Lady in the Lake(51)

“What did he want?”

Judith took no offense at the question, borderline rude as it was. “He asked me to go out. I knew my mother would be scandalized, but it was my father who really hit the roof. I don’t know if it was the cop part or the Irish part. At any rate, he said there was no way any daughter of his would go out with ‘such a man.’”

“A shame,” Maddie said, not meaning it. “He was cute.” Again, not meaning it. She couldn’t recall anything about the man but his vapid chatter.

“He wants to meet up with us tonight,” Judith said. “At the theater. If that’s okay?”

Maddie felt silly, a little used, although she was the one who had called Judith. She even felt her allegiances shifting toward Judith’s parents, to whom she might have been closer in age. If Seth had wanted to date a shiksa, a cop’s daughter, Maddie would not have approved. But she also would have been careful not to object. That’s how her mother had handled her high school relationship with Allan. Pretending not to be worried, inviting his parents over for Passover dinner.

How, Maddie wondered, would her mother have acted if she had known about Maddie’s true first love? Somehow, she had managed to hide him from everyone. Perhaps that was her real talent, secret loves. But it was 1966. Being a courtesan was not a career.

Courtesan. She could hear her first love, laughing at her across the years. Euphemisms are for cowards, Maddie. He had laughed at her a lot, come to think of it. Mocked her ambition to write, said she would be just another suburban mama.

“Of course, that’s okay,” she assured Judith.

“And I thought,” Judith said, “if you don’t mind—we’d give you cab fare to get home. You see, if my parents think that I have to drive you back to the city and home again, that’s a good hour of time, and—”

Her turn to blush. Maddie would have been quite jealous now, except that she knew whatever Judith and her date did in their stolen hour could not compare to what she and Ferdie accomplished in that same window of time. But, oh, how lovely it would be to sit in a movie theater, holding hands with someone, anyone. Was this always the choice, passion or respectability?

The movie was The Sandpiper. After a carefully staged chance encounter in the lobby, the trio chose seats toward the rear of the theater, then Maddie insisted on moving closer to the front, claiming she had forgotten her glasses. (She didn’t wear glasses.) Judith and her cop, Paul something, made faint protests. He was in civilian clothes. He was not especially attractive, not to Maddie. But there was something about the knowledge of this forbidden love (lust) eleven rows back that aroused her. Or maybe it was Richard Burton, so attractive despite his pocked skin. She found herself quite stirred up.

And then she realized that the man next to her had put his hand on her knee.

She picked it up and put it back in his lap, stealing a glance at him. He did not appear depraved. He was not trying to touch himself and his eyes were fixed on the film. She should have been screaming for an usher—and yet. His profile was quite nice. A fine Roman nose, a thick head of hair, long-lashed eyes behind his glasses. There was no dirty raincoat, no unzipped trousers—

It was then that Maddie screamed.

Not because she was scared, not really. Oh, she was terrified, but not by this man. She was horrified by her lack of fear, overwhelmed by the thought, however fleeting, that she could lead this man out of the theater and do things to him, let him do things to her. She was becoming depraved, there was no other word for it. This was why she had married as quickly as possible. Because her first love had awakened this terrible lust in her and she knew she had to bottle it, tame it. Now it was out again, loose in the world.

Of course, once she started shouting, Paul and Judith came to her rescue as well, while the man with the Roman nose was never seen again. There was no talk of cab fare, given the fright Maddie had endured. The two drove her home. Maddie almost felt guilty for depriving them of their time together. Then again, they had left the film forty-five minutes in, so they still had at least an hour to spend in each other’s company.

Judith reported in the next day, whispering on the line from her brother’s jewelry store.

“He wanted to park on Cylburn Avenue,” she said. “Near—is that weird?”

“No,” Maddie said. Yes, she thought. But not as weird as what I wanted to do last night, so who am I to judge?

A libertine, she thought after hanging up. I am becoming a libertine. Where had she first heard that word? From her first lover, of course. Was he still alive? He had moved away long ago and she had lost track of him. But given the family’s Baltimore connections, she assumed there would be an obituary in the local papers if he died. There would definitely be an obituary if his wife died. But he was not old yet, only going on sixty. There was no reason to think he had passed.

She saw herself, not quite eighteen, standing on the sidewalk and watching movers carry furniture into a van.

“Where are they going?” she asked the least intimidating of the men.

“New York,” he grunted.

“I know him. Them,” she offered. “I was—I went to school with their son.”

The moving man was not interested. For months, the gravest fear of Maddie’s life had been that someone would discover her secret, what she had done. But now she saw the worst fate was no one’s knowing. She had kept their secret too well. All the promises, the whispered words, the vows made in exchange for taking from her something she could never reclaim—there were no witnesses. Only he knew how he had spoken of their running away together, of the visions he had painted, better with words than he ever was with a brush, of a future in which they lived in the Village, true libertines, caring about nothing but art and love. She could not prove it had happened, any of it. The most significant event of her young life was being hauled onto that truck, transported to New York of all places, but probably not the Village, never the Village. They probably were going to live on the Upper East Side, in the kind of house and household that he said he despised.