Carnal Innocence

her wine. “I’m getting drunk.”
    “That’s all right, I’ll drive. Tell me the rest.”
    She leaned back against the counter. “Luis would be the conductor, I the featured artist. It would be grueling, of course, but we’d be together. And wasn’t that the important thing? Dr. Palamo—I had just started to see him—advised against it. What I needed was rest and quiet. I had this nasty little ulcer, you see. And the headaches, insomnia, fatigue. It was all stress, and he made it quite clear that going right back on the road would only make matters worse. I didn’t listen.”
    “He should have tossed you into a hospital and chained you to a bed.”
    “He’d like you.” Amused, she sipped more wine.
    “My mother threw a party the night before we left. She was in her element and had a grand time, hinting that it was really an engagement party. Luis responded to that with a lot of winking and hearty laughter. And off we went. As I said, Luis is a brilliant conductor, demanding, moody, but absolutely brilliant. We started in Europe, triumphant. After the first week he moved into his own suite—my insomnia made it difficult for him to get much rest.”
    “Slimy bastard.”
    “Not slimy,” Caroline corrected him meticulously. “Slick. Very slick. The rest I’ll go along with. On a professional level he was a tremendous asset to me. He pushed me musically. He said I was the finest artist he’d ever worked with, but I could be better. He would mold me, sculpt me.”
    “Why didn’t he buy himself some Play-Doh?”
    She chuckled. “I wish I’d asked. To give him his due, he never once stinted on his dedication to improving my performance. He did start to slide when it came to treating me like a woman. I started to feel like an instrument, something he would tune and polish and restring. I was so tired, and sick, and unsure. It annoyed the hell out of him when I’d turn up for rehearsal looking exhausted and frail. It annoyed me, too. It annoyed me to see those pitying glances from the other musicians, the road crew.
    “I performed well, really well. Most of the tour is just a haze of theaters and hotel rooms, but I know I performed as well as I ever had, perhaps better than I ever will again. I picked up some sort of infection along the way and lived on antibiotics and fruit juice and music. We stopped sleeping together completely. He said I was simply not giving him my best. And he was right. Then he assured me that when the tour was over, we’d go away. So I lived on that. The end of the tour, the two of us lying on some warm beach together.
    “But I didn’t make it to the end of the tour. We were in Toronto, three-quarters done. I was awfully sick, and I was afraid I wouldn’t get through the night’sperformance. I’d fainted in my dressing room. It scared me to wake up and find myself lying on the floor.”
    “Jesus Christ, Caroline.” He started to get up, but she shook her head.
    “It sounds worse than it was. I wasn’t an invalid, I was just so tired. And I had one of those vicious headaches that make you want to curl up in a ball and cry. I kept thinking it was only one performance, only one, and if I went to him, if I explained, he’d understand. So I went to him, but he was also lying on his dressing room floor. Only he was lying on top of the flutist. They never even saw me,” she said half to herself, then shrugged. “Just as well. I wasn’t strong enough to face a confrontation. Anyway, I went on that night. A stellar performance. Three encores, standing ovations, six curtain calls. There might have been more, but when the curtain came down the last time, so did I. The next thing I remember, I was waking up in the hospital.”
    “Someone should have put him in the hospital.”
    “It wasn’t him. He was just one more symptom. It was me. Me and my pitiful need to do what was expected of me. Luis hadn’t made me sick. I had done it. Diagnosis—exhaustion.” With a restless movement of her shoulders she walked back to the table to pour more wine, carefully shaking out the last drops. “I found that humiliating. Somehow it wouldn’t have been as bad if I’d had a tumor or some rare exotic disease. They ran scads of tests, poked and prodded and scanned, but it all came down to plain old exhaustion complicated by stress. Dr. Palamo flew up to treat me himself. No ‘I-told-you-so’s’ from him. Just competent, compassionate care. He actually booted Luis out of the