Land of Dreams: A Novel (29 page)

I knew there was a quip to be made, but could not think of one, as the estrangement of his pulling away was still fresh in my mind.

“I am so sorry, Stan,” I said. “I never meant for any of this to happen.”

“Neither did I,” he said. I was shocked—and a little put out. He had more or less told me that the experience had not been so bad.

“Well, they let you go and . . .”

“Not that,” he said waving his hands irritably. Then he opened his long-fingered musician’s hands and, in the kind of expressive gesture I had come to recognize as his alone, curved them into two wide bowls pointing skyward and said—shouted almost, “This, Ellie—THIS!”

He meant us.

“I thought we had agreed to be friends, Stan.”

Even as I said it I heard how small and curt and meaningless it was.

“Oh, Ellie,” he said. He put his hands down by his sides and shook his head. “I have enough friends.”

Just as I had begun to realize how hurt I was, I felt a wild sob drawing up from my stomach.

“I thought you liked me,” I said.

I had not realized how much I wanted this man in my life. Now he was rejecting me.

“Can you really be that blind, Ellie Hogan? Can you honestly tell me you cannot see that I am hopelessly, stupidly, in love with you?”

It was less a declaration of love and more an accusation.

In that spirit, he waved me aside and turned his face from me, as if afraid to look at me.

“Of course you are playing with me.” He was getting angry, his temper was rising and he faced me full on. “This is the game—this is an entertainment for women like you . . .”

“Women like me?” I was getting angry now. What on earth was he accusing me of? “Just what do you mean by that?”

“Oh, you—you seductress types, mesmerizing us poor, hapless males with your acumen, your art, your exceptional beauty. You think you can snap your fingers and we are there to do your bidding!”

Seductress? Exceptional beauty? Was he talking about me? Yes, of course I had known that Stan was a little bit in love with me. Perhaps I had manipulated that, but I had no idea his feelings ran so deep.

“You have made me weak,” he said, “and I am
not
a weak man.”

I could see that. Stan was perhaps ten, maybe fifteen years older than I was, his hair was white and, while his elegant demeanor favored intellect over brawn, it made his strength all the more potent and interesting to a woman like me.

“Get out of my house,” he finished as he turned his back to me.

I should have bowed my head and scuttled out of the door after such a pasting, but instead I felt myself becoming filled with rage. How dare he turn his back to me! All I could feel was the blood pumping through my whole body as I blurted out, without giving the slightest thought to dignity or consequence, “You think you’re such a brave man—yet you turn your back on a woman. You don’t have the
courage
to seduce me.”

He turned quickly and his eyes were sharp as he regarded me for a moment, perhaps searching my face to see if I was mocking him. I wasn’t. Stan had called me a beautiful seductress. I may have been satisfied with his friendship, but I had known from the moment I met him that this accomplished man desired me. In the heat emanating from my body I realized now that I didn’t want to lose his regard. He was right—I had wielded my power over him and now I was going to do it again, but in the way that he wanted. I would show him what a beautiful seductress could do.

I walked, quite deliberately, across the room and placed my sharp pickup keys down hard on the polished surface of his precious Steinway. Then, scraping the clawed feet of the piano stool across the delicate parquet floor so that it squeaked in pain, I perched myself on the edge of it and, supporting myself on either side, I leaned slightly backward, arching my back, and said, “A strong man doesn’t merely talk about love, Stanislaw.”

He did not hesitate.

Stan’s kiss was a revelation: assertive and hard. It was also short-lived because it brought about in me such a craving that I cut him short, clawing at his shirt and tearing at my own. My body was starving for love and I strained to his every touch, calling out for more. Writhing on the polished wooden floor, naked and exposed in the huge room, he ministered to me with a masterful strength and a deliberate calm that let me know he had had many, many women in his life. Neither of us were inexperienced; our lovemaking was seasoned with demands and certainties; different from the confused, needy passions of young love, but no less sweet nonetheless.

When I was satisfied, Stan turned me and I bent naked across his beloved piano. Holding my breasts in his warm hands, he rocked me in the soft breeze coming in from the open balcony doors. I looked out at Hollywood and its heroes sleeping beneath us, while my composer made love to me like god to goddess looking down on our kingdom. When he finally dropped his face into the nape of my neck, I turned and held his face in my hands and laughed with sheer delight.

