My Deja Vu Lover (13 page)

  
That’s the way it is with casual affairs. That’s the way it always was with me. Like I told Cyd, I loved the guy I was with. As soon as an affair ended, I chalked him up as a fun memory.

  
But I couldn’t be like that with Graham. I felt as though I was lying on the bottom of the Sound, a mind without a body, staring up through the moving green water at the distant play of sunlight and unreachable surface. When he touched me it wasn’t the touch of one person on another, but instead, an expansion of myself, as though I was the universe and he was the space between my galaxies.

  
He said, “I’m falling in love with you, April,” and I said, “You did that a long time ago.”

  
“If I had known, I would have waited for you.”

  
It was as though we had always lived in each other’s minds and bodies. He wasn’t part of a soap. He was my soul and if he had left me then, I would have died.

  
Was Graham a good lover? To what could I compare him?

  
With Tom, we had sex and there was a long history of
 
affection and trust. With Graham, we became each other.

  
The word love had no meaning for me then. Perhaps it never had. I had always loved the people around me and been loved in return on an availability basis. With earlier men in my life, we loved each other when we were together. When circumstances separated us, I sank into a few days or weeks of depression after which I found new relationships to fulfill my needs.

  
New affairs replaced old ones. I had never felt I belonged to anyone except Cyd and Tom and Macbeth and that was more like being community property. Yet even with them, I knew our relationship was human, could end, and I would survive.

  
None of that was so with Graham.

  
From the moment our bodies met, it was easy to believe our destinies had been entwined for a thousand years. If we parted tomorrow, I would spend the next thousand years searching for him, in and out of future lives.

  
I felt my pulses beneath his hands and his mouth. I touched and stroked and kissed him until I knew every texture of his being. Wrapped myself in his arms and around his body until our heartbeats matched.

  
It wasn’t a matter of satisfying needs, we did that, but I went past passion and claimed him, believed he belonged to me.

  
When I tried to explain how I felt, he said, “If you are my destiny, eternity won’t be long enough.”

  
But eternity and destiny are not the same.

CHAPTER 11

  
The faded gray frame cottage, pressed into a hillside and half-hidden behind the winter red clouds of contoneaster bushes, became my life’s center. The cottage belonged to Graham and me, making us a couple.

  
I never went over to the U again after that day we met at the Greek restaurant. The U and Graham’s career were part of his other life, one in which he was married to someone else.

  
We often stopped for dinner out at a number of places around town. He didn’t seem to care if he was seen with me. Which made it easy to believe his marriage was dead and everyone knew it. Occasionally he’d wave to a colleague. Occasionally I’d see a friend.

  
We were at a Mexican restaurant, lots of flamenco dancers painted on the walls, lots of piñata parrots hanging from the ceiling. Clusters of tables separated the rows of high-backed booths. We were discussing burritos when a familiar voice called, “April! Hi!”

  
I looked up and saw Tom striding toward us, winding his way through the tables to our booth. He was dressed Tom style in worn jeans and a heavily ribbed sweater. One large wrist was caught in the thin hand of the small dark-haired woman who followed him.

  
When they reached the booth, he said, “Hey, wondered where you were hiding out.”

  
Which meant he’d stopped by the apartment several times. Cyd must have told him I was dating a new guy. Typical Tommy, he would have wasted three minutes on a pout and shrug, then found a new playmate.

  
“Who’s your friend?” I said because he seemed content to let her stand behind him like a pet dog.

  
“Oh right.” He stepped back so that we could see her. “This is Sandra.”

  
Graham smiled at them both. “Would you like to join us?”

  
Tom started to answer, probably to agree because he always liked a tableful. But the woman said quickly, “Oh no, you already have your dinners. Come on, Tom, let them eat while their food is hot.”

  
“Sure, okay,” Tom said and held out his hand to Graham. They did the guy thing, shook hands and exchanged names and ended with the usual ‘nice to meet you.’

  
When they were gone, Graham asked, “An ex-beau?”

  
“An old friend. We knew each other in college.” I didn’t mention that Tom camped out at my apartment whenever he wanted to.

  
Graham smiled. “A little more than a friend, I think. A lover at one time.”

  
“Once upon a time,” I admitted.

  
“But you’re still friends.”

  
“We’ve always been friends. Anything else was temporary and neither of us ever called it love.” When I said it aloud, it sounded weird, even to me.

   
I switched the subject back to the burritos we were eating. It’s hard to get in trouble discussing a burrito.

