Acts of Love (6 page)

“They spend a lot of money, people recognize them and like to be seen with them, and they're invited everywhere. It's more than upper class, Luke, it's like royalty, if we had royalty. Well, we don't, but Americans really would love it if we did—why else do you think every magazine with Charles and Di on the cover sells out in five minutes? Instead we have people like Joe and Ilene, who are movie stars and who do all those royal things like sponsoring benefits and getting their pictures in the paper and buying a lot of art. Readers love to read about them. And if you think they're asinine and dull, why are you going to their house tomorrow night?”

“A good question. They've invited a playwright from the former Yugoslavia; I've heard of him and I want to meet him.”

“Invite him for dinner at your house.”

“It's easier to meet him at the Fassbroughs' and see if we have anything to talk about.”

“Why do you think they're asinine and dull?”

“Because they prattle about money, and measure people by money, and because they're exhibitionists, which I find infantile.”

“But they're famous.”

“And you write about famous people, so you certainly should write about them. But as if they're royalty? You don't really believe that.”

“I believe they're as important as royalty, and that's what counts.”

He shrugged. He knew that Tricia's enormous success was due in large part to just that sort of serious naiveté, her pure belief that the people she documented—most of whom were shallow and unimportant—were as newsworthy as royalty, their doings every bit as interesting to her readers as the machinations of presidents, generals and crooks.

And he knew that that was exactly what he asked of his audiences: that they suspend their disbelief and let themselves be swept into the worlds he created. All his work as a director was toward that end: to bring to life the work of the playwright so that audiences responded to it with a pure belief in its reality and importance. For that reason he understood Tricia and even sympathized with her. She had the kind of belief that children have in fairy tales and adults have in fantasies that make their lives tolerable by keeping everything on the surface, avoiding depth and complexity. Together with her blond beauty and endless store of anecdotes, that had kept him amused and interested for almost four months.

He liked her fame, too. He always chose to be with beautiful, well-known women and he was used to attracting photographers, and the night at the St. Regis was no different. For Luke, the whole evening—the auction to raise money for a cause he had not bothered to notice, the dinner and dancing, the fragments of conversation snatched from the air as groups gathered, broke apart and re-formed—seemed to float on the attention that surrounded him and Tricia. It was a way of getting through the evening without feeling boredom or impatience.

Without feeling anything.
The words flashed and were gone, but they left him feeling as he had in his limousine earlier that long day: stifled, waiting for something and trying to figure out what it was.

He danced with Tricia, made conversation, bid on and won three items in the silent auction, and engaged in a fierce battle in the live auction for a sculpture he had determined to own. He won there, too, and the crowd broke into applause. In the limousine, he gave Tricia the necklace he had bought in the silent auction, and she cuddled against him. “Are you getting serious about me, Luke?”

“As serious as you are about me,” he said easily.

She frowned. After a moment, she said, “I think someday I might like to marry you. I'm just not sure. I think you'd be hard to live with.”

“You're probably right.” The limousine stopped in front of her building; Luke sent Arlen home and he and Tricia went upstairs.

“What does that mean?” she asked. “That I'm probably right. What does that mean?”

“That I would most likely be very hard to live with.” He walked with easy familiarity through her living room, a large, coldly modern square space filled with clusters of wood-framed glass tables, white couches and armchairs, marble floors with Stark geometric rugs and a scattering of minimalist paintings on the white walls. Luke disliked it all, finding it neither beautiful nor comfortable, but a major designer had done it for a sum of money that even Tricia found excessive and so she defended it vigorously and wore bright colors that made her stand out like a brilliant flower in a black-and-white photograph. Luke went to the bar and made Tricia a drink and she sipped it while he made one for himself. Then he sat beside her on the couch and took her in his arms. “It's not something we need to talk about now.”

She held herself slightly away from him. “Do you want to get married again?”

“Probably not.”

“Luke, you keep using those words. Probably. Most likely. Aren't you sure?”

“Probably not,” he said, smiling, and kissed her, pulling her into his arms and feeling her move pliantly against him. Her tongue tasted of the martini he had made her, her skin became flushed beneath his hands, as supple as warm, polished taffy. She led Luke to the bedroom and when they lay on the silk coverlet of her bed she fit herself beneath him with rippling movements that came from her own experience and her familiarity with him. So skilled was she that she blurred into anonymity. In sex, as in the times they were apart, Luke never spoke her name; in fact, he barely thought about her. He did not think that was a bad thing or a good one; it was as if their moves had been scripted—they could have been any two people in bed after an evening on the town—but he was aware of Tricia's skill at making him feel that whatever he wanted she would do: she would bend and sway and stretch and open to him however he wished because at this moment nothing in the world was important to her but pleasing him. And that was enough to make him dismiss their conversation, and if Tricia remembered it or let it intrude on the next few hours, she never said a word to Luke. As far as he was concerned, marriage was as far from her thoughts as his.

But when he walked home just before dawn, striding through the oddly quiet streets, his restlessness returned. When he let himself into his silent apartment, he went to his study and sat at his desk and thought of reading for half an hour before going to sleep: a few scenes from
The Magician
or a new novel. He did neither of those things. Instead, he reached for Constance's box of letters, and pulled one out at random.

