Petals on the Wind

  "He doesn't use drugs!" I defended, protective of the good that was in Julian, and for some reason, wanting to forget all that wasn't.

  "He jumped on your toes, when you need those toes to dance on--so don't tell me you will have a sane man to deal with. When you were putting on your clothes, I overheard someone say that since Julian started running around with Yolanda he's been an entirely different man. Everyone else suspects he's on drugs--that's why I said it," and here he paused, "and besides, I know for a fact that Yolanda takes anything she can get."

  I was sleepy, in pain and worried about Julian who should be home by now, and there was an incipient baby in me whose fate I had to decide. "Chris, stay then. But when he comes home, let me do the talking--just fade into the background--promise?"

  He nodded, while I began to drift off again, feeling as if nothing was real but the bed underneath me and the sleep I needed. Lazily, without thought, I tried to turn on my side, and my legs slipped from the heaped pillows, making me cry out. "Cathy . . . don't move," said Chris, quickly adjusting my legs back on the pillows. "Let me lie beside you, and hold you until he comes. I promise not to sleep, and the minute he comes through that door, I'll jump up and fade away." He smiled to charm me into cheer again, so I too nodded and welcomed the warm, strong arms he put around me as again I sought the sweet relief of sleep.

  As in a dream I felt soft lips move on my cheek, in my hair, then lightly over my eyelids, and finally my lips. "I love you so much, oh, God, how much I love you," I heard him say, and I thought for a disoriented moment it was Julian who'd come home to say he was sorry for hurting and humiliating me . . . for this was his way, to give me pain, and then apologize, and make love with passionate abandon. So I turned a bit on my side and responded to his kisses, and put my arms around him, and twined my fingers into his strong dark hair. That's when I knew. The hair I felt wasn't strong and crisp, but silky and fine, like my own. "Chris!" I cried out, "stop!" But he was out of control as he lavished my face, my neck, and the bosom he bared with his ardent kisses.

  "Don't cry stop," he murmured, caressing and stroking me, "all my life I've had nothing but frustrations. I try to love others, but it's always you. . . you, whom I can never have! Cathy . . . leave Julian! Come away with me! We'll go to some distant place, where no one knows us, and together we can live as man and wife. We won't have any children . . . I'll see to that. We can adopt babies. You know we make good parents . . you know we love each other and always will! Nothing can change that! You can run from me and marry twelve other men, but your heart is in your eyes when you look at me--it's me you want--as I want you!"

  He was carried away with his own persuasions and wouldn't listen to my weak words. "Cathy, just to hold you, to have you again! This time I'll know how to give you the pleasure I couldn't before--please, if you ever loved me--leave Julian before he destroys us both!"

  I shook my head, trying to focus on what he was saying and what he was doing. His blond hair was beneath my chin, nuzzling at my breasts, and he didn't see my denial, but he did hear my voice. "Christopher--I'm going to have Julian's baby. I went to a gynecologist while I was in Clairmont--it's the reason I stayed longer than I originally intended. Julian and I are having a baby."

  I could have slapped him from the way he moved backward, abandoning the sweet ecstasy of kissing forbidden places that had aroused me. He sat up on the side of the bed and bowed his head into his hands. Then he sobbed, "Always you manage to defeat me, Cathy! First Paul, then Julian . . . and now a baby." Then suddenly he faced me. "Come away and let me be the father to that child! Julian isn't fit! If you never let me touch you, let me live near enough so I can see you every day and hear your voice. Sometimes I want it back like it used to be . . just you and I, and our twins."

  Silence that we both knew well came and took us, and shut us away in our own secret world where sin lived and unholy thoughts dwelled, and we'd pay, pay, pay, if ever . . . but no, there wouldn't be any "if ever". . .

  "Chris, I'm going to have the baby with Julian." I said with a firm resolution that surprised me. "I want Julian's child--for I do love him, Chris--and I've failed him in so many ways. Failed him because you and Paul got in my eyes, and I didn't appreciate what I could have had in him. I should have been a better wife, and then he wouldn't have needed those girls. I'll always love you--but it's a love that can't go anywhere, so I give it up. You give it up! Say goodbye to yesterdays and a Catherine Doll who doesn't exist anymore."

