Destiny (107 page)

"For God's sake, Stephani. Get up. Take that stuff off. Get dressed."

"All right, Lewis," she answered, still in that quiet little-girl voice. She stood up, and began to take off the jewels, one by one. She put them back on the bed. She took off the sable coat, and laid it carefully next to them. She walked into the dressing room, and reemerged, some five minutes later, in the fishtail dress. She crossed to the mirror and powdered her nose thoughtfully. She took out her lipstick and painted her hps glossy pink. She picked up Helene's silver brush and touched her hair into place. She came back to Lewis, who had slumped in a chair, and stood looking down at him. When Lewis finally looked up, he saw that she had an odd expression on her face. If it had been anyone but Stephani, he would have said it was disdain.

"You should have told me, Lewis." The words came out in a little rush. "You should have. If I'd known ..." She stopped and lifted her chin slightly.

"You can't be right for her, that's all. I'm sure that must be it. You're just not right, and that must be horrible for her. I know how that feels. I've felt it, lots of times. Half the time, the men never notice. They can't tell the difference, or they don't care. Poor Helene. I always thought she looked sad—you know, you'd see it in her face, when she thought you weren't looking at her. I see why now."

Lewis wanted to stand up. He managed to lean on his chair, and get to his feet. He began to shout. He could hear himself shouting, as if he were outside the room, and the voice was inside it.

"What are you saying? What are you goddamn well saying?"

The words echoed and reechoed in his head. Stephani did not answer him, and Lewis knew there was no need. He knew the answer anyway, he could read it in her face. She had wanted him because she thought he was Helene's; now that she discovered he was not, she didn't want him anymore. The expression in her face was now pitying, and that enraged him so much that he wanted to hit her.

"I'm going home." She turned away.

Lewis clutched at her. "I'll come with you. I'll drive you. Wait . . ."

"You're drunk, Lewis. You couldn't drive. And I don't want you to come home with me. I don't want you to come over tomorrow. If you do, I won't see you. I never want to see you again."

The room suddenly seemed to Lewis to be full of rushing noises, as if the windows were open, and a wind was blowing. It whirled around the room;

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it howled at him. He took a step forward, and fell over. Stephani looked at him, hesitated, and then went out and closed the door.

"Helene ..." Lewis cried, and there was no answer. He closed his eyes. He rested his head on his arms. He curled up in the fetal position and lay very still.

He was still there, a few minutes later, when Helene came into the room. She had passed Stephani on the stairs, but she had been hardly aware of her. All her mind was concentrated on coming into this room, closing oflf the noise of the party, picking up the telephone. The band was playing a waltz; she could hear it faintly as Edouard's name danced in her mind. The certainty that, in just a few minutes, she would hear his voice, made her shake. She walked toward the telephone, seeing, for a moment, nothing else.

Then she stopped. She saw first the coat, folded across her bed, then the crumpled cover and pillows, then the little heaps of jewelry. Lewis moaned slightly; she turned and saw him. He was out cold.

The next afternoon, she came into Lewis's room. He had dragged himself back there at some point in the night, and he had slept all morning. The room was in disarray. There were leather suitcases everywhere; Lewis was packing.

Helene sat down on a small upright chair. Lewis did not stop, or look at her once.

"Was it Stephani Sandrelli?" she said finally in a cold tired voice.

Lewis paused. He looked up. "Yes. It was. If it's of any interest to you." He thrust a shirt into a suitcase.

"Did you have to take her to my room? Take out my clothes? My jewelry?"

Lewis looked at her. Her face was pale and set. Lewis shrugged. "I didn't have to, but I did. And don't for Christ's sake ask me how long it's been going on, or something like that. Spare me that kind of farce, at least."

She stood up. "Are you leaving, Lewis?"

"Yes. I'm leaving. I was well brought up. I thought I'd save you the trouble."

"You're not to come back. Not this time. I won't Hve with you anymore, Lewis."

Her voice was flat. Lewis slammed the suitcase shut. "I think you're supposed to say that we're tearing each other apart—isn't that the usual line?"

