Secrecy (21 page)

“Yes. Please go.”

He picked up the jacket that he had flung over a chair. In a daze she heard his last furious words from the outer hall: “Go back to 1884 with a fan and a bottle of smelling salts. It’s where you belong.”

The closing door left a thundering silence. She sat down on the sofa with her head in her hands. It was all so ugly, so shaming, a replay, in spite of the major difference, of the scene with Peter. Benumbed, she sat for minutes without moving. Only her blood still moved and pounded.

After a while the blood quieted, and logical thought resumed. He had been rash, not what she had thought he was, true. But it had been absurd to put him out like that as if he had harmed her or threatened harm. There had been no reason to humiliate him so and goad him into fury.

For he had seen her plain. Was she not “wound up tight”? She had acted a role in a melodrama. She had gone out of control because he had used a word:
rape
.

“Look into yourself,” he had said. My God! As if she had never looked!

She went to bed, and only in the exhausted hours before morning, fell asleep.

*   *   *

The rain, driven by the wind to an acute angle, struck hard at the tall north-facing windows. It was darkest February. Charlotte looked out into the blast and back at her work, a final watercolor drawing, ready for the client’s approval, of a tropical pastel house.

Looking over her shoulder, Mike remarked, “Nice. What about a tall, cold glass on the terrace after a swim, with the breeze blowing through the palms? I could be very comfortable in a house like that.”

Charlotte studied the picture. “Actually, Mike, it’s pretty awful, isn’t it? Two-story Corinthian columns on a plot in Florida? It should stand back on a sweep of lawn among copper beech trees a century old, not in a dinky suburban yard. And the columns are too heavy, anyway.”

Mike shrugged. “If the client wants it, you have to give it to him. At least until you’re an independent, big-name firm, you have to.”

“Do you ever dream of having an independent, big-name firm of your own?” she asked.

“Dream! That’s about what it is, like winning the lottery, so I don’t bother dreaming.”

When Charlotte did not comment, he looked at her with curiosity. “Why? Is that what you’re aiming at?”

“Yes,” she said simply.

His expression changed to amusement. “Have you any idea what the competition is? You must have. Take my advice, do the best work you can, as you are doing, marry a great guy, have a baby, and be satisfied.
Susie’s pregnant, she’ll take a year off from her job, and we’ll get by nicely even if I don’t reach the top of the ladder, which I won’t.”

He didn’t know, nor could he know, that she had entered a new phase of life in which she would rely on no one but herself: a rigorous, proud life of labor and achievement.

So she smiled, saying only, “Mike, we’re all different.”

This, then, was the change. The search for a social life, for men or for a man, no longer absorbed her spirit. She began a regimen that, like a diet, would energize her in body and mind.

She walked for miles, all over the city. She watched the swan boats and saw the first leaves appear on the weeping willows in the Public Gardens. In the mornings she jogged. After work she swam at a businesswomen’s club. On weekends she went alone to concerts, bookstores, museums, and foreign films; it pleased her to be making independent choices, deferring to no one’s tastes but her own.

Sometimes she asked herself a sharp question: Was this simply a case of sour grapes? Was it because she was unable to be what she wanted to be that she must now turn away in defiance? Yes, possibly so. But if that is how it is, she said sternly, I must accept it.

Besides, her head was filled with designs. She was only a beginner in the drafting room, yet she had lordly views of fabulous projects: opera houses, civic centers, and monuments so grand that she could almost laugh at herself—almost, but never entirely.

One afternoon Pauline summoned her into her private office.

“It must be hard to come to a strange city without knowing a soul,” she began. “I can’t imagine it. Rudy and I were thinking that you’re too smart and pretty to go to waste, which is my way of inviting you to a party. You don’t have to accept, though. We won’t be insulted if you say no.”

Charlotte was certainly not about to say no to the boss.

“We do this every spring,” Pauline explained. “You might call it a block party. All of our neighbors and other friends come together to celebrate the end of the winter. It’s kind of dressed up,” she added, and then, as if fearing she might be giving the wrong impression, corrected herself with a laugh. “Oh, not really dressed up. I mean—anything goes. You may see everything from diamond earrings to—well, not quite to jeans.”

