The Quiet Game

Livy's expression does not change. She holds her eyes on mine, attentive as a spectator at the opera. But I sense that she's expending tremendous effort to maintain this illusion of normalcy.

"What was she talking about?" I ask.

"I have no idea." She looks away from me. "Mom probably doesn't either. She's a hairbreadth from the DTs by five o'clock every day. Daddy's talking about sending her to Betty Ford."

"She was referring to something specific. I saw her eyes."

Livy turns and peers into the cloudy water. "My divorce has upset her quite a bit. Divorce isn't part of the fairy tale. If it were, she'd have left my father long ago."

"I thought you were only separated."

"Pending divorce, then. It's just semantics." She looks at me over her bare shoulder, an injured look in her eyes. "You think I'd ask you to make love to me if there was a chance my husband and I would get back together?"

This is one of those moments where we make a heaven or hell of the future, by choosing honesty or deception. "I don't know. You weren't that discriminating in the past."

She flinches, but she can endure much worse than this. "The past, the past," she says. "The damned sacred past. Can't we try living in the present for once?"

"Yesterday was the only free ride we're going to get."

She looks back into the depths of the pool. "I have a room," she says in a deliberate voice. "It's two doors down from yours. Why don't we talk there?"

A room. Part of me wants to slap her for assuming so much. I move sideways so that I can see her face. "Will you really talk?"

She pulls her hair back into a thick ponytail, as though to feel the breeze on her neck. Her collarbones are sculpted ivory, creating shadowy hollows at the base of her throat.

"About what?"

"About what? Everything. Why you did what you did twenty years ago."

"What do you mean?"

This is Kafkaesque. Can she really have edited the past so completely that she no longer remembers how badly she betrayed our dreams? "Why you disappeared for a year. Where you went. Why you ran off to Virginia. Why you treated me like a stranger when I flew up to ask you to get your father to drop the suit."

She turns to me and lets her hair fall, and whatever mask she was maintaining falls with it. She looks more vulnerable than I have ever seen her, and when she speaks, her voice is stripped of all affect. "Penn, I can't do it."

"Livy, if I understood some of those things, I might… well-things might not have to happen the way they are."

"What do you mean? If I answer your questions, you'll withdraw the charges you made against my father?"

I don't know what I mean. I started into the Del Payton case to destroy Leo Marston, but compared to understanding the mysteries that shaped my life, revenge seems meaningless. Of course, there is still Del Payton. And Althea. And the small matter of justice-

"I can't pull out of the Payton case now. It's too late for that. But I can pursue it a different way. If your father's part was only-"

"Stop," she says, shaking her head. "I can't talk about twenty years ago. Not even to make things easier on my father."

She takes a step toward me. I want her to stay back, because the closer she gets, the more I want to go to her room with her. She is achingly beautiful in the moonlight.

"How did I ruin your life?" I ask.

She shakes her head, absolving me of any possible sin. "You didn't." Another step. "But you can save it."

"Livy, listen-"

"Come with me," she pleads. "Right now."

If she had kissed me then, I would have walked away. But she didn't. She picked up her purse from the pool chair, took my hand, and led me across the parking lot toward the motel, a purposeful urgency in her stride.

The deja vu of walking beside the numbered doors is powerful enough to dislocate time. If I were to close my eyes and open them again, I would see the eighteen-thousand-dollar gown flowing behind her like a trail of mist. The lifetimes of water that have passed under the bridge since that night have all flowed back in a span of moments.

When she opens the door and closes us inside, I pull her to me and kiss her with the thirst of a binge drinker returning to the bottle. My questions fade to dying sparks, made irrelevant by the absolute connection of our lips and hands. I don't even know I am backing her toward the door until she collides with it, the unyielding wooden face holding her as I continue forward, pressing against her, my hands groping at her dress, searching for the hem.

"That's right," she says hoarsely. "That's right… that's-"

The moment my hand finds her sex, she is breathing like a sprinter in the last few yards of a race. She kisses me with almost desperate passion, then pushes down the front of the strapless dress and pulls my mouth to a breast. In seconds both her arms are outstretched, fingers splayed and quivering, discharging the frantic energy pouring from her core. Touching her this way is rapture, at once within her and without, needing no other thing, no friend, no thought-