  "You forgive him for breaking your toes?" he asked, astonished.

  "He kept begging me to say I loved him, and I never would. I kept a deceptive parasol over my head, to keep dark doubts in my mind, and I refused to see anything that was noble and fine about him but his dancing. I didn't realize that to love me, even when I denied him, was noble and fine in itself. So, let me go, Chris--even if I never dance again, I'll have his child . . . and he will go on to fame without me."

  He slammed the door and left me, and I soon fell asleep to dream of Bart Winslow, my mother's second husband. We were waltzing in the grand ballroom of Foxworth Hall, and upstairs, near the balcony balustrade, two children were hidden inside the massive chest with the wire screen backing. The Christmas tree over in the corner towered up to heaven, and hundreds of people danced with us, but they were made of transparent cellophane, not of the healthy flesh, blood and muscle that was the beauty of Bart and I. Bart suddenly stopped dancing, and picked me up to carry me up the broad stairs, and down on the sumptuous swan bed he laid me. My beautiful gown of green velvet and softer green chiffon melted beneath the touch of his burning hands--and then that powerful male shaft that entered me and wound about me started shrieking, screaming, and each loud cry sounded exactly like a telephone ringing.

  I bolted awake. . . why did a telephone ringing in the dead of night always have such a threatening sound? I sleepily reached for the receiver. "Hello?"

  "Mrs. Julian Marquet?"

  I came awake a bit more, and rubbed at my eyes. "Yes, this is she."

  She named a hospital on the other side of town. "Mrs. Marquet, would you please come as quickly as possible? If you can, have someone else drive you. Your husband was in an auto accident, and is even now in surgery. Bring with you his insurance papers, identification, and any medical history you have. . . . Mrs. Marquet . . . are you there?"

  No. I wasn't there. I was back in Gladstone, Pennsylvania, and I was twelve years old. Two state troopers were in the driveway, with a white car parked . . . and swiftly they were striding to interrupt a birthday party to tell us all that Daddy was dead. Killed in an accident on Greenfield Highway.

  "Chris! Chris!" I screamed, terrified he might have gone.

  "I'm here. I'm coming. I knew you'd need me."

  In that dim and lonely hour that comes before dawn, Chris and I arrived at the hospital. In one of those sterile waiting rooms we sat down to wait and find out if Julian would survive the accident and the surgery. Finally, around noon, after hours in the recovery room, they brought him down.

  They had him laid out on what they called a "fracture bed"--a torturous looking device that strung up his right leg which wore a cast from his toes to his hip. His left arm was broken, and in a cast, and strung up in a peculiar way too. His pale face was lacerated and bruised. His lips, usually so full and red, were as pale as his skin. But all of that was nothing compared to his head! I shivered to look! His head had been shaved and small holes drilled for metal calipers to be hooked in to pull his head up and backward! A leather collar lined with fleece was fastened about his neck. A broken neck! Plus a leg fracture, and a compound fracture of his forearm--to say nothing of the internal injuries that had kept him on the operating table three hours!

  I cried out, "Will he live?"

  "He is on the critical list, Mrs. Marquet," they answered so calmly. "If he has other close relatives, we suggest you contact them."

  Chris made the call to Madame Marisha, for I was deathly afraid he'd pass a
way any moment, and I might miss the only chance to tell him I loved him And if that happened, I'd be cursed and haunted all through the rest of my life.

  Days passed. Julian flitted in and out of consciousness. He stared at me with eyes lackluster, unfocused. He spoke but his voice came so thick, heavy and unintelligible I couldn't understand. I forgave him for all the little sins, and the big ones too, as you are apt to when death is around the corner. I rented a room in the hospital next to his where I could catch naps, but I never had a full night's rest. I had to be there when he came to, where he could see and know me, so I could plead with him to fight, to live, and, most of all, say all the words I'd so stingily kept from his ears. "Julian," I whispered, my voice hoarse from saying it so often, "please don't die!"

  Our dancing friends and musicians flocked to the hospital to offer what consolation they could. His room filled with flowers from hundreds of fans Madame Marisha flew up from South Carolina and stalked into the room wearing a dreary black dress. She gazed down on the unconscious face of her only child without any expression of grief. "Better he die now," she said flatly, "than to wake up and find himself a cripple for life."

