Keeping Secrets Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Keeping Secrets

  Acknowledgements

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

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  Keeping Secrets

  By Sarah Shankman

  Copyright 2014 by Sarah Shankman

  Cover Copyright 2014 by Tom Webster and Untreed Reads Publishing

  The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

  Previously published in print, 1988.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, dialogue and events in this book are wholly fictional, and any resemblance to companies and actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Also by Sarah Shankman and Untreed Reads Publishing

  Impersonal Attractions

  First Kill All the Lawyers

  http://www.untreedreads.com

  Keeping Secrets

  Sarah Shankman

  There are many people I would like to thank for their generosity, love and support during the writing of this book. The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts four times gave me a room and a studio of my own, gifts beyond measure. Tom Smythe read the first words and said yes. Rita Sitnick and Vin Gizzi offered enduring love and a country perch. Harvey Klinger kept me on track even when I didn’t want to be there. And many thanks and much love to all the other friends in New York, Atlanta and California who put me up to it.

  This book is dedicated with love to the memory of Robert M. Daniels—Southern gentleman, gifted artist, uncommon friend and the dearest of dearhearts.

  1

  Los Gatos, California

  1974

  The rain pattered on the rooftop of the house in which Emma and Jesse Tree lay sleeping. Emma’s dream shifted; someone was tap-dancing. Clickety, clickety, click—her unconscious heard the rain as time-steps.

  In the small yard, squirrels chittered to one another about the falling water. Would it wash away the nuts they’d hidden so carefully in the redwood siding that covered the small two-story house? They’d tucked reserves into its red shutters too, and around the edges of the now screened-in carport where in summer the Trees potted begonias and barbequed. Would it wash away the ivy they’d watched Emma plant beneath the back of the house where the house stood on stilts?

  The rain ran in torrents down the single-lane twisting road that led to the house. It wiped out the tracks of pickup trucks lugging in cords of wood for the canyon’s fireplaces. It washed them down into the creek that flowed out of the canyon, under the highway, into the reservoir.

  It scrubbed the large windows that paraded across the back of the Trees’ bedroom, cleaning the outside where Emma couldn’t reach, for the land dropped off there and she’d need a ladder fifty feet tall.

  Emma was dreaming of sailing now, sailing in rough seas. Salty water was splashing in her face, roiling in bigger and even bigger waves. She was going to drown. Someone had been in the boat with her, but now he had disappeared. She was all alone, terrified, and there was water, rising water, everywhere.

  Then she jolted awake to the taste of salt in her mouth. She was drinking her own tears.

  She wiped her bright-blue eyes open. Then Emma, a long, pretty blonde woman, smiled. She wasn’t drowning after all. She was safe, well, as safe as she could be, in bed with her husband, Jesse. It was only the first rain, early this season, only the rainfall of which she was dreaming.

  Thank God, the rain was back from wherever it had spent its summer vacation. Emma hated the long annual drought that spread from May to October, sometimes November, the endless golden days when nothing changed, as if the weather wore a permanent smile and she felt that she should, too. If the weather were this good, shouldn’t she be deliriously happy? Instead, she waited for the rain as if she were waiting for her period, holding her breath, teetering on the edge of good news or bad.

  Slyly, slowly then, Emma pulled her long blonde hair across her face like a curtain. She peeked through it to see whether Jesse was awake.

  She hoped not. She wanted to lie here for a while alone.

  She didn’t want to answer Jesse’s questions about the weekend she’d just spent in Berkeley. She didn’t want him to reach over and tweak her nipple like the switch on the automatic coffeemaker, as if he could turn her on just like that. She wanted to simply wallow in the glory, like the first taste of a lemon-meringue pie, of this first day of rain—and she had the time to do that.

  Emma had never had free time in the fall before—teachers didn’t. But this year she’d taken a leave from the junior college where she taught literature and composition. In another month she’d be leaving for Italy, then France.

  She stretched her arms, but carefully so as not to awaken Jesse. Oh, she was in hog heaven, happy—as they would say back home, her home, in Louisiana—as a pig in shit on this rainy October Monday morning. Nowhere to be, nothing pressing. How she adored rainy days with no have-tos. They were like Saturday mornings when she was a child, a little bit too comfortable to rise and shine with Big John and Sparky on the radio who couldn’t see her anyway—so she’d told herself in West Cypress. How would they know if she didn’t march around her room when Sparky sang their theme song? “If you go down in the woods today, you’d better not go alone.”

  But this morning she was already in the woods in her California mountain home, and she most certainly was not alone.

  She sneaked another blue-eyed look at Jesse, listened to his steady breathing and his little whistling snore.

  Then, propped on one elbow, she studied his lovely paper-bag-brown face, the full lips, the slight tilt of his closed lids. The springy curls of his short black hair and beard were sprigged just here and there with white. He was holding his own. Jesse, she thought, you’re going to be gorgeous forever. Who would guess that you’re thirty-six? But then his brown skin was never going to tell tales on him as her complexion, translucent as a fine china cup, was beginning to.