Dearest Constance, I can't believe we're in another play together! Do you know it's exactly two years since we met? And I feel just the same as I did then: I wake up and the world is bright and exciting, sort of holding its breath, waiting for evening, when I'll be with you. I've been working
so
hard—I've hardly seen anybody at all because I'm trying to do everything you told me to do. I'm taking classes in ballet and modern dance and speech. When you wrote, “You must learn about your own body, every movement you make, and about your voice, how it sounds to others, how you can control and vary it, how the shape of your mouth changes when you speak with anger or joy, or with an accent . . . if you learn all this, when you are on stage, you will be in command of it,” I shivered when I read that; the idea of
being in command
 . . . Anyway, I'm also in a yoga class—I guess it
is
discipline of mind and body, the way you said it was, but mostly it's a lot of fun—and I'm reading lots of biographies and autobiographies, which you also said I should do, to understand all kinds of people in all kinds of situations. With all that, I'm much better than I was two years ago; I can feel it and it makes up for being alone so much. I hope
you
think I'm better. If I am, it's all because of you.

She'd be eighteen, Luke thought. Constance would have been—he calculated rapidly—sixty-three. Two years had gone by without a letter—at least, there were none in the box—but in that time Jessica had done everything Constance had suggested. He was touched by the image of a lonely young woman steadfastly following the advice of someone she worshiped but did not see or hear from for two years. And she must indeed have improved, because here she was, appearing once again with Constance. He wondered if Constance helped her get the part.

He returned the letter to its place in the box and took another at random, much farther toward the back.

I know, I know, Constance, of course you're right, but I'm so angry I can't think straight. It isn't enough to say that I'm alive and life has so much to offer—I know it does, but
it isn't enough!
I want what I had . . . oh, God, I want it back and it eats away at me that I can't have it. I'm sorry, dearest Constance, I shouldn't pour all this out on you, but I know you understand, because you're living on your mountain in Italy and that isn't enough for you, either, is it?

This must have been after the train accident, Luke thought.
It eats away at me that I can't have it.
She meant the theater, of course, but why couldn't she have it? What had happened to her?

Holding the letter, he gazed through his tall, leaded windows as the sky brightened, thinking that Jessica Fontaine was turning out to be far more interesting than he had ever thought she was, more interesting, in fact, than anyone he knew right now. A remarkable, mysterious woman. Something drew him to her: perhaps the tragedy of her life and her disappearance, perhaps her greatness before that, perhaps her friendship with Constance. He did not know the reason; he only knew that the box of letters was like a magnet that tugged at him wherever he was. I need a quiet evening, he thought, to start at the beginning and read them in the order she wrote them. He looked at his calendar for the next night. Cocktails at Joe and Ilene's. Dinner at Monte's. A late supper with Claudia. He flipped through the pages for the rest of that week, and the next. God damn it, he needed a night at home. Well, tomorrow night. He wrote a note to make his apologies to Joe and Ilene and to Monte, then slipped Jessica's letter back in the box. He had a few hours to sleep before he was due at Monte's office. And that evening he would come back to Jessica, and find out what happened to her: why she vanished from the stage, where she was now, whether she knew about Constance. What she knew about him.

And he realized, as he went to his bedroom, that he was already thinking he might want to see her again. Not for any special reason, he thought; just out of curiosity. And then, at last, he went to sleep.

Dearest Constance, it seems so weird to be back in high school, spending my time with all these people who have no idea what I was feeling all summer, how much I learned, how different I am. A boy I met last year, Wesley Minturn, very tall and thin and stooped (like a stork peering down to see what the rest of us are up to) asked me to go to a movie. He said he had his father's car and he even told me what kind—a six-cylinder Alfa-Romeo convertible, red, with black leather seats—I guess he thought I'd find that irresistible but actually I thought it was pretty sad that he couldn't trust himself to be the main attraction of the evening. He made me feel old . . . well, older than him anyway, because I do trust myself, maybe for the first time in my life. I think I won't date at all for the rest of high school; I'm just too different from everybody here, I've seen too much of the world, I'm
world-weary
(I'm pretty sure I know what that means) and even though I'm an actress I won't act like all the other seventeen-year-olds in my class. I'm sure I'll be lonely, but that's the price one pays for being an artist. If we don't suffer, how can we ever become great? I hope you're fine and please write to me. All my love, Jessica.

Luke smiled.
World-weary.
Hardly. She was young, charming, full of energy and hope, and dramatic as only a seventeen-year-old could be: acting a role even when writing a letter. Constance probably had seen herself, at seventeen, in that letter. No wonder they'd become friends.

He slipped Jessica's letter back in its place and sat back, his gaze moving around the library. It was large and square with a deep green cove ceiling, mahogany shelves lining three walls and a mahogany-carved fireplace within a green marble surround. A red, green and brown Bessarabian covered the floor and the long couches were the same red, startling and dramatic against dark green velvet drapes. “Like a stage set,” his grandmother had said with satisfaction, and she had sat like a queen in the center of one of the couches, looking up to the ceiling with its wrought-iron chandelier and down to the vast coffee table covered with stacks of books, most of them bristling with bookmarks. I miss her, Luke thought; those weekly telephone calls, our visits, just knowing she was there, part of my life.

The telephone rang and he reached for it. “Luke,” said Tricia, somewhere between annoyance and alarm, “I'm at Joe and Ilene's; why aren't you here?”

“I decided to stay home and read.”

“Stay home?
You never stay home! And this playwright you wanted to meet—”

“I called him; we made a date for lunch next week.”

“Something's wrong. Was it last night? Because I talked about getting married? I wasn't serious, you know; and anyway, I said I didn't want to, so—”

“It has nothing to do with you. I enjoy being home and I don't do it often enough.”

There was a pause. “Are you going to Monte's dinner?”

“No.”

“Luke, he's your producer!”

“He's having sixty people for dinner; he won't miss me. I'm sorry I'm not with you, but you'll find plenty of scandals for tomorrow's column and that's the real reason you're there, isn't it?”

“Well, and to be with you.”

“I'll call you tomorrow. We'll do something on Friday if you're free. Right now I'm going back to my reading.”