  "How dare you say that?" I flared, ready to strike her. "He's alive--and he's not doomed. His spinal cord wasn't injured! He'll walk again, and dance again too!"

  Then came the pity and disbelief to shimmer her jet eyes--and then she was in tears. She who'd boasted she never cried, never showed grief, wept in my arms. "Say it again, that he'll dance--oh, don't lie, he's got to dance again!"

  Five horrible days came and went before Julian could focus his eyes enough to really see. Unable to turn his head, he rolled his eyes my way. "Hi."

  "Hello, dreamer. I thought you were never going to wake up," I said.

  He smiled, a thin ironic smile. "No such luck, Cathy love." His eyes flicked downward to his strungup leg. "I'd rather be dead than like this."

  I got up and went to his fracture bed that was made with two wide strips of rough canvas slipped over strong rods, and a mattress was beneath this that could be lowered enough to allow a bedpan to be placed in position. It was a hard, unyielding bed to lie on, yet I stretched beside him very carefully, and curled my fingers into his tangle of uncombed hair-- what he had left. My free hand stroked his chest. "Jule, you're not paralyzed. Your spinal cord was not severed, crushed, or even bruised. It's just in shock, so to speak."

  He had an uninjured arm that could have reached to hold me, but it stayed straight at his side. "You're lying," he said bitterly. "I can't feel one damn thing from my waist down. Not your hand on my chest either. Now get the hell out of here! You don't love me! You wait until you think I'm ready to kick off, and then you come with your sweet words! I don't want or need your pity--so get the hell out, and stay out!"

  I left his bed and reached for my purse. Crying, even as he cried and stared at the ceiling. "Damn you for wrecking our apartment!" I stormed when I could talk. "You tore up my clothes!" I rampaged, angry now, and wanting to slap his face that was already bruised and swollen. "Damn you for breaking all our beautiful things! You knew how painstakingly we chose all those lamps, the accessories that cost a fortune. You know we wanted to leave them as heirlooms for our children. Now we've got nothing left to leave anyone!"

  He grinned, satisfied. "Yeah, nothing left for nobody." He yawned, as if dismissing me, but I was unwilling to be dismissed. "Got no kids, thank God. Never gonna have any. You can get a divorce. Marry some son of a bitch and make his life miserable too."

  "Julian," I said with such heavy sadness. "Have I made your life miserable?"

  He blinked, as if not wanting to answer that, but I asked him again, and again, until I forced him to say, "Not altogether miserable--we had a few moments."

  "Only a few?"

  "Well . . . maybe more than a few. But you don't have to stay on and take care of an invalid. Get the hell out while you can. I'm no good, you know that. I've been unfaithful to you time and again."

  "If you are again, I'll cut your heart out!"

  "Go 'way, Cathy. I'm tired." He sounded sleepy from the many sedatives they fed into him and shot into him. "Kids are not good for people like us anyway."

  "People like us . .

  "Yeah, people like us."

  "How are we different?"

  He mockingly, sleepily laughed, bitterly too. "We're not real. We don't belong to the human race."

  "What are we then?"

  "Dancing dolls, that's all. Dancing fools, afraid to be real people and live in the real world. That's why we prefer fantasy. Didn't you know?"

  "No, I didn't know. I always thought we were real." "It wasn't me who ruined your things, it was Yolanda. I watched, though."

  I felt sick, scared he was telling the truth. Was I only a dancing doll? Couldn't I make my way in the real world, outside the theater? Wasn't I, after all, any better at coping than Momma?

  "Julian . . . I do love you, honest I do. I used to think I loved someone else, because it seemed so unnatural to go from one love to another. When I was a little girl, I used to believe love came only once in a lifetime, and that was the best kind. I thought once you loved one person, you never could love another. But I was wrong."

  "Get out and leave me alone. I don't want to hear what you've got to say, not now. Now I don't give a damn."

  Tears coursed my face and dropped down on him. He closed his eyes and refused to see, or listen. I leaned to kiss his lips, and they stayed tight, hard, unresponding. Next he spat, "Stop! You sicken me!"

