Cartier's Hope, page 25
“No thinking about it. I won’t let you back in unless you promise.”
I moved in front of him, opened the front door, and stepped out.
“Vera?”
I turned.
“I will let you back in.”
“I figured.”
On the way to the store, I thought about how Jacob had so abruptly closed the lid on the box. He was obviously hiding something. His silent ways gave him a mysterious air that I wasn’t sure I trusted. Yet I’d probably been drawn to him precisely for how enigmatic he was. I was always, much to my detriment, attracted to people who had secrets. Only those who lived boring lives were open books.
I found the grocer, baker, fish market, and butcher within two blocks, and I returned with two bags of food. I’d bought basics—eggs, bread, butter, milk, cream, potatoes, cheese, apples—and some surprises, including shrimp and oysters. Then I stopped in at the tea shop and picked up sandwiches and chocolate doughnuts.
Back in the apartment, Jacob took the packages from me, and we unpacked them in the kitchen. Since the ice wouldn’t be delivered for another day, he said, we put the cold items on the window ledge—the November air would keep them fresh. The rest we put away in the cabinets.
Jacob took out plates for the sandwiches. I unwrapped them while he set the table in the corner with silverware, napkins, a pitcher of water, and two glasses.
“How long have you lived in this apartment?” I asked, once we were seated and had begun eating.
“Since arriving in America. Two years ago. I chose it for the neighborhood. I like that a lot of artists live here.”
I’d been distracted by the box but remembered then that there had been art supplies on the table in his workshop. “Do you paint?”
“Not really. I do sketches of my designs with pencils and gouache, but I don’t consider that really painting.”
“Do you have any of your designs here?”
“I do, and I’m going to guess your next question is to ask if you can see them. Am I right?” He laughed.
“I’m that predictable?”
“Well, your inquisitiveness knows no bounds. You ask so many questions it makes my head spin. It wasn’t hard to guess what you were going to ask next. Are you always so curious?”
“When I was sixteen, my father had a brooch made for me, a question mark set with tiny diamonds.”
Jacob laughed again. “Wear it the next time we meet. I’d love to see it.”
“I will.”
“Your father must have been a wonderful man.”
I nodded, not trusting my voice to answer without cracking.
“What happens when you ask all those questions and get answers you don’t like?”
“I try to keep an open mind. To focus rather on the discovery and where that will lead.”
He cocked his head and stared at me for a moment. “You should be a reporter,” he said. Then he reached for another sandwich.
Instead of responding, I took a bite of my own sandwich and chewed.
“Have you ever thought of working?” he asked.
No one had ever asked me that. The people I met as Vera Garland rarely considered that a woman might have a calling besides motherhood.
I didn’t even consider telling him the truth, given how deep I was into the lie already. And I was good at lying. I’d been practicing for years. I’d lied my way through factories and tenements and abortion clinics, as well as other nefarious and hazardous places.
“I can’t imagine working that hard or doing anything that dangerous,” I said.
“No, I suppose that wouldn’t be typical for one of your set.”
I bristled and was suddenly sorry I’d answered the way I had. I sensed a bias that I hadn’t guessed at before. But of course, he would have some resentment toward high society and the fashionable set. He had to deal with the likes of them all day long in the shop. And I was certain that he’d endured more than his share of rude treatment.
“Do you have a secret?” I asked him.
He cocked his head. “What an odd question to come out of the blue.”
“Do you?”
“Yes,” he said, without hesitation.
“Is it a big secret or a small one?”
He hesitated this time, then sighed, as if debating whether to tell me the truth. “I have one very large secret with many compartments.”
“And have you ever told anyone?”
“No. In fact, I’ve never admitted to anyone but you that I even have a secret at all.”
“Why did you tell me?”
“You asked.”
“I doubt it is that simple,” I said.
“No, Vera. It’s not that simple. I don’t think anything about you or me is simple, do you?”
“No, I don’t suppose it is.”
He took another bite of his sandwich and then a sip of water. “Your turn now. Do you have many secrets?” he asked.
I hesitated.
“Ah, so you don’t like having the tables turned? You can ask all the questions you want but become shy as soon as I start asking them?”
I had a sudden memory and with it a realization. We were at the dinner table. My mother had asked my father something he hadn’t wanted to answer. I could distinctly remember my mother saying almost the same thing to him that Jacob had said to me just now. That it was fine for him to ask questions but not her, and was that fair? My mother asking my father if it was fair. How had I forgotten that after all these years?
“Vera?”
“Yes, sorry. I just remembered something. My father loved asking questions, too, but my mother complained that he didn’t like to answer them. Odd that you would say the same thing about me.”
“Not so odd. You probably take after him.”
It struck me then to wonder if I had become a reporter to deflect the questions being asked of me.
“Well, I do take after him much more than I do my mother.”
“So do you have any secrets? Answer me, or else you don’t get a doughnut,” he teased.
“Yes, then, I do. Quite a few.”
“And have you ever shared them?”
“Yes, I have. My father knew all but one of them.” I thought of my abortion. “But my mother and sister only know one.”
“Cryptic… and interesting.”