“Who would have thought it?” I said.

“You don’t believe my prowess?” he said. “Will I prove myself to you again?”

“I was promised coffee,” I said.

Stan kissed me sweetly on the forehead before going to the kitchen.

As I started to gather up my clothes, he called, “You can use my robe, if you like—it’s on the back of the bedroom door.”

As I reached for the blue cotton robe, I had a flashback. I had worn John’s woolen shirts around the cottage house in Ireland; Charles used to wear my old silk robe with the embroidered peonies, when coming out of the shower, and sometimes kept it on all morning just to amuse me.

Borrowing Stan’s robe would indicate a moment of domesticity. This was not what I wanted.

I got fully dressed and presented myself for coffee.

Stan was wearing his shorts and shirt. (His legs, I noted, were surprisingly athletic.) He seemed disappointed that I was already dressed.

“I have no food in—of course, I will call Greenblatt’s and ask them to deliver . . .”

“No, Stan—coffee is fine. I have to get back home anyway. The boys, you know?”

“Of course, of course . . . ,” he said.

We both took a mouthful of coffee.

“So this is it,” he said, “we make love—you leave.”

“I thought it was what you wanted?”

“The making love? Of course. The leaving afterward? Not so much.”

“I have to get back to . . .”

“. . . the family—of course, of course. To Bridie and the boys. Not to me; not to Stan.”

“They are my sons; you can’t expect me to—”

“I expect nothing, Ellie, but I have a problem. You see, I love you. There. But you cannot love me back.”

“How can you say that after . . .”

“. . . after what, Ellie. After we made love?”

I felt somewhat exasperated, but also strangely frightened.

“Again, I thought that was what you wanted.”

“To make love? That’s it? Ellie, I am a rich man, a clever man. You think there is a shortage of women I can make love to, huh? In this town? You are crazy—I can have any woman I want.”

“I thought I was special.”

“Don’t shirk me, Ellie—you are smarter than that.”

I was. I knew exactly what he was driving at, but it was sending such a wave of panic through me.

“I can make love with any woman, but can I laugh with her? Can she understand me? Can I admire and respect her, and be happy to spend every waking moment of each day and every dreaming hour of the night with her? Can I love her children because she loves them? Can I eat the lumpy Irish bread of her adoptive mother because I am so hopelessly in love that I have lost myself . . . ?”

I laughed despite myself when he said that about Bridie’s bread, then I thought,
Please—please, let this not be happening. Just when I thought everything was going to work out just fine; just when I was starting to feel in charge of things again.

“I have fallen in love with you, Ellie. From the moment we met, I wanted to be with you. I had heard it would happen once in my life, but I got to this age and I thought it had eluded me. On the train, I saw you sitting there in my seat and straightaway I thought, ‘This is my woman.’ We talked, and oh, I was so certain then, but I was afraid—you know? I have been alone all my life, so I thought, ‘Let her go, and put it in the lap of the gods. I have met my woman—now she is gone. But at least I can say she is out there somewhere.’ Then, when I saw you at the studio, I thought then, ‘This was meant to be.’ ”

“Why didn’t you say anything?” I asked.

“What would you have thought of me—stupid old man to mock? You made it clear you did not want us to be lovers.”

“Things have changed now, Stan . . .”

“Because we have made love, Ellie? I am not a boy; my desire does not define me. You may challenge my desires, Ellie, but I am a man—and I am defined by higher passions than my body alone. Making love to you was wonderful—how could it have been any other way? To give love to you, it’s all I want; but I want to make love to you—not just with my hands and with my body, but with my mind, my heart, in everything I say and do. Every moment we are apart it hurts, you know? I thought we had something special between us.”

“We do,” I said.

“But not love,” he interjected.

