Lying In Bed (7 page)

“Next!” the barrista called and I stepped up to the register. Ignoring pastry, panini, soups, slabs of carrot and zucchini cake, wedges of pie and cheesecake, I ordered black coffee. Plain. I wasn’t in the mood for a creamy cappuccino or a sweet mocha. All I wanted was a cup of coffee, hot and bitter.

After paying, I walked over to the window and sat down at the six-foot long marble topped bar surrounded by high wooden stools.

Usually Dean & Deluca was crowed, but that afternoon there was only one other person there: a young woman wearing a paint- stained shirt who was sipping a tall iced tea and eating a brownie in tiny, tiny bites as if she was trying to make it last forever.

Taking the top off my paper cup of coffee, the steam escaped, and I took the first sip, inhaling the dark, aromatic scent.

The woman smiled at me. There were rings of paint around her cuticles and more splattered on her hands. I liked seeing her there. SoHo had become so gentrified that artists were now greatly outnumbered by business people and tourists.

Cole – my anger with him, my disappointment with him, my embarrassment that I had been fooled by him – was like a splinter. I felt him there.

For years, too many times, I’d taken the needle and tried to fish out the remaining sliver of him that seemed lodged forever under my skin but I hadn’t been able to exfoliate him. I had to figure out a way to clean him out of my system. Finally.

“You were pretty damn rude the other day to walk out on me, after I did everything but kiss your hand to make it better.”

Once again, I didn’t see his face first, but his hands as he put a plate of chocolate chip cookies and a cup of espresso on the table beside me.

Then, pulling out the stool, he sat down.

I didn’t want to be interrupted. Didn’t want anyone to intrude on my self-pitying anger at my stepbrother. Didn’t want to be polite to a potential client and didn’t know how to extricate myself from a stranger who had made me feel undressed in my own office.

“Why did you do that? Is that how you treat all your potential clients?”

That he had used the exact same phrase I’d been thinking startled me. Logically, “potential client” wasn’t that unusual a term for it to be odd we’d both used it, but I still felt as if he knew more about me than I wanted him to or understood how he could.

Meanwhile, he was looking at me expectantly, waiting for an answer. I fumbled for a reason, something that wouldn’t be personal but that would satisfy him and prevent him from asking me any more questions.

“I didn’t walk out on you.”

“What would you call it?” He’d swung form sarcastic kindly banter to a moment of sincere anger. Looking at it from his point of view, it was not undeserved. I had left him sitting there.

He took a gulp of his coffee and then waited for me to say something. I didn’t. Not right away.

Gideon was wearing blue jeans again. And a sweater with thin ribbons of blue, indigo, green, and white stripes. His hair had the same tousled look it had before, and when he reached up and brushed his hand through it I knew why. His habit of running his fingers through the dark curls and pushing the forelock off his forehead gave him a perpetually breezy look. That, with the slightly insolent slant of his cheekbones and the sparkling but hard to read eyes - unusual eyes that were like fine Italian marble, verdant green with threads of black swirling through them - engaged my curiosity. Despite myself.

“I didn’t mean to be rude,” I said sincerely.

“What happened then?”

I knew I probably owed him an explanation but what could I say that would make sense?

Always try for some version of the truth, my dad had taught me. He’s an ethics professor at a New England college but none of his theoretical arguments were behind the advice. I am simply a lousy liar, he says. My face always gives me away.

“I never heard anyone read one of my letters out loud before. It was like standing there and being undressed by a total stranger.”

He didn’t respond to that except to push his plate of cookies closer toward me. “Have one,” he said, implying how good they were. How did he do that? I didn’t think I’d ever met anyone who conveyed so much in so few words. Or so much behind his words.

They smelled delicious and eating was something to do instead of just sitting there feeling even more foolish than I had before I’d blurted out the thing about being undressed, so I broke off a piece and took a bite. It was soft and sugary and started to dissolve as soon as I put it in my mouth. First Grace’s chocolate and now the cookies, I was going to be on a sugar high for the rest of the day.