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"I don't know, Lewis. It's you that spends all day writing the usual lines."

Lewis stopped. He stood quite still, staring at her. The cruelty of the comeback was so unlike her; it shocked him as much as it hurt him. It shocked her too; faint color came into her face, and she turned away.

"You see?" she said. "We'll get worse. More cruel. More vicious. You and I, both of us."

Lewis hesitated. He closed the other suitcases, one by one. He carried them to the door and put them outside in the hall. He walked around his room, and carefully closed each closet door, each drawer. Helene did not move. She seemed utterly dejected. Lewis went into his bathroom and swallowed four little red pills from the store he kept there. His eyes looked bloodshot. He smoothed his hair back into position, and looked at himself with hatred.

He walked back into the bedroom and put on the jacket of his suit, a pale gray Prince of Wales check, made for him in Savile Row, years ago, when he and Helene were first in London.

He tried to think about that time; he tried to think about it very hard, because he felt that, if he did so, he might not say the thing he was going to say next. He waited; his mind darkened; he felt split in two, one half of him pleading against, the other urging for. The words would be spoken, they would not be held back.

He cleared his throat and heard himself say, in a perfectly casual voice, "I saw Cat's father on television a few weeks ago. I meant to tell you."

Her face lifted, as if he had hit her; her eyes widened with surprise and with pain.

"Did you miss it? Obviously you did. He was being interviewed about some merger, or some takeover—I forget which. ..."

"Cat's father is dead." She sprang to her feet. Her face was chalk-white. "Stop this, Lewis. It's cruel. ..."

"Oh, I know you told me he was dead," Lewis heard himself go on, in a reasonable voice. "But I'd have said he's very much alive. There was that interview; there was an article about him in The Wall Street Journal, only last week. ..."

"You're crazy." She drew in her breath. "You drink so much, and you take those pills. You imagine things. You can't remember what happened yesterday, an hour ago. ..."

"I can remember that, I remember it quite distinctly. Because of the shock, I suppose. You see, he looks so much like Cat, doesn't he? The hair, the eyes, everything. It's unmistakable, and I suppose it was very stupid of me not to have realized before. After all, I've seen photographs before, but they were mostly in black and white. And I've read articles, of course. The

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endless expansion of the de Chavigny companies—there's something about him, somewhere, most weeks. But in color, seeing him speak—well, that was different, of course. As soon as I saw that, there was no doubt."

He stopped. For a moment he thought she was going to faint, she was so drained of color. She swayed slightly, and then stood still.

She said, "Lewis. Go away. Just go away."

"All right." He started toward the door, and then stopped. A thought came to him, and he turned back.

"You know." He paused, looking now almost bewildered. "If you hadn't lied, if you'd told me right from the first, it might have been different. I might have been able to accept it then. It was not knowing, imagining, trying to understand—it, and you—that was what went wrong." He hesitated. "Helene. Why didn't you tell me? You could have, you know. Right back at the beginning. You didn't need to lie. ..."

"I wasn't lying. How could I tell you something that wasn't true?" She swung around to him, her voice rising in her agitation. "You've imagined this. You've made it up. Your mind plays tricks on you, Lewis. ..."

"Yes. It does, sometimes." He looked at her intently. "I wonder. Does yours?"

The evening of the day Lewis finally left, Helene went to her daughter's room. She read Cat a story, and Cat leaned back on the pillows, listening. When the story was over, she talked a little about what she had done that day, and Helene wondered if she might ask about Lewis, for he had been seen to leave, by the servants, by Madeleine and Cassie, and the atmosphere of pity and embarrassment that permeated the household was intense. But Cat did not ask; Lewis was absent so often anyway. Helene hesitated, and then decided—it would be better to break it to her gradually, and to answer the questions when, and not before, they were asked. She was not sure whether Cat would mind, or how much she would mind: she had spent so little time with Lewis.