“My turn for another question. Have you told many lies?”
He paused, as if he were figuring out how to answer. “Yes, I suppose I have, but I hardly think that’s very unusual. Don’t you think in the course of a life one does? Many of them are kind. For instance, what am I supposed to say when a client asks, ‘Do you think these earrings flatter me?’ Or ‘Do you think I’m too old for these pearls?’ ”
“Are there any pearls a woman is too old for?”
Jacob laughed. “I supposed that wasn’t the best example.”
“What are other types of acceptable lies?”
“Well, there are the lies you tell yourself when dealing with various situations. Telling yourself that someone isn’t worth bothering with, even though you know in your heart they are, but maybe they’ve hurt you and you can’t get past it. Convincing yourself that sometimes it’s OK to do the wrong thing if it’s for the right reason. Or the kind of lie that gets you through dark nights, telling yourself that there is nothing to fear when you know there is.”
I was silent for a moment. I knew those kinds of lies. All too well.
“What other kinds of lies are there?” I finally asked.
“Vera, where is this all going?”
“I’m curious, that’s all.”
“I think it’s more than that. I think you are struggling with your secret and want to tell me but aren’t sure you can trust me.”
I shook my head. “I think the question is more likely if you can trust me.”
“That is a damnable habit, to keep turning my questions back at me.”
“I’m just full of damnable habits, or so my mother always tells me.”
I took another bite of my sandwich. Jacob finished his second.
“I’m going to make some coffee to go with those doughnuts,” he said. “And don’t try to stop me. I saw your kitchen. I know which of us will make the better brew.”
A few minutes later, he brought in a tray with the plate of doughnuts, two mugs of hot black coffee, a little pitcher of milk, and a pot of sugar. I watched him make his coffee sweet and very light. I drank mine black. Too many newsrooms ran out of milk and sugar over long nights, and I’d gotten used to going without.
“Now,” I said when we finished eating, “you need to take a nap. The doctor was quite clear about that. At least for the rest of the week, you need to do nothing but eat and sleep, read novels, and let your body get over the shock of the attack.”
I shivered without realizing it.
“What about you? Are you over the shock of the attack?”
“I don’t think so. I couldn’t get past it while you were lying there in that hospital bed, worried if you were ever…” I couldn’t finish the thought.
“Tell you what: I’ll take a nap if you take one with me. The nurse told me how much time you spent at the hospital. More than you told me. Every night, Vera?”
He took my hand and ran his thumb across my knuckles, sending shivers up my arm.
What was I doing? Jacob might be the key to unlocking the story I was chasing. What would he say if he knew I was pretending to be interested in purchasing jewelry, all so I could gather information about Cartier? And I was on the verge of getting the sordid facts I needed. But at the same time, I was honestly and truly attracted to Jacob. Not just because of who he was but because of who I was with him, and I could imagine spending more time with him. Much more time, and it had been so long since I’d thought that about any man.
Was I taking advantage of my attraction to him and risking it all for a story? Except it wasn’t just a story. This was about my father’s life. My uncle’s life. It was about right and wrong.
“Come on,” Jacob cajoled, as he took my hand and led me toward the bedroom. And I, responding to his touch, shut down my thoughts and followed.
He sat down on the edge of the bed and, still holding my hand, pulled me with him. He took off his shoes and then leaned down and took off mine. He put his arm around my shoulders and drew me back onto the pillows with him.
We were both still fully dressed, lying on top of the bed. He rolled toward me, got up on one elbow, looked down at me, and then with his forefinger traced the lines of my face—eyebrows, nose, cheekbones, chin, and finally my mouth. Leaning down, he pressed his lips against mine, softly, then more firmly.
All the questions still swirling around in my mind came to roost like birds settling on the grass. As we undressed each other I forgot about my confusion and guilt, my duplicity and guile. I just wanted to feel all the sensations Jacob roused. I just wanted to revel in his touch, in his presence, in his scent, in his attention.
One kiss led to more. I leaned so far into him that we were pressed together without any space between us. I wasn’t playing at anything with him. I was as attracted to him as to any man I’d ever met. I wanted him, the flesh and blood of him. I wanted the man who was touching me, and now undressing me, and now caressing me. But when he raised himself up and looked down at me, with his secret smile on his lips, as he lowered his naked body onto mine and slipped inside me and I felt the first shudder, I knew that I also wanted what he might be able to give me: his help, his secrets, and Mr. Cartier’s.
And wasn’t that part of what made being with him so desirable? So decadent and dangerous? This was far more complicated than just passion. Someone like Vera Garland, a member of the 400, was not supposed to mix and mingle with a Russian Jewish jeweler. Someone like Vee Swann, a female journalist trying to make her way in a male-dominated profession, was not supposed to enter into a personal relationship with a source. This was far worse than befriending a seven-year-old schoolgirl. I was on new ground, and it kept shifting beneath me.
But as Jacob moved inside me, I lost focus on my duplicity and ethics. Our two rhythms synchronized into one. Our breaths coming at the same time. Our hearts hitting the same beats.
