The kiss lost its sweetness, becoming dark and desperate. His breathing grew more ragged, and she arched her back to press her hips closer. Sweat broke out on his body, mingling with her own, and suddenly his hands were all over her. Rough, clumsy hands—at her breasts and waist, on her hips and buttocks, pushing inside her.
There was something so desperate about his touch. She was frightened for him, frightened for herself. All the frustration, the years of denial, formed a fiery ball in her chest. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and met his fierceness with her own. “Love me, Jake,” she whispered. “Please love me.”
His fingers dug into the soft skin of her thighs, spreading them far apart, and his weight settled between them. Without warning, he thrust deep and hard within her. She cried out. He grabbed her head between his hands and covered her mouth with his own. He kissed her desperately as he drove inside her. She came at once, breaking apart in a joyless orgasm. He didn’t stop. He stayed with her, tongue in her mouth, hands in her hair, pushing harder…faster…letting out a harsh, anguished cry as he spilled himself deep within her.
He pulled away as soon as it was over. She lay staring at the ceiling. His desperation…his dark silence…the bleakness of their lovemaking…His book was done, and he’d just said good-bye.
Love me, Jake. Please love me. The words she’d spoken in the throes of lovemaking came back to her, and she felt sick inside.
They lay on the bed, not even their hands touching. Nothing.
“Flower?”
In her mind she saw a long stretch of sun-scorched sand spreading bleak and empty before her. She had so much—her job, her friends—but all she could see was the barren sand.
“Flower, I want to talk to you.”
She turned her back to him and burrowed her face into the pillow. Now he wanted to talk. Now that it was all over. Her head ached and her mouth felt dry and acrid. The mattress creaked as he left the bed. “I know you’re not asleep.”
“What do you want?” she finally said.
He switched on the gooseneck lamp that sat on his desk. She rolled over to face him. He stood next to the desk, unself-conscious in his nakedness. “Do you have anything going this weekend that you can’t cancel?” he said. “Anything important?”
He wanted to play out the final scene, the great good-bye. “Let me reach under the pillow and check my appointment calendar,” she said wearily.
“Damn it! Go throw some things in a suitcase. I’ll get you in half an hour.”
Two hours later they were in a chartered jet flying to God-knew-where, and Jake was asleep in the seat next to her. Was there some basic flaw in her makeup that made her keep falling in love with this man who couldn’t love her back? She didn’t try to slide around it anymore. She loved Jake Koranda.
She’d fallen in love with him when she was nineteen years old, and now she’d done it all over again. He was the only man she’d ever known who seemed to belong to her. Jake, who went out of his way to close himself off, was part of her. Maybe she had a death wish. Again and again, he left her emotionally stranded at the gates of the couvent. He didn’t give anything back. He wouldn’t talk about anything important—the war, his first marriage, what had happened when they were making Eclipse. Instead he deflected her with wisecracks. And if she wanted to be honest, she knew she did the same to him. But it was different with her. She did it because she had to protect herself. What did he have to protect?
It was seven in the morning when they landed in Santa Barbara. Jake turned up the collar on his leather jacket against the early chill, or maybe the prying eyes of a lurking fan. He carried an attaché case in one hand and guided her by the elbow toward the parking lot with the other. They stopped next to a dark maroon Jaguar sedan. He unlocked the door and slung his case, along with her overnight bag, into the back.
“It’ll be a while before we get there,” he said with an unexpected gentleness. “Try to get some sleep.”
The cantilevered glass and concrete house looked almost the same as she remembered it. What a perfect spot for the farewell they still had to play out. “A return to the scene of the crime?” she said as he pulled up in front.
He turned off the ignition. “I don’t know that I’d exactly call it a crime, but we have some ghosts to put to rest, and this seems like the right place to do it.”
She was tired and upset, and she couldn’t help sniping at him. “Too bad you couldn’t find a root beer stand. As long as we’re dealing with the business of lost innocence…”
He ignored her.
While he took a shower, she changed into a swimsuit. After she’d wrapped herself in a warm robe, she went out to test the water in the pool. It wasn’t heated nearly enough to combat the late morning January chill, but she shed her robe anyway and dived in. She gasped from the chill and began to swim laps, but the tension coiled inside her refused to unravel. She got out, pulled an oversized bath towel around her, and lay down on one of the chaises in the sun, where she instantly fell asleep.
Hours later, a small Mexican woman with shiny black hair awakened her and announced that dinner would be ready soon if she’d like to change first. Fleur deliberately avoided the big bathroom with the sunken tub where they’d made love all those years ago, choosing a smaller guest bathroom instead. By the time she’d finished her shower and swept her hair back from her face with a set of combs, her grogginess had disappeared. She pulled on light gray slacks and an open-necked sage-green blouse. Just before she stepped out into the living room, she slipped on the necklace Jake had given her, but then she fastened the button between her breasts so he wouldn’t see she was wearing it.
He was clean-shaven and dressed almost respectably in jeans and a light blue sweater, but the lines of exhaustion around his mouth hadn’t eased. Neither of them had much appetite, and their meal was tense and silent. She couldn’t get past the feeling that everything that had passed between them was about to be resolved, and there wouldn’t be a happy ending. Loving Jake had always been a one-way street.