She sat looking at her daughter, at the small fierce little face, at the hair which would stand up in spikes, and not lie down. And she saw then, that however much she loved Cat, however close they might be, her daughter was a separate person, not a baby now, but a little girl, with her own mind, her own feelings, her own memories, removed from her, and full of mysteries. Cat was old enough now to hide things from others, she no longer had that absolute transparency of the very young child. She tried to hide hurt —Helene had seen her do it in front of Lewis. What else did she hide?

It made Helene's heart ache a httle, to acknowledge this little distance.

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this separation between them. She looked at Cat, and she studied her face and her hair and her eyes. It was, of course, what she had come into this room to do, what she had postponed doing all afternoon, since Lewis left. Now she looked, and was afraid to look, and had to force herself.

The hair was very dark—but her own mother's hair had been brown, and while Billy's hair hadn't been as dark as Cat's, some of his brothers and sisters had taken after their mother, who was surely as dark as Cat. And Edouard's hair was straight, whereas Cat's curled, a httle. The eyes, and the straight dark brows above them: sometimes, it was true, when Cat had a certain expression on her face . . . But now she was sleepy, and they had a soft dreamy expression, not hke Edouard's at all.

"What are you thinking?" Cat leaned forward.

"Of you. Of—who you look like. Nothing."

Cat frowned. She looked puzzled.

"I look hke me," she said after a pause.

And at that Helene felt relief sweep through her. Her heart lightened. She smiled, and kissed Cat gently.

"That's right. You do. You're you and there's no one else like you, and I love you very much. Now, you must he down, and try to go to sleep. ..."

Afterward, the doubts came back again, very often at first, but less as time passed. Helene looked for resemblances to Billy, and found them. She collected them in her mind—this turn of the head, that way of laughing, a certain gesture of the hands—all these things she noted, and stored, and replayed, until, gradually, the force of Lewis's words diminished. What he had said could not be true; Billy was not really dead—^he hved on in Cat.

Helene spent a great deal of time alone now, and she came to like it. She began to refuse invitations. She stayed at home, often not leaving the house for days at a time, and in the evenings, when it was quiet, she would sit and fix her mind on her childhood. She would summon up the trailer park, and her mother and Ned Calvert; she would rehve the things that had happened, the things that had been said: those southern days, those south-em summers.

And she began to feel, more and more strongly, that what she was planning to do was not revenge—revenge was a stupid word, a word out of a melodrama—no, it was righting a wrong for her mother and for Billy that they, dead, could not right for themselves.

At night, when she went to bed, she had the most vivid dreams. In these

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dreams, her mother and Billy were so close, and so real to her, that sometimes, when she woke, she could still hear their voices, and feel their gentle presence in her room. She wanted them to stay, and fought against waking, against the moment when she must finally acknowledge that they had gone.

Thanksgiving came, Christmas approached, but this tangible passing of present time meant nothing to her. It seemed less real than the past, which she thought of and dreamed of.

The future seemed least real of all, a flimsy and thin construct. She was glad that she had agreed to do Gregory Gertz's film. She knew it was important to have it ahead of her, a fixed and definite point. Otherwise, she felt sometimes, she would not have been able to see beyond her return South; the trip to Orangeburg would have been a final destination.

Of Edouard she would not let herself think at all. The night she found Lewis in her room, she had not made the telephone call she had promised herself; now she would never make it. Lewis's accusations had put fortifications around that possibility: she would never consider it again.

It seemed to Helene, during this time, that she was very well, but neither Cassie nor Madeleine shared this estimation of her physical state. They discussed it: Helene did not eat enough, she was getting very thin, she often seemed strained.

Was it, Madeleine suggested, tentatively, once when she and Cassie were alone, was it simply because of Lewis's departure?

"If she had a grain of sense, she'd have been glad to see the back of him years ago." Cassie sniffed. "I don't think it's that. She always was a secretive girl. She doesn't want to talk, and nothing on God's earth will make her. But there's something—something on her mind."

Madeleine said nothing. She liked Helene; she pitied her, and it would have satisfied her own nature very much if she had believed that Helene's strange state had one obvious and spendidly romantic explanation.