It was then, as the car rounded a corner and disappeared, that he began to plan his own disengagement from Gini. It would have to be contrived, he told himself, so that it caused the least guilt, and the fewest repercussions—at least in her case. He would have to lie to her. In a distant way, he wondered whether, when the moment came, he would be able to do so effectively. Could he lie as well as he had claimed to her he could, he wondered. Could he lie so well that she would never suspect?
“Ready?” Martigny called to him.
Rowland nodded, and crossed to his side. They were bringing out the stretcher and body bag as he and Martigny reached the lobby. A glint of light on black plastic; some difficulty in maneuvering this load out of the elevator cage. Rowland thought: an ignominious departure. He averted his eyes.
Upstairs, confronted with that pink shrine of a bedroom, he paused. He had imagined this room, as it was described to him by Juliette de Nerval. He had imagined it again as he waited in that police van. Yet it was not as his mind’s eye had seen it. He had not foreseen this much blood, this much debris. He passed his hand across his eyes: this room, his own life—both seemed to him fantastically unreal.
He looked at the wreckage steadily, then Martigny beckoned to him and they went into the sitting room. Martigny quietly drew him aside and thrust a pile of press clippings and handwritten papers into his hands.
My Biography, Star had written in a small, neat hand:
They tried to tell me my mother was this hooker, and my father one of her johns. After she died, when I was around two years old, I was fostered out to this sister of hers, who was married to some GI Joe, & lived near Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I guess they didn’t like me, because they got rid of me pretty soon, and when I was around four I got dumped in the first of the homes. This version of events is one big lie. Now I know the truth, which feels real good. So let me explain: this is who I am…
Rowland felt pity: he could identify with this. Wouldn’t we all like the answer to that question, he thought; wouldn’t we all like to say with certainty—this is who I am. He sheafed through the papers, seeing the handwriting deteriorate further on as Star explained a quest that had gone murderously wrong. He switched on Gini’s tape recorder, then quickly switched it off again as he heard her voice. All the components he needed for an immediate story were here. He had learned self-discipline, and so patiently, and with no outward sign of disquiet, he retired to a corner of the room and set himself to work.
They finally allowed Gini to leave the hospital the next morning. At seven, when Pascal was sedated and sleeping, a car was provided to take her back to her hotel. Gini climbed into it meekly, then gladly sensing the driver’s indifference, persuaded him to drop her off. She was desperate to be alone, just to walk and breathe and think, so she made her way back slowly, by a circuitous route, breathing in the cool damp air, watching the eastern sky lighten, listening to the echo of her own footsteps along the still, almost deserted streets.
She walked down to the Seine and stood on the quay for a while, watching the slide of the water, watching the events of the past days, and the past night. She watched the questions she had seen in Pascal’s eyes, the questions he was too wise to voice. She watched the police ask questions, to which her patient replies felt correct but not right. She watched the consultant explain, gesturing at shadows on X rays, that this was a compound fracture, necessitating a complex operation, in which steel pins would have to be inserted in the arm, here and here and here. She watched herself, alone with the consultant now, in a small anteroom: “He must be able to use his hands,” she said to the man. “It’s his right arm that is broken. He’s a photographer. A very fine photographer. He has to be able to work quickly. He has to be deft. You do understand?”
The man—eminent in his profession—said in a kind way that he did understand, that he already knew this.
His reassurances seemed to come at her from a great distance. She could feel sense fragmenting. She felt that this man was not hearing her, or not fully understanding her, so she brushed aside his remarks about postsurgical therapy, patient cooperation, and a period of healing that would take, at the very least, six months.
She reiterated her fears, and her arguments, until suddenly midsentence, she realized she was not asking this eminent man to cure any injury Star had inflicted; she was asking him to cure all the injuries, especially those she had inflicted herself.
