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“Vaughn.” Jane finally got a word in. “That’s not necessary. I appreciated the time we had to speak to each other, and—the information you shared with me—but I really think, that covered it.”

Please?” Vaughn said. “It’s not just for your sake. I’m… alone. I wanted to talk some more, not about all that stuff, just, as a friend.”

“Vaughn, not to put too fine a point on it, I can’t honestly call us friends.”

“I trust you. I need someone to talk to.”

Jane rubbed her aching neck. “What’s wrong?”

“Oh, God. What’s right? I don’t know. I looked through my phone, with all the numbers to call. I looked through every name in there, searching for one person I could talk to. There wasn’t a single one. No one to count on. It’s ridiculous. When you called me to meet I kept your number on my mobile, so I had it just in case. I thought you were someone I could talk to. You’re sweet. Ian would only marry someone good. I didn’t know him so very well, but I could tell that much. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t lay all this on you.”

“Gosh. I don’t know what to say.” Jane felt that sneaking sensation, feeling what Vaughn must feel. An off switch for that would be handy. She could call the nanny service again for Tam. See if she could get Marie-Renée again. “I know how you feel,” she said. “Alone, I mean.” All those long evenings at the house after Tam was in bed. The last six years, could it really be six years? They had been…no other word for it. Lonely. She said, “If I can get a babysitter we could get together for a little while.”

She heard Vaughn’s sigh of relief. “Brilliant. Give me the address where you’re staying. I’ll come pick you up.”

“That’s all right. Why don’t we meet. I’ll get a cab.” No reason to give the address away. Who knew how chummy she’d want to be, dropping by and so forth. There were limits.

“Come over for dinner. I’ll make something. I’ve got a recipe I’m burning to try on someone.” What had been desperation now sounded like anxiety to please.

“You cook?” It came out before Jane could catch it.

“Oh, yes. I love it. Do you have anything you don’t eat?”

“Um, not really. I don’t like tomatoes much.” Her mother’s constant permutations of the same basic pasta dish had soured her on that ubiquitous little fruit.

“I’ll work around it.” Vaughn had no trace of former gloom in her voice.

Dinner with her nemesis. Wasn’t it? If Vaughn wasn’t, who was? Tyrannical Tor? Why would Vaughn and Ian trust someone so clearly amoral? And yet, as Jane dressed, told Tam, made her call to Nannies Nightly, put on the makeup that she’d started to wear again here in London, she found herself curious about the evening. If this were battle, she had her war paint on. And if it were peace talks, she was ready with the language of diplomacy. The clash with Tor had emptied something from her, some kind of burning righteousness. Would she have been putty in his clutches, too? 

Dinner had been well-prepared: simple goulash, bread, and wine. Satisfying and surprisingly homey for someone as glimmering and glittery as Vaughn, who looked like a different person behind a white canvas apron and without the high-heeled boots. She still carried off a certain flash, Jane noted, even in jeans. She had that aura. Over dinner they talked mostly of Vaughn’s work over the last few years, the films she’d made, people worked with—memorable personalities, pleasant and unpleasant. She was entertaining when she chose to be, and she was trying, that was apparent. After dinner, they settled in the sunken living room for drinks, on a sectional white leather couch. 

There was something about it: the candles, the darkened room, the music. The ambiance. Vaughn had lit cinnamon incense. Jane had a sense of déjà vu. A memory of an experience in her unmarried past circled in her mind like koi in an ornamental pond, coming to the surface for an answer just out of reach. At last, it came to her. There was something in Vaughn’s manner, her clothes: her silk blouse unbuttoned three buttons. Her sleek hair.

As they were sipping their fourth glass of wine, Jane roused herself out of the
politesse
of their after-dinner conversation to address the undercurrents. “Are you coming on to me?”

Vaughn tipped her glass and downed the last of it. She shook the glass gently and set it down on the glass coffee table. “I think you should have whatever you want. Have you enjoyed yourself at all in London?”

The wine was making Jane feel blurry. Her head was expanding; her skin a floating, insubstantial boundary. Blinking owlishly, she saw Vaughn on the other side of the couch. Saw through her was more like it. “Are you trying to mess with my head?” She had to smile.

“No.” Vaughn smiled back, catlike.

Jane pushed her lips forward as if considering and brushed her fingers back through her hair. “Don’t they call you irresistible?”

