Gillyflower Read online

  Well, I hadn’t seen too many of Nora’s little pictures in a while when I discovered a really fine one accidentally, while searching for some stationery in her room. (We had a bedroom together, of course, but we both had a tiny hideaway room of our own; that was one thing Nora insisted upon, and I loved it too. Staying apart that way made our time together more special. Nora called her room “Virginia’s room” after A Room of One’s Own.) I remember clearly that it was the week after that trip to New York when she went to the play with her mother, because I was looking for the stationery to write to an employer about a new job I was after, and I got the job—so I remember the date. I found the paper where I expected it to be (Nora was awfully neat) and then noticed what looked like a drawing turned face down on top of the bookcase.

  I turned it over. It was exquisite.

  It was so exquisite, in fact, it gave me kind of a shock. The picture was the same favored size of many of Nora’s works—about a foot square, maybe a little smaller—and it was the usual black and white with a bit of color, but there was something hauntingly different about it that kept me standing there quite some time. I carried it over to the light to look some more. The scene showed the inside of some kind of big auditorium, the point of view somewhere high up in the balcony, off to the right. Light was dim everywhere, except around the stage, but you could make out many individual heads and hats and the shapes of the seatbacks and steps leading down to the front. On stage there were some people in costume (you couldn’t tell exactly what kind, but you could see it wasn’t modern-day dress), most of them gathered off to the right. And in the very front of the stage, on the left, stood a tall man in an odd posture. It was subtly odd; he appeared at first glance just to be standing there upright, but on further examination you could see that he was inclined slightly forward, and that he was looking down.

  A shaft of light, colored the palest of yellows, led from the man’s face to a head in one of the front rows of the audience, and when I examined the picture under the lamp on Nora’s desk I saw the most remarkable expression on the face of the man, an expression of anger and wonder, and I noticed the only other color in the drawing: a vivid blue-black, used for his eyes. So tiny, and so subtle (to call attention to a particular “blackness” in a black-and-white drawing seemed quite a feat), were these dots of color that they had at first escaped my notice, but once I’d seen them they seemed to bounce uncannily off the shaft of yellow light and to give the man’s face an animation that was truly delightful.

  I say “delightful,” but I was delighted only with the artistic value of the thing; in another way it gave me the creeps, though at the time I couldn’t have explained why. Maybe that’s why I didn’t mention to Nora that I’d seen it when she got home that day. Maybe I was waiting for her to bring it and show it to me (then I would have had a lot of questions). But several weeks went by, weeks filled with many distractions, and neither of us ever mentioned her new drawing.

  I went into her room only once again during that time, ostensibly on another innocent errand but with the firm intention of viewing that drawing again. I couldn’t find it. I hoped she hadn’t destroyed it; I thought she’d probably sent it to a magazine. I’d wanted to see it again, but I can’t really say I was sorry it was gone.

  9. Leon

  We went back to London directly after Hugh’s divorce from Maryann, but we never got to Ireland. I can’t say I was sorry; I liked Hugh’ s hideaway cottage there, its quietness and isolation, but the country of his birth seemed to bring out a brooding Hugh, and in the past I’d seen him sink into the deepest reveries and the lengthiest, most morose “downs” (as the Americans say) over what seemed to me mere trifles. The absence of his daughter, certain only to be exacerbated by distance, would almost definitely have caused him to fall into one of these depressions, and I didn’t have the stomach for it, not this time.

  So it was with secret glee that I greeted Hugh’s announcement several weeks after we’d landed at Heathrow that he’d been offered the lead in The Lion’s Share, which was to play a definite engagement of at least one month on Broadway, and that he was seriously considering the deal. It was a play he loved and had starred in once before, long ago, to rave reviews in the West End, but he had been much younger then and he told me he now felt he’d “grown into” the role. Also, I suspected, he was hoping that he could see quite a bit of Ruby in the States and perhaps even spirit her away from her mother for a while. . . maybe even a long while. His fervent wish was to raise the child in Europe, mother or no mother, though I didn’t see how he’d pull that off, with Maryann being an exemplary parent and the child accustomed to nothing since birth but American ways.