  Emma ran her eyes over her husband’s naked body. Always hotter than she, he had tossed the covers down.

  His broad brown chest, shoulders and arms were thick with muscle. His stomach was flat. At six feet he was a big man, but not nearly as big as people thought.

  “It’s the combination of things, darling, that builds the illusion,” Emma had once told him, ticking off as if they were building blocks his bull-like neck, the surname Tree, his rich deep bass-baritone.

  “They think you’re the Jolly Black Giant,” she had teased. “If it weren’t for that laugh of yours you’d be downright scary.” For Jesse did have the most wonderful laugh, though on this rainy morning she couldn’t remember having heard it in a very long
time.

  “That ain’t why, honey,” he’d gone along with the joke, imitating a Deep South (where he’d never been) black. “It’s ’cause I’m a darky is why they thinks I’se big. Big everywhere!”

  Then he’d leered like a lunatic, wet his lips, jutted his pelvis and reached for her rear end.

  “Ain’t that right, Miss Emma, ain’t that what you white folks think?”

  They’d fallen onto the bed laughing then, Jesse rolling over her, or was it she who was on top? It hadn’t mattered in those good old days, at first.

  A while later, he’d breathed into her ear, “Miss Anne, Miss Anne,” still teasing her with the black slang for a high and mighty white lady, “I’m coming, I’m coming.” Then the joke had stopped. “Jesus, Emma,” he’d gasped. She’d smiled and held him tight. But she didn’t want to think about that now.

  Then Miss Emma, Miss Anne, Miss Scarlett, she said to herself, staring out the windows at the rain, what are you going to think about? The rain, perhaps?

  I will. I’ll do just that. She closed her eyes again, and time fell back.

  She was in a steamy delta summer of her childhood, flopped out in the side yard watching the thunderheads gather. The hot heavy sky darkened, and the mile-high cumulus clouds that had grown gigantic out over the Gulf piled one on top of another like meringue on a banana pudding.

  Something about the waiting for them to collide and then explode made her itch. Then there was a CRASH! and the smell of ozone just as the drops began to fall was quick and sharp, a rush of aphrodisiac—though she hadn’t put a name to it as a little girl. She had known only that the flash of lightning, the roll of thunder, the sudden dizziness in the sultry summer air made her want to run around the yard like a crazy person, rubbing her legs together very fast until she was tingly all over.

  Now Emma sneaked another glance at her sleeping husband. Her lust for Jesse—the most handsome man she had ever known, whose sexuality practically glowed in the dark—used to strike her like lightning, stun her with its force. Where had that passion run away to now? Why did she never smell the heat, the ozone, the musk?

  There had been a time when the rain outside drip-dripping made her grin and roll against him, tickling him awake. Then they would pull the covers over their heads and play with each other till they couldn’t anymore.

  “No need to rise and shine if there’s no shine,” Jesse had said, his fingers exploring all the while.

  Where had all that loving gone?

  Was it up in the beams of Skytop, the old hotel that he’d been renovating for all of their four years together?

  Had their heat been transmogrified into the lodge’s joists and ceilings, studs and posts, the mile after mile of cabinetry—all of which Jesse insisted on doing by hand, alone? Jesse, trained as a sculptor, was a cabinetmaker, a fine-furniture maker, an artist in wood.

  When Emma met Jesse his work had already been in a host of museums, including the de Young, MOMA, the Metropolitan, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He was a success—approaching fame.

  But, Emma thought, nobody was ever going to see another of Jesse’s massive desks of ebony, delicate tables of tulipwood, cherry jewelry boxes, signed and dated on bottoms that were finished as finely as if they were the tops. If you wanted to see Jesse’s work now, you’d have to drive up and see Skytop.

  * * *

  Their conversations went like this: “Jesse, you’re obsessing. You’re not a carpenter, you’re not an innkeeper, you’re an artist. You’ve taken a wrong turn. You can’t see the forest for the tree.”

  “Mixed metaphors and a bad pun, love.”

  “What about the New York Contemporary Crafts Show? You’re going to let that opportunity pass you by?”

  “How many times have I told you, Skytop is my work now. Every foot of it is part of one gigantic show!”

  Emma changed her tack. “I never see you.”

  “You never saw me in the studio.”

  “That’s not true. All I had to do was walk out the back door and up the steps. I don’t know what you’re doing anymore.”

  Jesse raised one eyebrow, cocked it like a pistol. “And you’ve always been an open book. Right, Emma? Always laid out every little part of yourself for me?”

  “Oh, please, let’s don’t go over that. Jesse, come with me off this mountain. Come with me to Italy.”

  She could see them in her mind’s eye, in a little inn, still slightly drunk on the rough red wine they’d drunk before bedding down for the night.

  “Run away with me,” she had begged. “Come to Europe for a while. We’ll eat ourselves silly, drink buckets of good wine.”

