"If you look and act like Joel, I'll be glad to see the end of you as well."
Oh, how could I say that to the man I loved? He shifted farther away, then refused to respond to my touch on his arm. "Chris, I'm sorry. I didn't mean that." My hand caressed his arm, then moved to slip inside his pajama jacket.
"I think it best if you keep your hands to yourself. I'm not in the mood now. Good night, Catherine, and remember, when you look for trouble, you usually find it."
I heard a distant door close. My illuminated wristwatch read three-thirty. Drawing on a robe, I slipped into Melodie's room and sat down to wait. It was four before she managed the long trip from the garage to her bedroom. Did she and Bart stop to embrace end kiss? Did they whisper love words they couldn't save for tomorrow? What else could be taking her so long? Faint hints of dawn approaching showed over the rimming mountains. I paced the floor of her room, growing terribly impatient. Finally I heard her coming. Stumbling in the door of her room, Melodie held her high-heeled silver slippers in one hand, and in her other hand she held a small silver clutch.
She was six months pregnant, but in her loosefitting black dress it was hardly noticeable. She jerked when she saw me rise from a chair, then choked as she backed away. "Well, Melodie," I said cynically, "don't you look pretty."
"Cathy, is Jory all right?"
"Do you really care?"
"You sound so angry with me. You look at me so hard--what have I done, Cathy?"
"As if you don't know," I said to her with angry emphasis, forgetting the tact I'd intended to use. "You slip out on a rainy night with my second son, and you come home hours later with red strawberry marks on your neck, with your lipstick smeared and your hair unbound, and still you ask, what . . . have . .. you . . . done. Why don't you tell me . . . what you have done."
She stared at me with huge eyes of disbelief, half- blended with guilt, with shame, but there was some element of hope there as well. "You've been like my mother, Cathy," she cried, her eyes tearing as they pleaded for my understanding. "Please don't fail me now--now when I need a mother more than I ever have before."
"But you forget, I am Jory's mother first and foremost. I am also Bart's mother. When you betray Jory, you betray me."
Melodie cried out again, pleading with me to listen to her.
"Don't turn away from me now, Cathy. I have no one but you who will understand. Certainly you of all people have to understand! I love Jory, I'll always love him--"
"And so you go to bed with Bart? What a fine way to show your love," I interrupted. My voice sounded cold and hard.
Her face lowered into my lap as her arms wrapped around my waist. She clung to me. "Cathy, please. Wait until you hear my side." Her face lifted, already stained with tears, black tears because of her mascara. Somehow this served only to make her look more pitifully vulnerable. "I'm part of the ballet world, Cathy, and you know what that means. We are the dancers who take music into our bodies and souls and make it visible for all to see, and for that we pay a price, a heavy price. You know the price. We dance with our souls bared for all to view and criticize if they will, and when the dance ends, and we hear the applause, and we accept the roses, and take the bows and the curtain calls, and hear the calls of bravo! bravo! finally we end up backstage to take off the makeup, to put on everyday mundane clothes, and then we know the best of what we are isn't real, only fantasy. We float on wings of sensuality so powerful nobody can realize as we do the pain of all that's so insensitive and cruel and brutal in reality."
She hesitated to gain
the strength to go on, while I sat stunned with her acuteness, for I knew the truth when I heard it--who would know better than I?
"Out there in the audience they think most of us are gay. They don't realize we're borne on the music, sustained by the music, made bigger than life by the sets, the applause, the adulation, and least of all do they realize that lovemaking is all that keeps us really nourished. Jory and I used to fall passionately into each other's arms the minute we were alone and only then could we find the release we needed to wind down enough to fall asleep. Now I have no release, nor does he. He won't listen to the music, and I can't turn it off."
"But you have a lover," I said weakly, fully understanding every word she'd said. Once I, too, had flown on the joyous wings of music, and drifted downward, sick because there was no one to love me and lend reality to the fantasy world I lo ed best of all.
"Listen, Cathy, please. Give e a chance to explain. You know how boring it is in t is house, with no one ever visiting, and the only time the phone rings it's Bart they want. You and Chris and Cindy were always in the hospital with Jory, while I was a coward and hung back, scared, so scared he'd see my fright. I tried to read, tried to entertain myself with knitting like you do, but I couldn't do it. I gave up and waited for the telephone to ring. Nobody from New York ever calls me. I took walks, pulled weeds from the garden. Cried in the woods, stared at the sky, watched the butterflies, and cried some more.
"Several nights after we found out that Jory would never walk or dance again, Bart came to my room. He closed the door behind him and just stood there looking at me. I was on the bed, crying as usual. I had ballet music playing, trying to recreate the feeling of how it had been with Jory, and Bart was there, staring at me with those dark, mesmerizing eyes. He stood waiting, just looking at me, until I stopped crying and he came closer to wipe the tears from my face. His eyes turned soft with love when I sat up and just stared at him I'd never seen his eyes so kind, so full of tenderness and compassion. He touched me. My cheek, my hair, my lips. Shivers began to race up and down my spine. He put his hands in my hair, stared into my eyes, and slowly, ever so slowly he inclined his head until his lips brushed over mine. I'd never guessed he could be so gentle. I'd always presumed he'd take a woman by brutal force. Maybe if he had touched me with rough, uncaring hands I would have turned away. But his gentleness was my undoing. He reminded me of Jory."
Oh, I didn't want to hear anymore. I had to stop her before I felt pity and sympathy for her, for Bart.
"I don't want to hear anymore, Melodic," I said coldly, jerking my head so I didn't have to look at the love marks that Jory might notice if she went to him now. "So now when Jory needs you most, you intend to fail him and turn to Bart," I said bitterly. "What a wonderful wife you are, Melodic."
She sobbed louder, covering her face with her hands.
"I remember your wedding day when you stood before the altar and made your vows of fidelity, for better or for worse--and the first worse that turns up, you find a new lover."
While she sniffled and tried to find better words to win me to her side, I thought of how lonely this mountainside home was, how isolated. And we'd left Melodic here thinking she was too upset to want to drive anywhere. Thoughtless about what she and Bart could be doing, never suspecting she'd turn to him-- the very one she'd seemed to dislike so much.
Still sniffling and crying, Melodic fiddled with her strap, while her washed-out eyes took on a certain wariness. "How can you condemn me, Cathy, when you have done even worse?"
Stung, I rose to leave, feeling that my legs had turned to lead along with my heart. She was right. I wasn't any better. I, too, had failed, and more than once, to do the right thing. "Will you forget Bart and stay away from him, and convince Jory you still love him?"
"I do still love Jory, Cathy. It may sound strange, but I love Bart in a different way, a strange way that has nothing at all to do with the way I feel about Jory. Jory was my childhood sweetheart and my best friend. His younger brother was someone I never really liked, but he's changed, Cathy, he has, really. No man who really hates women can make love as he does . . ."
My lips tightened. I stood in the open doorway condemning her, as once my grandmother had condemned me with her pitiless steel-gray eyes alone telling me I was the worst kind of sinner.