The Fine Art of Truth or Dare (27 page)

31

THE SOLUTION

From
Who's Who, Ladies of Pennsylvania
, ed. Lee Addison Elkins. Elkins Press, 1958:

 

Erasmus, Vera Hamilton (Mrs. Harold N. Erasmus).

Born: Philadelphia, November 6, 1912. Daughter of Mr. John Girard and Marina (Kulikovsky) Hamilton. Educated at the Agnes Irwin School and the University of Pennsylvania. Married Harold Norton Erasmus, March 11, 1935; children: Thomas, Lillian, Edward, Alice. Affiliations: the Acorn Club, the Cosmopolitan Club, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America. Trustee of the Willing School, Philadelphia, and the Barbara Ryan College for Women, Bryn Mawr. Member of the Board of Directors of numerous organizations, including the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, the Free Library of Philadelphia, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Current address: c/o the American Embassy, Moscow. Permanent address: Selavy, Bryn Mawr.

 

I turned off my computer and went back to my books.

 

From
Incomplete: The Life and Art of Edward Willing
, by Ash Anderson. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983:

 

Attendants at the funeral of Edward Willing, Père Lachaise Cemetery, January 20, 1916. Pictured: Edith Wharton (foreground), Gaston Leroux, Phillip J. Addison, Unidentified Woman (in veil), Pablo Picasso . . .

 

“Lots of people came,” I said, looking up from the book.

“It was January in Paris,” Edward replied. “What else did they have to do?”

I studied the picture as best I could. It was grainy, black and white, and the book wasn't expensively printed. “I expected Edith Wharton to be prettier.”

“Well, I expected Picasso to have three noses, so you never can tell.” He rotated a shoulder, like he was working out a kink. “I have to say, Ella, it's nice to have you voluntarily speaking to me again.”

“It's probably temporary.”

“As perhaps it should be. Have you learned what you wanted to learn?”

“Maybe.” I tapped the photo in the book. “I think this is Marina Hamilton. Is it?”

Edward didn't answer.

“Of course,” I sighed. “You won't give me answers. How about this, then? I'll talk. You listen. Nod if anything sounds good.”

He gave a small jerk of his chin.

I took a breath and began. “After Diana died, you painted a portrait of a friend's new wife. She was young and unhappy.” I looked, but Edward didn't move. “You fell in love.” Still nothing.

“I think she was Russian. You called her ‘
Dorogaya.
'” I thought I saw him flinch at that, but it might have just been the old bulb in my desk lamp flickering. “It's what you call the person who has your heart. That's why I think it was love and not just an affair. That and the photo I found of the two of you. I think the bronzes in the museum are of Marina and her daughter, Vera, not your sister and your nephew. I think maybe Vera was yours. I doubt I could ever prove it, but I figure if I dig, I can find pictures of her, maybe even meet her kids. She named one Edward. Coincidence? Maybe. There's an Edward Erasmus living in Radnor. I bet it's him.

“Anyway, I think Marina traveled with you to Europe. She might or might not have left her husband. I'm pretty sure she was with you when you died. I'm also pretty sure she made you happy. In the last photos of you, you look it. I
hope
the fact that you don't name her or talk about her or show her face, for God's sake, was a matter of discretion and not embarrassment. And I really hope you made her happy.”

He blinked at that. I was sure I saw him blink. “That's important?” he asked.

“It should be. All of us invisible girls deserve that at least.”

“So, do you think Alexei Bainbridge is going to make you happy?”

I shrugged. “Haven't a clue. I might have screwed it up with him. I'll tell you this, though, Frankie makes me happy. So does Sadie. I don't want to canoodle with either of them, but I love them to death.”

“Must you use those words in my presence?”

“Sorry. But.
Truth:
You are dead as the spat.”

Edward sighed. “You're right. You're absolutely right. So I suppose you'd best go to sleep, darling Ella. It's late. And, as was famously said, ‘tomorrow—'”

“—is another day? Thank you, Scarlett O'Hara.”

“Actually”—he scowled at me—“I was going to say, ‘Tomorrow comes. Tomorrow brings, tomorrow brings love, in the shape of things.'”

“Shakespeare?” I asked.

“Queen,” he shot back. “Not nearly as good as ‘Bohemian Rhapsody' or ‘Fat Bottomed Girls,' but certainly poetic.”

