Gillyflower Read online

  Emil and Jack were dawdling over their beers, making stupid jokes, and generally driving me nuts. We’d been to a Red Sox game, and all they could talk about was Wade Boggs’s batting average and how many points up and down it had gone in the past two weeks. I wished I’d gone to the game with Nora; she knew all Boggs’s numbers too, but she also would have been talking about his new beard, and about the way the lights at Fenway made the infield grass look blue, and about some person in the bleachers who’d caught her eye, and a lot of other things. If I’d taken Nora to the game, I’d be home right now waiting for her to brush her teeth and come to bed. I left my boys and went home on the T, pleading an early morning the next day and trying to take their head shaking and back slaps with good humor.

  All the way home I thought of Nora, wondering what she’d done with her friend all day and what kind of mood she’d be in when I finally saw her. It was pretty late, but she might still be awake. A day with Mellie usually filled her up with all sorts of stories and observations and news, and I was looking forward to hearing about it, though I didn’t really care about any of that stuff; I just had this big desire to hear Nora’s voice.

  But when I got home she was already asleep. She’d left me a note saying she was exhausted and she hoped I’d had a good time at the game. Bummer. But I didn’t want to wake her up.

  As I turned out the lights in the kitchen I noticed the little answering machine light was blinking away, so I pushed the “message” button. Nora’s voice, sounding a bit remote, said, “Hi Rick. I’m staying to dinner at Mellie’s. I might be a little late. Hope you had a good day. See you later.” I wondered what time she’d left the message, then realized she must have come home early after all and forgotten to erase it.

  I turned on the light in the bathroom, which partly illuminated the bed if you positioned the door just right, and went in to look at Nora. When I saw her sleeping I knew her note hadn’t lied: she really did look exhausted; she almost looked sick. Her face was clenched instead of relaxed, and her hair was all damp and stuck to her forehead. I smoothed the hair away and kissed her nose. She stirred a little, and turned her head. I thought she mumbled something about a flower, but I couldn’t really understand her.

  21. Nora

  “Oh gaaawd,” Hugh said when he heard my rumbling innards. “We never did manage anything to eat, did we, my dear?” He looked aghast at his failure as a gentleman to provide a lady with nourishment.

  I laughed. “I don’t really feel like eating,” I said. “But I do seem to need something solid in here.” I patted my stomach.

  “I could use something solid myself,” he said, “but where do we go?”

  I looked over the iron fences, foolishly; I knew there was nothing in the neighborhood but a fancy bar on Boylston and the trendy Newbury Street eateries, where I was sure Hugh would be recognized. I might even meet someone I know, I thought for the first time—I did occasionally run into acquaintances in Boston. It astonished me that I hadn’t thought of that before; it would spell disaster. I imagined someone mentioning it to Rick, sometime before I’d gotten up the nerve to tell him. “Boy oh boy,” the person would say, “you could have knocked me over with a feather when I saw old Nora walk into Joe’s on the arm of that movie star.” Life would just be over.

  Hugh tapped my shoulder. “Penny for your thoughts,” he said. I must have been musing too long.

  “Hugh, I’d really rather not leave here. I mean, it’s so lovely, and there’s no one around. . .”

  “Who might know you?”

  “Yes,” I admitted.

  There was a long pause. And then, “Are you married, Nora?”

  “Yes.” I took a long breath. “His name is Rick.”

  Hugh smiled ruefully. “And does he know where you went today?”

  I looked him straight in the eye. “No, he doesn’t.”

  “Why is that?”

  I wondered if he could be making fun of me. “Because, in a way, I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t know what would happen—it didn’t have anything to do with him.” I looked at Hugh. “And I wish you hadn’t brought it up.”

  He picked up my hand and turned it over, palm up, and kissed it. A huge peony opened in my chest.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I didn’t know where I was going myself. I don’t think I do even now.” We sat then a while, just loosely holding hands. I think we were waiting for our last words to wash away in the dripping fog. I felt weightless, unmoored. I sailed away from myself.

  After a while Hugh broke the silence. “When I was younger, Nora,” he said, “I believed in a lot of things. I believed in God—oh, how I believed in him!—and in honor and freedom, and socialism. . . and much, much more.” He let go of my hand and pulled his coat tightly around himself, as if he’d suddenly grown very cold. “And I didn’t believe in any sort of ‘silliness’—no conspiracy theories, or tarot cards, or space ships from Mars, or horoscopes, or psychologists. . . or dreams. The one thing I believed in always—and more than anything else—was art. Can you understand that, Nora?”

  “Very well,” I said.

  “And now that I’m old. . .”

  “Not old,” I said—predictably, but sincerely. He was ageless to me, and ageless, I suspected, to himself.

