Photographic (17 page)

Vaughn turned her head to Ian, accompanied by the faint dull click of gold. 

“Agreed." She moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue.

“Agreed.”

They didn’t speak the words; they didn’t say to each other, this is what we’re going to do, we’re going to have sex, yes, we’ve decided to do it. They communicated nonverbally, at the beginning, a look: we’ll see how it goes, okay? Okay. He took his robe off. It always felt strange at first. Without the modesty pouch he usually wore, he felt vulnerable.

“Goddess?” He bowed to her with bent arm. She laughed and pulled off her robe, tossing it to him. He placed her robe on top of his. Returning to the bed, observing her sprawled on the furs, he felt his blood quicken. He kept his eyes on hers. 

“Shall I light the torches?”

“Do.” 

Tor stopped his preliminary filming long enough to get them the lighter, which he gave them to light a long thin reed so he could film her lighting the torchieres around the bed. 

Ian slid onto the bed with her, running his hand over her back as she knelt on all fours lighting the torchieres. As he touched her long smooth back, he thought of his journey the next day, home on the fair wind promised him. Intoxicated by the power of the moment, his love for Penelope surged through him like the blood pumping through his body, blood roused by another woman. With the thought of Jane, of Penelope, of Calypso bewitching him, his anger sparked and he grasped Calypso by the shoulders. She turned her head and opened her mouth. He flipped her over, pressing her into the furs, pinning her down.

“Why do you keep me here.”

“The smoke will limit how long we can have those lit,” Tor murmured from far away.

“You belong to me." 

“You’ve had me these many years. Let me go.” He felt his eyes wet, dripping on her face, smearing the thick kohl circling her eyes.

'The last time." She fumbled for the shell.

“Witch.” 

“Lover. It’s the last time. Give me that. It’ll set you free.”

He heard a tearing sound and she rolled the condom on him in one smooth motion and he did as she said, and as he did he loathed her, and he loved her, as she opened the trap door, allowing him to escape from nothingness.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

T
HAT
NIGHT
:
A
restless night in which she couldn’t sleep, the longest night of her life, waiting for dawn and dreading it, thoughts swirled in a tide pool that wanted to suck her down into a bottomless drain of questions and doubts and accusations—in the early hours she felt herself sharpening and finding home—until in the morning she was an arrow pointing in one direction, right at Ian.

They had slept in the same bed; he came to bed long after she had found her way there, trying to bury herself. She did not dignify his arrival with movement or comment. She couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. 

In the morning she found her voice and with it her wrath. She sat straight up in bed. The earliest morning light filtered in thin, shifting lines on the floor, as the cracked window’s breeze fluttered the drape. His unmoving form was silent but awake, she sensed, and she spoke to it with that knowledge. 

“What happened that day?”

He rolled over. One arm tucked under his head, he looked at her silently for a few moments. He scooted up into a sitting position, his back against the headboard. 

“It was all there in place for something extraordinary to happen. I know I probably can’t explain it and make it ever sound right.” He spoke hesitantly at first, then gained momentum and confidence as he continued, searching for how to explain it and coming to new conclusions that she could see in his eyes excited and justified whatever doubts he’d been living with. “It was about something. The search for that moment you never quite get to. Letting go of things you’ve held onto so long you forgot why you grabbed hold in the first place. It was that moment of abandonment, when you lose yourself, and it’s as if you’re not even a person anymore, or a thing; it’s as if you’re a feeling, and then you aren’t even that. You’re beyond feeling. You are that moment in space and time and it might last forever, or for only one second; it doesn’t matter. Just to have been connected to that endlessness was sublime.”

Jane watched him so fixedly, listened so hard, she had forgotten to take a breath and found herself shuddering in air after his last words. He continued, not noticing. 

“We shared an ecstatic experience that day and it was an epiphany. I felt my place on this earth, my insignificant self holding on to the edge of nothingness. I became conscious of my smallness in the pattern of all things and yet it felt a great relief. My life was in relation to all things, most of which I know nothing. It gave me a perspective I’ve never had.” His expression was puzzled, child-like. 

