The Nicholas Linnear Novels (15 page)

“Meditating, no doubt,” Terry said. He picked up the phone, stabbed the intercom button. He spoke softly and briefly to someone on the third floor, informing him of the new client. He cradled the receiver. “He’ll be another twenty minutes at least,” he said to her. He stared at her long black gleaming hair. Brushed back and unbound, it rushed like a night-dark stream over her shoulders, down her back in a thick cascade, ending at the tops of her buttocks. She started and he said, “What is it?”

Her head turned. “Nothing. I just felt you staring at me.”

He smiled. “But I do that all the time.”

“At night, yes.” Her eyes stayed serious, her pouty lips firm and straight. “Don’t do it here, Terry. Please. You know how I feel about that. We work together and we—” Her eyes met his and for just an instant he felt his heart lurch within him. Was that fear he had glimpsed there lurking like a prowler in the night?

He reached out a hand, pulled her gently toward him. This time she did not resist and, as if seeking warmth, she allowed herself to be cradled, her arms tight around him. She felt safer here, with him so close.

“Are you okay, Ei?”

She nodded wordlessly against his muscles but felt the tears welling up like deep pools within her eyes. Her throat constricted and she could not think why. “I want to come over tonight,” she heard herself say and immediately felt better.

“How about every night?” Terry said.

It was not the first time he had said this, though it had been in different ways before. Eileen’s response had always been the same, yet now she knew the source of the churning inside her, knew that when he asked her again this evening, as he surely would, her answer would be yes. “Tonight,” she said softly. “Ask me tonight.” She dabbed at her eyes. “When should I come over?”

“I’m having dinner with Vincent. Why don’t you join us?”

She smiled thinly. “Uh uh. There’s too much you guys talk about that I have no interest in.”

“We’ll cut that all out tonight. Promise.”

She laughed then. “No, no. I don’t begrudge you that.
Bushido
is important to you.”

“It’s part of our heritage. We wouldn’t be Japanese without it. I’m not yet that assimilated into Western culture—I’ll never be—that I can forget the history of my people—” He paused, seeing her shudder, her eyes flutter closed.

“My people,” her words a ghostly echo. “
Bushido.
I shall die for my Emperor and my beloved homeland.” Tears welled from beneath her lowered lids, turning to minute rainbows. Behind them were galaxies of pain. “We survived the great firestorm in March”—her whispered words like the shouted cries of the dying—“when the American armada dropped almost three quarters of a million bombs filled with napalm; when two hundred thousand Japanese civilians were roasted or boiled alive; when half of Tokyo was cindered; when, the following morning, as you walked down the street, the wild wind took the charcoaled corpses and blew them away like dust.”

“Ei, don’t—”

“We moved out, then, away from the war, to Hiroshima in the south but, quite soon, my parents, terrified by all the rumors, packed me off to my grandparents who lived in the mountains.” She looked at his face without really seeing it. “There was never enough food and slowly we began to die of starvation. Oh, it was nothing very dramatic, merely a kind of all-pervading lassitude. I would sit outdoors for hours unable to think of anything. It took me forever to comb my hair because my arms would hurt, keeping them lifted like that. That was for me. But for my mother and my father there was Hiroshima and the light that fell from the sky.” Her eyes focused and she looked at him steadily. “What is there for me but shame and hurt? What
we
did and what, in turn, was done to us. My poor country.”

“That’s all forgotten now,” he said.

“No, it’s not. And you, of all people, should understand that. It’s you and Vincent and Nick who talk constantly of the spirit of our history. How can you celebrate the one without feeling shame at the other? Memory is selective, not history. We are what we are. You can’t arbitrarily excise the bad, pretend it never existed. Nick doesn’t do that, I know. He remembers; he feels the hurt, still. But I don’t think you and Vincent do.”

He wanted to tell her of his recent thoughts but he found that he could not. Not now, at least. It was the wrong time, the wrong place, and he had a highly developed sense of these things. Tonight, perhaps. Tonight he would see that it all came down. He watched the diffuse, artist’s light on her satin-skinned face, her long slender neck, her slim compact body. It was impossible to think of her as being forty-one; she did not look a day over thirty, even in harsh light.

