But the mirror was not deceiving her, nor was she deceiving herself.
Her flame red hair was healthier looking, and a bit longer than before, flowing like a river of molten fire that bordered on iridescence—the once deep-set circles under her eyes, evidence of a life lived recklessly had vanished. Her skin glowed, her complexion having lost a certain paleness, and she could also actually count less wrinkles, crow’s-feet and the like, not more, a self-analysis that surprised Carla with its results.
Lord, I have been to hell and back! she exclaimed, and yet the years seem to have fallen away from my face. I looked older than this the morning after I won my Oscar for Best Actress of the Year.
One hand happened to be resting on a relatively new red leather-bound Bible, the other on a gold-framed color photograph of a young man in his late twenties, square-jawed, with a slight scar slicing through his left eyebrow.
Older…
He looked older, over thirty in fact; his shirt off, showing a chest that was muscular but not grotesque, more like that of a champion surfer than a body builder.
I suspect that that was the problem, she told herself. If you had appeared as young as you truly were, I doubt that I would ever have—
Carla stopped that thought, suspecting all too well that there was no way she could have predicted anything about their relationship because, after all, he would have been the same person he was regardless of his age, and nothing about her would have changed except perhaps her expectations.
How she did love this man! How wise he seemed!
Though only half a dozen years older by the calendar, Carla Gearhart was much more than that in terms of her experience in a life that had had more peaks and valleys, it could be said, than much of Switzerland itself.
“By contrast, you seemed to have lived like a monk in some monastery,” she said out loud. “And that innocent, modest manner of yours. You were so different from anyone I’d ever known.”
Kissing…
A flashing memory of his lips touching her own took her back to the first time they had held one another.
We were standing on the deck of a riverboat that was cruising down the Mississippi toward New Orleans, Carla remembered. I told you I felt nervous about the performance I was scheduled to give there and I told you I had prayed about it. And you stood back, and looked at me as though you were seeing me for the first time, then you leaned over and kissed me, and we stayed like that for what seemed like the rest of that little journey but which probably was only a few minutes, lost to everything and everyone around us.
She brought her fingers to her lips.
I had not been kissed like that since high school, she told herself, with such tenderness and even a little uncertainty.
Carla sighed as her finger moved up to her lower eyelids and wiped away a tear that had formed.
You seemed so strong, she recalled, but nothing like any of the other men I had known—
Carla cut herself off, tears starting to pour in earnest down her cheeks, causing her makeup to streak.
What a mess, she told herself as she looked again at the mirror, and the sad reflection that it now gave back to her. The makeup girl will—
The door!
Lost in her thoughts, preferring the company of even bittersweet memories to the harsher present reality, Carla was startled when someone began knocking on the door to her star’s dressing room.
“Are you okay, Carla?” the stage manager asked apprehensively. Despite himself, he had developed some affection in recent months for a woman whom he once had found quite intolerable but who now was very different, changed so drastically that some idle, jesting-type scuttlebutt was actually suggesting that she might be an identical twin who had taken on the task of impersonating the real Carla Gearhart.
At first she could not answer, hoping that he would come back later, that for the present she could be left alone.
“Are you—?” the voice started to repeat with a bit more urgency.
“I will be, Albert,” she interrupted, “God knows I have to be.”
“That He does, Carla. Bless you.”
A second of silence, then: “Five minutes and you’re on.”
Five minutes!
Under ordinary circumstances, getting her makeup back on would take at least half an hour. How could she possibly reconstruct it in a fraction of that time, especially since her makeup girl was nowhere around.
“Are you still there, Albert?” she asked quickly, hoping to catch him before he was involved in some other task.
“Yes, Carla, I am.”
“I wanted to say something else.”
“Go ahead, Carla.”
She could think of few times in her adult life when she was tongue-tied but this was surely one of them.
“Thank you for being a friend, thank you for your concern, though I wonder if I deserve it,” she said without telling him what was going on inside her head, but meaning the word friend more than she had ever thought possible, since she once had been prone toward treating stagehands and assistant directors and others of their ilk as servants who had to do her bidding or she would make matters totally miserable for them.
“You never called me that before,” he acknowledged. “But I do now, Albert, and it comes from my heart, dear man.”
“I’ll be back in four minutes.”
“I know I can count on that.”
Carla glanced at that photo on the makeup table, knowing how great a part Kyle had played in her transformation from show business haridelle to what she had become, and speculating where she would be without him in her life.
Kyle, she thought, my love, my impossible love.
Carla reached out and brushed the year-old photo with her fingers, pretending that, by doing so, she could somehow touch Kyle himself, that the glossy paper it was pnnted on was a kind of portal, and he could be found on the other side, and all she had to do was reach through, and he would be there waiting to hold her again.
If only you were here tonight, she told herself, if only you were in the audience and I could sing my heart out to you in front of everyone, and tell you before tens of thousands of witnesses what it means to me that I have been able to love you.
How she hated those two words.
…if only.
It might be that they were the cruelest in the English language, forcing her mind and emotions back over territory that it might have been better not to revisit.
…if only.
That second time, the tears came in a flood that could have proven unstoppable but she was still a woman of exceptional will, a will that used to be so dominant that it sought to control others but which now focussed only on herself, and how badly she had treated people before Kyle and she had met. And Carla knew that she could never let sorrow and despair get the best of her, could never let visions of the past few months squander her present, for that would not have pleased Kyle, that would have upset and alarmed him terribly and brought him hurrying to her side as he begged her, “You must stop this, you must not destroy yourself. I am not worth it, my dearest Carla.”
Despite