"I know it's not romantic," she said, looking embarrassed. "I'm always hungry after a performance though. And now that I'm not bound up in knots inside, I'm doubly ravenous. Can you forgive me?"
I pulled her against me, laughing again. "You're apologizing for that?" I asked. I kissed her cheek. "Come on; let's feed you. Now that I think about it, I'm famished too. All that flopping around works up an appetite."
Her smile was vivid, engulfing me. She hugged me so hard it made me wince. "Oh, I love you!" she cried. "And I'm so happy, I could vanish in a spark!" In quick succession, she kissed me four times around the lips, then drew back. "Will you join me for a late, late supper, dear Mr. Collier?"
I'm sure my smile was one of worship. "I'll check my appointment book," I said.
She hugged me again, this time so hard a hiss of pain escaped me. "Oh." She pulled back quickly. "Have I hurt you?"
"If you're that strong when you're hungry," I said, "what happens after you eat?"
"Wait and see," she murmured, a faint smile flitting across her lips. She stood and held out her hand. Standing, I walked with her to the cart and put a chair beside it for her. "Thank you, love," she said. I sat across from her and watched as she uncovered the dishes, revealing an array of crackers, cheese, and fruit. "Will you open the wine?" she asked.
I drew the bottle from its bucket and read the label. "What, no unchilled red Bordeaux?" I said without thinking.
The skin grew taut across her cheeks and she seemed to draw back in her chair.
"What is it?" I asked. I tried to sound casual but the look on her face dismayed me.
"How do you know that is my favorite wine?" she asked. "I have never told another person but my mother. Not even Mr. Robinson knows."
I tried, for several moments, to come up with an answer before I realized that there could not be one. I shuddered as she turned her face away from me. "Why am I afraid of you?" she murmured.
"No, Elise." I reached across the cart but she wouldn't take my hand. "Not afraid; please, not afraid. I love you. I would never harm you." My voice, like hers, was weak and shaken. "Not afraid, Elise."
She looked at me and I saw, to my sorrow, that there was fear in her face; she could not conceal it.
"When the right time comes, I'll tell you everything," I said. "I promise you. I just don't want to alarm you now." "But you do alarm me, Richard. Certain things you say. Certain expressions I see on your face. They frighten me." She shivered. "I could almost believe-" She broke off with a pained smile. "What?"
"That you are not quite human."
"Elise." My laugh was equally pained. "I'm human to a fault." I swallowed. "It is . . . where I come from that I just can't tell you; not yet anyway. It isn't terrible," I added quickly, seeing her expression change again. "I've told you that. It isn't terrible at all. It's simply that-I feel it would be wrong to tell you now. I'm trying to protect you. And us." The way she gazed at me made me recall Nat Goodwin's words about her large gray eyes looking into someone else's "as though they could penetrate into the recesses of their very soul."
"I love you, Elise," I said. "I will always love you. What more can I say?"
She sighed. "You're certain you can't tell me." "I am," I said. I was certain. "Not yet."
She was silent again for what seemed to be a long, long time before she spoke again. "All right," she finally said. I wish I could describe the rush of feeling I experienced when she did. I didn't truly know how much it meant to her but I could sense that it was probably the most demanding acceptance she had ever been forced to make in her life.
"Thank you," I said.
I poured some wine for us, she handed me some cheese and crackers, and we ate in silence for almost a minute; I wanted to give her the time she needed to adjust. At last she said, "I've been at a crossroad for many years, Richard. I knew that I was going to have to rid myself of all romantic thoughts, devote myself exclusively to my career. The man I had always expected didn't seem to be appearing." She put her glass down and looked at me. "Then you did appear," she said. "Suddenly. Mysteriously."