  Less than a month in London, some quick rehearsals (during which Hugh was lauded as “perfect” for his part), and we were headed again for the States. This time at least, I told myself, we wouldn’t be immersed in a state of fake luxury in that awful California; New York, if dirty and dangerous, is a tad more civilized and to my taste. We set up in a nifty hotel and the play opened to surprisingly receptive American hearts. It seemed assured to run a favorable course, perhaps well into the summer.

  Hugh was doing splendidly, both professionally and personally. Except for occasional bouts of gloom and doom (usually occurring after one of Ruby’s weekend visits), he was sleeping and eating better and staying away from the liquor and the ladies. I rarely heard him voice a complaint or concern about his heart. (He seemed to have forgotten about his uncertain physical condition, and the doctors assured me that this was a healthy development. Since I was looking out for him, it was better for him to proceed as he normally did; I kept him from overdoing without inhibiting his activities too noticeably much. This put the strain on me, but I was willing to accept it.) He worked like a demon, never missed a performance, and even forced himself to be cooperative with the media, appearing on several late-night television shows, a practice he abhorred and usually avoided assiduously. Hugh did not come over well in an interview: he appeared wild-eyed and distracted, and laughed a good deal at nothing, but this play had endeared him to New Yorkers somehow, so that even his foolishness was lovingly accepted.

  I welcomed also the return of our comradeship of old, a relation that had necessarily been weakened by his marriage and Ruby’s birth, and by my own dissatisfaction with the Los Angeles locale. In New York that summer Hugh and I regressed in a delightful way. He rarely bid me to leave him, and even on his long walks in Central Park, when I tailed him some paces behind to give him his privacy, we enjoyed our familiar communion of souls.

  In truth, I worried about him on these walks. What was to prevent some madman, recognizing Hugh (or even not recognizing him at all except as a well-dressed and lonely stroller), from robbing or beating or God forbid even kidnapping him right out from under my large, working-class nose? But nothing of the sort happened, naturally; we rarely encountered anyone at all. And I was cheered to see the change in Hugh for the better.

  At night when he could not sleep (he still had the occasional bout of insomnia) we’d sometimes play cards, or I’d read to him, or, and this was best, Hugh would simply talk and talk. He is a man of amazing sensitivity and intelligence, and his vocabulary, and the way he used it to dramatic and often comic effect, had always thrilled me—always shall.

  On one night I remember especially from our time in that posh hotel, Hugh told me about a peculiar dream he’d had a few weeks before.

  It was strange the way he spoke of that dream: there was a certain reverence in his delivery that was usually reserved for the very few topics Hugh considered unworthy of the smallest scorn. (This included such themes as children—though only since he’d become a father—Ireland, the avoidance of “unnecessary” wars, and of course Acting.) And there was a certain innocence as well, a charming display of awe, tempered by a bit of what seemed like superstition. Hugh was superstitious to a degree (about his famous blue gloves, for example), but always with a touch of self-deprecation.

&n
bsp; This time there was none of that. He lay on his back in that big brass hotel bed with his hands behind his head and the covers pulled up to his chin, and spoke to the ceiling in a low, sleepy voice that mesmerized me.

  “It was the night of my birthday,” he began. “Do you remember, Leon, how ill I was that night?” (Indeed I did, but he did not wait for a reply.) “When you put me to bed with that warlock’s elixir of yours I felt as though I were making straight for heaven, but to heaven I did not go. I went into a dream, Leon, a strange dream that has bothered me quite a bit since then.” Silence for a minute, and then, “Shall I tell it to you?”

  I said, “Yes, do.”