  For Emma, who had been hungry for a multitude of things for most of her life, had discovered that more than anything what she wanted to do was cook, not just cook but cook. Her dream was to leave her junior-college English post forever, to do more than her part-time catering, to do it right: apprentice in restaurants in Italy and France and return home a chef. And now she was standing on the edge of her dream. She had finished summer school. In a few weeks she’d be cooking in a kitchen in Rome, then Provence.

  “No,” he said, “I have to stay here. Then we’ll talk about traveling, before I go back to furniture again.”

  “It’s not that easy to go back,” she had answered.

  “No,” he had said, giving her a long look, “not for some things.”

  * * *

  Jesse stirred again, murmured, groaned. He smiled, still asleep, dreaming as the rain raged.

  Emma watched his face. And about whom, my good man, my dear husband, are you dreaming? Who makes you stiffen and grow erect? Your ever-loving wife, Emma Fine Tree? Or Caroline, your lover, that bitch?

  I’m getting out of here, she said to herself then, easing up and reaching for her robe. Lying here lonely but not alone is no way to spend a perfectly good rainy morning.

  As Emma shut the bedroom door behind her, Jesse Tree opened one brown eye and grinned. He wore a very amused expression for a man whose wife had just left him in bed with a magnificent erection.

  * * *

  Emma reached out of the tub to tune the bright-red radio. Her favorite country-and-western station was fading. She couldn’t make out which it was, his busted tires, busted wallet or busted heart, that was causing the singer such pain.

  She wondered: If the portable radio fell into the tub, would she fry? Would her silver fillings bounce radio waves off the mountains over to the Pacific thirty miles away? Would her lover, for, yes, she too had one, though Jesse didn’t know it, would her lover on his sailboat bouncing on the waves read her last electric gasps on his radio: Mayday, Mayday?

  Suddenly the bathroom door flew open and in strode Jesse wrapped in the paisley silk robe she’d given him for Christmas. Circling around his head as he whistled were the tinkling notes of a Vivaldi melody.

  Jesse loved baroque music. It wound Emma up tighter than a tick.

  She splashed one hand in the water and waited for the question he would ask in his ever-so-polite classical-radio-announcer voice, his tones plummy and full as if the words Neville Marriner and St. Martin-in-the-Fields wouldn’t melt in his mouth: “You don’t mind if I turn this down, do you?”

  But this time he didn’t say that. Instead his full lips, pursed into a sweet brownness like a fig, changed their tune, segueing neatly into the lament of being busted flat in New Orleans that was playing on the radio.

  Emma narrowed her eyes at his wide silken back, the interlocking figures of the paisley fitting together like pieces of a puzzle or gourds making love. What was up with him this morning? Jesse, who was whistling harmony now, hated country music.

  “Excuse me,” he said, lifting the toilet seat and relieving himself in a hot, splashing stream. He dropped the seat again before running cold water in the sink. One thing for which she was grateful—growing up with two sisters, Jesse did know that the proper position of the toilet seat was down.

  He brushed his perfect teet
h, then patted hot water on his cheeks and neck, on the parts where he shaved around and under his beard.

  Emma stared at his reflection in the mirror.

  She loved the ritual of shaving; it was a peek behind the door marked MEN. That intense act with a deadly sharp razor on the face, so close to the jugular, how did it feel, that singular act reeking of soap and testosterone? How did it feel, pitching instead of catching? Flexing muscles, slapping towels in locker rooms, all that bullshit and bravado, how did it feel?

  Then his brown eyes caught her blue ones on the shiny face of the mirror. Her gaze could run, slipping off the edges, but it was already too late to hide. She knew that he knew what she was thinking.

  Suddenly she was aware of her nakedness—covered only with a thin blanket of iridescent and now cooling bubbles. It reminded her of her other nakednesses, stolen embraces, things she didn’t want Jesse to look into her eyes and know.

  Play busy, she thought, falling back on the posturing that came naturally to a Southern girl. A study in nonchalance, she turned on the hot water and switched on the Jacuzzi.

  “So, how were Clifton and Maria?”

  Emma’s answer, just as she’d practiced it, was cool as lemonade on a summer afternoon. “Just great. Maria and I took a drive up into the hills, found a little vineyard we’d never seen before.”

  “Do some tasting? Anything good?”

  Emma nodded. “A dessert wine I loved.”

  “Since when do you like sweet wines?” He paused a beat. “But your tastes have changed so, I don’t know what you like anymore.”

  Emma opened her mouth and closed it again. Be careful, she warned herself. This bathroom is laced with mines. Watch where you step.

  Jesse turned back to the mirror now. He was letting the moment go. She couldn’t believe that—Jesse retreating, Jesse who was so clever at closing in for the kill. What did he suspect about the weekend she told him she’d spent in Berkeley? What did he know? But he was concentrating now on his neck, the silvery razor flashing. Then once again he caught her reflected eye. He grinned and touched his nose.