“She’s in the courtroom,” he said.
“Nonsense,” I said. “If I know Celia, she’ll be in the bedroom.”
But I don’t think it was I who said that. It was my voice, but I think Gigi said it... She could never quit dwelling on the time she found Celia in Jack’s and her bedroom. Like a wildcat, she was.
Gigi was supposed to be at work. It was busy at the store — they were getting ready for a fashion tea. And it was stupid of me — I shouldn’t have mentioned, while Gigi and I were eating lunch together, that Celia was coming to the studio that afternoon to talk over the one-man show Celia was sponsoring for Jack. In the middle of the afternoon Gigi told her boss she was getting appendicitis or something, and went home. It was a horrible mess. Gigi slapped Celia and kicked her as she ran downstairs. Celia had a bad fall. I was thankful she was so rich, else she might have sued.
Every time Jack came near Gigi, she scratched his face. Fighting was in her blood. She was beautiful and a good enough girl, but quite common on occasion. Malloy was her name before she married Jack.
The minute Jack called me, I rushed right from the office to her studio. “Georgiana Grace!” I scolded, using her real name instead of the pet name Jack liked. “Do you realize you may ruin Jack’s chance to have this big exhibit? Celia’s going to bring important critics. Maybe Jack will get a picture story in Life — Celia knows one of the editors. You know very well Jack’s paintings are hanging all over this apartment, even in the bathroom. Would you spoil his career just because he showed his sponsor the paintings in the bedroom?”
Gigi said a filthy word. “Grow up!” she said. “Jack’s too big to dress in doll clothes any more.”
“Jack, will you give me your word that everything between you and Celia was — proper?” I asked. Jack never lied to me. When he was small and used to work coins out of my piggy bank, he would always admit it.
“Everything was proper,” Jack said.
“I’ll bet!” Gigi yelled, and scratched him again.
The madder she got, the more Jack tried to hold her and kiss her. At last she let him. When I went into their kitchen to start dinner, he was holding her on his lap explaining how it would be foolish to give up the exhibition when it would all be over in another week or so.
“Then I’ll buy you another Dymka, baby!” he laughed. But not a word about the hundreds and hundreds of dollars that — oh, well...
Watching the butler splash himself and his velvet pajamas in the sink made me suddenly frantic to be clean and cool. I was drenched with perspiration. I was stifled by this house.
I tiptoed out and entered what seemed to be the dining room, with chairs arranged around a long rectangle. But the rectangle was not a table. It was a huge painting, a portrait of Jack, one I had never seen. He was dressed in evening clothes, and carried two cats by their tails. The cats had women’s faces. One was mine, the other was Gigi’s. Her face looked lovely and right, on the cat’s body. Her long, slanted blue eyes — Jack always called them the eyes of a Celtic nymph — were feline, wonderfully exotic.
Beyond this room was a long hall. At the end of it, through a broad doorway, I saw the golden posts of what I thought must be a bed.
“Celia!” I called. A bathroom would be off her bedroom. And I was driven by the need to bathe myself.
My cry couldn’t be heard, even by me. All the hall was padded with the soft, thick toweling. Every sound was absorbed. The soundless cry backed up in me. It created a rhythm, a bottled frenzy; it made my blood beat, beat, until it was like music. I began to dance, the way I used to. My head bent, my neck curved like Pavlova’s in the pictures Mama collected for me.
Suddenly I knew why I was hunting Celia. I was going to ask her to sponsor me in a dance exhibition.
I went dancing down the long, muffled hall. Bending, leaping with a lightness I should have lost years ago. It would astonish Celia, with her superior veiled look. She’d not look at me now the way she did at that cocktail party she gave for Jack, wondering what part of me could possibly be like Jack.
I danced into the room with the golden bedposts. But there was no bed attached to the posts. They were slender, golden columns that spiraled so high they held up the blue sky. No, it wasn’t the sky. Only a blue ceiling. In the blue ceiling were star shapes, outlined with tubed light. It was hideously ugly, because it was dead. It was a dead sky.
The golden posts formed a high, open circle. Celia stood within the circle. Her big dark eyes were lowered so I could not see the golden flecks in them that always reminded me of how rich she was. So I wasn’t frightened of her any more.
It was wonderful not to be frightened of a rich person. Always before I had been frightened by her rich house and her rich thinking and her rich manners — even by the rich way she was put together, her round golden flesh, her lips like little red-satin cushions, her poured-honey hair, the golden flecks, all the smooth butter luxury of her.
“You’re not as beautiful as Gigi,” I told her confidently. “Gigi is a Celtic nymph. She’s Irish, you know.”
She still didn’t look at me. “Yes, I know,” she said. “Jack told me.”
“I was always a nervous child,” I explained. “If I had not been so nervous, I would have been as beautiful as Gigi — as beautiful as you.”
“Not as Gigi,” she said. “Gigi is a Celtic nymph.”
“I’m tired of hearing that,” I said. “Do you have a bathtub in your bedroom?”
“This is not a bedroom,” she said. “This is the courtroom. I am standing in the middle of the court. Isn’t it lovely the way I was able to buy heaven for its ceiling?”
She lifted her eyes, but so high that I couldn’t see into them. She clasped her hands under her chin and gazed at the blue ceiling.
“Don’t try to look saintly,” I warned. “I know as much about your kind as Gigi does. I just pretended I didn’t so I wouldn’t hurt Jack’s career. It’s my career too, you know.”
She smiled. She really looked quite kind. “Ever get fooled?” she asked softly.
My body burned, but at the same time I was cold with perspiration. The lump in my throat hurt. I began to cry. “I must have a bath, I’m filthy, and there’s no tub here.”
Celia moved beside me, her eyes once more directed toward the floor. I think she pressed a button on one of the golden posts — I was too disturbed to see. For the floor of the circular court slowly slipped aside, revealing a large pool of water with steps leading into it.
I walked slowly down the steps to the water’s edge.
“But the water’s dirty! It’s full of old dead leaves,” I said, weeping again.
“You’ve let it get stagnant,” Celia sneered. “You should have drained it long ago.”
What a terrible woman! Blaming me for her own dirty pool of water! I hated her terribly. I hated her with all the hate I had ever had for anyone throughout my life.
I turned, whirling, leaping up the steps, a nymph doing arabesques of fury.
Celia began laughing, raising her eyes toward me.
“Don’t look at me!” I warned. “If you look at me, I’ll kill you!”
But she was already looking. Staring, staring.
There was a towel in my hand — I must have picked it up somewhere in the house.
She waved her hand at me, as though in farewell, and turned her back. Then she lay on the floor and went to sleep.
Slowly, as though walking through water, I went to her, eased the towel beneath her cheek. Then I knotted it tightly over her face. She made no struggle. She was already sound asleep.
I left her and ran away. The house compressed, the way things do in dreams, and I was running out the door, stumbling, running again, the secret no longer hiding but pursuing me...