Those words, as such, were not said, but she felt that the doctor sensed something of her meaning; he read, maybe, the pain and the guilt and the distress she felt. He chose—and it was perhaps a wise choice—to ascribe her reaction entirely to shock. Gini, who knew this to be untrue, did not argue. She consented to the prescribed interlude of quiet and rest. She was led to a small room; she lay down on a narrow hospital bed. In order to hasten the departure of the nurse assigned to her, she pretended to sleep, and lay there with closed eyes, watching with mortification and sick despair reenactment after reenactment of her own shame, of her betrayal not just of Pascal, but also of herself.
Fatigue and misery and self-reproach made her grip on these events begin to slacken eventually. For the first half hour, all she could see, fearfully repeated, were her own actions, that night at the St. Vincent. Yes, it was true; she had done these unimaginable things, and said these unimaginable things, but as they danced before her eyes, as she made herself reexamine them, they began to seem not more real, but less. Her tired mind rebelled. She began to feel that it was not she who had acted in this way, but some other Gini, a woman who had sprung up unheralded from nowhere, a succubus, a dream woman, a mirror woman who had stepped out from the glass and for a few hours reversed the rules of life, so north became south, and right, left.
Grasping at this idea, and despising herself for doing so, she fell into a restless, feverish sleep. And in the sleep, up from her unconscious, came a man who might have been Rowland McGuire, who spoke with his accent but did not have his face. This man rearranged all these actions in yet another form; he consoled, and with a promissory air, said no, she was reading the sentences all the wrong way; if she would only let him rearrange the words in a different order, she would understand. With a conjuror’s hands he took the words “shame” and “self-betrayal,” and they spelled out “love” and “hope.” She watched all those bright vowels and consonants sparkle in the air, and just when they were suggesting to her that a right might lie beyond a wrong, she awoke, crying out.
Now, looking down at a gray city river, the dream eddied into her mind, then slipped out of reach. She felt a terrible despondency, a conviction that she could understand those events no better than she could understand that impulse which had come to her out of the air and had made it possible, just hours before, to pull a trigger, fire a weapon, end a life. Turning away from the flux and current of the water, she fixed her eyes on the loveliness of the particular buildings in front of her as their outlines emerged in the strengthening light. If understanding and reason failed her, she thought, beginning to walk again, then duty and precept and principle would have to suffice.
I have no choice, she said to herself; I have no choice; I have made my promises, I am almost a wife.
She increased her pace, repeating this litany to herself. She loved Pascal, and with repetition, this litany gathered strength. By the time she reached the hotel, she was convinced this strength was more than sufficient to carry her through any parting from Rowland McGuire—and a parting, a final and absolute one, she also planned and scripted as she walked.
But confronted with him later that day, across the nervous and narrow expanse of her hotel room, she could see only the banalities and untruths of that carefully prepared script. One look at his face told her: that speech had been contrived for a different and lesser man, some man she had allowed her mind to invent. It would be unpardonable to speak it now, an insult to him, and also to herself.
She was afraid to look at him, and terrified of what would happen if he touc
hed her. So she edged away from him as he stood awkwardly by the door, wearing an overcoat, booked on a London flight. She turned her face to the window with its view of Paris lights. Her carefully stacked arguments fell apart in her mind. I have no choice, she repeated silently and fiercely to herself—but even that sentence, so reassuring, so clearly true a few hours earlier, now failed her. Choice entered the room with him; his physical proximity made every certainty shift.
She turned finally to look at him. He was frowning. He glanced back at the door as if regretting he had come here, then he began speaking. Gini could scarcely hear his words, let alone make sense of them, though their sense was clear enough. She knew at once, instinctively and with absolute certainty, that he, too, had planned some careful exodus speech, and was duly beginning upon it.
It would have been easier for them both had he been able to continue with it. But the increasing strain was evident, in his gestures and tone, in his pale, tense face. He negotiated, by sheer force of will, just three sentences. Then abruptly, with a sudden angry gesture, he stopped.
