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“Oh, dear.” Jane was mortified. This had to stop. She'd have to throw this woman out. 

Her visitor seemed to sense the shift in the air. 

“I must go.” She rose. Jane sprang to her feet. “You needn’t tell Marta I stopped by. I’ll write to tell her about the codicil. It won’t make any difference to her. She never cared for a bit of land. She laughed in the county’s face.” They stood facing each other in the living room. Mrs. Clark-Edwards turned her extraordinary eyes down to Tam. “I wish you a more obedient child than I was blessed with.” With that she swept out, slapping her gloves against her hands in a curt farewell. 

Jane took Tam in her arms and held her, the back of Tam’s head resting against her chest as they watched Marta's mother leave.

CHAPTER THIRTY

“T
HIS
IS
AN
unexpected pleasure,” Tor said as he ushered Jane into the editing suite. No one sat at the editing console. “Sam’s chair,” Tor explained, gesturing at the empty seat. “She’s at lunch. We’re against the wire, but we’ll make it. Trying to get a Memorial Day opening. We’ll make it,” he repeated. He motioned her to a couch along one wall of the dimly lit room. She sat and he spun his executive chair around to face her. He inquired after Tam and Ian. Sat in front of her placidly smiling. “What can I do for you, Mrs. Reilly?”

She sat looking at his self-sufficient smugness and felt the urge to prick it; puncture his inflated ego until he fizzled down to a flaccid bit of shine and smudge on the floor, to confirm her suspicion that there was nothing substantive inside that counted. He didn’t look easily rattled. 

“I’m trying to find out, from your perspective, what happened in those caves, and why.”

Tor’s smile didn’t fade. He blinked and his smile broadened; he twirled away from her and fetched something from a bowl on the desk: a peppermint. He whirled back, popped it in his mouth and swirled it around. “Care for a peppermint? No? What exactly would you like to know?”

She shrugged. “How about everything.”

He rolled the mint around in his mouth, eyeing her. “We always think we want to know the truth. The truth, you see, is not always the thing. It can even harm us, my dear. It’s not always the right thing to run after, blind to the bigger picture.”

“What’s the bigger picture?” Jane asked, her mouth barely moving.

He stuck his lower lip out and tilted his head from side to side. “Hard to say; in your case, probably the marriage. Perhaps your psychological well-being.”

Jane took a quiet breath and tried to focus on something inside, something she could take with her out of this room, something nothing to do with him. She pictured Tam’s face. 

“No matter what you might think is best for my psyche, or my marriage, I prefer to judge for myself. So, I’d like you to tell me what happened. Even if you think it’s damaging. Go ahead and hurt me.”

Tor found this
trés amusant
, looking delighted, as if a child had said something unexpectedly clever. He chuckled, the mint clicking against his teeth, then opened his mouth to speak; she saw his eyes widen and his mouth open; he bent forward, gagging. His hand clutched his throat. He choked, trying to breathe. Jane stood up. His face was beet red. She grabbed his twirly office chair and spun him around away from her. Stooping, she encircled his waist and jerked upward with her hands clenched under his ribs.

He hacked the mint out. It flew across the room, landing in the corner. She offered him a bottle of water from the desk. He made a noise like a cat with a hairball problem and took a drink.

“Thanks.”

“Welcome.” She sat back down, this time in the other rolling chair by the editing console, Sam the editor's chair, so they were on a level.

A bit sheepishly he unwrapped another mint and sucked on it. He gave a flat-lipped smile. “Erm…what exactly was it you were wanting to know?”

“Everything."

“Everything,” he repeated tonelessly, sucking away.

“Did you plan it from the beginning?”

Tor thought this over. His cocky expression was gone, but she didn’t know if that meant he’d be honest. “Yes and no. I’d thought of the idea before.” He stopped.

“Oh?”

He smoothed his khaki safari jacket, straightening in his chair. “Never had the chance to implement it exactly how I wanted to.” His eyes glinted as he said this.

“You’ve done this before.” She swiveled her chair a little, back and forth.

His mouth curved into a conspiratorial grin. “I’m not saying anything. But I never got to do it how I wanted to do it.” He steepled his fingers. “I was looking for the right intersection of events and people to make it possible.” He spoke as if this were the most natural thing in the world. 