“Crossing that external boundary let us cross internal ones. It was wrong in the sense of conventional morality, very true.” He glanced over at her. “I broke faith with you. But I somehow kept it with myself. I’m grateful. It’s not something I intend to repeat. As if it could be repeated. I want you to forgive me, if you can, and try to understand what good it brought me. I don’t want to feel guilty. I don’t want to wish it away.”

Jane felt all the anguish she’d felt through the night boil up in anger, in spite. 

“You were acting. That’s what you were supposed to be doing. Not being real. Making it seem real. Not making it a real experience for yourself. You created this outrageous…selfish experiment. At the root of it, as far as I can tell, was lust. You goaded each other to peel away layers; for what? To reveal misdirected desires that if you examined them you’d see would only hurt and injure other people. You were hurting yourselves as well. What you were doing wasn’t heightening or enlightening. Making things more real through Art. You debased yourselves. And me. That’s not art. It’s self-indulgence in the name of it.” She could feel her face and neck were scarlet.

 He was stiff and pale. “If that were true, I couldn’t bear myself. You’ve just heard what happened. You’re reacting. All I can say is, that’s not how it felt. It felt pure. Cathartic. It felt like enlightenment.”

“I’m so glad to hear it.” She squeezed her arms around her stomach. "You fucking dared to sleep with me after this, without saying anything. You reassured me. You let it happen when you knew all along. I don't know who you are." She fought the urge to vomit.

“Jane.” He grabbed her wrist. 

She wrenched her arm free and leapt out of bed. “What the fuck do you want me to say!” She stared at him for a frozen flash of a moment, seeing him see her, nightgown a pale blur in the darkness, brown hair wild from sleep and desperation, eyes wide and white-rimmed. 

“Don’t touch me!” Her shriek pushed her beyond the breaking point. There was nothing left. She ran from the room, yanking her way through the door, streaking down the hall to Tam’s room. 

Halted in her flight outside Tam's room, she stood breathing. Her daughter. What was going to happen?

She peeked in to see if Tam were still asleep, closed her door, and ran to the fourth bedroom. The sheets of the bed were too cool for comfort. Lying there, Jane reckoned she’d never yelled like that in her life. She could feel the pain in her throat. Her heart beat away fast and powerful in her chest. It was over. Who did he think he was? He was a liar, that was what he was. He was a liar.

After they rose that day, Jane used the ruse of a routine summer activity and got Tam off to her friend Jessamine’s to play. In the sullen aftermath, she brought herself to ask a question that had begun to haunt her. She wondered how lost in character he had been, how lost to practical realities. Simmering, she asked it straight out as she roamed the living room like a caged lion.

“Did you use a condom?”

His expression didn’t change but intensified like a laser-beam. She waited for a heart-stopping moment until he answered, “Yes. It wasn't…it didn't go far enough..there was no orgasm. It was protection. I was thinking of you. You were my Penelope.”

"You are delusional." After a short silence, she said, “Aside from everything, everything else, apart from your
wife
, your
family
, how could you do something so unprofessional? Everything your work means to you. You had to think of that. What you believed was right. And what you did is recorded, forever. Tor will talk about it, brag about it, probably. Have you seen the footage?” She knew he didn’t usually watch dailies.

He nodded. “I saw the rough cut. Just Vaughn and Tor and me.”

Her heart wrenched and she felt expressions slide off her face in turn, veils pulled away, one after another, until she was left naked and exposed. 

“It was all there.” He looked hopeless. She didn't recognize him.

Jane watched the starlings outside flutter up from the ground in a wave and resettle, gently as a wedding dress in negative, billowing down church steps.

"All of you having sex with another woman?"

"The characters…” He trailed off.

“Can you tell me one thing?”

“I’ll try.”

She turned from the window, resting her eyes on him. “You had this grand epiphany. Why did you feel it with her and not with me?”

His head jerked back, an involuntary revulsion. “Oh.” 

“You locked it all up. And what do I get. I get to hear the replay afterward. I could smack you.” The humiliation crept up and leapt upon her, wrestling her in its grasp. She fought it, struggling for control of her emotions, her dignity; failing. With a deep inhale, she let in as much cool air as she could and hissed out the fury, a snakelike, atavistic, “Ssssssss.” Her eyes teared in anger as she blinked and stared at him, her object of rage, cause of mortification. Her husband.