“Good night, Edward.”

“Good night, lovely girl.”

I turned off the light and climbed into bed. “Oh. By the way.”

“Yes?”

“I think I figured out why you called Diana all those nicknames. ‘Spring,' ‘Cab,' ‘Post' . . .”

“Yes?”

“They're all things you wait for. I think Diana was making you wait, and it was making you crazy. Am I right?”

“Oh, Ella. You
know
I can't tell you that. I will, however, leave you with one more lovely old chestnut—”

“‘All good things are worth waiting for'?”

“I really wish you would let me finish a thought tonight. I was going to say, ‘Ain't nothing like the real thing, baby.'”

“Marvin Gaye,” I said.

“The one and only.”

32

THE RAY

Tuesday came.

He showed up.

I was ready, on the off chance that he would, and waiting by the window at nine forty-five. It was a long fifteen minutes. I checked my phone three times. Frankie still wasn't returning my calls. Alex wasn't calling to cancel. Then his car pulled into view, and my heart gave a series of happy little thumps. I didn't make him wait; I was opening the front door before he was all the way out of the car.

He walked around to open the passenger door. “Hi” was all he said.

I climbed in. “Hi.”

Neither of us said anything as he turned up Eleventh Street and drove north. I wanted desperately to talk to him, to say something smart and hot and mysterious all at the same time. “Did you go back to the party?” I asked finally. He gave me a sideways look. “Just asking.”

“I went home.”

Angry? Relieved? Feeling anything at all?

“Sleep well?”

“Like the dead,” he told me.

Truth:
What I really wanted desperately was to know that everything was okay between us.

But here's the thing. If you can't ask that question straight out, if you have to wriggle and hint and hope the other person will do it for you, you really shouldn't ask.

I shut up. For about four blocks. Then, “Where are we going?”

This got a half smile. One side of his mouth curved. “I was wondering how long it would take you to ask.” He looked at his watch. “Three minutes.”

“So?”

“So, you're going to have to wait a few more. Here.” He did his incomprehensible jiggling thing with the radio dials, and the static came on. “Find something.”

I passed a couple of stations that shouted the words “
Goals!,” “Spirit!,”
and
“Not in my house!,”
which told me it was religion, sports, or politics. The international station had a couple doing a cover of “Low” in what I thought might be Japanese. I settled on Elvis singing about suspicious minds and hoped it wouldn't make Alex dwell on the scene at Harrison's house.

Suddenly, the sky-blue girders of the bridge to New Jersey were in front of us. Alex headed for it. He reached under his coat, which was balled on the seat between us, and pulled out a Macy's bag. “For you.”

It was soft. My heart did its little jumpy thing again. I tipped the bag and pictured cashmere. I pictured him winding it gently around my neck and using the ends to pull me toward him . . .

Jungle-print nylon slithered into my lap.

I lifted it with the tips of my fingers. It was a swimsuit: technically one-piece but composed of very small pieces, a few triangles of various sizes, held together by what looked like jump rings.

“It's a swimsuit,” I said, which wasn't really stating the obvious as much as it might have seemed. Frankie's handkerchiefs covered more—and were nicer to look at.

“Yes, it is.”

“Let me out.”

“Ella—”

“Pull over and let me out!”

“We're in the middle of the Ben Franklin Bridge. What are you going to do, jump?”

I spun in my seat to look at him. He was concentrating on the lane beside us. A tractor trailer the size of Florida was blasting up on the inside, making the car shake and rattle. “Is this payback for that night?” I asked shakily. “Humiliating me in the most effective way possible?”

Lane clear, Alex drifted to the right. He hadn't shaved that morning. He looked a little rough. Beautiful, but rough. And tired. “Look,” he said, “I know it's not something you would have chosen in a thousand years, but the options are pretty limited in December. And if I'd told you today's excursion required a bathing suit, would you have come?” When I didn't answer, he grunted. “See?”

We were off the highway now, driving through the empty streets of downtown Camden. I could see Philadelphia just across the river. I wanted to go home.

“You were going to need a suit,” he went on. “This looked like it would fit—” I peeked. It was only one size too big. “I won't look at you. I swear. I won't see you in it. No one will see you in it.”

