Genuine Lies

leave her until she is. She doesn’t have anyone else.”
    As a woman who had not so long ago escaped a ruinous marriage, she tried to empathize with Victor’s wife. “It must be difficult for her, your work, the traveling, and the hours involved.”
    “No, actually, she enjoys it. She loves the house, and the servants are well trained to care for her. If she needs care.Actually, she would be self-sufficient but she often forgets to take her medication, and then …” He shrugged. “She paints. Very well, too, when the mood’s on her. That’s how I met her. I was your typical starving young actor, and I took a job modeling for an art school to earn enough to eat.”
    She forked a bite of his pie and grinned. “Nude?”
    “Yeah.” Her smile eased out one of his own. “I was a bit on the thin side then. After a session, Muriel showed me a sketch she’d done of me. One thing led to the other. She was what we’d have called a bohemian. Very forward-thinking and free-spirited.” His smile faded away. “She’s changed. The illness—the baby. Things changed her. She was diagnosed less than a year after we were married, and gave up completely on the dream of making art her career. Replaced it by making a career out of the religion we’d both rebelled against. I was sure I could shake her out of it. We were young, and I was positive nothing really terrible could happen to us. But it did. I began to get parts, we began to have money. Muriel began to become what she is today: a frightened, often angry, unhappy woman.”
    “You still love her.”
    “I love the rare, the very rare glimpses of that young bohemian who so enchanted me. If she were to come back, I don’t think the marriage would hold. But we’d part as friends.”
    Eve suddenly felt tired, overwhelmed by the smell of grilling onions, the taste of coffee that was too hot and too strong, the hard, headachy colors that surrounded them. “I don’t know what you expect me to say, Victor.”
    “Maybe nothing. Maybe I just need you to understand.” Reaching across the table, he took her hand. When she looked down she saw that she was completely enveloped by him completely covered, completely caught. “I was twenty-two when I met her. Now I’m forty-two. We might have made it all work if the fates hadn’t been against us. I’ll never know. But I knew when I looked at you. I knew you were the woman I was meant to spend my life with.”
    She felt the truth of it, the terrifying truth of it pass from his heart to hers. As cleanly, as quickly as a flower is slicedfrom its stem, the bright corner where they sat was cut off from the rest of the world.
    Her voice was unsteady as she drew her hand away. “You’ve just spent a great deal of time explaining to me why that’s not possible.”
    “It’s not, but that doesn’t stop me from knowing it’s what should be. I’m too Irish not to believe in destiny, Eve. You’re mine. Even if you get up and walk away, that won’t change.”
    “And if I stay?”
    “Then I’ll give you whatever I can for as long as I can. It’s not only sex, Eve, though Christ knows I want you. It’s needing to be there when you first open your eyes in the morning. Sitting on some sunny porch together listening to the wind. Reading by the fire. Sharing a beer at a baseball game.” He took a careful breath. “It’s been nearly five years since Muriel and I have been together as husband and wife. I haven’t been unfaithful—not in those five years or all the years we’ve been married. I don’t expect you to believe me.”
    “Maybe that’s why I do believe you.” She got shakily to her feet, but held out a hand to keep him from rising as well. “I need time, Victor, and so do you. Let’s finish the movie, then see how we feel.”
    “And if we feel the same?”
    “If we feel the same … we’ll see what destiny has in store for us.”
    “And when the movie was over, we felt the same.” Eve still had the glass in her hand. There were tears running unnoticed down her cheeks. “Destiny has run us a long, hard course.”
    “Would you change it?” Julia asked quietly.
    “Parts of it, God, yes. But as a whole—it would hardly matter. I would still be here, exactly as I am today. And Victor would still be the only man.” She laughed, brushing a tear away with her index finger. “The only man who could bring me to this.”
    “Is love worth it?”
    “It’s worth everything.” She shook off the mood.