  “Older, then, thank you,” he continued, picking up my hand again. “Now that I’m older I have art only. No wife, no lovers of import. A child I hardly see. No politics to speak of, no God to censure me. I sometimes think I’m like a slug: no apparent inner or outer structure. But Nora, I have my art. I could not bear for that to desert me. I tell myself I have some good years left with it, but who knows? And you have your drawing, so you can understand that. You may not be famous. But you have. . . powers.” He stopped and looked over my shoulder and in the strange, pale light of the fog I examined his face: I saw the deep, raked lines around his eyes and mouth, the imperfections of his skin, the growth of grey-black beard beginning to show along his jaw. I saw him flawed, and plainly. As he spoke I kept my eyes on his wide mouth and his fairly unattractive teeth, and on the way he paused between phrases, with his mouth partly open and his tongue resting lazily just inside his lower lip. I told myself I did not like it. Although his words thrilled me, they were like a just-sharpened knife: gleaming and seductive. I think I was trying to hate him.

  “What I mean is,” he went on, “when I had that dream about you, and then saw you in the theater that afternoon, I can tell you I didn’t feel too cocky. And when I saw your drawing, saw into your drawing, I should say, I was felled like an unsuspecting, stupid, bloody oak.”

  “I never meant to—”

  “No. No, I know you meant no harm. I don’t think anymore, now that I’ve met you, that it was anything you controlled.” He grinned. “I no longer think that you’re a witch, though I admit that for a while I did think so. I don’t know who or what designed all this—I can’t imagine. I only know that you and I are the only ones who know it happened—whatever it was—and that you’re the only one I can discuss it with, remember it with. The only one. . . But I must tell you, Nora, how angry I was with you. I blamed you for all my fears—so awfully unfair, isn’t it?” He shook his head. “That afternoon in the theater, as I told you at lunch, I wanted to kill you. I think I might have done, if I’d had the chance. It was irrational. It wasn’t just that you’d thrown me off balance with your stare. It wasn’t just that. I was scared silly, I thought I was losing my mind. I thought—felt very strongly—that I was in danger of never being able to give a decent performance again, that art had been drained from my veins by a vampire: you, Nora. You. I began to be afraid I’d look for you everywhere, in every audience—see you everywhere. And the worst part was, I wanted to. I wanted to see you, Nora, old thing, and never more so than when I received your drawing.”

  “I don’t know why I sent it,” I told him. “I don’t even know how I drew it, really. It just. . . came about.”

  I told him pretty much
everything then—from before the play to the night I drew the picture—and he listened very carefully and seriously to all of it, with his great head bowed. Sometimes he would look up at me, searching my face intensely. I did not feel ashamed to admit anything to him; it all seemed impersonal, it seemed as though I were talking about two other people. I had never spoken that way to anyone before, not even in the confessional. It felt as if we were detectives discussing a case, so that we could find a clue that might explain the things that had happened.

  We talked a long while; it was growing dark. I knew I had to leave, but I couldn’t until we’d found some kind of answer. And yet I suspected there was no answer to find. We talked in ever-diminishing circles, but we could never find the center of the thing, and that is why we loved it, and why we finally stopped talking.

  With arms linked, we walked back around the pond, very slowly. It was warm and the thick fog had enveloped the gardens; we opened our coats. He took off the hat and stuffed it in his pocket; it had made a little ridge around his hair that I wanted to touch. He walked me slowly over to a tree and leaned me up against it. Of course he kissed me.

  He began as slowly as we’d been walking, kissing me gently around my mouth, then on it, licking my lips tentatively, but never putting his tongue inside. Neither of us closed our eyes at first, as if we wanted to be sure we were awake. We kissed for a very long time, still holding hands. He tasted of cigarettes and salt and milky bourbon.

  I kissed him back the way he kissed me, as if we had all the time in the world—as if there were no time or world. We kissed and we kissed and there was fog on our faces, then finally Hugh pulled me into his coat and I felt his hardness. It did not startle me. I was not Nora Forrest. I wanted him so badly then that I would have let him take me against the tree, or on the wet path. I thought I would fall down, but he held me up and held me.

  After a minute or two of that, Hugh pulled back slowly and led me to a bench. He sat me down on one end of it, then sat himself a foot or two away. “Hold on,” he said, smiling. “Let us just hold on a moment or two.”

  I laughed. I tried to catch my breath, which seemed to be coming visibly, in little cartoon clouds; I felt as if I’d taken some psychedelic drug.

  “Dearheart,” Hugh said, and laughed in an astonished way. We both laughed. We talked about the pigeons and the mallards on the pond, and finally he looked straight into me and said, “Let’s go now.”

  “All right,” I said. “I will have to make a call.”

  He didn’t answer, only put his hat back on and pulled up the collar of his coat. We went back to the hotel and he took me to a corner of the lobby, where a public telephone was housed in a plush little booth. He vanished around the corner.

  I called home. Rick was out—I’d forgotten he was going to a ballgame. The answering machine picked up.

  “Hi, Rick,” somebody’s voice said into it, “I’m staying to dinner at Mellie’s. I might be a little late. Hope you had a good day. See you later.”

  When I came out, Hugh met me. We went upstairs.

  22. Leon

  I could tell right away I needn’t fear Hugh would realize he was being followed. He was obviously so wrapped up in Miss F. that he saw nothing else. The two of them walked closely together, deep in conversation I suppose, and at first they walked so quickly I had trouble keeping up.