She laughed, a deep, knowing laugh. “I knew we could talk.” 

“You thought we’d have a lot in common?” She could see the faint freckling beneath Vaughn’s new tan along her shoulder, where the blouse slid away and exposed the skin. 

“Yes. When I saw you in the café, I thought, this is someone I could get into.”

Jane thought what they had in common was Ian, and had been prepared to follow up with a cutting remark. Vaughn getting her flirt on was a more powerful defuser than even Jane could resist. She felt a ruddy flush seep from her collarbone up to her cheeks.

“I knew you had to be special.”

“Right. Because Ian chose me, right?” 

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Except that’s exactly what you meant. People like to say that.”

“Ian’s an unusual person. A special person. I didn’t mean to make you out to be just an add-on to him. He’s soulful and I thought he’d have a partner who was deep, like him.”

“Vaughn. Tell me. Why did you do the scene with Ian? For real.”

Vaughn blinked twice. “Oh, love.”

“You’re not going to tell me?”

“I just did. Love!”

Jane stared at Vaughn in horror. “You’ve fallen in love with Ian?”

“For heaven’s sake, woman!” Vaughn was even more agitated than Jane.

“What, then!”Jane grabbed her arm.

“Before the film, I’d just broken up with my girlfriend. I was angry. Angry at her. Sleeping with Ian was a way to say ‘fuck you’ to her.”

“That’s why you did it?” She let go of Vaughn’s arm.

Vaughn took a sip of wine. “Mostly. Yes.”

“Do you like men?” 

Vaughn shrugged. “I like both. Most of my relationships have been with women, since I turned twenty-eight.”

“So you did it to get back at your girlfriend. But you broke up with her.” Jane smoothed her hand along the leather of the couch. “What was that line of crap about being completely in character and doing it for Art?”

“That was true. It wasn’t bullshit. But without the break-up, it probably wouldn’t have happened. “

“Because it would have been cheating on your girlfriend.”

“Eh.” Vaughn looked away.

“Why did you break up with her, if you cared enough to try to make her jealous? You must have told her what you did, then, if it was to get back at her.”

Vaughn laughed, a self-mocking laugh that petered off into something like despair. “The joke’s on me, love. I can’t tell her. Don’t have her number.” She put her hands out in a gesture of helplessness. “Burned that bridge.” She made an exploding sound. “She’s deep in the bloody bush or the veldt, or wherever unselfish doctors go when they want away from the western world. I don’t know where she is. Patching people up, curing people, giving them inoculations. Saving lives.
Médecins Sans Frontières.
Wouldn’t give me her number. Wouldn’t tell me where. Do you believe it?” She laughed the same sad laugh. “Sex-symbol-bombshell cries her eyes out every night because she’s an undesirable joke to the person she loves. There’s my luck. Career like a rocket ship, personal life like a guided missile of doom.” She sniffed. “On the other hand, can you believe someone like that loved me in the first place? She really did. She loved me.”

Vaughn sank deep into her couch, into the half-hedgehog position of universal gloom.

“Maybe she’ll come back someday.”

Vaughn’s expression didn’t change as she considered this. “I’ve thought of that, dreamed of it. I think of going to look for her, wearing a funny hat, maybe. But you can’t make them love you, can you?” She grabbed at the bottle and poured herself more wine. 

“You sure can’t.”

“Ian loves you.”

“Maybe think of who you are to me before you say those words.”

“I’m your friend, I hope.”

“Do friends sleep with friend’s husbands? Do friends try to make friends feel sorry for them when they are the transgressor and they invite them over to dinner and try to seduce them?”

“You have a horribly clear way of putting things.”

“It’s a gift.”

“I’m sorry. I’m in therapy, if it helps. I’m trying to learn how to be a grown-up who doesn’t blow up everyone’s lives around me.”

“Why else did you do it? Other than to make your girlfriend jealous.”

“Salossa. Her name’s Salossa.”

Vaughn cradled her wine glass in her drooping fingers. With one hand she brushed her bangs away from her eyes and resumed her grip on the wine glass. “I was mad at myself that I’d fucked it up. She was going away and I had a fit like a baby, thinking she’d stay. She’s too grown up for that, of course.” She sighed. “I’m not used to maturity.”

“But why? Why have sex with Ian?”