He pulled into a parking lot and took a spot. The sign over the entrance read A
DVENTURE
A
QUARIUM
. When I looked back at him, he was pulling his shirt up with one hand and the waist of his jeans down with the other. I saw green plaid and a drawstring tie. “I'm wearing one, too.”

I couldn't even remotely imagine a scenario that had me coming out feeling anything other than shredded.

“Out.” He reached across me and opened the car door. I got a blast of icy air.

“I'm taking you to swim with sharks.”

• • •

“How recently have the sharks been fed?” the guy next to me asked.

Alex and I were in a small room with a dry-erase board, a perky blonde aquarium employee, and three guys from Rutgers who'd won their fraternity Christmas prize. True to Alex's promise, no one had seen me in my minuscule jungle print. Another perky girl had handed me a wet suit and pointed me into a changing room. So as I listened to the basics of shark tank etiquette, I was fully encased in blue neoprene from ankle to jaw. The frat boys kept sneaking looks at me when they thought I—and Alex—wasn't looking. It made me feel just a little bit better. Alex's promise that I didn't have to get into the water if I really didn't want to helped, too. It had gotten me out of the car and into the aquarium.

“You can do it,” he'd coaxed.

“Yes,” I'd answered, thinking of the skateboarder a little and “fake it till you make it” more. “I can do it.”

“Yesterday.” Perky Girl answered the feeding question. “Believe me. They're not hungry.”

I wanted to know exactly how she knew that. Did she ask the sharks?

“Okay,” she chirped. “Let's get snorkeling.”

The five of us followed her to a shallow pool. A few feet away was the shark tank. It looked a lot smaller than it did from the vantage points I'd had on previous visits to the aquarium. And the sharks looked a lot bigger. In fact, they made Jaws look like a pond koi. “That's a nurse shark.” Yet another aquarium employee, this time a buoyant guy, pointed out a smaller (yeah, right) one that was lurking near the edge of the tank. “They're cuddlers. They like snuggling up to each other and even us sometimes.”

I edged closer to Alex. He grinned and wrapped an arm around my waist. That got me into the practice pool. It was cold.

“Okay,” our guide called, “deep breath, then bite down hard on the mouthpiece . . .”

It took me a few minutes and a fair amount of unappealing water down my throat and up my nose. Alex, of course, managed like he'd been snorkeling all his life. Which, I realized, he probably had—in the Pacific, Caribbean, the Mediterranean . . . I still picked it up faster than the frat boys, who seemed to greatly enjoy the “blasting,” or blowing hard to shoot any water out of the tube. Eventually, we all passed inspection.

“Ready?” Alex asked as we stood on the edge of the tank.

The cuddler and its buddies were all on the other side. That didn't make me feel much better. I watch Animal Planet. Sharks move fast.

“Tell why I'm doing this again,” I whispered.

“Because you want to,” Alex whispered back. “Face your fears, Grasshopper, and you will be free. Now, in you go.”

“Hey,” one of the frat boys asked as I eased myself into the tank, “do the sharks ever eat the fish that are in there with them?” There were dozens of smaller fish flitting through the tank among the sharks.

“Sure,” came the response. “But not too often.”

The shelf we were on had a low wall to separate it from the main body of the tank, but it also had shark-size cutouts spaced along it. As we waited, just under the surface, one of the sand sharks swam by. I tensed. Beside me, Alex was leaning forward, hands braced against the wall to keep him inside it, but head and shoulders out as far as they could go. He turned back to face me. It's hard to smile with a big tube wedged in your mouth, but he was managing. He was having a blast.

I scooted up a few inches. For countless minutes, we watched the sharks and fish make their swirling patterns through the water of the tank. I started to feel calm, almost, almost convinced that I was really the kind of girl who could swim with sharks. And then a trio swam directly toward us.

They stayed there, swaying a little to keep moving, but never getting more than a few feet away. I thought of the Hannandas. The middle shark did a sharp circle, ending with its snout an arm's length from Alex's face. I grabbed his arm and he thrust it out, a solid if narrow barrier between me and certain death. For the rest of our time in the tank, he let me stay there, pressed against his shoulder blade, his arm curved backward around me. I knew that, even if it was only for this few minutes, he would put himself between me and a ravening Hannanda without a second thought.

