Forever in Blue (23 page)

And yet.

Now it was all different again. Her dream had come back, and she didn’t know if she was waking or sleeping, what was real and what was illusory.

She called Lena even though Lena had her own things to worry about.

“Do you have any idea what’s going on?” Tibby raved. She was done with playing proud.

“With what?” Lena asked.

“With Effie and Brian!”

Lena was silent. Not for more than a second, but long enough for Tibby to know she knew something.

“Well.” Lena sighed.

“What do you know?” Tibby practically exploded.

“I don’t know anything for sure.” Lena’s voice was slow and steady. “I mean, I know Effie’s had a crush on Brian. But that’s been going on a long time. Everybody knows that.”

Tibby felt she might swallow her tongue. “They do?”

“Oh, Tib. Just a crush. You know, a juvenile kind of crush. Brian is very good-looking, obviously.”

“He is?” Tibby wasn’t breathing at all anymore.

“Tibby! Come on. You know what I mean. I’m not trying to torture you. I’m just stating the facts of the case.”

Tibby sat on her hand. “Okay,” she squeaked.

“Do you want to talk about this?”

Did she? No! But there was nothing else in the world to think of or talk about. “I have to know,” she said.

“I don’t think there’s much to know,” Lena said, and her voice was pitched for comfort. “Effie has a crush on Brian, Brian is miserable over you. I think they’ve talked on the phone a few times.”

“They have?” Tibby’s hand was asleep. Her ear was hot from the phone.

“Tibby, I don’t want to be in the middle of this. But I do want to be honest with you.”

“They haven’t…gone out together or anything.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so?”

Lena sighed again. “It’s the kind of thing Effie would mention. Trust me.”

“Do you think Brian likes her?”

“I have no reason to think so. But I do think he’s had a pretty lonely time.”

“Because of thinking I broke up with him?” Tibby asked vacantly.

“Because you did break up with him.”

“Oh.”

“Hey, Tib?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t mean to bug you, but you really should have told Effie the truth.”

“Gee. Thanks.”

After she hung up with Lena, she sat at her desk and tried to unscramble her brain.

Effie wanted Brian. Brian was a dreamboat. Duh. Everyone knew that. Everyone wanted him. In fact, it so happened that he was way way way too good for Tibby.

It was base and painful how these things mattered.

Yes, Tibby had once forgotten how to love Brian, but her memory was now effectively jogged. Oh, how painfully she remembered.

Of course Brian was gorgeous! It wasn’t like Tibby didn’t know that! That wasn’t even what mattered!

But all the other stuff did matter—that he was confident and good and that he was an optimist and could whistle Beethoven and didn’t care what other people thought. That he loved Tibby! He knew how to love better than anyone. Or at least, he had.

Now the idea of loving Brian was back. Now she couldn’t remember the idea of not loving him. When she thought of Effie and Brian, she wished she could remember the idea of not loving him.

A spell broke again, a dream ended, but this time in reverse. Now not loving him was the spell. Not loving was the dream she woke up from. That was how it seemed to her. But how confusing it was! How could you even know what was real? Or what would be real tomorrow? She was so scrambled she couldn’t keep track.

Who was she that she could change her mind, her very reality, so completely? Could she ever trust herself again?

Over the next few days she wished she were working more at Movieworld. With her hours so much reduced, she had endless time to stare at her “Script” and wonder about these things. The more she wondered, the less she knew.

She tried to write her script. She had the idea it would be a love story. But she couldn’t hold on to any thread. All she could think about was love’s intermittency, and that made for no story at all.

Peter came to see Bridget in the lab a few days before she was set to leave for home. She had labels in her pockets, stuck all over her clothes. She had three different-colored Sharpies in her left hand and one in her right.

She’d avoided her lab responsibilities for almost the whole program. She knew she had won the notice of David, the director, for her work in the house, so she could get away with it. She liked being outside in the sun. She liked having her hands in the dirt. She did not like this part. So she’d saved her dues-paying until the end of the trip. She thought of Socrates before the hemlock. You had to pay up eventually.

