Guilt by Association (33 page)

knight in shining armor? I can’t imagine any woman who wouldn’t be proud to ride off with you.”

“Is that a yes?” he asked.

Karen stopped short. She had been so eager to come to his defense that she hadn’t really given much thought to the effect her words might have on him.

He was so terribly nice and the last thing in the world she wanted to do was hurt him. But she had long ago resigned herself to the idea of being unmarried, choosing instead to devote herself to a career, whatever it turned out to be, and she was not uncomfortable with that decision. Now all she had to do was find a way to let him down gently.

“I think maybe you should give me a little time,” she heard herself say. “You know, to kind of sort things out.”

“Of course,” he exclaimed. “Take all the time you need. I know this is a pretty big decision for you to make.”

The biggest, she thought. “Thank you,” she murmured.

Ted reached for his iced tea and politely drained the glass. “Why don’t I let you get back to work,” he said. “I mean, it’s not as though I”m not going to see you again in a few hours, right?”

“Right,” she agreed.

The moment the door closed behind him, Karen made for the kitchen, filling her tea glass with Scotch and drinking it down in one long swallow.

The plastic composure she had cultivated for the past eighteen years, that singular ability to draw a curtain across her emotions, crumbled as she giggled and cried and shivered all together. She refilled her glass and went back to the living room, where she collapsed in a heap. Halfway through the second Scotch, she began to feel very foolish.

“Why didn’t you just come right out and say no?” she reproached herself aloud. “Why did you have to leave him dangling as though there were some hope?”

The day Peter Bauer walked out of her life, Karen had been devastated. Although, clearly, she had been the one to betray him, she had been unable to shake the feeling that, in some indefinable way, he had betrayed her as well. She determined

that she would never again put herself in that position. The yardstick of the 1960s still hung over her in the 1980s. In her heart, she knew that no man would ever be able to forgive her for what she had let happen on that cold December night, as Peter had not, and would shrink from her at the first mention of it—at the first sight of the result. Of course, she had to admit, she had never been willing to let anyone close enough to test her theory.

Instead, she had come to terms with being single. In many ways, she found she was well-suited to the solitude, and the consequent peace and privacy it afforded. Then, too, the state of spinsterhood no longer carried the stigma it once had. Karen knew women who were enjoying a whole new kind of life-style. They were out in the business world, being successful and single. Some lived intimately and openly with men to whom they were not married. A few Were even choosing to have babies without having husbands.

Downing the last of her Scotch, Karen sighed a sigh of defeat, knowing in her heart of hearts that, even though she had truly made peace with the way her life had turned out, she would gladly have given up Demion Five and her posh East Side apartment and her Rankin oil for just one day of being elbow-deep in diapers and dirty dishes and Tinker Toys. That was the irony of what Ted had come across town to suggest. Had he offered her Mrs. Peagram’s position instead of a marriage proposal, she might have been tempted to accept.

Karen laughed outright. Nothing less than two stiff drinks could have brought her to admit anything like that. But it was true. In just a few short months, she had become so involved in the lives of Gwen and Jessica and Amy that she couldn’t imagine a more rewarding assignment than to spend every single day with them, helping them to learn and grow and blossom into beautiful young women. It would go a long way toward making up for the children she could never have.

Sometimes she liked to imagine, when she sat on Amy’s bed in the evenings and spun out her stories, that these three little girls were indeed her very own. She couldn’t have loved them more. But to marry a man just so she could stay close to

his children? There seemed something not quite honest about that.

It wasn’t that she didn’t like Ted. On the contrary, she liked him enormously and probably even loved him, as a sister would love a brother. But the thought of having to share a bed with him, or let him see the ugly scars that screamed the truth of her youthful indiscretion, made her shiver all over again.

No, she would have to tell him again how flattered she was by his proposal, and then decline—even knowing it would mean she would lose the girls, because things would be too awkward after that. How many men who had been rejected would still want the woman who rejected them underfoot all the time?