Jane stared at his feet, his hands, her eyes wandering all the way back to his face. His even eyes and straight, yet flexible brows, his straight line of a mouth all belied the twists and turns beneath that symmetrical façade. She had a sense of unreality, that this couldn’t be happening. She tried to drag back in some common sense from wherever it had been abandoned by this lunatic. 

“If that’s what you wanted to do, why didn’t you go out and make an adult film? Why lie about what you’re doing? Why create the illusion that it’s something else?”

Tor’s lip curled. “I’m a respected artist. I’ll not ruin my reputation by producing pornography.” His expression grew abstracted. “I knew if I could get the actors to cross this line I would get incredible performances. The best they had ever done. Peeling away layers upon layers to see what is underneath all the posing and award-seeking and fake tans and neediness. To see the humanity of these people, the true beauty.” He caught her eye. “And I did. It’s the most spectacular scene. It’s my favorite one in the movie. My best work.” His voice had taken on a tone of hushed reverence. “And I’ll fight for every shot. They’ll threaten me with NC-17. But I--I-- have final cut, and the ratings board can screw themselves. The producers don't need to know every detail. All I want to show is the human body in its magnificence. The act of love. Bah! I can show someone’s eye put out with a fiery stake, but I can’t show two spectacular people fucking. It’s madness, I tell you.”

“Tor.”

“Yes?” He was wound up from his rant.

“Did you think of me at all: specifically, in the abstract, or…at all?”

The manic light faded from his eyes. He hunched over a little. “Oh, I thought, Ian is always alone…where is his pretty wife…dum de dum…and it was said…Ian’s wife doesn’t travel with him, she stays at home. Hum. So I wondered. I asked around.” His voice had a lilt like he was telling her a fairy tale at bedtime. “People said she traveled with him in the beginning. Then she stopped. She’s afraid to go out, they said. She stays at home. Agoraphobia? I asked. They didn’t know. Poor Ian, I thought. Does he sleep around, I asked? Nobody knew. There was nothing concrete. But a man alone on a movie set, for years…my dear, you were very trusting. And very stupid. Perhaps you were ill. I don’t know. But I thought he was ripe for the plucking. And if you forgive me, you left him so. Ah, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

Jane wiped her tears away, furious he'd seen them. “You make him sound like an unattended child.”

“You weren’t lonely during all those times he was away?” Tor pointed out, cagey and sly. “What if you had felt that way and been constantly surrounded, day after day, by temptation? Would you have passed every test, always the devoted wife? If you were in the positions he was in? Up against the most desirable men in the world? Are you so perfect?”

“I’m not perfect,” Jane snapped, “but you set him up. You manipulated both of them.”

Tor rolled closer and grabbed the arms of her chair. He was so close she could see his bloodshot eyes, his peeling lips. “I did set them up, to get what I wanted. But they agreed. They could stop or leave any time they wanted. He chose to do it. I think there was something amiss in your marriage before this happened. Now you know. This is the red light. So go home and figure it out.” 

He pushed her away and she rolled back until her chair hit the desk behind her, recoiled and shot towards him again until she braked it with her feet. She sprung out of the chair, wiping away the flecks of spittle he’d sprayed her with. As if anticipating an attack, he stood too, puffed out like a rooster. She was taller. She opened her mouth to say something cutting. What could hurt him? What could show him?

“I have to thank you,” he said before she could find words; breathless, excited, looking up at her from his stance, chin lifted, “for providing your husband in a state of such readiness. The film world owes you. I owe you."

She backed a couple of steps away, stumbling against the chair.

“You're cruel. You're not an artist." She turned away blindly, to push through doors one after another, away from his den, through a confusing warren of long intersecting hallways. She wouldn't stop to ask her way out. At last she was outside in the car park. Although less than a half hour must have passed since she arrived, for a moment she couldn’t remember how she’d traveled there in the first place, how she would get back home.

