Photographic (14 page)

Now she examined the situation without interruption or relief. He was coming home.

Jane stood at the terminal lounge window, on the private side of the airfield, watching cloud shadows slide down the asphalt. Hank had come over to watch Tam, since she decided to meet Ian alone. A trip to the airport restroom had shown a pasty image of herself in the mirror. She fixed herself up with a little powder and blush. Last she dabbed a bit of red lipstick, smoothing it with her finger, mesmerized by what she was doing. She wore makeup so seldom now. And she couldn’t remember her normal behavior on his homecoming. Everything felt different. The most basic assumptions called into question. Was he the same person? Was this all the machinations of the tabloid money machine? She had never felt particularly proprietary before; now she felt she had lost something. What was it? The last person she wanted to ask was Marta, the one person who might know.

She looked her reflection in the eyes. “Fool.” She turned away. 

“Be calm,” she muttered as she walked down to baggage claim. Her palms were damp as she resumed her spot by the window, waiting for his plane to land. Like standing outside the door to the makeup trailer, on the day they’d met. That day, her life was about to change. Somehow her body had known.

The lineman wandered off to the hangar for something, so she was alone. Fishing in her purse for gum took up a minute. There wasn’t anyone around. No onlookers to witness their reunion, at least. That was something. 

Before she was ready, there it was, a compact white jet floating in for a landing. A light bounce, and down. She could hear the high-pitched whine of the engines and the faint drawn-out squeal of brakes as tires met pavement. The jet turned and made its way to the little base of operations. It rolled to a stop and she pushed through the door of the lounge to walk out to greet him.

She stood, wind playing with her hair, feeling out of place, and alone without Tam. After a short wait, the door opened and the stairs lowered to the ground. He appeared in the door, looking for her, a smile on his face. 

She felt the shock go through her she always felt when seeing him anew, after an absence, an electric short circuit flashing out to her fingertips and the roots of her hair. Like in a dream he stepped down toward her, closer. She ran her eyes from his worn brown boots to his jeans up his body to his face. Their eyes met and she felt the force of it hit her. Everything slowed down as she blinked and he stepped off and walked to her, slid his hands between her arms and her body, pulling her tight. His cheek against hers, he said her name and she felt an exquisite twist of pleasure, with a chaser of pain.

“Let’s go.” She pulled him toward the terminal. She looked toward their destination rather than at him.

“Hey.” He pulled back on her hand to stop her. She was a step ahead of him, their arms stretched by the joining of their hands. Allowing herself to be pulled, she but glanced around, self-conscious. The line operator was seeing to the jet, the little flight crew still on board. Usually Ian was the one to hurry through the first reunion, to avoid a hassle at private moments. He gripped her hands.

“I’m practically hallucinating at this point.” His voice was deep and scratchy, either from lack of sleep or just having woken, she couldn’t tell. She hoped he wasn’t smoking. Some characters…but this one existed in a place and time where there was no tobacco. His face was darker, leaner. He reeled her in close. She resisted an urge to thrash and break away. 

“Do I get a proper hello?” They kissed. He examined her face. “Have you gone all shy? You’re not sick? You don’t look well.” He ran his fingers down the side of her face. They used to stand together and hold each other this way, cupping the sides of each other’s faces, to see in, deeply. 

She felt her smile fluttering at the corners—to inhale his scent again—but she forced her mouth to a line . “I’m fine. Let’s just go.”

She remembered their reunions in vivid detail on the car ride home. The next twenty-four hours would not be like that. 

The hours were blurry and too bright, a Technicolor slideshow of life before, an afterimage still projecting even though nothing could ever look the same. An ecstatic reception by Tam, a short hello and goodbye from Hank, a spaghetti dinner. Even if she heard what she wanted to hear, even if he said what she wanted to be true, this was the end of before.

After he’d told Tam too many stories and tucked her in bed, they lay in their own bed. The place of comfort and refuge. They stared at the ceiling. He held her hand.

“Something’s wrong.” He broke the night’s silence. His words sounded far away and hollow, as if he’d spoken in a cave. What he said sounded improbable to her in that moment. 