That occasion was not the first on which Rowland had seen Gini that day, and their previous encounters had given him, he realized now, a misplaced confidence. They had met first that morning, in the doorway of this same room, when their conversation had been brief: stiff inquiries on Rowland’s part as to her welfare, and Lamartine’s; equally stiff reassurances on Gini’s part. Rowland’s mind burned with the unsaid, but a night spent working, filing copy, had left him convinced that he possessed the resolve to act. That afternoon, when to his surprise Gini insisted on working with him, filing more copy on a story that even blasé Max admitted to be a scoop, he had remained obstinately convinced he had the willpower to negotiate this.
He had sat next to Gini, editing her copy on screen. He watched her words scroll; he watched the cursor move; he watched words delete and paragraphs shift. He was aware of the ironies of the procedure, aware that his skills as an editor would shortly be required in a rather different context. He thought as he worked: if I put it in this way, if I use this particular phrase, if I’m careful to delete that emotion; he glanced at her set profile, then quickly away. It seemed to him that any script he concocted would involve not only the deletion of truth, but also of himself.
He felt capable of effecting his plan, nonetheless. He experienced some indecision after Gini left, when briefly his own feelings rebelled, and he twice postponed his London flight. But he was sure by the time he finally came down to this room to say good-bye that he had such weaknesses under control. It might well be that during this brief interview he had to make Gini think ill of him, but he was prepared for that. Being proud by nature, it was not easy for him to envisage losing her respect, but if such a reaction facilitated her disengagement from him, it was a price he was determined should be met.
Yet something began to fail him almost at once.
He allowed himself, finally, to look at her. She was standing by the window with her face averted. He let his eyes rest on the light of her hair, the pale curve of her throat, the soft grayish dress she was wearing. The longing he felt for her then was intense. It was not physical desire, though he knew perfectly well that surge would overwhelm him immediately if he were unwise enough to move forward, or touch her. It was a longing beyond explanation, and certainly the other side of reason, a longing for the joy she alone could now gift. He knew how insubstantial this power was: he knew it was compounded of a thousand frail elements, much intuition, some instinct, some irrational hope, yet it was tensile, as irresistible as steel cables, a winch. He could feel it winding him in, winding him in, through a silence that first whispered, then spoke. He knew she listened to the language of that silence as intuitively as he did. She turned slowly back to meet his gaze, and he was one inch away from the complete certainty that she not only knew, but felt as he did.
She gave a small distressed gesture of the hands, displacing air. He watched her face alter, soften, and then flood with regret.
“Don’t.” She moved across to him and took his hand in hers. “You were going to make a speech—weren’t you?”
“I was.”
“Please don’t. I can imagine it. I was going to make a speech too. A similar one, I think. None of it would have been true—it might have made things easier, but it wouldn’t have been true. I was going to be—oh, hard. Brittle. Dismissive. Light. Maybe a little cheap. I thought cheap might help…” She paused and gave a half-smile. “And you?”
“Brusque. Shabby. Stereotypically male. I’ve had some practice at that.”
She smiled again, then, her eyes filling with tears, shook her head.
“I’m glad you stopped. I’d have hated that. It would have meant I was wrong about you—that you were less than I thought.” She hesitated, then looked up at him with an expression half doubtful, half pleading.
“May I say something else instead? It’s brief, I promise you—and I probably shouldn’t say it, but…”
“Tell me.”
