My Deja Vu Lover (32 page)

  
Graham’s voice came from some outside reality that I refused to recognize.

  
“April, we need to talk.”
 

  
Yes, that’s what I had presumed this was all about.

  
He stood up, walked over to me, sat down on the couch, covered my hands with his hands. “Darling, I thought I could work something out. I thought my wife was getting better and that I could finally leave her. April, I love you so much.”

  
He paused, waited, expected me to answer. I didn’t. I kept staring at the white chair.

  
“Darling, I had to believe. I wanted so much to be with you. Listen, please understand. It’s started all over. She has to be hospitalized. She could go on like this for years.”

  
Don’t think so. He could have told me she had embezzled all his money. Could have told me she’d threatened to deny him access to their son. Could have told me any number of lies about her behavior. But he made a big mistake when he said she was an alcoholic about to break down.

  
Obviously she had been good to her word. Hadn’t told him we’d met. If she had, he would know I knew his wife might be anything at all except alcoholic and chronically relapsing.

  
I had looked up Barbara Berkold on the internet and yes, she did the things she claimed, was on the boards of three non-profits and worked for several others.

  
Against the glare of the white chair I could see no images, no memories. My imagination could not compete with it. My mind drifted, the only condition that was bearable.

  
“It’s not fair to keep you now when I have no future to offer you.”

  
The brittle branches of the shrubs, with their blackened leaves clinging to them, scratched the windowpanes, stirred by an incoming storm. I couldn’t turn my gaze away from the chair to look at the window. If I did, I would absorb his words and my heart would stop beating. I felt the skin tighten on my face and I could imagine myself turning into a stone statue.

  
I finally managed to say, “Why didn’t you tell me this the last time we were together? Why today?”

  
“Three days ago I thought I could work this out. I even talked to my lawyer. I’d give anything to be free to marry you, darling. I thought it might be possible. It isn’t.”

  
Why had he driven me all the way out to the cottage to tell me? Did he need time away from me to sort out his feelings for me? Was that what this trip to Spokane was about?
  

  
“I’ve never been worthy of you,” he said. “You deserve so much more.”

  
Oh please, at least think up an original line, I thought. For a few seconds my eyes focused and I saw the man behind the words. Had he brought me here because he knew, probably from many past experiences, that no one could be as stupid or innocent as I appeared to be. Did he expect me to make a scene?
 

  
I considered shouting obscenities at him. I could give him rage. I could scream and pick up the nearest table lamp, or maybe a chair, and hurl it at him. Or I could throw myself against him, tear at his face, rip the mauve silk shirt, rake my nails across familiar flesh, leave welts. Then he could later bathe and bandage while assuring himself that he was right to end a relationship with someone so unstable.

  
“It’s for you, April. You’re the one bright spot in my life. But darling, I want to do what is best for you.”

  
I dug my fingers into my cold arms. The muscles in my abdomen cramped. While his voice went on, a drone of sound without meaning, my mind clutched at fury, churning thoughts, then letting them slip away to be replaced by other despairs, until finally there were no feelings left in me.

  
When I was so numb I could no longer accept one more possible reaction, I straightened my legs, put my feet on the floor, and slowly stood.

  
I would not give him the satisfaction of a scene. If he was tired of me, bored, I couldn’t change that. I couldn’t make him love me.

  
If he did love me, meant everything he said, but couldn’t pay the price, loss of his home, threat to his career, I couldn’t change that, either.

  
And I could not stay on this seesaw.

  
“April, talk to me.”

  
I whispered, “It’s cold here. Please take me home.”

  
By the time I reached home, my teeth were chattering. Graham pulled up in front of the building and I didn’t try to say goodbye to him. I just hit the car door handle, tumbled out, reached back and slammed the door behind me.

  
He said my name.

  
I didn’t answer. I ran up the walk, fumbled with my lobby key, slammed that door, fumbled with my apartment key, slammed that door.

  
From the kitchen Cyd called, “Hi, April. Come see what I’m fixing.”

  
If I could have said a word, I would have answered her, but I was shaking so hard, all I could do was rush into the bedroom and fall on my bed face down. I didn’t know who I was any more.

  
The present was chronological, my affair with Graham, built from meeting him to falling in love to losing him, was all in order, days and weeks on a calendar.

  
The past was jumbled, out of sequence. My first memory was of a car crash. If that was destined to happen again in the present, it would be the last memory. When? I was never going to see him again, so when?

  
I must have sobbed enough of my misery aloud for Cyd to sort out. With my face buried in the pillow, I told her snatches of thoughts through tears, sometimes whispering, sometimes screaming.

