Lying In Bed (9 page)

There was a beat. He continued looking at me. As if he were trying to figure something out. And then he said: “What’s wrong?”

“I didn’t say anything was wrong.”

“No,” he looked confused for a moment. Trying to figure out for himself why he’d asked me that. “You didn’t. It occurred to me as you were speaking that you were unhappy somehow about your own work.”

I was. The collage I was working on at home was going well but it was deeply personal and painful. But I wasn’t going to tell that to Gideon Brown.

Ignoring his invitation to comment I said: “It’s nice of you to ask about my work but I’m sure that’s not why you’re here. How can I help you?”

His eyebrows arched knowingly, implying he understood exactly why I’d changed the subject and was willing to humor me for a while but also warning me that he might not always be so obliging. That bewildered me, having such a strong sense of what his thoughts were when he was a stranger to me. To have such a strong sense of anyone’s thoughts was unusual to me.

“Have you read a lot of erotica?” he asked, with his voice at a slightly deeper register.

I hadn’t expected this. “No,” I said after thinking about it for a few moments.

“No Anais Nin? Henry Miller? Not even Pauline Reage?”

I shook my head again.

“How about D.H. Lawrence?”

“Yes, but I consider that literature.”

“Nabokov’s
Lolita
?”

“Yes. But again–”

He interrupted. “Some people called what they wrote porn. Banned them for years. I would have thought you’d have read Nin, at least. Didn’t you need to study some of the greats?”

“Because of the stories I write?” That was stupid. Why else? “Mr. Brown, I’m not a student of erotica. So I can’t defend it or even tell you if it’s what I’m doing. I don’t even think of myself as a real writer. I’m an artist. I’m only doing this until I can get a gallery for my collages. Or until Grace finds someone better and faster at this than me. All I do is talk to my clients and write what they would if they could.

“Gideon,” he said.

I didn’t understand at first and it must have showed on my face.

“Call me Gideon. Mr. Brown sounds much too formal for what I’m here to talk to you about.” He was still looking right into my eyes. The entire time he’d been sitting there he’d never glanced away once. I tried to meet his gaze even though it was disconcerting. People usually looked right at each other, didn’t they? It wasn’t something I’d ever thought about before. Obviously there was something different about the way he kept his eyes on me.

“How closely will you work with a client?” His eyes narrowed a little with the question, the way men’s eyes do when they move in to kiss you. He was leaning in close enough so that I could smell him again: that woody, forest-dark scent. His voice even lower than it had been before, as if he were asking me how I wanted him to touch me and where. But that wasn’t what he was talking about. The undercurrent had to be my imagination. I was manufacturing it. Looking for it. And I didn’t know why.

There was nothing about him that explained my interest. I didn’t know what he did for a living and so it wasn’t his job that had me curious. His looks were familiar to me because of the painting in the Metropolitan but that was a coincidence that didn’t have any meaning. He hadn’t revealed anything about himself that should have connected us and made me feel as if we were moving together, doing a secret dance.

But that was exactly how I felt.

“A client can be as involved as he or she wants to be,” I said, wondering how many subtexts there were to the conversation.

“Orchestrate what each letter is about?”

“You mean, give me ideas and direction?”

He nodded.

“Yes, of course you can do that. In fact, it’s easier for me if someone has ideas.”

He ran his fingers through the hair that had fallen forward on his forehead, and the movement made me aware that I was playing with a pen. I put it down and the metal clinked on the desktop. The noise filled the silence of the last few seconds.

“I’d like to send a few short stories to the woman I’m seeing. She’s travelling. She won’t expect this from me, but it should please her.”

Of course, he would be with someone. Why else would he have been interested in Lady Chatterley’s Letters in the first place? Why had I been certain that he was, like I was, alone at his core?

So much for my intuition.

This wasn’t the first time I’d read someone wrong. Usually it didn’t have serious consequences. Once it had. I should be better at not trying to guess.