It was just about two years since they had first met, a year since they had become clandestine lovers—at least as far as those at the
dōjō
were concerned; of course all their friends knew. In that time she had never asked for more, never wanted to know about the future. It was he who, lately, had felt the need for more. And recently he had become aware that, at least partially, the ending of his love affair with kenjutsu had been, simultaneously, the beginning of his love affair with Ei. Now, it seemed to him with pristine logic, that there was nothing more important in life than being with her. The
dōjō
, which he had opened nearly five years ago, was well established and he was more than satisfied that it could run itself for a short while. Time enough for a marriage and a long, leisurely honeymoon somewhere far away. Paris, perhaps. Yes, definitely Paris. It was Ei’s favorite city, he knew, and he had never been there. All that remained was for him to ask her. Tonight. Would she say yes this time? He suspected that she would and his heart fairly danced.

“Tonight,” he said. “I’ll be back by nine, ten if Vincent gets stuck in Island traffic on the way in. But you have a key and some of your clothes are there. Come anytime. But bring champagne. Dom Perignon. I’ll bring the caviar.”

It would have been easy for Eileen to ask what this was all for but she felt that it would spoil the moment. There was, after all, plenty of time to find out what she already knew in her heart.

“All right,” she said, her eyes very large now.

He turned, abruptly remembering. “I’d better get upstairs and prepare the
bokken.
Soon Hideyoshi will be through with the others and I want to be ready.”

Justine’s eyes were completely dry. This was something new for her but it brought her no solace. Not when the anxiety had come again, a fierce knot in her stomach, a pressure on her chest, constricting her breathing, refusing to go away. There is nothing wrong, she repeated over and over to herself. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. She shivered, feeling cold. Her fingers were like ice.

She stood in the darkened living room of Nicholas’ house, staring out at the mist and rain on this dismal Sunday. Out there, somewhere, was the sea, curling endlessly, but the spiteful rain hid it from her as if it were withholding a bright toy on Christmas morning. She thought about going out there, piercing the mist, finding the ocean for herself, but she lacked, at this moment, the necessary fortitude to brave the weather.

Oh, my God! Oh, my God!

She whirled from the sleeted windowpane, running blindly through the house, groping for the bathroom, and there, at last, she collapsed in front of the toilet, retching.

Her body shook and sweat stood out on her forehead, rolling down into her eyes in tiny stinging rivulets.

After an endless time, when she could no longer stand the stink, she reached out a hand to flush the toilet. It seemed to take all the energy she possessed. But, after that, she somehow found the strength to stand up and bend over the sink. The cold running water fell on her face like bullets from a gun. She shivered, opened her mouth to get the sour taste out. She could not swallow.

Sitting on the edge of the porcelain tub, feeling the cool bar of it striking across her buttocks, she curled over, putting her head in her arms, her arms on her knees.

She rocked back and forth, thinking.
I can’t do it. I can’t.

It was her mind now that did the vomiting up. The history of the betrayals unfurling like a hated flag above her head, blotting out all other signs of life. All her men. Timothy, who had been the first, the high school basketball coach.
I’ll be gentle, Justine,
and thrusting savagely into her over and over, enjoying the expression of pain on her face, her crying out into the perfect sterile symmetry of the darkened gym; watching his eyes burn with her instant’s fear. Then Jodie, the Harvard man with the laughing eyes and the cruel soul.
I want to be a surgeon, Justine
—and already was. Eddie, who was seeing her and his wife on alternate nights; there was nothing he wanted but them both. And then, in San Francisco, there had been Chris. They had come together, igniting like a bonfire, insatiable, insensate to everything and everyone around them. Or was that only the way it had been with her? She could not bear that truth, even now. Dredging it up was like an act of cruel masochism, like opening the edges of a slowly healing wound and probing for the nerve.