She saw Peter and she removed the label she was holding in her mouth to say hello.

“How’s it going?” he said. They were much changed since the kiss on the hill, both of them chastened.

She shrugged. “Okay.”

He looked around to make sure they had privacy. “I didn’t want you to go without saying good-bye.”

She nodded.

“I feel bad about what happened.”

“Probably not as bad as me,” she said. She cringed inwardly. What a weird thing to be competitive about.

“Hard to imagine feeling worse,” he said.

God, they were alike. Going overboard even at this stage.

“It makes me realize what a mistake it is for me to be away from my family for this long. I lose sight of what they mean to me, you know?”

She did know. She knew exactly. He was canny and he was hungry in all sorts of ways. He lived in the present just as she did.

“You’re probably right about that,” she said, also knowing that he was missing the deeper solution.

He grinned at her. “It could have been worse.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You think so?”

“We could have rolled down the hill.”

At that point, it would have just been gravity, but she didn’t say so.

“I think back on that night. I feel like we dodged a bullet,” he said.

She looked at him without saying anything. No, they hadn’t. They hadn’t dodged a bullet. The bullet had dodged them.

She thought of Eric, and for the first time in a long time she could actually begin to picture him. The set of his mouth when he concentrated on something. The crumple of his forehead when he was worried. The slightly jaunty overlap of his front teeth when he smiled. He came to her in little bursts, and she could feel, achingly, what it was to miss him.

She had gone to some lengths not to feel this, she realized. In spite of the sweetness and reliability of his e-mails, she had guarded against her feelings for him. She had long ago instituted a personal policy against missing people, based on the fear that you would spend your life missing people if you really got going on it.

The time had come to rethink that policy. You blocked the pain and you blocked everything.

Eric loved her. She trusted him more than she trusted herself. She appreciated the wisdom of loving someone built so differently than she was. She was stupid to let him go, even in her mind, even for a day. It was her loss.

As she said good-bye to Peter, she suddenly felt sad for him. He would do this same thing again. At some other place with some other misguided girl. He was already looking forward, shaking off the past—a past that now included her.

She made a vow to herself not to do that.

Tibby called her mother. Sad but true.

“Have you heard anything?” she asked. She had no pride. None. This would be unthinkable if she had any.

“Honey, no.”

“Have you seen them together?”

“No.”

“You know something. I can tell.”

“Tibby.”

“Mom. If you know something you have to tell me.”

Her mother sighed in exactly the way that everybody Tibby had talked to had sighed. “Your father saw them at Starbucks.”

“He did?”

“Yes.”

“Together?”

“Seemed like that.”

“Brian doesn’t like Starbucks!”

“Well, maybe Effie does.”

That was the worst possible thing to say. Tibby felt the need to pout for a while.

“Tibby, sweetie. You sound like you are really upset about this. Why don’t you tell Effie to lay off? Why don’t you tell Brian how you are feeling?”

Typical her mom. These were the worst and least practical suggestions Tibby had ever heard in her life.

“I have to go,” she said sullenly.

“Tib. Please.”

“I’ll talk to you later.”

“You know what your dad said?”

“No. What?”

“He said that Brian did not look happy.”

Tibby breathed out. That was the first and only good thing her mother said the whole time.

“Hey, Carmen?”

“Yes, Andrew.”

“What’s going on?”

It was just the two of them in the empty lobby of the theater. Andrew Kerr seemed to have recognized that public humiliation didn’t work, so he was trying to reach Carmen privately.

“I don’t know.” She put her face in her hands.

“Carmen, darling. Just relax. Just tell me what.”

“I don’t know what.”

“You were doing so beautifully with this role. Even Ian said it. ‘She’s a miracle,’ he said, and do you know what I said?”

Carmen shook her head.

“I said, ‘Let’s not jinx it.’ ”

“Thanks a lot, Andrew.”

“Carmen, I know what you are capable of. I believe in you. I just want to know why you are not doing it.”

“I think I’m thinking too much,” she said.