That's the worst thing you can say to someone? 'You're not an artist.' You're not an artist.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

I
AN
SAT
ON
the back porch, watching the rain fall. It was steady and determined. For two days, nothing but rain. For hours he sat and watched it. The rhythm of the drops on the roof, the puddles on the ground outside gradually pooling and widening; he’d watched it all as if it were performance art. He’d wanted to smoke but hadn’t. Instead he drank coffee, ate almonds, and sat. The first day his mind was a blank. It was as if someone erased all thought and memory. Empty. Nothing.
Tabula Rasa
. Better that way. He preferred not to feel anything than feel something horrible. That had been the first day. The second day there was the suspicion of a feeling. It came up, like the quiet bubbling of spring-fed water, from deep within the ground, finding its way to the surface through a fissure. He sensed the source beneath, a deep well of feeling waiting to shoot through any frailty. He sat some more.

An edge of uncertainty and doubt crept into the purity of feeling he thought was behind his actions during
Odysseus
. Was it possible he had indeed been motivated by a baser reason than he believed; what he had justified as an exploration of uncharted territory, the uncapping of buried emotion, almost a therapeutic encounter with another soul, had underneath it all been a gratification of lust?

When he met Vaughn, he hadn’t felt lustful toward her, or particularly attracted. She didn’t affect him that way. Even her acting skills were, to his mind, in doubt until proven otherwise. He thought she was aesthetically pleasing, and hoped there was more to her than that. When they talked, he found out she was a lifelong student of their art, like him, and well versed in her part; he enjoyed talking to her. He got excited about working with her. Still, he hadn’t wanted her. So later, when they made the choice to go all the way, all that way together, it seemed a clear-eyed decision, without the cloudiness of desire. And he hadn’t seen feverishness in her eyes, either. He would have been wary of that. Vaughn was not someone easily touched by love, he had imagined. If she had been, if either of them had been, it wouldn’t have been wise. 

Now, alone in the house, in the wake of the decision, he could feel ramifications that he knew he had brushed off at the time. He’d wanted to do it, so he had. The rationalization of it as an acting choice was for the first time ringing false back home. He’d fucked another woman. On film. While the “on film” part seemed to justify and explain what they did on set, here it heightened the outrageousness of the act. He got up from his seat and pushed the screen door open, walked outside. The rain pelted him, drops in strange synchrony, striking him one after another, slow and painful, one beat after another. Standing out in it, he turned in a circle, looking at the piece of earth he owned, the land he’d laid claim to, and where he should be, but seldom was. He had land but didn’t live there. He had a woman; left her alone and betrayed her trust. Had a child and let her grow up without him. His life was a fuck-up. How many people wanted to be him? If they only knew. The worst of it was, if he were honest, it was worse to be someone around him than to be him. Driven them, he had, out of the very country. Grasping hold of the front of his shirt he yanked downward, ripping it. He tore off the sodden thing and threw it in the mud. He felt the cool hard drops on his shoulders, his back. Tilting back his head, he felt the water on his face, pushed the hair out of his eyes, and waited for the absolution he knew would not come.

Jane sat on the edge of the bed and took an analgesic for her spasming neck, washing it down with a swallow of water that tasted sweet. Picking up the glass again, she tipped it back and gulped the water gratefully. She felt dizzy and lay back on the bed. If only there were music to listen to. There was no rhythm to this new life. She was so tired. It was early afternoon, but she felt enervated, as if she could sleep for days.

The phone rang. Groggy, she was conscious of lifting the receiver. Her voice thick, she asked who it was; the answering voice was eerily familiar. Oh God: Vaughn, the last person she wanted to hear from, except maybe Tor. The two people she herself had sought out. Now would they start tormenting her, calling her; the universe’s bizarre karmic payback for what she’d done in unearthing them?

Vaughn’s husky, brandy-on-the-rocks voice sounded different than it had the day at the café, without the same energy and force. She sounded bleak. “Listen, I’ve been thinking about the other day, and I feel bad about it. So I wanted to ask you if you’d consider a peace offering. Come out with me. Let’s leave things better between us. You’re probably having a rotten time here, when you should be enjoying yourself. Listen,” she interrupted, when Jane tried to say something. “I know I’m the last person you want to see,” she said, leaving Jane wondering if she were psychic like Magdalena or just not stupid. “That’s why we’re not finished. It doesn’t have to be like this. I don’t want to be a ghost, haunting you. So come out with me—let’s make it right.”