“Yes. It is.”

He rolled over to look at her profile.

“What’s going on?”

“Ian.” She heard him breathe and exhale gently. 

“Yes?”

She felt cold. If there was a bomb, there was a bomb. It was there whether she spoke of it or not. If it went off now, exploding their lives to pieces, would she be to blame for lighting the fuse? Not even lighting it. Holding up the lighter so it could be seen.

“I need to know what happened on the set with Delaney.”

The light leached from the room, as the late summer sun relinquished itself.

“What do you mean?” 

Jane hitched herself up into a sitting position against the headboard. A plummeting sensation made her want to retch, loosened her bowels. She pressed her index fingers to the inside corners of her eyes and swept them out to the outer rims, drawing tight the lids, unfocusing her world, creating white flashes in the blackness. “What was your relationship with her?” 

He shifted and brought his legs up under him, sitting cross-legged on the bed. “Delaney? Why her? The tabloids said something?”

“A little more than that.”

“Nothing happened between Del and me.” 

Jane sat quietly. She believed him. Relief, like an anesthetic, flooded away the pain in her body and heart with an expanding rush. It washed over her, wavelike, drenching all feeling. “They sent me pictures, you know.” 

“They? Of Del and me?”

“Yes.”

“Who are ‘they’?

“I don’t know.”

He brushed his knuckles against the scruff of his cheek. “Bloody hell.” 

“Do you want to see?”

“Yeah.”

He followed her to the study. She flicked on the desk lamp, punched the combination to the safe, pulled the door open, took out the manila envelope. She closed the safe with a soft whump. They sat in two cushiony chairs near the window, where no one ever sat. She slid out the photos and handed them to him. He held them flat on his lap, to catch the pool of light from the desk, the last bit of gray from the sky. He shuffled through them one by one, the slippery sound of the film against itself giving Jane a shiver. Then back through again, with care.

He held them, the first one back on top. He looked at the cutout shape of himself. “They sent it like this?”

“No. I cut you out. I don’t know.”

The light from the desk gleamed along the scrim of his face, the length of his leg.

“Well.” His eyes were in darkness. She pushed the button of the lamp on the small round table between them. It lit him from beneath, and she could see his face. 

“These aren’t real.”

“Someone did it on a computer?”

“No. The photos are real, but the story isn’t. The hotel shots, I went to her hotel, we did some rehearsing on a balcony in back, I left a while later. The shots of the window shades have nothing to do with anything. I was never in her room. The other two shots.” He pulled them out. “The racy ones are from from the film. It’s clever how they put this together, because it’s all shot the same. And the angles, they made it look realistic somehow, I don’t know how, since we’re in bloody B.C. I guess when it’s all bits of clothes and skin who can tell.” He studied them further. “I don’t get it. Someone must have stolen these. They’re like stills, frames from the film. There weren’t any paparazzi around.” He considered. “It’s weird though. Someone took these others. Maybe a local took the ones in front of the hotel and sold them. That could be. Everyone I met was so nice.” He looked glum.

Jane absorbed all this information, the only new input she’d had from a source from the other side, so to speak, since she’d seen the pictures. His story sounded right. There was truth in his aspect. He had never given her cause before to doubt him, and he hadn’t now. Someone else had done that. She sat taking it all in. He set the pictures on the table, and leaned back in his chair, his head in hand. 

“We’ll figure it out.” Her relief made her giddy. She tried to get him to smile, but he didn’t change expression. She grabbed his knee and squeezed it. “It’ll be okay.” 

“Yeah.” 

With the weight lifted off, she was ready to tell him bits and pieces about Marta. He found it hard to believe that, one, she had given an interview that he knew nothing about, and two, had continuing contact with this person, who to him represented the lowest of the low. Who made his life hell on a daily basis, outside the bubble of their life here.

“Talk about letting the fox in the henhouse. I don’t understand. Where is this going to go? This is a friend of yours now?” 

“Not exactly. We went to lunch with Evelyn. Evelyn was cool with it.”

“Evelyn was cool with it. Okay. Wow. I had no idea how much was happening back home.”