I didn’t have the gift that Grace has of intuiting things about people. I wasn’t subtle and I missed other people’s subtleties. Who you are informs what you understand about the people you know or meet. I’d be better off using my perception like a reverse barometer - if I sense something I should automatically assume the opposite.

His hands were on my desk, fingers splayed on the polished surface.

This simple thing, his flesh on the same slab of wood that I worked on every day, felt like an invasion. I wanted to move his hands away. Regain what was mine.

I could still hear his damn voice reading my words. It had been like him shooting an X-ray of my psyche.

Why did he provoke such a strong reaction in me?

Movies did that. Paintings hanging in the museum did that. So did music. Terrible news on television. Stupidity aroused me. The extremes of great beauty and creativity and the horrible, irrational, or cruel.

But men who I met onsight - without knowing them - never do that to me.

Except he had.

The ocean roared
. The sky was gray and there were rain clouds gathering.

“Why did you want to start with sound?” I asked Gideon as we walked side by side on the beach.

“Because it seemed like the most difficult sense to create an erotic story about,” he laughed.

“You have a perverse thing for challenges?”

“You have a perverse thing for questions?”

“Questions lead to answers. The most complicated part of writing a letter or a story for a client is getting inside his head so that I can make it personal.”

“Then I haven’t been very helpful, have I?”

“Not very.”

“That make us equally difficult.”

Gideon and I had taken off our shoes at the top of the wooden staircase that led down to the beach and had been strolling for about ten minutes.

My friend, Tina, and her husband, Jim, lived in Manhattan and only used their house over the weekends. She’d told me that of course I could use her beach. She’d even reminded me of where the key to the front door was in case we needed to use the bathroom or the kitchen.

There were other beaches closer to New York City but I’d wanted to go someplace I felt comfortable. The assignment had me nervous enough. I didn’t know what it was going to be like to come up with a scenario for a story in tandem with a client.

The beach hadn’t been my first idea.

Gideon had officially offered me the job over the phone two days after he’d come back to see me at Ephemera and we’d worked out the details of what he wanted: five stories that he would rewrite in his own hand, without any collage work from me. One a week until his lover came home. Each of the stories was to focus on one of the senses, beginning with sound, and he’d like to start as soon as possible. Then he’d asked if I could give him some ideas in a day or two, suggesting possible story lines and locations where we might place the first story.

That had made me realize he wasn’t from New York, or else he would have known the city well enough to propose the locale himself.

I’d come up with the idea that we go to a symphony and suggested a story about two lovers who sit, listening to the music, watching each other and how the notes and chords lead them to a crescendo of feeling so strong they bring each other to climax only with their eyes.

I’d tried not to blush when I’d told him my idea, even though he had been on the phone and couldn’t see me. And I tried not to focus on how much the idea for the story had come out of the way I felt when Gideon looked at me – even though I knew my reaction was inappropriate and a figment of my own imagination, an imagination that was not normally focused on my own sexuality.

He hadn’t been sure about that idea, he’d said, asked me to put it on the maybe list and requested another. My second choice was about two lovers in bed. She’s sleeping. He’s listening to a CD and slowly, following the rhythms of the music, he begins to make love to her. Arousing her awake.

Gideon responded more positively but still wasn’t sold.

Finally I’d come up with a story set at the beach. I didn’t have any idea of where it would lead or what kind of fantasy might take place. Just the concept of the ocean being the sound that seduces the lover.

So of course that was the proposal Gideon said he liked the most.

The one that I had the least inspiration for.

As we walked, the sand warm on the soles of my feet, I thought about how different this was from work I’d done for other clients. At least half of my assignments had been reworking existing stories and letters that Grace kept from the five years she’d been offering Lady Chatterley’s Letters. Of those who wanted originals, I’d never met with one of them outside of my office. None had wanted to be involved to this extent - where he or she would see and feel and explore the story with me. Making Gideon’s job a challenge.

