Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [38]
Reasonable! An idea that only someone who’d reached real depths of unreason could muster. But yes, more reasonable at the time, than shouldering what could have been the authentic mission. I failed you, failed myself failed everyone. There is no defense.
One gift you can give yourself, if you have the patience to listen to someone you have every right to ignore, would he to cut your mother and father, Jessica and Brice, all the slack you can manage. None of this is their fault, just as none of it is yours. Where does the fault lie, other than with me? I have been all over the world, running and now walking, slowing down as I’ve come to the place where I begin to see that it lies nowhere, maybe. If I’m nowhere and the fault lies with me, then the fault lies nowhere. You’ll agree there’s a logic, a complementum as your grandfather’s sometime colleague Niels Bohr used to put it, to such a lie of reasoning.
And as tears streamed down Ariel’s cheeks, she wondered whether he meant to misspell that word line.
In her role as incognita, Franny Johnson was freed of the awkward truths most lovers must face about their romantic pasts. She could make hers up as she went along, and so she did. Her powers of invention surprised her at times. Although she’d never really had a boyfriend before, she conceived of several. The relationships were nothing serious, she assured Marcos. Sergio had been an exchange student back in Princeton, from northern Italy, near Milan. He’d hoped to become a diplomat one day. After he went back home, he wrote her a nice letter inviting her to join him in Venice, but she never did, and that was that. Then there was a graduate student, a research assistant who was her mother’s acolyte. His name was—Peter, Peter Cummington. Came from a good family, blue-blooded rather than red-blooded. Tall, slender, memorable for his cable-knit sweaters and tortoiseshell glasses but little else. No chemistry, a total fizz. The sound of his wingtip shoes clomping down the corridor of the mathematics building still made her shudder. The last was Sebastian, before she swore off men altogether and prepared herself for a life of celibacy. Sebastian was clever but conceited, handsome in a vain sort of way. The last time she saw him—well, never mind.
All of this would have been a perfect backstory for Audrey Hepburn in the film Love in the Afternoon, had Marcos resembled the game if aging Gary Cooper, which he didn’t. But for all its fraudulence, her Billy Wilder-worthy performances did project curious truths—among them her desire to make her man covetous—and through the course of her fictions, Franny watched a most unexpected thing develop. A love affair. One that deepened from ideas to words, from words to acts, on the very stage they themselves walked.
Yet Mary lingered, enigma that she was, in the wings. That day on which she had begun but failed to reveal herself to Kip receded into the past. Honoring her silence, he never broached the matter again. And honoring his, she willfully neglected it, a path abandoned at least temporarily for fear of finding out what lay at its end. One question she neglected to ask herself was whether Marcos would not have been just as happy to know the real Mary as the fabricated Franny. Mary tried to bring this to Franny’s attention, and while the question never quite formulated itself, it nagged at her in subtle and unsubtle ways. She dropped a bowl of black bean soup at work for no reason. She lost the key to her house so many times that she finally hid it as a matter of course under the doormat, and even then it disappeared. When driving out to Pajarito, she forgot her license—her only remaining piece of material evidence that Franny Johnson didn’t truly exist—hidden in the medicine cabinet.
The whole damn mess was nearly brought to an abrupt end on the feast day of San Felipe de Nerí, Mary’s twenty-first birthday. It was