“I could love you, Rowland…” She gave a small gasp, or sigh, as she said this, as if the words shocked her as much as they did him. She jerked her face away as if ashamed, then turned back, clasping his hands. “Oh, God—I think that’s true. I think I knew that—but I don’t know why. When I walked into that room here with you, when you began talking—it was before you touched me, I’m sure of that. I think it’s why I went to bed with you—but that might just be an excuse. Except no. No…” She shook her head angrily. “It isn’t an excuse—that’s how it was. Something came at me, out of the air, I hadn’t foreseen it, I promise you that. It wasn’t a matter of strategy, decisions… I just… I could see all the possible consequences very clearly. I could hear them, Rowland, shouting away in my head—all the lies, the misery, the betrayal of trust, the hurt to someone I loved—someone I still love. Oh, God…” Her face contorted. “I could see—all those consequences, all those barriers—and I still did it. I’m not proud of that, but I can’t be ashamed of it either. I could—I could sense something, there in the room with us, and it felt bright, Rowland, good, like hope, like a promise—no, not like a promise, like a glimpse, just a glimpse of another future, and I… oh, God. I shouldn’t be saying this—”
She broke off, her eyes filling with tears, and bent her head. She had begun to tremble as she spoke. Rowland was deeply moved; everything she attempted to describe, in all its flimsiness and strength, he, too, had felt. He said her name and drew her into his arms. “Darling,” he began. “I understand. I know exactly what you mean. Listen to me, Gini.”
“No. No.” She drew back from him a little, then clung to him again. “No—you must listen, Rowland. Please listen. Don’t touch me—I have to finish this. I have to make a choice, I know that. I’ve known for days. I’ve been thinking and thinking—I’ve thought of nothing else. I have to decide. And I’ve chosen, Rowland—I’ve already chosen. I’m going to stay with Pascal. Rowland, he loves me—I have to do that.”
“No, you don’t.” He caught her to him again and forced her to meet his eyes. “You don’t have to decide—not yet. You shouldn’t even be trying to decide, not now. You should wait—think. Gini, listen—you think that was nothing to me, what happened here between us? You say you could love me? Why do you say that—why? You know it’s much closer, much stronger than that…”
“No. No—and I mean what I say. I don’t trust that kind of love, Rowland. I don’t trust being in love—it’s too—it feels like being drunk—or drugged. It makes me—I can’t think when I feel that way. I feel blind—I’m sure I must look blind. Rowland, look at me…”
Rowland looked. Her face was alight with contradictions, with pain, and with delight. Her eyes, bright with tears, dazzled him.
“You think I can look at you now…” he began in an unsteady voice. “Darling—I feel blind too—but I also feel—Gini, will you for God’s sake listen to me…”
“No. I know what you’re going to say. I can feel
it here. Color flooded into her face. She pressed her hand against her heart. “You feel as if you can see better. As if you see more. I know. I feel that too. But, Rowland, you can’t trust that. It isn’t the first time I’ve felt it. And it doesn’t last, you know that as well as I do—we’re both old enough. It’s there—and then it dwindles away. So I have to listen, Rowland, to all those other voices. Trust. Honor—if I have any left. All the promises I made to Pascal. The things I said. The things I swore. I can’t go back on them. I do love him. I love him very much. I owe him—so many things, I can’t explain…”
“You don’t need to explain.” He jerked away from her, his face darkening. “I know why you’re saying this. He saved your life yesterday. That’s the reason for this. If that hadn’t happened, this might have been different.”
There was absolute silence. Gini stared at his face. It was taut with strain. Suddenly, with an oddly formal gesture, he released her hands and stepped back.
“I didn’t mean to do this. I didn’t mean—above all—to say that. I intended to leave here and keep my feelings to myself. That was what I planned.” He hesitated. “I can see how much Pascal Lamartine loves you. I don’t doubt you also love him. I feel I owe him a debt for what he did yesterday. But I find I can’t… Too much is at stake.” He gave a quick, angry shrug. “I want you to be very clear. I’m old-fashioned—Lindsay said that. And so—if you would have me, I’d marry you. And if you’re still going to dismiss me, you can do it knowing that.”
His manner had become more formal by the second; his final statements, made in a way that was almost harsh, were as devoid of emotion as he could make them—and the more effective for that. Gini’s eyes filled with tears.
“How can you say that, how? Rowland—stop. You scarcely know me—”