Carnal Innocence

with Luis began to unravel, and my confidence—my personal confidence—hit the skids. Luis and I ended things with an ugly scene full of accusations and tears. His accusations, my tears. At that point in my life I hadn’t learned to fight well.”
    Tucker laid a hand over hers. “Then you learned fast.”
    “Once I make up my mind, I’m a quick study. Too bad it took me nearly twenty-eight years to make up my mind. When Luis and I parted ways, I wanted to take some time off, but I’d already been committed to all these guest appearances and a special for cable TV. My health …” It was difficult to admit it, even now. No matter how illogical it was, she was still embarrassed by the illness. “Well, it deteriorated. And I—”
    “Wait. What do you mean deteriorated?”
    Uncomfortable, she shifted and began to toy with the stem of her glass. “Headaches. I was used to having headaches, but they became more chronic and severe. I lost some weight. My appetite suffered because nothingseemed to settle well. Insomnia, and the resulting fatigue.”
    “Why didn’t you take care of yourself?”
    “I thought I was just being indulgent. Temperamental. And I had responsibilities. People were depending on me to perform, and to perform well. I couldn’t just—” She cut herself off with a short laugh. “Excuses, as the wise Dr. Palamo would say. Truth—I was hiding out. Using my work to escape. The repression wasn’t just sexual. I’d been taught to behave ‘properly.’ To present a certain image and to live up to my potential. And, as my mother would say, feeling unwell is no reason for a lady to act unwell. It was easier to ignore the symptoms than to face them. When I was taping the TV special in New York, my mother came up. Escorted by Luis. I was so angry, so hurt, I walked off the set.” She smiled a little, then the smile became a laugh. “I’d never done a thing like that in my life. Beneath the anger and hurt was this little nugget of triumph. I had taken control. I’d acted on impulse, on pure emotion, and the world hadn’t come to a screeching halt. It was a very heady five minutes.”
    She couldn’t sit any longer, simply couldn’t, and pushed away from the table to roam the room.
    “That was how long it took her to swirl into my dressing room and read me her version of the riot act. I was behaving like a spoiled child, an insufferable artist, a prima donna. I tried to tell her that I felt betrayed that she’d brought him along, but she just ran right over me—I was rude, foolish, ungrateful…. Luis was ready to forgive me for being willful and overly sensitive and mindlessly jealous, and here I was turning up my nose. Of course, I apologized.”
    “For what?”
    “For whatever she wanted me to apologize for,” Caroline said with a wave of her hand. “After all, she wanted only the best for me. She’d seen that I had the best. She’d worked and sacrificed so that I could have a brilliant career.”
    “I guess your talent didn’t count.”
    Caroline let out a deep breath, trying to expel someof the bitterness along with the air. “She can’t help it, Tucker. I’m still working on accepting that, and I’m almost there. There was a time I couldn’t help it either. Luis came to my hotel suite that evening. He was charming, sweet, full of regrets and explanations. It had been the strain of being without me for so long—not that that was an excuse for his unfaithfulness, he assured me. But he’d been so lonely, so vulnerable, and my doubts and questions had only added to the strain. The other women, they had only been substitutes for me.”
    She snatched her glass off the table. “Can you imagine a woman with a single working brain cell falling for that?”
    Tucker took a chance and smiled at her. “Yeah.”
    She stopped, stared at him, then began to laugh. “Of course you would. And, of course I did. He was still the only man who’d ever made love to me. Maybe if I’d had a few flings myself, I wouldn’t have been so ready to fall back into the pattern. Maybe if I’d had the same confidence in myself as a woman that I had as a musician, I’d have shown him the door. But I agreed to put all the mistakes behind us, to start fresh. We even talked about marriage. Oh, in a very distant, diluted sort of way. When the time was right, he would say. When things fell into place. And because he asked me, I committed to another tour.”
    A little surprised, she looked down at