Valentine (15 page)

Jill held her hand up to his lips. “It’s okay, Nate. You didn’t know.”

Their hands clasped tightly together, Jill and Nate turned to stare at the new flowers in the vase on the dining table. She felt his other warm, gentle hand come up to stroke the back of her hair.

“I won’t let anything happen to you,” he whispered, still staring at the roses.

Mary Daley broke the tension with her patented hearty laugh. “And they said chivalry was dead!”

In a moment, they were all laughing. Then, to change
the subject once and for all, Jill said, “I wonder how Tara and Doug are doing. . . .”

“I’m thirty-two,” he said, watching the beautiful actress across from him. “Atlanta. Dad was a podiatrist, Mom a homemaker. Both gone. No siblings. Prep school, then NYU. Art major, specializing in photography. Stupid lab job for Kodak: two years. Assistant to Juan Vega: three years. Loaded cameras, developed, traveled with him to fashion shoots all over the world. Favorite spot: Australia, the northern coast, near the Great Barrier Reef. Favorite model: Stacy Green.”

He paused after that, waiting for Tara’s reaction.

“Stacy Green,” she said, her eyes widening. “Stacy? The girl who—”

“Yes,” he whispered, cutting her off before she could say more. Then, because something was expected, because he couldn’t just leave it at that, he added, “She was my wife.”

She stared. “Oh, gosh, I’m sorry.”

“Yeah,” he said, smiling bleakly over at her. “So. That’s my life story, I guess. Well, almost: the last book I read was a biography of Richard Avedon.”

Not for nothing is she a gainfully employed actress, he thought. Sensing instinctively that his murdered wife was not a topic for dinner table conversation, Tara dropped it immediately.

“Is there any more champagne?” she asked.

He checked. “No.”

“Let’s get another bottle.
My
treat.”

Jill, in her rather desperate search for conversational subjects that did not include her predicament, turned now to Mary. “When are you going to start that book you’re always threatening to write?”

Mary blushed and shrugged. “Oh, God, I don’t know. I’m doing so well on the other side of the desk—”

“Oh, please!” Jill said, laughing. “Don’t use that as an excuse. Yes, you’re a wonderful agent, and I hope you’ll always be
my
agent. But that’s not really what you intended to do with your life, remember? That speech you gave me at our first lunch together, right after you accepted me as a client and sold
Darkness
in a matter of minutes. Something about envying me, and about Emily Brontë . . .?”

“What?” Nate, now stretched out on pillows on the floor between them, sat up. “What about Emily Bronte?”

Jill giggled and reached for her coffee mug. “Oh, she has this monologue—”

“Fink!” Mary cried, also giggling. “Okay, Nate, just for you. When I was, let’s see, fifteen, my parents rented this summer house on Fire Island. I spent most of my time there sunbathing with these other girls I met, you know, trying to attract boys, or fishing with
my dad and my two brothers. I hate fishing, but they still do it every chance they get. Anyway, there was this one week in August where it rained every day, so boy-watching and fishing were out. I looked around this house we were in for something to do, and I found all these old books on a shelf in the living room. Dusty, leatherbound things. Mom found me going through them, so she looked through them all and pulled one down and handed it to me. Told me to read it: it was her favorite. Well, I was just curious enough about my mom to wonder what could possibly be her favorite book. I’d never even
seen
her with a book, and she said, ‘Try having three kids, and see how much time you get to read,’ or something. So, I curled up in the windowseat and gave it a look.

“It was
Wuthering Heights
. I sat there for three rainy afternoons, lost on these moors with these incredibly real people. I think I married Phil because he looks a little like Laurence Olivier in the movie version. Cut to the chase: that day to this, I’ve wanted to do that. To write, to create something real on paper, with nothing but language and my own imagination. To make other people feel something of what I felt in that windowseat in that rented house that summer on Fire Island, when it rained.”

Mary smiled and picked up her brandy. Nate stared, entranced. After an appropriate moment of silence, Jill clapped her hands.

“Brava!” she cried. “I just
love
that Emily Brontë speech!”

“You’re making fun of me.”

“Oh, no,” Jill assured her friend. “I’m perfectly serious. I have the same story, only it was
Rebecca
, not
Wuthering Heights
, and it was my bedroom on Central Park West, and it wasn’t raining that I remember. I was fourteen. And, yes, Nate looks a little like Laurence Olivier in the movie version—boy, that Olivier certainly had his pick of the best parts, didn’t he? But you describe it much better than I could, Mary. I think you’re a writer. And I think it’s time you started writing.”

She watched with genuine pleasure as Mary Daley, who was not given to blushing, did just that. Then she looked down at Nate, who lay at her feet looking up at her. She recognized the expression on his face: he was still thinking about the valentine cards and the roses. With a smile, she reached down to push a lock of black hair out of his eyes. “How about you, babe? When did you know you were going to be a painter?”

He sat up, the troubled look immediately evaporating. “I told you about that, Jill. Our first dinner together. Lincoln Center. Remember?”

Jill winked. “Of course I do, but Mary wasn’t there. She told you about herself; now it’s your turn to reciprocate.” She turned to her friend, laughing. “I swear! Sometimes he can be such a clam!”