Andrew nodded sagely. “Ah. Very bad. Don’t think too much. Don’t think at all.”

“I’ll try not to.”

“Good girl.”

Ten minutes later she was back onstage with flowers in her hair, trying to say the line about hostess-ship.

“Carmen!” Andrew thundered. “I hope you are not thinking again!”

“Are we on for Sunday?” Leo left the message on her answering machine.

“Are you there? Are you okay? Do you want to have dinner? What’s up?” was his message on Saturday.

“Please, please call me, Lena,” he said on Sunday morning.

So she did. When he asked her how she was, she couldn’t quite figure out what to say.

“Can you pose today?” he asked hopefully.

Could she? An echo of the old terror sounded at the thought, but it was far away, more like a representation than the real feeling. “Okay,” she said. She didn’t have the stamina to think why not. “I’ll be over in half an hour,” she said.

She took a shower. Her skin felt cool and clean, a strange coating for her strange soul. She didn’t try to organize her impressions or her anxieties. She just walked to his building and rang 7B.

Upstairs at the door he pulled her into the loft and hugged her and kissed her as though he’d been starved of love for his entire lifetime. Failure to return calls was a depressingly effective aphrodisiac, she thought fleetingly, even among decent guys.

She felt her body curve into him, her lips respond instinctively. Maybe she was starving too.

Leo was a little bit self-conscious when he drew her into his room. He closed the door behind him, which he had not done the week before. She sensed he didn’t want the common rooms bearing witness.

The robe was ready. His bed was carefully draped. The little red couch was pushed against the wall.

“I was thinking…” His feet shuffled in a winning way. “You could be on the couch again if you want. Or…”

“Or?”

“Well, I was thinking maybe…”

She pointed to the bed. She could tell it was what he wanted.

“Right. Because. Well, I’ve sort of been envisioning this painting.” He could not stand still. He was practically bouncing.

She could see how much he wanted it. Whether for her or for art she didn’t know.

“Do you mind? If you are uncomfortable I totally understand.” As he said it, his eyes pleaded with her to get on his bed.

“I don’t mind,” she said. For some reason, she didn’t. The way he’d set it up was lovely. She could see how he wanted the painting to be. She was happy for him.

He politely disappeared and she shed her clothes, not bothering with the robe. She lay on her side on the bed. She laid her head on her arm. She loosened her hair over her shoulder and back and let it fan out behind her on the sheet.

Leo knocked timidly. He came in with the close-held expression of a man who didn’t expect his desires to work out. But his face changed when he saw her.

“That’s exactly, exactly what I imagined,” he said, awestruck. The energy in his long limbs made him seem young to her. “How did you know?”

“This is how I would want to paint it,” she said honestly. She wondered where all her millions of layers of self-consciousness had gone. It was strange. Where were the coiled muscles, the purple cheeks, the inability to follow a single thought?

Maybe it was depression. Maybe after the horrible incident with Kostos, she’d lost her will. Maybe she’d held the old hopes so tight that once they were gone, nothing much mattered anymore.

But she didn’t feel sad, exactly. She would probably know if she were truly sad. She’d certainly known in the past.

She felt old, she realized. She felt tired. She felt like she’d lived a long time and could see her coquettish self of last week from a very far distance. She felt she hadn’t the same things to hide. Or maybe she just lacked the energy to try.

Maybe she cared less. She looked at Leo gazing at her, poised with his brush. Maybe she cared differently.

Maybe it was just a relief to know that the epoch of Kostos was finally, finally over.

“Beautiful,” he murmured.

She wasn’t sure if he meant her or the painting. Maybe it didn’t matter. In a strange way she felt as though she was off the hook.

She watched him paint. She listened to the music he’d put on. More Bach, he said, but this time orchestral and choral. She almost felt like she might fall asleep. Her mind unwound into drowsy thoughts about the sea and the sky as it looked outside her grandmother’s kitchen window in Oia.

She might have fallen asleep, because when she opened her eyes the light was different. Leo had put down his brush and was studying her.

“I’m sorry. Did I fall asleep?” she said.