The Portrait (24 page)

"I—I can't," she said helplessly. "You don't understand. He doesn't know what he's saying."

"I know exactly what I'm saying," Jonas interjected. "Go with him, Genie. I don't want you to stay."

She knew it was a lie. It wasn't his stance that told her, or his voice, or even his eyes. But there was something there, something that reminded her of earlier today, of his too-sad words.
"They say they love you and they leave."
And though she'd never told him she loved him, those words hung between them; she felt his dejection and his despair, hidden as it was by his dismissal.

Thomas touched her arm. "It's settled then—"

"No." She pulled away.

"What spell has he cast on you, Imogene?" Thomas's voice was edged with frustration and exhaustion. "What the hell has he done to you?"

"He's done nothing," she said slowly. She took a deep breath and licked her lips. "Just a few more days, Thomas. Please." She dropped her voice to a whisper. "Just give me a few more days."

Thomas expelled a harsh sigh. "You leave me no choice, my dear, you know this."

Her stomach tightened. "Yes," she said. "I know."

"And you'll still defy me?"

"I'm not defying you. I'm asking you to understand."

"I do understand. I understand that he's taking advantage of you. I understand that you're—you're obsessed with him somehow." Thomas spun on his heel, heading for the door. He grabbed the lever and jerked it open, pausing to look at her. "Imogene—" he said, and she knew he was giving her one last chance. One chance for forgiveness. One for absolution.

One last chance.

She gave it back to him. "I'll keep in touch, Thomas," she said.

She winced at the slamming of the door, trying to gather her composure as she heard him stomping down the hall. She thought she heard the crashing of the front door clear up to the third floor.

“You didn't have to do that." Jonas's voice drifted over her, soothing and soft, gravelly with fatigue. "You should have gone with him."

She turned to look at him. "Probably."

He regarded her through bleary eyes. "You'll regret this, you know."

"No."

"Yes, you will." He rubbed his hand over his jaw. "You think there's something you can do, but there isn't. There's nothing anyone can do."

His words were self-pitying and sad and vaguely annoying. Imogene said nothing.

He turned back to the bedroom. "I'm going back to sleep," he said dully.

She felt desperate and isolated. Thomas had always been her only friend, and without him she had no one. No one but Jonas. She wanted, needed, reassurance that she had done the right thing. She needed someone to sit up with her for a while, to talk about—oh, about art and its place in the world, about Caravaggio's angels. She needed the Jonas of two nights ago.

But he was gone.

She wanted him back so badly she could barely stand it. "Wait," she said, and when he stopped and looked over his shoulder at her she babbled on, unable to stop. "Stay up with me, won't you? Please? We'll drink some wine. We'll talk."

"Talk?" he repeated. "About what? The human condition? The fleetingness of life?" He shook his head and turned away, shuffling back into the bedroom. "I'm not in the mood to talk," he said, disappearing through the curtain. "I'm going back to bed."

And she was alone again. Just as she always was. Just as she was afraid she would always be.

Chapter 21

H
e wanted her to go. He was afraid she would. He couldn't stand the sound of her voice, but when she was silent he nearly went crazy in the quiet. He couldn't bear her presence, but he hated being alone more. Because when she was silent, and when she was gone, he had no choice but to look inside himself, and what he saw there terrified him. Hopelessness. Blackness. Madness. A despair that wouldn't go away. He was mad; his father had always said it, everyone had always said it. And every year brought that insanity closer, until now it was hovering just beyond him, baiting him, threatening him. One day he would wake up and it would all be over, he knew. His mind would be consumed by the blackness. There was only a thin wall keeping it from him now. A thin wall.

Genie.

He turned to look at her. She was sitting just beyond him, looking stiff and uncomfortable in one of the rickety ladderback chairs he'd bought from some relocating artist. She'd pinned her hair back again, but it was escaping from the chignon to dangle about her cheeks and against her neck, and the honey-colored strands warmed the paleness of her face, the colorlessness of her lips. She looked surprisingly serene, unaccountably tranquil. She was reading an old book with a split and discolored leather cover, and her lips moved slightly as she read, as if she were memorizing every word.

He tried to remember making love to her. Tried to remember how her skin had looked, what it had tasted and felt like. He wondered if he'd kissed the curls at the apex of her thighs, if he'd watched her cry out in climax. He wanted to remember. He wanted to remember not just the act but how he'd felt afterward, wanted to know if her touch had calmed him the way her presence did, if she'd looked at him with gratitude or with pleasure.

But all he could remember was bits and pieces; the sight of a breast and the feel of her nipple against his tongue, how she threw her head back and how dark her lashes looked upon her cheeks. And he thought he remembered repletion and its accompanying joy. Thought he did, though that last got tangled up with his memories of waiters and red wine, and he wasn't sure which was real and what was illusion.

