The Whore's Child

Took some photos. Like I said.”
    â€œYou should’ve come with me. The path through the forest is strewn with fairy houses.”
    â€œWith what?”
    â€œLittle houses built of bark and leaves and pebbles. By children, I suppose, if you don’t believe in fairies. People leave pennies near the ones they like best. Isn’t that sweet? I can see why Laura loved it here.”
    Martin just stared at her.
    â€œWell . . . that’s why we came all this way, right? This island was your wife’s favorite place in the whole world, and this is your way of saying goodbye.”
    â€œI didn’t know you—”
    â€œI’m not
stupid,
Martin. I know how much you loved her.”
    But I didn’t.
The words were right there to be spoken, and for a heartbeat Martin thought he’d already said them. But if he did, how would he ever stop? How would he keep from adding,
Any more than I love you.
    They used Robert Trevor’s flashlight to wind their way up the narrow, pitch-black staircase to locate their room on the third floor. Undressing in the dark, they lay in the canopied bed and watched the sky through the open window. Though the storm had moved out to sea, it still flickered on the distant horizon, and every twenty seconds or so the beam from the lighthouse swept past.
    â€œWhat do you think?” Beth said. “Should we stay an extra day?”
    â€œIf you like,” he said. “Whatever you want.”
    â€œIt’s up to you.”
    After a moment he said, “I called Peter while you were out. He needs me to start work earlier, by the second week of rehearsal instead of the third, if possible. He didn’t come right out and say so, but that’s what he wants.”
    â€œWhat do
you
want?”
    â€œI wouldn’t mind heading back.”
    â€œFine with me.”
    â€œLet’s, then.”
    A few minutes later she was snoring gently in the crook of his arm. For a long time Martin lay in the dark thinking about Robert Trevor’s farm in Indiana, if there was such a place, and the countless versions of Laura he claimed to have stored there. And he thought too about Beth, the poor girl. She had it exactly backwards, of course. This trip wasn’t so much about saying goodbye to his wife as saying hello. He’d fallen in love with her, truly in love, the moment he’d uncrated the painting back in L.A. and seen his wife through another man’s eyes. Just as Joyce had known, somehow, that he would.
    What folly, Martin couldn’t help concluding, bitterly, as he contemplated the lovely young woman sleeping at his side; it was his destiny, no doubt, to sell her short as well. What absolute folly love was. Talk about a flawed concept. He remembered how he and his junior high friends—all of them shy, self-conscious, without girlfriends—used to congregate in the shadow of the bleachers to evaluate the girls at Friday night dances. The best ones were taken, naturally, which left the rest. “She’s kind of pretty, don’t you think?” one of his friends, or maybe Martin himself, would venture, and then it would be decided, by popular consensus, if she was or she wasn’t.
    That they were leaving in the morning was a relief to Martin. He preferred the West Coast, and he was looking forward to working on Peter’s new picture, which was to star an actress they’d both worked with shortly after Laura’s death. That script had called for partial nudity, and the actress, who’d recently had a baby, fretted constantly about how she would look. “Trust me,” Peter had told her. “Nobody’s going to see anything. They’re just going to think they do. Because this man”—he pointed to Martin—“is an artist.”
    The next evening, the three of them sat on folding chairs watching the dailies of the scene that had so frightened her. They’d shot only three takes, and midway through viewing the first the actress—she
was
one of the most beautiful women Martin had ever laid eyes on, and never more beautiful than right then—began to relax, intuiting that it was going to be all right. Still, he couldn’t have been more surprised when she took his hand there in the darkness, leaned toward him and whispered, without ever taking her eyes off the screen, “Oh, I love you, I love you, I love you.”

The Farther You Go
    I’ve cut only a couple of