  "I love you, Julian," I sobbed, "and I'm sorry if I realized it too late, and said it too late--but don't let it be too late. I'm expecting your baby, the fourteenth in a long line of dancers . . . and that baby is a lot to live for, even if you don't love me anymore. Don't close your eyes and pretend not to hear, because you are going to be a father, whether or not you want to be."

  He rolled his dark, shining eyes my way, and I saw why they shone, for they were full of tears. Tears of self-pity, or tears of frustration, I didn't know. But he spoke more kindly, and there was a tone of love in his voice. "I advise you to get rid of it, Cathy. Fourteen is no luckier a number than thirteen."

  In the room next door, Chris held me in his arms all through the night.

  I woke up early in the morning. Yolanda had been thrown from the car in that accident, and today she would be buried. Cautiously I eased from the fold of Chris's arms, and I arranged his nodding head more comfortably before I stole away to take a peek into Julian's room. He had a night nurse on duty, and she was sound asleep beside his bed. I stood in the doorway and watched him in the dim, greenish light from the lamp covered by a green towel. He was asleep, deeply asleep. The intravenous tube that led to his arm ran under the sheet and into his vein. For some reason I fixed my eyes upon that bottle with the pale yellow liquid that seemed more water than anything else, so quickly it was being depleted. I ran back to shake Chris awake. "Chris," I said, as he tried to pull himself together, "isn't that IV supposed to just trickle into his arm? It's running out very quickly--too quickly, I think "

  Hardly were the words out of my mouth when Chris was up and running toward Julian's room. He snapped on the ceiling light as he entered, then wakened the sleeping nurse. "Damn you for falling asleep! You were in here to watch him!" By the time he had that said, he'd pulled back the covers and there was Julian's casted arm with the opening for the needle--and the needle was still inserted, and taped in position--but the tube had been cut! "Oh, God," sighed Chris, "an air bubble must have reached his heart."

  I stared at the shiny scissors held so loosely in Julian's slack right hand. "He cut the tube himself," I whispered, "he cut the tube himself, and now he's dead, dead, dead. . . ."

  "Where did he get the scissors?" snapped Chris, while the nurse began to tremble. They were her small embroidery scissors she used to cut her crochet thread. "They must have fallen out of my pocket," she said weakly. "I swear I don't remember losing them--or maybe he took
them when I was leaning over. . . ."

  "It's all right," I said dully. "If he hadn't done it this way, it would have been another. I should have known and warned you. There was no life for him if he could never dance again. No life at all."

  Julian was buried next to his father. On the headstone, I made sure Madame Marisha agreed to the name I added: Julian Marquet Rosencoff, beloved husband of Catherine, and thirteenth in a long line of Russian male ballet stars. Maybe it was ostentatious and gave away my own failure to love him enough while he lived, but I had to let him have it the way he wanted--or as I thought he wanted.

  Chris, Paul, Carrie and I paused at the foot of Georges's grave too, and I bowed my head to show respect to Julian's father. Respect I should have given him too. Graveyards with their marble saints, angels, all so sweetly smiling, so pious or sober--how I hated them! They patronized we who lived; we who were made of fragile tissue and blood, who could grieve and cry while they would stand there for centuries, smiling piously down on all. And I was right back where I'd started.

  "Catherine," said Paul when we were all seated in the long black limousine, "your room is still as it was, all yours. Come home and live with Carrie and me until your baby is born. Chris will be there too, doing his internship at Clairmont Hospital."

  I stared over at Chris who was seated on the jumpseat, knowing he'd won a much better position in a very important hospital--and he was interning in a small, unimportant one. "Duke is so far away, Cathy," he said with his eyes avoiding mine. "It was bad enough traveling when I was in college and med school . . . so if you don't mind, let me be somewhere near so I can be here the day my nephew or niece arrives in the world."

  Madame Marisha jolted so her head almost struck the ceiling of the car. "You carry Julian's child?" she cried. "Why didn't you tell me before? How wonderful!" She glowed, so the sadness dropped from her like a gloomy cloak. "Now Julian's not dead at all--for he will father a son, who will be exactly like him!"