“Why not? I didn’t care about anyone or anything except Salossa and I didn’t have her. I suppose, if I’m honest, there was a part of me that was just curious, you know? I was curious about a man like Ian. He seemed like fun. You don’t know what it’s like. Every single film I’m in has a sex scene. You have this hot guy pounding you, you’re grinding on him and it’s like teenager sex. It’s fun. It turns me on. When I said it wasn’t far off from the real thing, I wasn’t kidding. It’s incredibly intimate. It feels amazing, if you’re into the person.” She smiled a little. “Ian was sort of self-contained, I guess, but with this sadness seeping out, his passion seeping out of him.” She took a sip of wine. “He was someone who belonged to somebody else. He was forbidden. I wondered what that would be like. It shouldn’t have happened but we said it would.” As she spoke she became more intense and swept away by what she described. “We created our own little universe. It was our own little island. And on the island I was a goddess and I demanded he surrender himself to me. As Calypso I could ask more of Odysseus, and be given more, than as Vaughn I ever could. And Odysseus could be my reluctant lover, my slave, someone he never knew himself to be as Ian. We met each other as other people, other dark sides of ourselves. Our shadow selves, Ian called them.” She paused in her recital, as if coming back to Earth. She glanced toward Jane, then away. “We left those people behind on that island. Do I know Ian? Not at all. I knew one of his incarnations which no longer exists.”

Jane sat transfixed by Vaughn. The stabs of jealousy and anger had flooded her anew. Yet with her eyes on this other person baring her soul, she felt the transforming power of her own perception. In all her humanity, in the revelation of the loves and lusts and temptations and consummations and even pettiness, Vaughn was beautiful, because the soul in her was revealed, as imperfect as any other. 

Ian was a person, too, his own person, who lived his own shadow life, just as Jane had hers. No marriage usurped that other self, the self pushed away at the peril of the marriage being consumed by it. Jane could judge Vaughn, believe that only someone empty in her own life would try to wrest the imitation of love from another’s. But it was too easy. It was a way to push away the shadow in herself onto another. Tor had seen that. Tor had called her out on her own hypocrisy.

Vaughn did not have the power to destroy anything. What happened had happened. What happened next would be determined by others. Jane felt blood rushing back into her hands and face, prickling her skin. Although Vaughn and Ian had crossed the line into the standard black-and-white territory of the unforgivable, it had happened. It had happened, but it hadn’t happened to her. There was something unknowable about it, because it was outside her experience, outside the realm of temptations laid before her. It hadn’t been her choice. It hadn’t been her mistake. Maybe it hadn’t been her luck?

Calypso and Odysseus--Vaughn and Ian--in another time, another place. An alternate universe. Or maybe a part of this one Jane didn’t happen to share. What part of the universe was hers, that Ian didn’t know about?

“How do you feel about it all now?”

Vaughn raised her eyebrows and shrugged. “We did work that surpassed anything any of us has done. I felt it. There was magic in that day, in our scene. But I fear it’s tainted somehow.” She shook her head. “I feel guilty. I did it to hurt Salossa. I hurt you. Sometimes being bad feels good. And then it feels bad.” She smiled wistfully. “I’m a bad girl, what can I do?”

Jane thought, looking at her, that through Vaughn’s thick smokescreen of sexuality was a sensitive soul, trying to connect, grappling for it with the wrong set of tools. “I wanted to know so much, when I found out about all this. I had to know what, and how, and who, and most of all, I wanted to know why. I wanted to solve the mystery of what happened.” 

Vaughn nodded. She didn’t say anything. 

Jane thought, we’ve become somehow attuned to each other, she knows not to speak right now. Jane wondered what Ian would have thought if he had seen a movie of Hank and her together, when she had been feeling alone and in extremis; how would he have felt?

They sat for a while. Jane felt her sobriety returning to her; her head clearing, returning to its normal size, skin lying down smoothly atop her bones. Vaughn was lost in a reverie, staring at the light sparkling off the wine bottle. Jane rose and put on her jacket. She looked down at Vaughn’s face, washed clean by emotion, composed. As she prepared to leave she said, “You know, Ian felt something.”

Vaughn stirred, looked up. “What?”

“To him, that scene was an epiphany. It meant something grand. Meaningful. It changed him.” Jane walked to the door, looked at Vaughn once more from across the room, her shining beauty, before she left, shutting the door behind her.