I felt both lost and found. He was letting me float in the great wide-open space of sensation and then pulling me back. I was tethered to him by the places where our flesh touched, where he moved, where his fingers explored, where his tongue teased, where his heat warmed me, and where I absorbed his fire.
I’d never experienced anything at this level of feeling before. Was it because I had so recently faced my mortality? Was it because staring down that gun barrel had made me understand that no single moment in life should ever be taken for granted? Was it because this man I was with, this man who my mother would remind me was nothing but a working man, and a foreigner at that, had stepped in front of that gun and taken a blow for me? Almost died for me. For me.
Every single tingle and flutter and wave and throb I was experiencing was a gift. But none so great that if not for him I might be able to receive any of them. The enormity of that suddenly overwhelmed me. As I angled my hips to take him further and deeper, so that he could reach my core, I kept thinking that this man had saved me and was saving me again and again and again, and it became a song in my head as the explosions came, followed all too soon by my tears.
CHAPTER 25
We both fell asleep and woke several hours later, hungry once more. First for each other. And then for food. I made us scrambled eggs with cheese and toasted slices of bread, and Jacob made coffee. While we ate, he asked me not to leave but to stay with him for the night. I said I would. After we finished our supper, Jacob went back to sleep, and I went into the parlor, looking over his bookshelf to find something to read and entertain myself with.
I helped myself to a book called Mr. Justice Raffles by E. W. Hornung. I’d read some of the author’s short stories a few years before, when a fellow reporter at the World had reviewed them, and remembered finding them easygoing and clever. Perfect for that evening.
Raffles was a “gentleman thief,” as he referred to himself. A rakish, charming, and cunning man who never seemed to get caught—or get caught for long. There was something Sherlock Holmesian about Raffles, which was no surprise, because Hornung was Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law. When the first Raffles story had been published, there was a lot of talk in the newsroom about the family connection. There was also quite a bit of speculation that Raffles and his sidekick were patterned after Oscar Wilde and his lover Lord Alfred Douglas. At the time, that hadn’t held much meaning for me, but now it did.
As I read Raffles’s first escapade and recognized the homosexual theme between Raffles and his younger friend Bunny Manders, I couldn’t help but think about my father and the letter I’d read from Uncle Percy. I so wished that my father had confided in me and wondered, not for the first time, how unhappy he had been and how difficult a time of it he’d had being married to my mother. He was such an accomplished, generous, and creative man, who always seemed to enjoy life—food, beautiful things, the store he’d created, reveling in his grandchildren and my writing. Yet there was an entire other side to him that I’d never seen. Worse, never sensed. How perceptive could I have been not to be aware of it? What kind of reporter did that make me?
And with that question, the old doubts came back. I’d broken the cardinal rule of getting involved with my story about Charlotte and trying to swoop in like Lady Bountiful and help her. No, more than help her—save her, change her circumstances. It wasn’t up to me to change the world. But to report on it so that the proper authorities could change it. So that popular opinion would change it. Just thinking about Charlotte, my back twinged. My forever reminder of the little girl I’d loved and lost.
And yet here I was again, involved with Jacob while chasing a story. Except he wasn’t the subject of the story, I thought. And then I almost laughed out loud at the pathetic way I was trying to justify my actions.
I returned to the book, read another chapter. How very charming this character Raffles was. My father had been charming. Charisma hides quite a bit of darkness in people. My mother, for instance, was beautiful, accomplished, determined, and smart. But she wasn’t charming. Perhaps charm was really just another kind of lie. A way to put on a false front to hide the reality underneath. Jacob was charming, too. Did he use charm to hide his broken, tragic past? Or something else?
I put the book down. Thinking about Jacob’s past made me think about his secrets and the fancy leather box that he’d closed and locked without explanation earlier that day.
I rose and wandered into his workshop. I stood on the threshold, where I told myself not to go. To resist the temptation of snooping. I turned, retreated to the bedroom. I would get back into bed and go to sleep beside Jacob. But that wasn’t what I wanted to do.
Jacob’s jacket was hanging on the silent butler where he’d left it. I quietly lifted it and walked out of the bedroom with it on my arm. I shut the door behind me and walked down the hall and into the kitchen, where I hung the jacket on the back of a chair at the table in the corner where we’d eaten.
Yes, it appeared natural there. As if he’d taken it off and slung it around the chair back. If he came out now and looked at it, he probably wouldn’t even remember that he had worn it into the bedroom and taken it off there.
Even as I sat down in that chair, I was telling myself I couldn’t do what I was contemplating. Everything about it was wrong. I would be betraying a man who had done nothing but help me. Who cared for me. Whose bed I had sat beside for days and nights.
I wasn’t going to give in. I couldn’t intrude on his life this way. And yet I wanted to know. I had to know. I could no longer trust that what I saw was all that was there, and without searching, I would never discover Jacob’s secrets.
But that wasn’t the way to get them. Or was it?
I took a breath and then reached into the jacket pocket and pulled out the key that I’d seen him hide when I’d walked into the room. Inspecting it, I thought it resembled the one I’d found in my father’s pocket. The coincidence unnerved me.