“Get out.” She turned and grabbed his keys from the hooks on the wall; threw them at him, hard as she could. He caught them, reflexes sharp as always. “Don’t take a damn thing. Just leave.” She turned and ran up the stairs. It was over and she was glad. She burst into tears.

Marta knocked, loud and firm. She wasn’t expected, but then, was she ever? The house was dark. She could tiptoe around the back and see if Jane’s truck were there. If no one were around, that opened up whole new possibilities for the afternoon. Marta’s hand sidled into her bag, reaching in to fondle her Nikon. Before she could get too far with her intimacies, the door opened. Someone stood there, a tall, pale someone, dark-eyed and dramatic; wild-haired, wrapped in a crinkly ivory silk dress. 

“Marta.” She turned and swept away from the door, leaving it open. Startled, Marta followed into the gloom of the house. The woman walked half-way up the stairs and turned. 

“Jane? Is that you?”

“What’s the matter? Haven’t you ever seen a heroine in exile?”

“I don’t recognize you. You…you’ve done something to yourself.”

Jane didn’t reply. She turned and disappeared up the stairs. Marta stood in shocked glee for the briefest of moments before she followed posthaste. She’d never been upstairs before, exactly the place she most wanted to see. At the top of the stairs she turned at the landing and looked down a long hallway. Jane vanished into a room at the end of the hall. Marta crept down the Persian-carpeted floor, camera at the ready. Passing by the temptation of opened doors along the way, she took one step up at the end, pushed open the final door, and walked into light. Blinking, she stood still, peering around. The room, which must be the master bedroom, spread the width of the house. Gauzy-curtained windows lined most of the three sides of the room, letting in soft, shifting light. The room was made up in white, with touches of blue, pale blond wood beneath. Jane wasn’t there. 

Marta took quick pictures of the bed. A sound from behind a door drew her attention and she pushed on, past that door to the bath, where she found her quarry. Jane sat on the floor, holding her arms, looking unlike herself, tragedy written on her face. She was transformed by dramatic makeup and elaborate hair. Marta sat on the edge of an oval tub opposite her. Her washed out, white-powdered face: dark, shadowed eyes, the even slashes of her brows, pale dry mouth, the full rich hugeness of her hair leaping up and back in a wild confusion. Marta did what she knew best. She brought her camera to her eye and pushed the automatic shutter. Jane’s eyes flew to her, burning with a hatred Marta had never seen in them before. Marta took five more shots in quick succession: slam-slam-slam-slam-slam. Jane looked away, uninterested. 

What’s wrong with you?” Marta was pleased she’d gotten the shot.

“I don’t care, anymore.”

“You don’t, eh?”

“I care about Tam. That’s it.”

Marta leaned toward her. “Are you on something?” She studied her eyes. Her pupils looked huge. She’d never suspected Jane of anything that way. 

“Yeah. It’s called reality. Straight up.”

“Why are you dressed like this? Your hair, your face.”

“You forget.” 

“I forget?”

“What I used to be. What I am. I’m something other than that, you know.” She indicated a family picture on the wall. 

Marta was lost in thought, looking at her. “You’re so lovely, all done up. You should do this more often. I’d like to take real pictures of you. The light’s not bad in here.” She looked up. “Ah, the skylights.”

“I didn’t do it for you.”

“Oh? Guess not.” Jane had hardly looked at her while they were talking. Now she looked pointedly at the camera. Marta shifted and tucked it back in her bag.

Jane turned her head away. “I think it’s time for you to go.”

“Really. And why is that? Why’d you let me in in the first place if it was just to be rude? You’re a strange bird, Mrs. Reilly. Did anyone ever tell you that? One moment all conciliatory, the next all prickly. What goes on in that head of yours? What is it you want from me? Why do you let me in at all.” 

Again Jane turned to her, her eyes whipped up in anger at first, then growing wide and soft, full of some unmentionable sorrow. 

“Look at us. What are we? I hardly feel like a woman anymore. I had to see myself as someone else. I had to get away from me. Do you understand?”