Eventually the housekeeper appeared with coffee. She set the pot down harder than necessary to protest the injustice that had been done to her meal. Jake dismissed her for the night and sat without moving until he heard the back door close. He pushed himself away from the table and disappeared. When he came back, he was carrying a fat manila envelope. She stared at it, and then she stared at him. “You really did finish your book.”
He shoved his hand through his hair. “I’m going out for a while. You can—if you want, you can read this.”
She took the envelope gingerly. “Are you sure? I know I pushed you into this. Maybe—”
“Don’t sell the serial rights while I’m out.” He tried to smile, but he couldn’t make it. “This one’s just for you, Flower. Nobody else.”
“What do you mean?”
“Exactly what I said. I wrote it for you. Only you.”
She didn’t understand. How could he have spent the last three months destroying himself over a manuscript that only she would read? A manuscript he never intended to see published? Once again, she thought of the little girl wearing a shirt with yellow ducks. There could be only one explanation. The contents were too incriminating. She felt nauseous.
He turned away. She heard his footsteps pass through the kitchen. He went out the same back door the housekeeper had used such a short time ago. Fleur took her coffee over to the window and stared out into the lavender evening. He’d written about massacres twice, first a fictionalized version in Sunday Morning Eclipse and now the true story in the pages sealed inside the manila envelope. She thought about the two faces of Jake Koranda. The brutal face of Bird Dog Caliber and the sensitive face of the playwright who explored the human condition with so much insight. She’d always believed Bird Dog was the fake, but now she wondered if she’d gotten it all wrong just as she’d gotten so many other things wrong about him.
It was a long time before she could make herself pick up the
manila envelope and pull out the manuscript. She settled into a chair near the windows, turned on the light, and began to read.
Jake dribbled toward the basketball hoop on the side of the garage and went in for a quick dunk, but the leather soles of his boots slipped on the concrete, and the ball hit the rim. For a moment he thought about going back inside for his sneakers, but he couldn’t bear to see her reading.
He tucked the basketball under his arm and wandered to the stone wall that kept the hillside in place. He wished he had a six-pack of Mexican beer, but he wasn’t going back into the house to get it. He wasn’t going anywhere close to her. He couldn’t stand watching her disillusionment for a second time.
He leaned against the rough stones. He should have come up with another way of ending things between them, a way that would have distanced him from her disgust. The pain was too sharp to bear, so he imagined the sounds of the crowd in his head. He envisioned himself in center court at the Philadelphia Spectrum, wearing a Seventy-sixers uniform with the number six on his chest. Doc.
Doc…Doc… He tried to make his mind form the image, but it wouldn’t take shape.
He stood up and carried the ball back around the garage to the hoop. He began to dribble. He was Julius Erving, a little slower than he used to be, but still a giant, still flying…Doc.
Instead of the roar of the crowd, he heard a different sort of music playing in his head.
Inside the house, the hours slipped by and the pile of discarded manuscript pages grew at Fleur’s feet. Her hair slipped from its combs, and her back got a crick from sitting in the same place for so long. As she reached the final page, she could no longer hold back her tears.
When I think of ’Nam, I think of the music that was always playing. Otis…the Stones…Wilson Pickett. Most of all, I think of Creedence Clearwater and their bad moon rising over that badass land. Creedence was playing when they loaded me on the plane in Saigon to go home, and as I filled my lungs with that last breath of monsoon-heavy, dope-steady air, I knew the bad moon had blown me away. Now, fifteen years later, it’s still got me.
Chapter 26
Fleur found Jake by the garage, sitting on the ground just beyond the reach of the floodlights. He was leaning against a stone wall, a basketball propped in his lap, and he looked as though he’d walked through the fires of hell, which wasn’t far from the truth. She knelt beside him. He stared up at her, the shutters drawn and tightly locked, daring her to pity him.
“You’ll never know how much you scared me,” she said. “I forgot about you and your damned metaphors. All that talk about massacres, and the little girl in the shirt with the yellow ducks…I saw you wiping out a village full of innocent civilians. You scared me so bad…It was like I couldn’t trust my own instincts about you. I thought you’d been part of some obscene massacre.”
“I was. The whole frigging war was a massacre.”
“Metaphorically speaking, maybe, but I’m a little more literal-minded.”
“Then you must have been relieved to learn the truth,” he said bitterly. “John Wayne ended his military career in a psychiatric ward pumped full of Thorazine because he couldn’t take the heat.”
There it was. The secret that haunted him. The reason he’d erected such indomitable walls around himself. He was afraid the world would find out he’d broken apart.
“You weren’t John Wayne. You were a twenty-one-year-old kid from Cleveland who hadn’t gotten many breaks in life and was seeing too much.”
“I freaked out, Flower. Don’t you understand that? I was screaming at ceilings.”
“It doesn’t matter. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t write beautiful, sensitive plays that look into people’s hearts and not expect to be torn apart when you see human suffering.”
“A lot of guys saw the same things, but they didn’t freak.”
“A lot of guys weren’t you.”
