Chapter 42
I knew that if I told Tom what I’d learned, he would insist I feel betrayed.
He would interrogate me over how she’d approached me in the park, the bracelet, the fact of the accident occurring in our house, and conclude that it had all been a manipulation, and need to know why, to what end?
In short, he would demand I never see her again—not because he forbade me to, but because that was the only reasonable course of action.
And so I said nothing. I steadied myself. I held his hand on the drive home. After we’d paid María and sent her home in our cab, at Tom’s suggestion, we went onto the balcony for a nightcap.
“To us,” he said merrily, clinking his glass against mine, kissing me.
Turning toward the view, his face opened into a boyish grin.
“I still can’t quite believe it.” He rested his arms against the railing, leaning out over the black emptiness into which she’d been thrown, and I imagined her sailing backward, her face opened in amazement, her hair streaming crazily.
“Cold?”
I had shivered. “No. A bit, maybe.”
He took off his jacket, gallantly draped it over my shoulders. “You look so beautiful tonight.” Lightly he trailed his fingers over my breasts, kissing me again, filling me with shame.
That night, when we made love, I was as if nothing, a mote of dust. Afterward, I went upstairs to look at the Navarro prints, smoke a cigarette.
I checked on the children sleeping innocently in their beds.
I felt I was now on the other side of something I could not recross, where I would have to carry Louise’s fictions, the pathetic myth of her storied love, of which I had somehow become a part.
As my initial shock subsided, what lingered was not the brutality or tawdriness, not even the creeping fear that I was being used.
No, what bothered me most was that she had become a woman like countless others.
A woman like my mother, willing to do anything for a man, debase herself, be hurled into thin air and broken open, and still hang his paintings on her walls and spin burnished tales of his greatness, this marvelous man, this important artist, her husband.
Just as I had allowed myself to become hers, to become Mia.