It was as strange to be sitting beside him doing something as ordinary as sipping coffee and eating cookies as it had been to have him read my own words to me, in my own office. I was too aware of all the tastes and smells and how he moved and what I said and how I sounded. I didn’t feel like myself in Gideon’s presence, and I didn’t know why. No, that wasn’t right. I felt like a version of myself I hadn’t been for years. Open. Vulnerable. Wired. Receptive. Angry. Aware of every fleeting feeling.

“So… I’d like to talk to you about an assignment,” Gideon said as he brushed crumbs off his hands and shifted so that he was facing me instead of the window. “How long have you been writing these stories?”

“About six months.”

“How did you start?”

I took a sip of coffee, then spoke. “The woman who had the job before me had quit and while Grace looked for a replacement she asked me to fill in. It was easy enough. There were a few dozen letters and stories already written, I only had to insert names and places and little facts to make them personal, and then decorate them. I never intended to stay on. And I never thought I’d start writing originals letters or stories. I’d never written seriously but…” I stopped. Why was I telling him my life story? I shrugged. “It is good money and selling collages isn’t.”

“Not the whole story, is it?”

Typically clients spent most of their time looking through my samples. Generally they are either giddy or giggly or slightly embarrassed. Usually happy and excited. They almost never asked me about myself or why I had my job.

I played with some of the crumbs on the marble, rolling them around under my fingertips, buying time, trying to figure out if I had to answer him or not and finally deciding I didn’t.

When he realized I wasn’t going to respond he changed the subject.

“Who owns the letters and stories that are originals?”

“The client does.”

“They can’t show up in your sample book?”

“No.”

The woman across from me picked up her empty plate, lifted her knapsack off the seat next to her, and left.

“And your boyfriend – or husband – what does he think about you writing love letters to strangers?”

“That’s not what I’m doing - the letters aren’t
from
me. I help clients figure out what they want to write. What kind of fantasies they want me to create. There’s a long questionnaire to fill out that gives me a lot of information and insight.”

“But the ideas are yours.”

“No. I’m just the translator for people’s emotions.”

“They’re your thoughts written down in your voice.”

“They aren’t my thoughts. That isn’t my voice.”

“I read them. It’s your voice. Has to be. Unless you ask each client to describe what it feels like to touch someone, kiss them, make love to them. You don’t do you?” He didn’t wait for my answer; he knew this, too. “When you write, aren’t you feeling your own heat? Isn’t that what you’re transferring to the page?”

Something was buzzing under the top layer of my skin again. I reached up and touched my glasses. Almost as if I was making sure the screen that kept people at a distance was still in place.

“You’re the seductress even if you are hiding behind some stranger’s signature.”

I couldn’t tell if he’d accused me or complimented me. And I was even less certain why it mattered. All I knew was that listening to him was like being buffeted by a storm, not sure how far you’ve been thrown off your course until the wind finally dies down. Then realizing you do know: you’re lost.

“The letters aren’t personal to me. They are anything but. I don’t give them half as much though as you’re giving them. I’m not describing what it feels like for me to kiss someone, or touch someone or make love to them. You’re making a lot of incorrect assumptions.”

“You’re angry?”

“Of course I am.”

“Capturing an emotion. Violent or passionate. Isn’t that the goal of an artist?”

I took another sip of what was left of my coffee. He had me all mixed up. So it had been a compliment. “I’m not making art. The stories are just a job.”

“Right,” he said, making it completely clear that having upset me pleased him in some way. “While I waited for you the other day, after you walked out of your office, I read a few more of the letters.”

I felt my cheeks get hot wondering which ones. Using my forefinger, I pressed down on one chocolate chip that was left on the plate and brought it to my mouth, letting it liquefy and savoring its intense flavor.

Before I figured out how to respond, he said: “Since what’s in the letters isn’t what you feel, but what your clients feel, your clients are all, amazingly, very sensitive and sensual and able to communicate with you awfully well.” His voice was complicated, the way the chocolate was both sweet and a little bitter at the same time. So mixed in with the sarcasm, I heard the shadow of his disbelief and concern for me.