She was being considerate. No doubt she thought that Charlotte, on her limited salary, had probably a very limited wardrobe as well.

Charlotte had to smile to herself. It was really funny. In her dingy little flat there was a closetful of expensive clothes, all bearing Italian labels. She owned diamond earrings, too, good-sized studs that had been Elena’s present on her twenty-first birthday. It had been quite a long while since she had worn them or had wanted to. But she would wear them to this party, along with a strand of pearls, a lime-green dress the color of April, and a pair of cream-colored shoes.

Actually, it was the Lauriers’ house that allured her. It was one of those old, red-brick, Beacon Hill residences where the brasswork on the front door glistens and the window boxes drip cascades of fuchsias. Inside, Charlotte was pretty sure, behind the lavender-paned windows, there would be cog moldings and original mantels. Pauline said frankly that they could never have afforded to live there if the house had not been left to her.

Apt to act motherly, she also said, “I have at least two men coming whom you might like.”

“I’ll be happy to come,” Charlotte told her, “and thank you for asking me.”

The house had all the charm that she had expected. Wandering through the rooms, she lingered before an eighteenth-century portrait of a woman in a mobcap and stood fascinated by an ancient map of the New World on which this continent was joined to Asia.

There seemed to be few people present with whom Charlotte had much in common. Many of the guests were elderly householders who, having known each other forever, naturally gathered together. Young people seemed to have come in pairs; they were either married or might as well have been for all the attention, once past the first politenesses, that they paid to an unattached woman.

A white-haired woman gave her an approving smile and a kindly compliment. “You look lovely, dear. What a pleasure it is to see a young girl not wearing jeans.”

“Young girl” indeed! But I suppose, Charlotte thought, twenty-five and fourteen must look very much the same to her.

A pair of quite attractive young men struck up an enthusiastic conversation, but it turned out that they were college sophomores who could have no more interest in Charlotte than she could have in them. As tactfully as possible, then, the three drifted, sophomores to the bar, and she in the direction of a corner where a group of women had collected.

Pauline, intercepting her, was distressed. “This is perfectly awful, your standing here alone. I’m absolutely furious. Those men I mentioned made last-minute excuses just this morning. I could kill them. No manners. I wouldn’t have believed they could be so rude. Now we have at least four extra women. It’s awful.”

“It’s not awful at all,” Charlotte said. “I can manage beautifully without men, so don’t worry. Really, Pauline.”

It surprised her that a woman as competent as Pauline, one who was making her way in the world, should still be thinking in terms of Noah’s ark: a male for every female, with a few extra males for good measure.

The women in the corner group were quite possibly the most interesting people in the room. They were a lawyer, a psychologist, a buyer of imported fashions, and a bright young mother of three. The conversation, quickly started up, began to bounce like a ball and was carried right through to supper, where the five sat together at the end of a long table.
The talk sped from clothes to child care, from divorce law to historical preservation, and slid into gossip. The fashion expert, who went by the name of Birdie, had too sharp and flippant a tongue but was at the same time hilarious.

“Take a look at the round table over there,” she whispered, “at the guy with the yellow tie. Doesn’t he look like a whiskey ad where the butler brings it in on a silver tray? Or else an ad for a BMW? It’s all there, graying hair, ruddy smirk, big stone house with a circular driveway, elderly wife, and, you can bet your Armani suit, a darling little secretary on the side.”

“I don’t have an Armani suit,” Charlotte said, laughing.

“Why haven’t you got one? You’re wearing a European dress. Italian, isn’t it?”

“Yes. A present from my mother. She lives in Italy. I can’t afford things like this myself.”

Now, why had she said that? She had said it because her eye, trained by Elena, saw that the others, with the exception of Birdie, were very inexpensively dressed.

It’s your sensitivity
, Claudia had always said, and would say now if she had been here.
You always sense what other people must be feeling. It’s a fine trait if you don’t carry it too far
.