  
She patted my shoulder, rubbed my back, tucked a blanket around me. “It’s all right, April. You’ll be all right.”

  
“No, I will never be all right. I don’t know who I am any more.”

  
I sobbed myself to sleep and into a nightmare.

CHAPTER
 
36

  
Finding Mabel Clara’s house was no big trick. Everybody knew where the stars lived. I used my rent money to pay for a cab. He let me out a block from her place and then I hoofed it down the sidewalk and up the circular drive. She had a swell place, iron gates that probably got closed at night but this was afternoon.

  
Three palm trees stuck up taller than the house, skinny brown poles topped with round umbrellas of green leaves. The pale adobe house had iron balconies sticking out below the upstairs windows and there was a red tile roof and red tile trim everywhere. No cheap oleanders here. Roses grew in pots and there were beds of bright flowers that never grew back home in Minnesota.

  
Marching up to the door, I knocked. Laurence was dumping me anyway. My life couldn’t get worse.

  
A girl in a black dress and one of those useless little white aprons opened the door.

  
“May I help you, madam?”
 

  
She spoke slowly with careful enunciation. Foreigner, I wondered, and then saw how it was. She was just like me, trying to get into acting, taking lessons, and earning a living at whatever job she could find. Maybe she hoped to go from Hollywood to Broadway.

  
“Yes,” I said. “Is Miss Mabel Clara home?”
 

 
 
Because if she was, I was going to go on in and ask her about getting cast in her next moving picture. I knew that wasn’t how to get work, and she would think I was nuts, but it was an excuse to see inside her house.

  
“No, I’m sorry,” the maid said. “Did you have an appointment?”

  
Of course Miss Mabel Clara wouldn’t see me. I wasn’t thinking clearly at all. And then it hit me, this idea. I said, “No, I don’t but someone told me she was looking for, uh, help, you know?
 
I can do almost anything, mend, iron, help in the kitchen.”

  
The maid dropped her shoulders and her accent. “Don’t know about that, could be, but you have to talk to the housekeeper. She’s the one who does the hiring.”

  
I brushed perspiration from my forehead and tried to be casual. “Is the housekeeper here?”

  
The maid leaned out of the doorway and squinted in the sunlight. “Your face has gone all red. Way too hot to stand outside. Come on in.”
 

  
And to my surprise, she turned and led me into this wide foyer. It had a curving staircase with a black iron bannister, and the floor was more of those red tiles.

  
I stood in the sudden coolness and looked around.

  
“This is Mrs. Cleeve’s day off. Sorry you came all this way for nothing. You could telephone her tomorrow and make an appointment. You look real hot, kiddo. Wait here, I’ll get you a glass of water.”

  
When she went through a doorway toward the back of the foyer, I ran my hands over my hair to try to smooth it out a bit. There was a large painting of Mabel Clara on the side wall, hung above a table with a bowl of flowers, almost like a painting of the madonna above an altar.

  
Kind of gave me the creeps. In the portrait, Mabel Clara wore her hair combed back in waves and then it came forward over her shoulders, long corkscrew curls. Her hair was chestnut brown, dark with a red tint. Her white dress looked like organdy. It had tiny pleats in front and lacy ruffles all around the neckline, real old fashioned.

  
His Sunday Sweetheart, that was it, that was the name of the picture where she’d worn that dress. I’d seen it back in Minnesota four or five years ago when I went to the matinee with my brother Dion. We had to sneak out because my parents thought going to moving pictures was a sin. Dion worked as a delivery boy for the grocer then. He gave most of his pay to our parents but he kept a little for himself and he was always good about treating me to a movie.

  
Dion was the only thing I missed about Minnesota. I wrote to the family as soon as I arrived in California because I never meant to make them worry. They never wrote back. Except for Dion. He wrote to me three or four times a year and he gave me the name and address of a friend who kept my letters for him.

  
What would Dion think of me now, standing in the fancy home of Miss Mabel Clara? I’d tell him all about it, next time I wrote.

  
A couple of dark carved chairs with red leather seats were closer to the door, and one of those freestanding hat racks with curved metal hooks. I caught my lip between my teeth to keep from letting out a screech.

  
There was a hat on the hook and a white linen jacket on the chair and I knew their owner. I walked over to make sure, almost afraid to breathe. What if he walked out of one of the several doorways that opened into the foyer? If Laurence caught me here, I might as well get on the next train and head back to Minnesota. He would never ever forgive me.

  
I lifted down the hat and saw his initials in the band. There was no need to check the coat.

  
Not waiting for the maid or the glass of water, I turned and fled out the front door and down the gravel curve of drive and past the tall hedge and the fancy iron gate. I ran until my breath burned so hot in my chest I had to stop.