Karen bit her lower lip and felt tears stinging her eyes. She was going to miss the children terribly, she knew. Not only that, she was truthful enough to admit that she was going to miss Ted terribly, too.

T
he photographic essay was finished and scheduled for production the second week in May. “Jesus,” Demelza breathed when she saw it. “I knew Nancy could take pictures, but I never dreamed Karen could write this kind of poetry. This is dynamite. We’ll order five thousand copies.”

“Do you think you can sell that many?” Nancy gasped.

“At least,” the co-owner of Demion Five told her. “What are you going to call it?”

After considerable debate, the two women had named the book
Four Seasons
because, after all, that was exactly what it was.

“Not to be confused with Vivaldi,” Nancy said.

“Or the restaurant,” Karen added.

Demelza priced the book at $49.95.

“My goodness,” the photographer exclaimed. “Isn’t that a bit steep?” Actually, she considered it outrageous.

“It’s a bargain,” Demelza told her. “Fifty Yanows for a dollar apiece? Fabulous presentation? Even without the poetry— which could be a lovely little book in its own right—it’s an absolute bargain.”

“I had no idea,” Nancy conceded, even though her single
prints, which were limited to a run of fifty, sold for as much as two hundred and fifty dollars each. But then, they were individually signed and numbered.

“You have to remember,” Demelza continued as though she had read the photographer’s mind, “it’s not so very different from marketing your prints. We’re still talking limited edition.”

“Five thousand doesn’t sound so limited to me,” Nancy observed.

“If we start promoting by the middle of July,” Demelza said, “we should be sold out by Christmas.”

“Sold out?” Nancy exclaimed. “Are you serious?”

Demelza smiled. “I suggest you start planning your next book.”

Nancy’s head was spinning and Karen was feeling as giddy as a newborn colt as the two women made their way over to Ninth Avenue and a new, highly touted Italian restaurant. They had promised themselves a night on the town when
Four Seasons
was finished.

“Why do I feel as though I’m in a leaky rowboat about to plunge over Niagara Falls?” the photographer wondered as they were shown to their table.

The poet chuckled. “Well, look at it this way,” she suggested. “It’s not your life you’re in danger of losing, just your credibility.”

“Thanks,” Nancy replied dryly. “That makes me feel lots better.”

It was a prix-fixe restaurant without a menu. The fare was whatever the chef felt like preparing that particular evening.
Reservations were required, and the place, which could accommodate only forty diners at a time, was booked at least two months in advance.

They discussed different ways of promoting the book through the minestrone, the in-store fanfare that Demion Five would be likely to launch over the hot and cold antipasto, and the incredible idea that their work could become a coffee-table necessity between bites of cheese ravioli.

It wasn’t until they had begun to dig into their veal scal-lopini that Karen casually dropped her bombshell.

“Ted asked me to marry him.”

The fork fell from Nancy’s hand and her uneven blue eyes almost popped from her head.

“And you waited through three courses to tell me?” she cried indignantly.

“Well, actually, it’s been a bit longer than that.”

“How long?”

Karen shrugged. “About a month.”

“A month?” Nancy squealed. “A whole month and you never breathed a word of it?”

“Well, I wasn’t sure how you’d take it.”

“How I’d take it? I’ve been hoping and praying for this for a year and a half now.”

Karen picked at her three-star food.

“The thing is, you see, I’ve never really thought of Ted in that way,” she mused.

“Oh?” Nancy said, and the word hung there between them.

“Don’t misunderstand. It’s not that I don’t care about him,” Karen insisted. “I do, a great deal, and you know how much I adore the girls. But, well, I wasn’t planning on getting married.”

“Why not?” was all Nancy could think of to ask.

“It’s just a choice I made, a long time ago,” Karen replied, gulping her Chianti.

Nancy had decided that Karen was ideal for her brother the first day the two women met at Demion Five, over tea and muffins and Paul Revere. She wasn’t sure what it was about the stylish boutique manager, among all the other women she had considered and rejected, that made her so positive so immediately, but the idea had caught on something inside her head and refused to be dislodged.