  
Graham didn’t give up that easily. The actor’s face twinkled with mischief and curiosity. “What do you think of Sandra? I gather she’s a new girlfriend? You’ve never met her before.”

  
“She looked a bit possessive. Tom’s girlfriends often are.”

  
“So you’ve met other girlfriends? Do they all cling to him like handcuffs?”

  
“Gosh, I guess we should have insisted they join us. Then you could have grilled her.”

  
He chuckled and changed the subject.
               

  
It took Tommy no time at all to start dating this new girlfriend, Sandra, so I knew he wasn’t heartbroken. Unfortunately, Cyd also mentioned Graham to Macbeth.

  
“Well, I had to, didn’t I?” she said later when I asked her why. “Tom knows and so it’s not as though you could keep it some sort of secret.”

  
No, and I had no reason to keep it a secret. But Cyd had told Macbeth that Graham was a professor and Macbeth looked him up on the internet and saw how long he’d been at the U.
 

  
“He’s a couple of decades older than you,” Mac said to me the next time I saw him.

  
“No. Don’t think so.”

  
“So how old is he?”

  
“What, you think I asked for his driver’s license?” I sputtered. “All right, I’d guess late thirties.”

  
“Divorced?”

  
The standard complaint about attractive men in Seattle was that they were either gay or they were married. I snarled at Macbeth, “You know what?
 
That’s kind of nervy of you, looking up my dates on the web. Don’t ever do it again.”

  
Macbeth started to say something, then closed his mouth. He couldn’t say why he was angry with me because he had no right to judge and he knew it.

  
And I knew I needed Graham and the cottage. While I was at the cottage, I didn’t have the terrifying nightmares that woke me in the dawn hours at the apartment.

CHAPTER 12

  
Graham and I walked the winter beach huddled into our windbreakers, with Graham’s long silk scarf lifting in the wind. He quoted poetry, often with lines written around my name, his hands waving to accent every line, almost as though the sea and the gulls were his orchestra and he the conductor.

  
“Didn’t know there were so many poems about April,” I laughed.

  
“I could do almost as well for you if you were May or June, but I’m glad you aren’t named February.”

  
“February Didrickson. I never would have learned to spell it. I’d have flunked kindergarten.”

  
When we were thoroughly chilled, we climbed the ladder and the path back to the cottage. Sitting on the couch, with its tangle of afghans and cushions, our feet stretched toward the glowing hearth, our arms wound around each other, we traded fantasies. Neither of us had life stories we cared to relate.

  
I told him, “I was born a princess, but a wicked witch cast a spell on my parents at my christening so that they forgot me and went off on separate hundred-year quests.”

  
“Isn’t there supposed to be a good fairy godmother in that story?” Graham asked.

  
“Oh yes. But she wasn’t as powerful as the witch. The best she could do was leave me a very small bag of gold, enough to pay for a couple of nonproductive years of college and give me a mini-income. That is as close to my life story as I have ever told anyone.”

  
“Coronets weigh heavy on young brows.”

  
“Yeah, it’s tough to be royalty. Now tell me your life.”

  
“Reverse the tale, my love. I was born to paupers.”

  
“Impossible,” I said because it was. He was Prince Charming right down to his toes. I knew every inch of the man, including his toes, and they were charming, too. “No, you were a queen’s son, stolen by jealous enemies and left on a doorstep.”

  
“I like that idea. From now on, it goes on my resume.”

  
But we couldn’t always avoid ourselves. Or maybe Graham could, but I couldn’t, because as much as I tried to forget whatever Cyd had told me about him, it wasn’t possible. The more I loved him, the more important the truth became to me.

  
I had to do it, had to ask him straight out and with no lead-in or buildup, my face turned to the fire because I couldn’t look at him when I asked.

  
“Graham, are you still in love with your wife?”

  
“I am in love with you.”

  
“Does she love you?”

  
“Probably not.”

  
“Then why don’t you get a divorce?”
 
My voice rose more than I had meant it to do. Now I sounded like Macbeth, probing into other people’s lives.

  
He said, “Because she needs me and I can’t leave her, not yet.”

  
“What do you mean, she needs you?
 
I need you.”
 
I could hear the tears in my own voice and that surprised me. I had spent so many years not letting myself care about anyone too much. So now I didn’t know how to handle the emotions Graham had awakened in me.

 
 
He pulled me closer, bending his head to press his face against mine. “April. Darling. I love you. You must believe me. And someday this will all work out. But for now, I don’t have a choice.”