Nate shrugged. Leaning back so his head rested
against Jill’s legs, he said, “Monet. He’s my favorite, I guess. Actually, I was big on English, too, until I took this course, history of art. It was pretty dull stuff, you know, slide shows and all that, until the day we got to the Impressionists. One of the slides was Monet’s
Water Lilies
#2.” He sat forward, his body suddenly tense. “I wish I could explain it the way Mary did. From the moment I saw that painting, I was hooked. I read every book on Impressionism I could find. I would stare at the pictures for hours: Monet, Manet, Degas—God,
all
of them! These people didn’t paint what was in front of them; they painted what they
felt
about what was in front of them! And I knew I had to do that, too. I became obsessed with it, with getting my feelings into the brush and onto the canvas.” He smiled, and his body relaxed again. “I’ve been trying to do that ever since. Not to re-create, but to
describe
.” He held out his right hand before him, staring at it. “With this.”

Mary nodded. “You love it, don’t you?”

Still facing Mary, he reached up absently and stroked Jill’s calf. “It’s my second-greatest love in the world.”

Jill felt the warm blush wash over her face, aware that Mary was smiling at her over Nate’s head. She leaned down to kiss his hair.

“So,” Mary said, mimicking her friend’s words of half an hour ago, “I wonder how Tara and—what was his name, Doug?—are doing. . . .”

He watched her go into the building. She turned to wave just before the inner door closed behind her. Then she was gone.

It wasn’t snowing again tonight, and the brisk wind was making the bitter cold even colder. He turned up the collar of his coat before stepping out into the street. He crossed it and stood on the opposite sidewalk, looking up.

She had been nice; a perfect date, really. She had steered the conversation expertly away from the past—specifically
his
past—and embellished dinner and dessert with amusing chatter about her work in television and intelligent questions about photography. They’d actually laughed a great deal, and he’d mentioned Nate’s invitation to go to his studio tomorrow night. She had readily accepted. She’d saved the best for last: when the evening was drawing to a close, and he was wondering if some sort of sexual overture might be expected, she yawned prettily and said something vague about an early-morning rehearsal. So,
that
pressure was off, too.

Yes, he thought now, a perfect date.

After a few moments, the lights came on in the picture window on the sixth floor. He nodded to himself, gazing up through the bare branches of the tree in front of her building at her lights, and the lights on the seventh floor directly above her.

Jillian Talbot is home, he thought, and Nate is probably with her.

Jillian Talbot . . .

He stood there for a long time, looking up at the lights, remembering, bracing himself for tomorrow night.

“Stacy Green?!” Mary cried.

“Oh, my God!” Jill added. She stared at Tara, now comfortably ensconced next to Nate on the floor with a snifter of brandy. She’d stopped at her apartment only long enough to get out of the lovely but uncomfortable blue sequin number Jill had helped her pick out. Now, in ripped jeans and her kid brother’s college football jersey, she still managed to look stunning.

“Can you believe?!” the actress cried. “There I am in my fancy dress with my look-at-me hair, doing my best Michelle Pfeiffer imitation, and he hits me with that. I, like, wanted to just go home right then and there. Stacy Green!”

The three women looked at each other, shaking their heads in disbelief.

“Who’s Stacy Green?” Nate asked.

At that, they turned their incredulity on him.

“You’re kidding, right?” Mary asked.

“Sorry,” he said. “Never heard of her.”

All three women started talking at once, so Nate raised a hand to stop them.

“Hey, it was Tara’s date, so let her tell it.”

“Okay,” Tara said. “Stacy Green was this incredibly beautiful fashion model. You used to see her face everywhere. Short dark hair, big brown eyes—she looked kind of like Jill, come to think of it. Anyway, she was sort of the well-scrubbed, all-American girl, selling toothpaste and com flakes and lemon-scented shampoo in those off moments when she wasn’t on the cover of
Sports Illustrated
. Then, about three years ago, she was stabbed to death in her house in East Hampton. Like, nobody could believe it. And
then
this whole story started coming out, about drugs and wild parties and lovers in the Mafia. The all-American girl, right? And—as if it weren’t already sordid enough—it turns out she was
married
. All the news I followed just said he was some famous photographer’s assistant who’d only been married to her for about a year, and that he and Stacy were already estranged at the time of the murder. I don’t remember if they ever mentioned the husband’s name, but I can tell you now: it was your friend, Doug Baron!”

“Jesus!” Nate muttered. Then he looked quickly up at the actress. “I’m sorry, Tara. I had no idea. Was he—I mean, did they—”

“Oh, no,” Tara said quickly. “He wasn’t the one. He was miles away at the time. There was this big investigation, and they finally arrested some sexy-looking Mafia hit man. One of her lovers, apparently
One of many, if you can believe the tabloids. The story was that he’d just found out she was also entertaining some industrialist, or something. And there was a big inquest, or pretrial hearing, or whatever they call it, and they let the hit man go. Lack of evidence, if I remember, and some buddies who swore he was with them at the time, blah blah blah. . . .” She trailed off, took a deep breath, and finished on a dramatic note. “So, nobody was ever tried for her murder!”

Nate stared. “God, how awful for him.”

Jill turned to him now, finally able to ask what she’d been wondering for several minutes. “How did you manage to miss this, Nate?”

He shrugged. “Three years ago I was in art school in Chicago, learning to paint.
Trying
to paint. I vaguely remember something about some cover girl being killed, but that’s all. I was becoming an artist: World War Three could have been declared, and none of the students in my school would have noticed.”

There was nothing left for them all to do now but look around at each other, shaking their heads. At last, Nate broke the silence.

“Boy,” he said, “I wonder how Doug feels about all that now.”

Tara grinned. “Ask him yourself. He and I are coming to your place tomorrow night!”

Everyone stared at her.