“I’m sure more happened to you.”

“A lot did happen. Where is this interview going to appear?”

She had never asked that question. “I don’t know. She hasn’t put it out yet.”

“So does she have pictures of you and Tam, or what?”

“No. That’s why I did the interview.” She was surprised he seemed to miss the main point in how she’d framed the story about Marta.

“Okay. I wish I’d been here, but it sounds like you handled it. I’m sorry about the pictures. I wish you’d talked to me about it.”

“You were in another world. I didn’t want to pull you out.”

“I kind of wish you had.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

S
OMEHOW
M
ARTA
’
S
INFLUENCE
had changed everything. How Jane saw her husband, how she saw herself. As they lay in bed again that night she spoke of it, hard as it was, embarrassing even, to speak her thoughts aloud. They had been too closed off from one another. It was time to speak.

“You know, you’re handsome. I’m not beautiful like that.” Although Ian hadn’t shaken his blue mood, he snorted at that, thinking she was joking, but she kept going. “I don’t move like you, with that kind of grace.” She traced a deft pattern in the air. “It never bothered me before, because we met and we had something, we had the spark, we knew each other, and it had nothing to do with all that. But my friendship with Marta is forcing me to see certain things I was blind to. I’ve got to see them because they’re there. I’ve lived protected here and you encouraged it, I think, because you wanted the same dream to be true. But I’m waking up.”

He cleared his throat. His head lay on the pillow. “What things were you blind to?”

“Before I just felt how we fit. It was a feeling. It wasn’t something from the outside. I didn’t know then how right you could look with someone else or that maybe you weren’t talking to me anymore, as your person to turn to when you needed someone. Those pictures, things Marta said, it made me wonder if those things were true. Maybe our marriage isn’t what I thought it was. And I’m the last to know.”

His head propped up on his arm, he watched her, intent. "I love you.”

Jane felt a chill under the duvet. She pulled it tight around her. 

Ian got up from the bed and walked toward the window, drawing the thin drapery, staring out into the night, his hand splayed on the glass. He loved to look at the moon in all its phases. “What’s happening to us.” 

“I think you were gone too long this time.” She twisted her wedding ring around and around her finger. 

He turned and leaned against the window frame, the moonlight silhouetting his body. “I’ve been gone this long before. This never happened.”

“There’s a cumulative effect.” 

“Yes.” His shadow spoke. “A cumulative effect.”

He came back to bed, after he pulled the heavier drapery closed to darken the room, their silence preserved like a spell. 

Lying beside each other in bed, he broke through under the safe cloak of darkness. “I’m not that good-looking. I’ve got funny eyebrows. My hair sticks up. Ask anyone who went to school with me. You’ve been waking up with me the last seven years, almost eight. You should know better than anyone else. You know me.” There was a fine, almost imperceptible note of desperation in his voice. 

“I know you, but we keep changing. I don’t know who you are at this moment, since the last film. I have to get to know that person again.” In the dark it was safe to confide. “I watched some of your films while you were away. I missed you. In the films it’s like you’re not even real. I wondered what you’re thinking. Sometimes I can see.”

“Yeah? What am I thinking now?” He slid his hand up her thigh between her legs. 

She wrapped her legs around his hand and slid closer. “What do you think about what I said?”

“What?” Another hand dove around the back.

“Is it weird, how I felt, watching you…oh God…”

“It’s an odd profession, it feels weird to do it, too, sometimes.” 

“But you like it.”

“I like it.” His teeth flashed in the darkness.

Jane raised one lone hand up from the bed.

“Where…did you…learn that?” There had definitely been something new. As Ian slid up the bed to lie beside her, she flung the other arm up, supplicant, from her supine position. “Wait.” Her voice was hoarse with emotion. “I can’t take anymore.” Her arms, which still floated up in the air, began forming patterns. “Annihilation. That's what it is.” The arms waved in graceful arcs, as if conducting a chamber orchestra. “That’s what you’ve done to me.” She sighed and folded her arms across her chest, closed her eyes. “What did they call the world when it was new?” Her voice was thick with the onward rush of sleep.