We walked by a piece of driftwood, twisted into a crescent. I stopped and picked it up. It was the sort of object I could incorporate into my next collage. I’d had the idea that while I was creating these stories for Gideon, I’d do a collage of each one for myself. Five pieces - one for each sense. Without knowing it, Gideon would be partially paying me to take an artistic journey of my own.

Maybe I’d be able to enjoy his odd assignment more if I turned it into an experiment of my own. The idea of concentrating this way on each of the senses, from an erotic point of view was compelling. Maybe enough that it would not only engage me creatively but, I hoped, distract me from Cole’s forthcoming show and center me.

It hadn’t occurred to me until we were walking on the beach, but Gideon Brown’s job had come when I needed a diversion. The closer the date of my stepbrother’s show, the more I was preoccupied with it.

I almost laughed. Even when I wasn’t thinking about Cole’s exploits, I was thinking about what to do so I wouldn’t think about them.

I spotted a piece of green sea glass, soft and smooth and frosted. A sand jewel, I’d called them growing up. Stopping, I picked it up, pocketed it, and then gazed out.

The water was a gray green with three-foot, white, foam- capped waves. Far out on the horizon was a ship, blowing it’s horn. The low note traveled to shore under the sound of the crashing surf.

If I asked Cole once more, would he reconsider? No. Of course not. What would be different about this time? I had nothing to offer him in exchange and that was the only way to get anything from Cole. Everything with him was a transaction.

Damn.

If I was going to do this job, I had to stop thinking about Cole and start focusing on getting an idea. But
wasn’t
it odd how Gideon had appeared and presented me with a very real and lucrative distraction from an equally real and disturbing fact of my life?

No. It wasn’t odd. It was how shit happened. It was a coincidence.

To think anything else was to deny logic and reason. Leave it to Grace to turn ordinary circumstances into meaningful consequences of my needs becoming manifest. The fates, she would have said, were working hard to help me out.

It suddenly became all right if this job proved more difficult than most. That would make it even more distracting. For the next few weeks, I was going to be Gideon’s sensory tour guide. And he – even if he didn’t know it – was going to protect my sanity.

The ship blew
its horn again and Gideon and I both looked out in the same direction. The fog was rolling in. It muffled the sound and misted my skin. I sucked in a deep breath, smelling the brine. Under my feet, the sand felt damper than it had a few minutes before.

“The storm’s coming. Pretty fast, too,” he said.

“Should we go back?”

“Not yet. You haven’t been inspired yet. We are walking toward an idea. As soon as you trip over it, we’ll go back.”

The surf had turned rougher, the whitecaps rolled up higher and crashed onto the beach with more force, disturbing the shells and sand, depositing more sea debris.

A few yards ahead, I spotted a creamy pink-colored shell.

About four inches in diameter, it was round and swirled to a point like a nipple. When I turned it over, I could see a complicated, pearly, deeper pink nautilus chamber within.

I picked it up and was inspecting it when Gideon said he saw another up ahead. I followed his glance and saw that there were several more dotting the beach.

The waves kept coming closer and closer as the tide rose, and with each one that jumped the beach and deposited flotsam, more of the shining wet shells were left on the shore.

By then my hair was curling around my face and both of us were wet from the damp air. It was a warm moisture that smelled of the ocean and enveloped us in its humidity. The atmosphere thickened, smoothing out the edges of the horizon and the houses on the other side of the beach, blurring everything, as if we were looking through a nearly opaque piece of sea glass.

There were occasional raindrops but we didn’t pay any attention to them. We were too preoccupied collecting the shells that the waves were bringing us like gifts.

Altogether we gathered two dozen of them. Perfectly formed, each slightly different, all creamy pink and golden with their erect nipples on top.

“Listen,” Gideon said, after we’d gathered them together in a pile, and held one up to my ear.

I heard the unmistakable roar of the ocean inside the chamber. The same sound inside that was coming at me from the sea. I smiled.