“Now, there’s a dress for you,” said Birdie. Like conspirators they all leaned toward her to hear her whisper. “Look at the white that’s coming now.”

A tall couple were sitting down at the far end of the table, he a dark, impeccable young man and she a
flashing person with regal posture. They were immediately greeted and noisily welcomed by all the other couples at the table.

“Late again,” said Birdie. “She is one big nuisance. She comes in an hour late for her fittings and nothing’s ever right the first time, or maybe the second time either. Well, I suppose when you pay what she pays, you feel you have to throw your weight around. It must be kind of thrilling.”

Charlotte was seeing, or rather trying not to see, the dark young man. Actually, she was seeing Peter, which was absurd, because they were so different. Red-haired Peter in his baggy shirts …

Yet there must have been something else that her first glance had caught, something to cause this quick agitation. The couple had made a difference in the atmosphere. But perhaps it was only the woman by herself who, with her striking dress, had made the difference?

“What do you think? Are they real or not?”

Someone had directed a question toward Charlotte, who had not been paying attention.

“Are what real?”

“The earrings.”

Like tassels, they dangled, glittering, almost touching the white spaghetti straps.

“I don’t know. Probably not.”

Birdie contradicted her. “Probably yes. Almost certainly yes. That’s brand-new money. With brand-new money you don’t wear imitation stuff, dear. You want the world to know you can afford the real thing.”

Birdie was angry. Underneath the vivacious wit she was bitter and angry. What was her story? Charlotte wondered. For everybody had a story. Everybody.

Ringing laughter came from the far end of the table, and she raised her eyes toward it. The dark young man was the only one not laughing. Whatever it was that had appealed so heartily to the rest of his group had not appealed to him.
He was not one of them
.

He was pushing his cuff back to see his wristwatch. When he looked up again over the long room toward the windows, she had a full view of his face, which was aquiline and not like Peter’s at all; yet the slight smile, as private as the thought that had caused it, was Peter’s; sometimes, at a pause in his lectures, he had looked toward the window with just such a smile, close lipped but soft.

Damn! Damn memories.

“The trouble with good-looking guys like him,” said Birdie, who, to no one’s objection, did all the talking among the women, “is, first, that they’re hard to catch, and second, that if you do catch one, it’s worth all your wits and energy to keep holding him.”

“He’s very attractive,” remarked the psychologist, sounding wistful.

The lawyer asked Birdie, “Who is he?”

“I’ve no idea. She’s always got new ones on the string.”

It would have been totally eccentric to say, or else Charlotte would have said:
He’s not on her string! He doesn’t even want to be here, can’t you see?

“Don’t look now,” Birdie said to Charlotte. “He’s looking at you.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

Birdie shook her head. “I have a hawk’s eyes, dear, and it’s not ridiculous. He noticed you about three minutes after he got here.”

All this talk was inane. Girls in junior high school, giggling at the lunch table, nudging each other when a boy came near, behaved like Birdie, who was supposedly a sophisticated woman. Nevertheless, when Charlotte raised her eyes above the wineglass, they met unmistakably the full, thoughtful gaze of the man who sat beside the tasseled earrings.

“You see?” said Birdie, who missed nothing.

“No, I don’t, because there’s nothing to see,” Charlotte replied shortly.

“If I were you, when we get up from the table, I’d meet him halfway. In spite of her it can be done.”

“I know it can be done, but I don’t want to.”

“Well, that’s your problem,” Birdie said with a shrug that dismissed Charlotte for the rest of the evening.

She went home, having been one of the first to leave, in a queer mood, irritable and flat. She who was such an orderly person kicked off her shoes, dropped her dress into a heap on the floor, and went to bed.

Dreams interrupted her sleep all night, bizarre flashes of people in places where they did not belong. She was having a tooth pulled without Novocain; the dentist was Peter. Rudy and Pauline balanced on a steel beam one hundred floors aboveground and
stopped her heart; she went to a party at her own house in Kingsley, where Dad was offering a drink to the dark young man with the aquiline face who had been staring at her in Pauline’s house.