She looked at her hands. "What I fear most is allowing this-mysteriousness to overwhelm me. It threatens to at every moment. Even now, your appearance and your manner are so spellbinding to me that I fear I will never know you at all, not what you really are. Thus my distress at your secrecy. I respect your wishes and accept that you have my welfare in mind. Still-"
She gestured haplessly. "How do we proceed? Where do we begin to know each other truly? It is as though, in you, I have come upon my most intimate fantasy brought to life-my most secret of dreams made flesh. I'm intrigued and fascinated-but I cannot live my life with only those emotions. I don't want to be the Lady of Shalott, seeing love only as a reflection in my own mirror. I want to see you, I want to know you. As I want you to see and know me- fully and without illusions. I don't know if you do. I don't know that you aren't looking at me through the same haze of fascination through which I look at you. We are real people, Richard. We have real lives and must resolve those lives realistically if we are to share them."
In spite of the uneasiness she conveyed, I found it reassuring to discover she'd been thinking much the same thoughts as I. I didn't want to say so at the time for fear she'd think that I was parroting her so I only said, "I agree with you."
"For instance," she went on, "regarding my career; you wouldn't ask me to relinquish it, would you?"
"Relinquish it?" I looked at her, astonished. "I may be deranged with love, Elise, but I'm not completely mad. Deprive the world of what you have to offer? God in heaven, I wouldn't dream of it. You're magnificent."
Her relief seemed incomplete. "Would you, then, expect me to appear exclusively in your plays?"
I had to laugh. "Elise," I chided. I was amused but I must have looked or sounded critical for she seemed taken aback. "Have you been thinking, all this time, that behind my every word and action lurked the sly ambitions of a hungry playwright?"
Immediate sorrow showed on her face. She reached across the table quickly and I took her hand. "Oh, love, forgive me," she said.
I smiled at her. "There's nothing to forgive. These are things we have to speak of. Nothing must be hidden. I'll tell you, frankly, that I don't know, at this moment, how I'll earn my living but it won't be from plays I expect you to perform in, you can be sure of that. I may never write another play. I may well write books instead. I can write-reasonably well."
"I'm sure you can," she said. "Just-" "What?" I asked when she didn't go on. Her fingers tightened slowly in mine. "Whatever you may do," she said, "and wherever you have come from, now that you are here-" she gazed at me with anxious eyes "-please don't leave me."
� � �
The air was almost still as we walked along the beach, my arm around her waist.
"Here I tell you how realistic we must be," she said. "And yet I keep clinging to the dreamlike quality of it all. Am I terribly erratic, Richard?"
"No," I said. "Of course not. There is a dreamlike quality to our relationship. I feel it too."
She leaned against me with a sigh. "I hope I never wake," she said.
I smiled. "We won't."
"I really did dream of you," she told me. "Sleeping and awake. I told myself that it was only a fulfillment of some inner longing but that didn't stop my dreaming. I told myself that it was only a reaction to that Indian woman's prophecy, then to Marie's prediction. Even in the last few days, when I waited for you consciously, expecting to see you every time I walked along this beach, I told myself that it was nothing but imagination. But I couldn't make myself believe it."
"I'm glad you didn't."
"Oh, Richard," she said, "what is this mystery that brought us to each other? I want to know and yet I don't; indeed, I wonder at my folly for attempting to discover what it is. Why should I know? What can be more important than being with you? How can anything matter but my love for you, your love for me?"
Her words cleansed my mind of all anxieties. "Nothing else does matter, Elise. All other things can wait."
"Yes," she said fervently. "Yes, let them wait."
We stopped and turned to face each other, we embraced and kissed and nothing else did matter in the whole world.
Until the kiss had ended. "No," she said with sudden mock severity. "If I'm to be Mrs. Richard Collier, I insist you know how terrible a person you'd be marrying."
"Tell me." I tried to sound as stern as she. "Oh, speak again, bright angel."
I winced, then laughed as she pinched my arm. "You'd best be serious, young man," she said, teasing me, yet, fundamentally, I sensed, sincere as well. "You think you have a lovely time in store, I wager." "Don't I?"
"No." She pointed at me ominously. "You'll be husband to a mad perfectionist who'll drive you to the bottle." She depressed the edges of an impish smile which threatened to undo her case. "Do you realize, dear fellow, that I actually had a blueprint for my marriage should it come? A blueprint! Every single detail of that planned-for marriage worked out in my mind as an architect designs a house." The impish smile escaped. "A house which would have caved in forthwith, I am certain; assuming it got built at all." "Proceed," I said.