  “I’d like to tell it, if telling would only help, but somehow I doubt it will,” Hugh said, and heaved an exhausted sigh. He almost sounded sorry for himself, which truly surprised me.Even on his worst days, Hugh had never been one for self-pity; he was more the angry, sarcastic, hysterical sort. So I put my feet up and Hugh told me the dream. There wasn’t much to it; indeed, I had been expecting something on the order of a Russian novel, in intensity if not in length. This was a simple dream, harking back to a scene in one of his last Hollywood films, in which he is sitting on the roof of a country church in the moonlight. I had always liked that part of the film; it showed off both Hugh’s murkier spiritual depths and his still-powerful physical attractions to perfection. He’d dreamed, he told me, that he’d fallen off the roof, done a bit of slow-motion falling, and landed unhurt at the feet of a young woman, a stranger to him, who somehow stared him into some kind of hypnosis that was so uncomfortable it had awakened him and left him out of sorts for days.

  I was about to make some inane comment (I didn’t really know what to make of it all), but telling the dream seemed to have exhausted Hugh, and he fell suddenly asleep, like a huge puppy. I recalled then that it was the day after his birthday that he’d taken off on his own like a damned fool and arrived at the theater nearly late, scaring me witless.

  I also remembered that it was during that particular performance that he seemed to have taken some sort of fit, a little like the petit mal of epilepsy, while he was onstage—an occurrence that both astounded and terrified me, but which, I soon learned, I seemed to have been the only one to notice. One of the stagehands had practically thrown a body-block to stop me from rushing the stage at that moment, and when that quick-thinking gentleman released me and asked me what on earth was the matter, I realized no one else had noticed anything at all amiss.

  Hugh was a little clumsy that afternoon on stage as well, which also worried me, but when I questioned him later about what had happened, he inquired if I didn’t think that a person who had performed the same part for “a million-million nights and days” had the right to display a bit of human frailty now and then. I had to see his point.

  But he was a beast that evening, and for several ensuing days—prey to an ugly, self-destructive mood—and I became not just exasperated but more worried than ever about his health. No matter what anyone else said, I knew I had seen Hugh in the grip of some sort of crisis on that stage, and brief as it might have been, by its consequences it had become serious.

  During his hour of rest before leaving the theater that afternoon, Hugh told me—no, informed me—that I was to take “a little vacation.”

  “Indeed,” I said.

  He said he’d been thinking that I’d been undergoing “too much stress” (another blasted Americanism) and that I was to “go off somewhere for a month or so and”—here he paused for dramatic effect, waving the hand bearing his cigarette holder like an arrogant monarch—“regenerate.”

  I said I would not go, that I did not feel the need; and thought, He’s wanting to get rid of me so he can sink into some damnable abyss, and I won’t leave him.

  We had a tremendous row. We called each other every conceivable name and nearly came to blows. At last Hugh wrapped himself in his flapping raincoat and said, disgustedly, “See you around, Leon,” and as he slammed the door he muttered what sounded like, “That little bitch!”

  While the epithet smacked of the wrong gender, I assumed he meant me, and I had no heart to follow him. He came home sixteen hours later, alone, smelling of vomit and still halfway drunk, and fell like a cracked-up toy soldier into my arms. He stayed in bed for two days, behaving like a huge, cranky infant. No further mention of my “vacation” was ever made by either of us.

  So although the dream he told me that night did not seem of great moment to me, I began gingerly to piece things together. The dream had upset him, leading to his awkward performance, which had upset him further. The mysterious woman in the dream had made him feel lonely. His little mistake on stage had made him feel his age and fear a loss of power, a decline, and that had angered him. He had then tested this uncertain power on me by dictating my vacation, and when I bested him by refusing, he had become further enraged. It all made sense in a Hugh-ish sort of way, and I congratulated myself on my amateur analysis.