I’d never wondered before if the people who read the sample letters thought that the fantasies, emotions, and feelings I described belonged to me. I had assumed everyone knew they were fictive dreams created to satisfy my clients’ needs, to express their emotions and desires. Why didn’t Gideon understand that? Why was he judging me against the words and trying to fit make us fit together?

“Okay,” he said, his word ending the exchange. “You’re a modern day Cyrano. Only without the nose. Have I got it right now?”

Finally, I laughed.

“What do you charge?” His seemed resigned, as if he hadn’t been sure before and then once he’d made the connection between what I did and Edmund Rostand’s 19th century play something had been settled for him.

“Fifty dollars to customize an existing letter or story to–”

“Originals,” he interrupted.

“Four hundred and fifty dollars. A hundred less if the customer only wants the words and not the collage.”

“Any discount for more than one?”

“No, sorry.”

“Accommodating, aren’t you?”

“It takes me the same amount of time no matter how many letters someone wants. Each is original.”

I wasn’t doing my best selling job. Clearly I was ambivalent about him hiring me. He was too present. Too intense. Besides, I was having a hard time believing that he wanted to hire me. He seemed too self-possessed to ask anyone to write a word for him.

He stood. “Thanks for answering all my questions. It’s all very interesting.”

“No problem.”

“I’ve got an appointment that I’m going to be late for. So I’m sorry but I’m going to run.”

“Thanks for the cookie.”

He smiled and shook his head, making it clear the thanks weren’t necessary. “I might want to hire you,” he added.

I nodded but I was surprised. Something about him made me doubt he would.

As if he’d heard the question I hadn’t asked but only thought, he said: “I know my own talents. What you do isn’t one of them.”

As I watched him walk out of the store, noticing how his shoulders sloped and how lazy his walk was despite his having somewhere to go, I wondered about him.

How had he wound up there at the exact time I’d been there? Did he work in this neighborhood and had come for coffee himself and seen me there? Or had he gone to Ephemera, asked for me, and someone told him where I was? And who would have done that?

It could be another coincidence. Like our mirror image scars. Grace would never accept that. But that’s all it was, probably, and was just as meaningless.

Hundreds of people stopped in Dean & Deluca because they were hungry, thirsty, or curious. Why couldn’t his motives have been as innocent?

Later Grace would tell me I was denying all the obvious signs because what was happening to me was beyond my rational interpretation of how things worked. “If you can’t touch it, you didn’t think it’s real.” She said. “But kismet
is
real.”

“You don’t expect me to believe that,” I countered.

“Expect you to? No. But I want you to. There are reasons for things that we don’t understand, for the unexpected and the unexplained. They have their own logic, Marlowe. Just because you don’t know what it is doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”

At ten o’clock
that night I got undressed, putting on the dark ruby silk robe that Grace had found for me in an antique store on West Broadway. I hadn’t even noticed it but she’d spotted it hanging on a hook by a painting that had me mesmerized. Ordinarily I didn’t like vintage clothing. While I could appreciate it, the idea of wearing what someone else had once worn didn’t appeal to me. My curiosity over who had owned it and when she’d worn it and how it had wound up for sale fifty years later was too vexing. I didn’t want my clothes to come with another woman’s history.

But the robe still had its original tag on it. For all those years it had escaped being sold. That in itself was enough of a mystery. Had it been a gift that had stayed in its box under the bed? Had it been purchased by a woman to wear on a trip that had never be taken?

I’d had it for as long as I’d been working for Grace and it had become my writing robe. I’m not superstitious. I don’t have talismans. But when I’m going to write someone else’s story, I slip into it, feel its smooth silk against my skin, shiver and then settle down at my desk, ready to take the hours when I used to sleep or watch television or read while Joshua sat beside me and give them over to strangers.

I had two rituals: I always wrote the letters and stories in my ruby robe, and I always wrote them by the light of a candle I used to keep on the bedside table. The same sandalwood candle that had lit my derailed lovemaking with Joshua.