He wondered if that was what was making her stay. God knew there was no other reason. He couldn't fathom why she'd disobeyed her godfather, why she was braving the condemnation of society to stay with him. Surely they'd all told her about his reputation, and she certainly knew he lived up to it. "Mad" Jonas Whitaker, he'd heard people call him, and it was true. She knew it was true. So why the hell was she here? Why did she insist on staying? Didn't she know he would destroy her? Couldn't she see?

It made him crazy, the questions, the unanswerability of them. He wanted to ask her, wanted to frighten her into telling him, but he couldn't rouse the effort, so finally all he said was "What are you reading?"

She looked up in surprise, and it made him wonder how long he'd been silent. An hour? A day?

"This?" She lifted the book. "Oh, it's nothing. Poetry. Byron. I found it on your shelf, I hope you don't mind."

"Byron?" he repeated wearily.

She flushed and looked down. "I know, I know. I should be reading about art, I suppose. But this was so much more . . . interesting."

He couldn't wrap his mind around that. Didn't want to. She wasn't reading about art and she should be, and he didn't care.

He looked away. "Byron was mad," he said.

"He wrote beautiful poetry."

"But was it worth the price?" he murmured. "Was it?"

"I don't know." Her voice was quiet and even and calm. "His words move me. Is that enough?"

"Does it matter if you're moved?" Jonas looked back to her. "Who are you, anyway? Just some woman. You'll be dead someday, and then what will all of this matter? What does any of it mean? So his words live on in you. His immortality lasts only as long as you do."

"And my children," she said stubbornly. "Because I'll read it to them. And perhaps their children."

"A hundred years," he scoffed.

"His poems have lasted thirty years already," she said.

He shook his head. "It doesn't matter," he said, staring at the wall, at the cracking plaster, the waterstain that looked like a giant feeding spider. "Nothing does. We all strive to say something—as if it's important. As if there can be some lasting value . . . And yet we all know mankind is doomed to nothingness. Immortality." He laughed bitterly. "There's no such thing. There's no meaning to anything. We get up in the morning, we push through the day, we go to sleep. Day after day. Endlessness. Meaninglessness."

"God is playing games with us," she said softly.

He looked at her in surprise. Her words were a familiar echo; through his bitterness he remembered his conversation with Rico, the argument he was always making, that God was jealous, that life was nothing but a trivial amusement.

"Yes," he said. "Yes, that's exactly it."

She glanced down at the book, a small smile caressing her lips. "Maybe you're right," she said. "Maybe, in the long run, life is only a game. But does it have to be something else? Does there have to be meaning?"

He stared at her, puzzled. "Yes, of course."

"Why?"

Why?
Her question rattled him. He couldn't think of an answer, and there had to be one. Had to be because he couldn't conceive of life without meaning, because then it fit too closely what he was feeling right now, bleak hopelessness, nothingness. If there was no meaning, then it didn't matter if he allowed the madness to take over, and he couldn't bear that. Christ, it terrified him to consider it.

"You . . . you can't mean that," he said hoarsely. "I've seen life without meaning. I've seen it."

"At Bloomingdale."

He squeezed his eyes shut, his throat grew too tight to swallow. "Yes," he breathed.

"Tell me," she said, "why it frightens you."

He didn't want to answer her. His head hurt, his body hurt. He didn't want to remember. But there was something in her voice, a genuine interest, a need to understand, and he was selfish enough to indulge her, selfish enough to want her to feel how hopeless and dark he felt. Selfish enough to hurt her, because when she hurt he had the upper hand. When she hurt, it only reaffirmed what he knew about himself: that he destroyed everything he touched, that he deserved to be alone.

"There ... are times," he said unemotionally, "when I wonder if I'm real, when I can't feel my body. Once I ... cut myself ... to see if I would bleed. I thought if I bled, it meant I was real. It meant I was alive." He looked at her, letting his despair shine from his eyes. "Can you even begin to understand that?"

She didn't flinch. She didn't look away. She swallowed, and he saw the sadness enter her face, a sadness so poignant he recognized it even through his own.

"Yes," she said. "I understand that."

He stared at her in shocked surprise. "How can you?"

She glanced down at the book, flipping slowly through the pages. "My father wanted to send me away. My mother couldn't stand the sight of me. Until Chloe died I was nothing." She looked up at him, and the pain in her eyes was so stark it sharpened her features. "I used to walk into rooms and they would talk right through me as if I weren't there. As if I were invisible."

Her words sank inside him. Despite the sorrow in her expression, they were so matter-of-fact, as dispassionate as his had been. They reminded him of something she'd said yesterday. Something about a man who loved someone else. A man . . . Nicholas. Unexpectedly Jonas realized he wanted to know about him. For some reason it seemed important that he know.