She had used her father’s name then—and his money. God only knew how much; surely she did not. Wasn’t it the money that had made her weak and lazy? So easy to pin down the blame, neatly and resolutely; coming back to her father. How she hated him for giving her—those things: his name (she always wrote the word out on the screen of her mind so that she could make the deliberate typo
fame
which was, as far as she was concerned, no error) and his money. Oh, he wasn’t like her. He had an accounting held indelibly somewhere; not that the amount could ever bother him; it was, after all, a tax deduction.

God, this thing makes me nasty and bitter, she thought. As if it’s a physical malady that manufactures bile as a byproduct. She gagged again but, wrapping her arms around her stomach, she held herself together; there was nothing more to come up; she was empty yet the anxiety made her feel as if she had swallowed a two-by-four whole.

I can’t do it
, she repeated to herself.
I can’t.

She had taken his money—so much of it—not thoughtlessly but willfully. Because she hated him. But she found that getting it was like having the goblet of wine that was always full no matter how much you drank. What had mattered so much to her was of absolutely no concern to him.

Of course it had mattered very much to Chris, who was the one, after all, who made use of most of the money. At least that was how it had all come down that day when her father had flown in, had come to her house with the battery of local detectives he had hired. It had all been there for her to read in the report. The thing had so shocked her that she had hardly been able to utter a word let alone protest as her father had his men gather up her clothes, all her possessions. He left them to it, hustling her outside and into the waiting limo. She had not said a word all during the flight back east. Her father, sitting across the aisle in the private Lear jet, was too engrossed in reports to notice. She found that she was not hungry, nor was she tired. She was nothing.

It seemed like a long time ago now. Years could be like lifetimes, never like days. This is what came to her on the plane ride back to New York: she saw their old country house, the one in Connecticut that she had loved so much with the stonewalls covered with green creeping ivy, the high leaded-glass windows, the flagstone patio and, across the emerald back lawn, beyond the dirt path, the brick red of the stables, smelling of hay and manure and horse sweat. How she loved that place; it reminded her of England, somehow. Not like the new place on Gin Lane out on the Island. Her father had sold the old house just after Justine’s mother had died, paying two and a half million for the estate along one of the most famous streets in all of America.

It was Easter time in Connecticut. She was eight. Gelda had some friends over whom she did not like or just did not want to be with. Her mother was gone, having driven into town to do some shopping. She wandered through the enormous old place, the large bright friendly rooms filled, here and there, by the busy servants preparing for a formal party later that evening. Peering out the window, she discovered that there were a number of cars in the semicircular driveway and, as she went down the long curve of the main stairway to the ground floor, she could just make out voices coming from behind the closed wooden doors to the library. Her hand on the knob, turning, and she pushed.

“Daddy?”

Her father had indeed been inside. He was with a group of men, discussing matters that had no meaning for her.

“Justine,” he said with a frown, “you must see that I am busy at the moment.” He made no move toward her.

“I just wanted to talk to you.” She felt utterly dwarfed by the circle of men. One of them shifted uncomfortably on the couch, the leather creaking under his weight.

“This is not the time. Shall I fetch Clifford.” The latter had the form but not the inflection of a question.

She looked around mutely.

Her father reached up and pulled a cord. In just a moment, the manservant appeared.

“Yes, sir?”

“Clifford,” her father said. “See that she is kept occupied until Mrs. Tomkin returns, will you? I can’t have any more interruptions. Doesn’t Gelda have some friends here?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, that’s the place for her then, eh?”

“Very good, sir.” He turned. “Come along, Miss Justine—”

But she had already turned, running down the long high hallway, slamming out through the front door. She could hear Clifford clattering away behind her. She liked Clifford. She spent a lot of her time with him, just talking. But right now she did not feel like being with anyone.

She sped around the side of the house, headed for the stables and was quite out of breath by the time she got there.

They had six horses. Arabians. Her favorite was King Said. He was her horse, to all intents and purposes. But of course the children, though already good riders, were not allowed on horseback or even in the stables without an adult to supervise.