  I’d already been walking around all day and I was hungry and tired. But finally they slowed down, and eventually came to a stop on a bench in a corner of the gardens where the evergreens were lush and I could easily find a hiding place. It was very wet, though. The day had not shaped up to be one of my favorites, and I thought back wistfully to that morning in the hotel, when I’d happily planned to visit this city again on my own. Now I was thinking twice about that. But I told myself, sensibly, that nothing really terrible had happened, that it was only another of Hugh’s little escapades, and that because these capers had been less and less frequent in recent years, I’d become ill-accustomed to dealing with them.

  The air was so sodden and the place so deserted I could hear Hugh and Miss F. quite clearly, though I had taken up a post behind some shrubbery about twenty-five feet away. I could hear them easily enough, but I did not understand them. The more I listened, the more confused I became. I had been correct in assuming that this whole mystery revolved around the drawing, but now I was hearing that there were connections to the dream Hugh had told me and the woman he’d seen at the play. Quite preposterously, I thought, he seemed to be connecting all three.Miss F. went along with him in this and spoke to him comfortably, as if she’d known him a very long time. She told him silly things about herself, which I put down to ingenuousness and hero-worship, but which Hugh accepted easily, as if she were the oldest of friends. What was this? Who was this young woman? Had Hugh a secret life, of which I knew nothing? It was not possible; we were together more than most married couples, had been so for so many years. My mind did drift off and perhaps I missed a few things, but all in all I could make neither head nor tail of what they were saying.

  At last the seduction began, and that I understood. I had seen Hugh kiss the palms of countless ladies. I knew just the way he took hold of their elbows and steered them around, his height, his long stride, and his imposing presence rendering them creatures fully under his control. I had studied the way he riveted them with his practiced eyes, exposed their secrets, received their confessions like a tender, avuncular priest, scooped out their inhibitions, tossed them away, and began to kiss those eager, upturned faces. Once, in the early days of Maryann’s reign, I had even seen him making love, though he didn’t know it. She and Hugh had rushed headlong into his bedroom while I was putting things away in the walk-in closet, and I, to my dishonor, had not made myself known. Instead, I’d watched from behind the half-closed door as if watching a film—but only for a half-minute. I felt embarrassed for Maryann’s sake. Oh, she was smooth and beautiful—but I was not titillated. Maybe I thought there would be something different about what Hugh did in bed, or the way he did it. I suppose in an odd way I just wanted to know everything about him, like a parent. But he seemed to do the deed like other men, or even a little more clumsily. Uncovered, and in motion, his interminable legs and arms seemed ungainly and bizarre.

  At any rate, as the Americans say, I knew all his moves. When he kissed Miss F’s cupped palm I thought to myself, so that’s it: all this dramatic folderol and hide-and-seek for a bit of silly sex. Perhaps he needed more drama surrounding the thing now than he had done in his younger days—That must be it, I thought. There had not been any women in a while, and although I could not instantly see what was so exciting about this rather odd-looking, smallish person, I simply thought, To each his own. I did not care.

  Moisture from my collar had begun to run down my back—remember, I did not have my coat. I wanted him to get on with it. I wanted him to bed her in a hurry (or in as much of a hurry as his heart could stand) and send her swiftly home so we could get back to New York. I prayed she would be a one-nighter and not encumber us with another set of American-female woes.

  At last they began to move, walking toward the pond (and, I hoped, the hotel, though again my sense of direction had betrayed me), and again they started off quickly and gradually slowed down. Hugh steered her to a tree, gently pushed her up against it, and began to kiss her. It looked uncomfortable. I moved in closer. Then I saw Hugh’s face and I felt the shame I had not felt that day I watched him from the closet. He kissed Miss F. with his eyes open, and they were his true eyes, not his stagey, manipulative ones. He was baring his soul to this girl-woman, and he thought she was the only one to see.

  Her eyes were open as well, and as naked as his were. I turned away. I felt stupid and ill and revolted. I knew I should not have been there.

  And after an endless time, while I stared at my rain-soaked shoes, they repaired to a park bench, laughing. Laughing. I could not hear them anymore and I did not want to. When they got up I walk
ed behind them until they entered the hotel and then I thought, I’ll go have a bit of dinner, I’ll go to a film, maybe two films. My job was over for the evening; Hugh was on his own.

  I walked down some street until I found a little shop where I bought a sack of chocolate biscuits and a newspaper. I wanted to go to a film that lacked romance, but I feared I would have trouble finding such a thing.

  23. Hugh

  At the moment I first held Nora Forrest in my arms, I thought of that cat, Horatio. When Leon and I had last gone back to England, I had somehow forgotten about Horatio for days, and yet one morning I woke and suddenly noticed him there in the room with me, languidly basking in the sunlight on top of a sweater I’d thrown on the window seat the night before. My God, I thought, he’s been here always, silently waiting, intimate and aloof and self-satisfied all at the same time, as only a cat can be. He’d had no need to announce himself, I thought—how admirable. Probably he’d lived at my house long before I even knew he’d existed.