She reached out for him, but before she could touch him, he stood up and turned his back toward her. “I managed to arouse all your protective instincts, didn’t I?” The words whipped her with their scorn. “I made you feel sorry for me. Believe me, that wasn’t what I wanted to do.”
She stood, too, but this time she didn’t try to touch him. “When you gave me the manuscript, you should have told me I wasn’t supposed to react to it. Did you expect me to respond as though I’d just seen one of your stupid Caliber pictures? I can’t do that. I don’t like watching you drill people full of bullet holes. I liked you a lot better curled up on that cot in the hospital, screaming your heart out because you weren’t able to stop what happened in the village. Your pain made me suffer with you, and if you can’t handle that, then you shouldn’t have given me the book.”
Instead of settling him, her words seemed to make him angrier. “You didn’t understand a damned thing.”
He stalked away, and she didn’t go after him. This was about him, not her. She made her way to the pool and stripped down to her bra and panties. Shivering with cold, she looked into the dark, forbidding water. Then she dived in. The frigid water stole her breath. She swam to the deep end and turned over to float on her back. Cold…suspended…waiting.
She felt a deep, wrenching pity for the boy he’d been, raised without any softness by a mother who was too tired and too angry over the unfairness of her life to give her child the love he’d needed. He’d looked for a father in the men who frequented the neighborhood bars. Sometimes he found one; sometimes he didn’t. She considered the irony of the college scholarship he’d received—not for his fine, sensitive mind, but for a ruthless slam dunk.
As she floated in the icy water, she thought about his marriage to Liz. He’d continued to love her long after their relationship was over. How typical of him. Jake didn’t give his love easily, but once he gave it, he didn’t withdraw it easily, either. He’d been numb with pain when he’d enlisted, and he’d futilely tried to distract himself with war, death, and drugs. He hadn’t cared if he survived, and it frightened her to think about how reckless he’d been. When he hadn’t been able to stop what happened in the village, he’d broken. And despite all those long months in the VA hospital, he’d never really recovered.
As she looked into the night sky, she thought she understood why that was.
“The water’s cold. You’d better get out.” He stood at the side of the pool, his posture neither friendly nor unfriendly. He held a beer in one hand. An orange beach towel dangled from the other.
“I’m not ready.”
He hesitated, then carried the towel and the beer over to a lounge chair.
She studied the racing clouds overhead. “Why did you blame me for the block?”
“The problem started when I met you. Before you came along, everything was fine.”
“Got any ideas about that?”
“A few.”
“Care to toss them out?”
“Not particularly.”
She pulled her legs under her and began to tread water. “I’ll tell you why you couldn’t write. I was storming the fort. Breaching those walls. You’d built them thick and strong, but this funny nineteen-year-old kid who ate you up with her eyes was tearing them down as fast as you could build them. You were scared to death that once those walls took their first shot, you’d never be able to build them up again.”
“You’re making it more complicated than it was. I couldn’t write after you left because I felt guilty, that’s all, and we both know that wasn’t your fault.”
“No!” She cut through the water until her feet touched bottom. “You didn’t feel guilty. That’s a cop-out.” Her throat was tight. “You didn’t feel guilty because you didn’t have anything to feel guilty about. You made love to me because you wanted me, because you even loved me a little.” A painful lump made it hard to breathe. “You had to have loved me, Jake. I couldn’t have generated all that feeling by myself.”
“You don’t know anything about what I felt.”
She stood shiv
ering in the water, the wet bra clinging to her breasts, the flower necklace stuck to her skin. Suddenly she saw it all so clearly that she wondered why she hadn’t understood it before. “This is about macho. That’s all this is. With Sunday Morning Ec1ipse, your writing had become too self-revealing, and then I came along at the same time and all your warning flashers went off. You didn’t stop writing because of me. You stopped because you were afraid to peel off any more layers. You didn’t want everybody to know that the tough guy on the screen—the tough guy you’d had to be while you were growing up—wasn’t anyplace close to the real man.”
“You sound like a shrink.”
Her teeth had begun to chatter, making her words come out in short, broken bursts. “Even when you joke about your screen image, you’re subtly winking your eye. Like you’re saying—‘Hey, everybody, sure it’s just acting, but we all know I’m still one hell of a man.’”
“That’s bull.”
“You started playing the tough guy when you were a kid. If you hadn’t, you’d have gotten swallowed up by those Cleveland streets. But after a while, you started believing that’s who you really were, this man who could handle anything. A man like Bird Dog.” She climbed up the steps, shivering as the air hit her. “Bird Dog’s exactly who you want to be—someone who’s emotionally dead. Who never feels pain. A man who’s safe.”
“You’re full of crap!” The beer bottle slammed down on the table.
Instead of accepting that he wasn’t invulnerable, he was lashing out against the closest target. Her. She gripped the railing, her shoulders hunched against the cold, her chest tight with anguish. “Bird Dog’s not half the man you are. Can’t you see that? Your breakdown is a sign of your humanity, not your weakness.”
“Bullshit!”
Her teeth were chattering so hard she could barely speak. “If you want to heal yourself, go inside and read your own damned book!”