I did not know what to say. I could not say, “I love you.” Not in the same way that I had said it to John—or even Charles, although I was less certain in my love for him. Stanislaw was not like any man I had ever met. He was extraordinary, and his friendship enriched and enlightened me. It made me happy to be in his company—and making love, I had recently discovered, was not a problem! However, the certainty was not there; and love without certainty was useless. I had to love him back with the same degree of passion that he felt for me. In my marriage to Charles the love had been unequal, and the marriage was a disaster. I would not have that happen again. Even if I had room in my life for another relationship, which I most certainly did not.

“No,” I said, “I can’t love you like you want.”

“All I want is to be allowed to love you, Ellie. You are the great love of my life.”

“I can’t let you do that, Stan,” I said.

“Why not?” he asked.

I didn’t answer him, because I did not know why. All I knew was that the idea of it sent me into such a panic that I simply grabbed my truck keys off the top of the piano and ran out of the door.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-E
IGHT

It was barely lunchtime when I got back. Freddie would be working and he had arranged to drop Leo off at the studio, where he was attending a song-and-dance class. Although his contract was yet to be renewed, Leo was still in the care of the studio and attending classes there. I was happy enough that he had some structure to his days until I decided what was to be done with regard to us returning to New York in September. I would, in all likelihood, have to find a new school for him, and he would probably have to be held back a year, due to all this movie palaver. I already had Maureen investigating day schools in the city that might accommodate both boys.

I was expecting to find Bridie alone in the house, so I entered with some trepidation, fearing the old woman might intuit what I had been up to. She had a sixth sense for immoral behavior, especially from me.

Instead of Bridie, Tom was sitting on the sofa in his pajamas, lifting spoonfuls of jam with his fingers directly from the jar onto slices of bread.

“What on earth are you doing, Tom?”

“Eating breakfast,” he said, as if this were an everyday occurrence.

“Why aren’t you in school?”

“Bridie said I didn’t have to go today.”

“What do you mean?”

“She said it was Mr. Flannery’s birthday—and we were having a party.”

Oh Jesus! Mr. Flannery had been dead for fifteen years.

“Where is she?” I said, rushing from the kitchen to her bedroom. She was gone.

“She said Mr. Flannery was coming on the train and she was going to meet him. She said to wait here, like a good boy, until they got back and then we’d have cake.”

Oh, good God in heaven, how had I not seen this coming?

“She didn’t make a cake. She usually makes a cake when it’s somebody’s birthday. I asked if she’d made a cake and she said she had . . .”

My head was fit to explode. Where the hell had Bridie gone? What was going on?

“. . . but I looked everywhere and I couldn’t find one, so I don’t think—”

“SHUT UP!” I shouted at him. Tom immediately started to cry.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Tom, I’m sorry.” I grabbed him and put his head to my chest. The poor child wasn’t even dressed. He knew something was wrong. “I just need to think.”

This was as bad as when Leo had disappeared—maybe worse, because Bridie was old. I tapped my forehead with my fist: how had I not seen this coming?

“How long ago did Bridie leave?” I asked Tom.

He shrugged and wriggled out of my hold.

“Okay. Now, you go and get dressed, there’s a good boy, then we’ll go and find Bridie.”

Tom was mad at me, for shouting at him, and probably for leaving him alone with Bridie that morning, having abandoned him the day before as well. I kept trying to do the right thing, yet I kept upsetting everyone around me.

I guessed that Bridie might have been gone for two hours—three at the most. How far could she have got? She wasn’t fast on her feet, she certainly didn’t drive and I was not sure she would even know how to hail a taxi in Los Angeles. The roads were wide and long and the sidewalks narrow. This was not a city with complicated street networks; she could only have gone in one direction or the other, and Hollywood was not a walker’s town—it was a driver’s town. I was sure to find her in a car. I decided to get out and look for her straightaway. I could stop into a police station and report her missing if I had no luck driving around, looking for her myself. I was reluctant to call on our neighbors, because I did not want to invade Bridie’s privacy by letting them know she had gone “wandering.” She was a proud woman—and I was proud on her behalf. I had known Bridie since I was little more than a child myself and I had yet to meet a stronger, more reliable, more steadfast person. If her mind had weakened with age, along with her body, that was nobody’s business but her own—and now mine; the least I could do was keep it that way. I was terrified, but I knew I had to stay calm.