and slept within five feet of each other, Julia had acted like Carmen wasn’t there.

Which was why it surprised Carmen in the third week of rehearsals when Julia turned to her and said, “How’s the play going?”

Carmen was pulling off her socks at the moment it happened, exhausted but also excited at having tried on her costume for the first time.

“It’s going pretty well. At least, I hope so.”

“How is it working with Ian O’Bannon?” Julia asked.

She asked this like they’d been having friendly chats night and day. Carmen was scared to believe it was actually happening.

“He’s…I don’t even know what he is. Every day I think I can’t be more amazed and then I am.”

“Wow. Lucky you, you get to work with him.”

Carmen sifted through these words, girding herself for jeering or sarcasm, but she didn’t hear it.

“It is really lucky,” Carmen said warily.

“It’s like…the experience of a lifetime,” Julia said.

Again Carmen weighed these words, studied Julia’s face. Julia’s face, which had seemed so beautiful and commanding at one time and now seemed furtive. The qualities Carmen had most admired in her seemed extreme now. She was too thin, too poised, too careful.

“I think it is,” Carmen said.

Carmen fell asleep that night wondering what had brought about the thaw, scared to trust it, but more than anything, grateful that it had happened.

So that when she woke up the next morning, she was still doubtful, though still hopeful.

“You should wear those green pants. They look really good on you,” Julia said when Carmen was rummaging through her drawer.

Carmen turned. “You think so?”

“Yeah.”

“Thanks.” Carmen put on the green pants even though she didn’t think they looked so good.

“What are you rehearsing today?” Julia asked.

Carmen counseled herself to take the friendliness at face value and just be glad for it. “I think it’ll be Leontes going bonkers for the first part. Perdita doesn’t even come in until act four, scene four, but Andrew wants me to watch. ‘Watch and absorb,’ he always says, and he shakes his fingers over my head. He thinks that’s entertaining for some reason.”

“He’s kind of an oddball, isn’t he?” Julia said.

“He is,” Carmen said, though she suddenly felt protective of his oddness. “I have no experience or anything, but I think he’s a good director.”

Julia could easily have said something cutting then, but she didn’t. “He’s got a huge reputation,” she said.

“Does he?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Huh.” This was enough pleasant conversation to last Carmen for the week, but Julia kept going.

“I can read with you if you ever want some extra practice,” she said.

Carmen looked at her carefully. “That’s nice. Thanks. I’ll let you know.”

“Seriously, any time,” Julia said. “My part in Love’s Labour’s is not exactly consuming, you know?”

Carmen didn’t want to be caught agreeing. “You have the last word, though. That’s a big deal.”

“As an owl.”

“Well.”

Julia’s expression was openly rueful. “R.K., our director, asked me if I’d give a thought to helping with sets during my downtime.”

Carmen tried to keep her expression neutral. “What did you say?”

“I said that sets really aren’t my thing.”

Carmabelle: Wow, Leo’s black?

LennyK162: Yeah. Half, anyway.

Carmabelle: You really are trying to kill your father.

LennyK162: Pretty much any color boyfriend would do it.

Carmabelle: Does Leo identify more with his black side or his white side?

LennyK162: What?

Carmabelle: I’m a woman of color. I’m allowed to ask these things.

LennyK162: I still don’t know what you’re talking about.

Carmabelle: Okay, does he listen to U2?

Bridget ended up that evening not in China, but on her dirt floor with a bad sunburn stinging her shoulders.

She was glad to have her floor again. She had worried that the joy of her floor somehow depended on Peter, but she now realized it didn’t. It was her own separate joy and could not be taken away.

She was glad to hear that Peter had gone with his family into town for dinner. She wanted to skip dinner, but she didn’t want to skip it on his account.

She continued this busy overthinking, feeling it an annoying by-product of adulthood. Were people in her work team treating her too carefully?

At least her hands still knew how to seek out the floor. She was down to the final couple of feet left over from last night. She couldn’t draw it out much longer.

She dug and sifted and sorted. At the final edge, her finger touched something hard. She was used to that by now. She assumed it was a piece of terra-cotta, like so many of the other bits were. She shook if off and held it up, but the sunlight was too faded to help. She felt it between her fingers. It was tiny. It wasn’t porous like clay. It wasn’t heavy like metal.

She recorded its provenience and hopped up the stairs to find a flashlight. Holding the little thing under the light, she felt her heart begin to thump.

She took it to the lab, glad that Anton was working late.

“What’ve you got?” he asked her.

She handed it to him. “I think it’s a tooth.” She was shaken by it. She felt a shaky chill in her abdomen.

He looked at it. He held it under magnification. “You’re right.”

“A baby tooth.”

“It certainly is.”

“Can you tell who it belonged to? I mean a boy or a girl?”

He shook his head. “You can’t discern gender from any of a child’s bones. Before puberty, boy skeletons and girl skeletons are exactly the same.”

Why was Anton looking so jovial about this when she felt sickened by it?

“I found it in the house,” she said. “In the new room.” Her breathing was moist and a little bit ragged. “I expect to find this kind of stuff in mortuary, but not in the house.” She really did not want to cry.

Anton looked at her carefully. “Bridget, it wasn’t in mortuary because the kid didn’t die.”

“It didn’t?”

“Or I should say, its death was not related to this tooth.”

“It wasn’t?”

“No.” Anton smiled, apparently wanting to cajole her out of her somber face. “The tooth fell out, Bridget. It got lost on the floor. Maybe the kid’s mother saved it.”

Bridget was still nodding as she walked back to her floor, almost wanting to cry with relief. This person, whoever he or she was, had long, long since died. But the person hadn’t died with a baby tooth. The little tooth did not represent death. It represented growing up.

“Do you miss him?” Carmen asked.

“I don’t think so. I’m not sure,” Tibby said, holding the phone with her shoulder and picking her big toenail. Some of the summer students were crowded around a portable video game in the hall. It was too noisy for a serious conversation.