  All this analyzing went on that night as I dozed on and off on the chaise by Hugh’s bedside. After relating his dream, he had fallen into a fitful sleep and I had dimmed the lights and removed his hands from behind his head and tucked him up like a baby. I don’t know why, but I felt I should sleep there instead of going back to my room. I looked at Hugh for a minute as he lay there. In repose, his face looked almost his true age; with his blazing eyes closed he looked dignified, peaceful, and shy, and I prayed he would wake feeling better. I decided against lying down next to him (though the bed was capacious) and took to the lounge.

  I thought he was off for the night, but after an hour or so he woke up and began speaking as if there had been no intermission.

  “That afternoon on stage, Leon,” he said after arranging his arms behind his head again and adjusting the covers. “You were quite right. . . I mean about something being wrong.” This statement woke me up completely; Hugh never admitted such things. “It was that dream-woman, Leon,” he continued. “She was there.”

  “What do you mean, ‘there’?” I asked.

  Amazingly, while still on his back and seeming not to move a muscle, he lit a cigarette. I brought him an ashtray and a glass of seltzer. His voice sounded cracked and dry.

  “I mean she was there in the audience, Leon, there in the bloody first row, and Leon, SHE DID . . . IT . . . AGAIN!”

  At this he popped straight up out of bed, spilling the drink, upsetting the ashtray, and giving me quite a start. He dragged the bedspread with him, pulling it around him like a cape, and began to stalk about the room as if he were searching for something. He waved his cigarette holder in his impatient, imperial way.

  “Sit down, Hugh,” I begged him. “What are you looking for?”

  He plopped down nearly on top of me on the chaise and handed me the cigarette. He put his arm around me, he put his head on my shoulder. I didn’t look down and I didn’t hear a thing, but I wondered if Hugh had begun to cry.

  10. Nora

  Life after the play was like a new life. I spent the first few days after my return from New York in a kind of dizzy reverie; I could think of nothing but that magical afternoon. Even after that first flush faded, Hugh still stood on the edge of my mind like a patron saint or guardian angel who could hop into the action whenever called upon or needed. On the surface, I suppose I seemed normal, but I felt as if I had changed. It was like being in love, only without that hopeless, terrified feeling that the loved one might not return your affections, because in this case of course there was no chance of that, and actually no real desire for it either. I thought of Hugh not as a person I might possibly come to know but as an experience that had altered my larger view. If anything, I bet I appeared more cheerful; at one point, in fact, Rick commented on how “carefree” I was acting, and I told him the weekend had done me good, that I’d needed to get away.

  I felt like drawing all the time, but whenever I tried, things got messed up; I didn’t really have a theme to work on. Then, one evening,
everything came together. Rick wasn’t home, our apartment building was quiet, and I took a sketchpad out onto the back porch. It was almost too dark to see, but I worked very quickly for about two hours before I really even knew what I was doing. When I decided to take a break and went in to make some tea, taking the drawing with me, I was amazed at what I saw under the bright kitchen lights.

  Here was the drawing I had imagined—the drawing of the inside of the theater that afternoon—and it was just the way I’d seen it in my mind’s eye. I remembered thinking, driving home from New York that day, that the picture would be like an illustration for a Wilkie Collins novel, old-fashioned and haunting, composed of a network of fine lines. The picture I held in my hand was certainly my work, but I had hardly been conscious of its execution; it was as if all my thoughts of the past few days had somehow given their energy and rapture to the original idea I’d had that day in the car.

  As I drank my tea I noted a few changes and additions I wanted to make. There should be just a bit of color: the palest of golds for the area extending from Hugh to me (I was just the back of a head in the first row), and exactly the right kind of “black” for Hugh’s eyes. What pleased me most was the excitement generated by the vibration of so many precisely drawn, delicate lines, and the way the lighted area of the stage and the beam of “golden air” allowed the observer to see into the front of the audience just enough for a mystery to develop there. I went back outside and finished the drawing quickly (I had some trouble with the eyes, but finally hit upon putting in pinpoints of white and blue, which illuminated their blackness perfectly), brought it into my room, matted it, and set it face down on top of the bookcase. I didn’t want to look at it anymore that night.