"Very well." She raised her chin and gazed at me austerely. Lady Barbara? I wondered. Or was it Lady Macbeth? "I am also much involved with woman's role in our society" she said. "Do tell."
She punched me on the arm. "You listen now," she scolded. "Yes'm."
"To continue: I do not believe that woman's social role should be so limited." "Neither do I."
She looked at me closely. "Are you teasing?" she asked, sounding genuinely confused.
"No."
"You're smiling."
"Because I adore you, not because I don't agree with you.
"You-?" She stopped and looked at me again.
"What?"
"You really feel that women should-?"
"-demand their liberation? Yes. Not only that but know they will eventually." At last, I thought, an attitude brought with me from "that other time" which had some value.
"Oh, my," she said.
I waited. Soon her eyes began to narrow and a look of such divine suspicion crossed her features that it taxed my will not to burst out laughing. "But woman's only role is to find a husband and obey him," she said. It wasn't a statement; she was testing me. "Woman's only role is to replenish the race." She waited. "Isn't that right?"
"No."
She gazed at me in wary silence. Finally, she sighed, defeatedly. "You're certainly different, Richard."
"I accept the difference if it makes you love me all the more," I told her.
Her expression didn't change. "I must love you," she said, sounding perplexed. "I could only speak so openly to one I love. I know that's true."
"Good." I nodded.
"No one has ever really known me," she continued. "Not even my mother. And yet, already, you have seen so deeply into me that-" she shook her head "-I can scarcely believe it."
"I understand you, Elise," I said.
"I believe you do." Her tone was faint, incredulous. We walked a way in silence, then stopped and looked across the water toward Point Loma and the periodic flashing of the lighthouse beacon. After a while, I looked up at the silver circle of the moon and the spattering of diamond stars across the sky. Nothing can be lovelier than this, I thought. Heaven has no more to offer.
It was as though she read my mind for, suddenly, she turned and slid her arms around me, pressing close. "I almost fear such happiness," she said.
I put a hand on each side of her head and tilted it back. She looked up at me and I saw there were tears in her eyes. "You must never fear again," I told her. Bending down, I kissed her eyes and felt her warm tears on my lips and tasted them. "I'll love you always."
With a shuddering breath, she clung to me. "Forget what I said about women," she murmured. "No, I don't mean forget it. Just-remember that it's only part of what I feel and what I need. The other part is what I'm feeling now, the part that's been unfulfilled for such a long, long time. I've pretended not to know what it was but I always knew." I felt her arms tighten around my back. "It was my female nature and it was unfed; it hungered, Richard." "No more," I said.
We turned and started back toward the hotel and it seemed as though we both knew why we were returning. There were no words now; we walked in silence, holding on to each other. Did her heart pulse as heavily as mine? I had no idea. All I knew-as I'm sure she knew-was that it didn't matter now what mystery had joined us, didn't matter if I was some deep-set fantasy of hers brought to life or if she was that to me. As she had said, it was enough that we were together, sharing these moments. For, no matter how the mind may speak, there must always come that moment when the heart speaks louder. Both our hearts were speaking now and there was no denying the command they gave.
Ahead of us, the massive form of the hotel stood in silhouette against the dark sky. Incredibly, two clouds of white were hovering above it. I say incredibly because the clouds had shape, looking like two enormous heads in profile. "The one on the left is you," I said, so sure that she had also seen the heads that she'd understand what I was saying.
"It is me," she said. "There are stars in my hair." She leaned her head against me as we walked. "And the one on the right is, clearly, you."
All the rest of our silent way back to the hotel, we watched those gigantic, phantom heads above the hotel roofline: Elise's and mine.
When we reached her room, without a word, she took the key from her purse and handed it to me, her smile one of dreamlike peace. I unlocked the door and we went inside. Closing the door, I relocked it and turned back to her. She let her shawl drop to the floor and pressed against me. We stood motionless, our arms around each other. "Strange," she whispered.
"What, love?"
"That, in giving you the key, I had no fear whatever of your being shocked. I didn't even think about it."