“Why would you make such a ridiculous choice as that?” she asked, as Karen toyed with her veal.

“I’ve been alone so long,” came the reply. “I’m set in my ways. I need my space.”

“It’s about a long time ago, isn’t it?” Nancy asked softly,
shrewdly. “About what happened to you—what you wrote about?”

Karen looked away. “It’s about a lot of things,” she murmured.

“But things can change,” Nancy insisted. “If we want them to.”

There was a pause then, neither of them knowing quite where to go next.

“I believe that everyone has two selves,” Karen said finally. “The public self that they show to the world and the private one that sustains them. For some people, the public self is merely an extension of the private self. For others, though, the public self is a mask for the private self, and without it they wouldn’t survive.”

Karen stopped there, and Nancy considered her words. This woman had been her closest friend for two years, in great part because they shared so many common interests, common values and common instincts, and Nancy had long ago seen beneath the self-assured facade.

“Sometimes sharing can be a means of survival,” she suggested.

“Not in this case,” Karen asserted. “You’ll just have to take my word for that.”

“I think you’re selling yourself short,” Nancy declared. “And Ted, too.”

“Perhaps I just have a different perspective.”

“Then why say anything at all?”

“Because you and Ted are so close and I don’t want this to come between you. And because you and I are close and I don’t want it to come between us, either.”

“He might not come to me.”

Karen thought about that for a moment. “Then go to him. There are so many good women out there. Don’t let him shut the door because one failed him.”

“He really cares about you, you know.”

A shadow flickered across Karen’s face. “He deserves better.”

The next evening, she dropped by for a bedtime story unannounced, choosing the tale of the princess and the pea. As
soon as she finished, she tucked the covers around Amy, kissed Jessica and Gwen good night, and went in search of Ted, finding him in the study, of course, hunched over his drafting table, the light from the lamp glinting off his golden hair.

“Are you busy?” she asked hesitantly.

His face lit up when he saw her.

“Never too busy for you,” he replied, snapping off the lamp and standing up to stretch his back muscles. Then he moved over to sit on the sofa. “Are the girls in bed?”

“One is, another is on her way and the third is probably on the telephone.”

“Come sit down,” he invited, patting the sofa.

Karen chose the chair across from him.

“You must have thought I was ignoring you,” she began.

“Nonsense,” he told her. “I know how hard you and Nancy have been working to finish the book.”

It would have been so much easier, she thought, if he weren’t always so nice and so understanding about everything.

“Well, I didn’t want you to think that I’d forgotten your… your kind offer.”

He grinned ar her, the gold flecks in his eyes dancing. “You make it sound like we’re talking about a job.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean to,” she apologized. “It’s just that I…”

Karen faltered. She had simply meant to thank him, decline his proposal, and then leave, as quickly as possible.

“It’s been such a short time,” she heard herself saying instead. “We barely know each other. I mean, we’re friends, and I really do like you, but…”

“… you don’t love me,” he finished for her.

She looked down at her hands twisted in her lap. “It’s not that so much,” she whispered, wishing she didn’t have to do this.
“But there are things about me, things you couldn’t possibly understand that—well, it isn’t you, you see, it’s that— well,
I can’t marry anybody.”

He looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, while she struggled with her hands.

“For a long time after my wife died,” he said finally, “I was convinced that I never wanted to get close to anyone again.
Losing her had hurt too much, and I knew I couldn’t risk going through anything like that a second time. So I built an invisible wall around myself, a bomb shelter, if you will, and I locked myself into it so I could be safe. I had my work, I had the girls, and I figured that was enough. But I was wrong, because all of life is a risk—and safe is as good as already dead.”

Karen pried her eyes away from her hands to glance up at him. He was sensitive and he was caring and he was trying so hard,
but he just didn’t understand.

“And for me, it’s the other way around,” she told him. “Safe is the only way I can live.”