Nearby, one of the overexcited frat boys started wildly windmilling his arms. He had overbalanced and now tipped himself right over the wall. In a second, the diver with us had grabbed his ankle and hauled him back. The sharks, instead of being attracted by the flailing, like they are in every single scary underwater movie, took one sideways look and promptly turned tail, heading for the other side of the tank. They stayed there and didn't come back.

The culprit's buddies pounded him when we climbed out of the water. “Smooth move, Ex-Lax,” one muttered. “Way to be a buzzkill.”

“Hey” was the red-faced retort, “at least I can say I scared off a shark.”

They went off to disturb some other sea life on their prize day. I was shivering a little, not entirely from cold, and the horror of a swimsuit had wedged itself firmly in my butt. I was ready to be dressed again. Of course, Alex had more planned.

“Stingrays,” I said, almost resigned, as I looked into the shallow pool we were guided to next. “You're putting me in a pond with”—I read the placard—“cownose stingrays.”

“Look, no spikes.” Alex pointed. Then he shoved a cup of fish bits into my hands. “Come on.”

Apparently, this was all familiar to the rays. They had Alex surrounded in a second, flapping their wings on the bottom of the pool and on him, as if to get attention. I could almost hear them calling, “Me, me, me!”

Alex was laughing and lowering bits of fish into the water. They disappeared immediately. Some of the rays did little wiggles, like happy puppies. “Okay,” I admitted finally. “They're kinda cute.”

“They're incredible,” he said, looking like a kid who'd just found said puppy under the Christmas tree, and held out his hand. I took it, fish guts and all, and got in with him.

We went through our ray food pretty quickly. I flinched the first few time and ended up dropping the fish. But then I got used to the gentle nibbling on my fingers. “Kisses,” the guide said. He was the same one who'd called the nurse sharks “cuddlers.” This time I didn't think he was entirely out of his mind.

Once all the food was gone, Alex and I waded toward the edge of the pool, where we would be able to sit and watch. One large ray kept bumping my ankle. I tried to step out of its way. It followed, bumping me again. I changed direction; it did, too.

“Sorry, dude,” I told it. “I'm all out.”

“Oh, he doesn't want food,” the guide informed me. “That's Ferdinand.”

I looked down at the surprisingly appealing head, with its wide-set eyes and curved snout. “Let me guess. He just likes to float and smell the seaweed.”

“Actually, he just likes everyone. He's a lover.”

This was my day, surrounded by cuddlers, kissers, and lovers. And Alex. We sat with our feet in the water. The rest of the rays figured out pretty quickly that there was no more food forthcoming, and drifted gracefully around the lagoon. Ferdinand, however, stayed near my feet, flapping and nudging. I reached down and tentatively stroked his back. It felt kind of like a sandy flip-flop: firm and pliable and a little rough. Ferdinand gave what looked like an unmistakably happy wiggle and nudged for more.

“He recognizes a sea goddess when he sees one,” Alex said, nudging me with his arm.

“It's a ray,” I retorted. “Its brain is the size of a peanut.” But I was secretly very, very pleased. I was genuinely sorry to climb out of the pool. The sharks . . . well, the sharks I could do without. But Ferdinand had charmed me.

We talked about all the unimportant stuff on the drive back to the city: the flailing frat boys, the flapping rays, the smell of fish that the mediocre showers hadn't quite gotten off our skin.

The ride going home went so much faster than it had coming. Alex stopped in front of my house but didn't turn off the car. “Come in?” I asked.

“I don't think—”

“Alex. Please. Just for a few minutes.”

He stared out the windshield for a long moment, hands tight around the bumpy steering wheel. Finally, he said, “I really can't stay long. Dad's home, and we're all going out to see my grandmother.” We climbed out of the car and headed for the house. “Then it's another family dinner night at another ‘Best of Philly' pick: Patsas. Apparently it's the ‘place to have something even Zorba couldn't pronounce.'”

My hands were shaking, but I got my key into the lock and the door open. As usual, he gestured me ahead of him. I had other things to say, but I started with “Order the moussaka. Grape leaves, spanakopita, and a salad with lots of feta.”

“You sound like an expert on the place.”

“Nope. Just a girl who knows restaurants. Trust me. Regulars have their faves; smart diners go for classic. People pleasers order the specials.”

“Good advice. So . . . ?”

“So.” I stood up a little straighter. “Come upstairs with me.”