"What about Nicholas?" he asked. "What about him?"

She shook her head.

"Tell me," he urged, unsure why he wanted it so badly, unwilling to think beyond the fact that he did.

"1 already told you," she said. "He was in love with someone else."

He waited.

She clenched her jaw, and he saw he'd cracked her composure at last, that the tranquility he'd wanted to take from her was gone. He saw the vulnerability in her face even though she wouldn't look at him. He'd wanted to hurt her. He'd wanted to prove to her that he would destroy her, and he'd done it with a word, with nothing more than a name.

He hated himself for it. Hated himself for hurting her. Christ, this was not what he wanted at all.

"Genie—"

She shook her head again, stopping his words in his throat.

"It's all right," she said. Then she swallowed, and he saw her struggle to regain her self-control. "It—it doesn't hurt any longer, truly it doesn't."

He didn't believe her, but he said nothing.

She kept her eyes fastened on the book. On Byron. Her finger traced the lines as if she were reading it, but he sensed she didn't see the words at all. "Nicholas was my sister's fiancé," she began, her voice so low he barely heard her. "And he was my friend. He used to talk to me. I couldn't believe he even noticed me, but he was always so kind." She paused. "I didn't mean to love him. I didn't want to love him."

"But you did," he prompted.

"Yes." She nodded. "I did. And when Chloe died ... I wanted him to love me. I was willing to be Chloe to make him love me. So I tried to be her. I made myself as like her as I could."

"Did it make a difference?"

She slanted him a glance. "No," she said. "He left me anyway."

They were quiet. He was thinking about her words, about her wish to be Chloe, and he had the feeling she'd told him that before, and that there had been the same sadness then too, a sorrow that needled him— that leapt beyond his own pain, beyond his fear and his despair. Her pain had nothing to do with him at all, but it hurt him just the same. He was afraid for her. Afraid for her simple beauty and her heart. Afraid of all the things that could hurt her in this life, the things that already had. He wanted suddenly to comfort her, and it was such an alien feeling it made him pause, such a strange notion he had no idea what to say or what to do. Finally he said the first thing that came to mind.

"He was using you, you know."

"Yes," she agreed softly. "I know."

With her admission his reticence melted away. The urge to protect her, to take care of her, grew stronger, and it nearly made him laugh. He couldn't protect her. Hell, she needed someone to protect her from him. He was the most dangerous thing of all.

But still he couldn't keep from holding out his hand. Still he couldn't stop himself from saying "Come sit beside me, Genie."

And when she did, when she took his hand and settled on the bed beside him, leaning into his side and drawing her legs up so the pale green satin flowed over his, Jonas felt comforted in a way he couldn't remember feeling in a long time, maybe ever. Comforted and safe. The blackness in his mind retreated just a little. He felt her warmth, her tranquility, ease into him, a pale yellow light, a soothing presence.

He held her tightly against him and looked up at the ceiling, listening to the rain.

S
he had been there three days before she decided to take him to the market with her. She thought he was better. Not good yet, but not so silent, not so hopeless. He was still quiet, and it seemed to hurt him to move and gave him headaches to think. He couldn't make a decision about anything, and so she made them all. She told him what to eat and how much, she told him when to wash and when to get out of bed. But mostly he stayed in bed and mostly she sat beside him, reading from Byron, or Tennyson, or one of the other books of poetry he had. She'd tried once to read to him from the "The Crayon," but he'd stopped her after two paragraphs, claiming he didn't want to hear about art.

She wondered if maybe that wasn't so true, if he had rejected the new art journal because he'd seen through her careful attempts to appear interested. Though she had been forced to read art journals and criticisms since Chloe's death three years ago, Imogene had never really understood them; she had never been interested enough to care what they said.

Why had that been so hard to admit before now?

She didn't know, and she tried not to think about it too much. Just as she tried not to think of anything too much. It was easier to go through the days with Jonas without wondering when they would end, or what would happen to her when they did. It was easier to concentrate only on him, on their short but intense conversations, on the things she was beginning to learn about him. Little things, like the fact that he drank his coffee very strong and that his right arm needed massaging in the evening to ease the strain of bearing the burden for two. Things like his shelves, which were scattered with knickknacks from all over the world, strange little toys she didn't understand, and that he liked her to sit beside him on the bed so he could twirl his fingers through her hair.

Little things. Things that made her feel alive and precious. Things that made her feel real.

She told herself it was only fleeting, that this time would come to an end, and with it all these little intimacies, these strange and tender familiarities. He would get better, and she would return to Nashville. It would end. He needed her now, but he would not always need her. It was something she reminded herself of every single day.