“You’re not going to tell me?”

  “I just did. Love!”

  Jane stared at Vaughn in horror. “You’ve fallen in love with Ian?”

  “For heaven’s sake, woman!” Vaughn was even more agitated than Jane.

  “What, then!”Jane grabbed her arm.

  “Before the film, I’d just broken up with my girlfriend. I was angry. Angry at her. Sleeping with Ian was a way to say ‘fuck you’ to her.”

  “That’s why you did it?” She let go of Vaughn’s arm.

  Vaughn took a sip of wine. “Mostly. Yes.”

  “Do you like men?”

  Vaughn shrugged. “I like both. Most of my relationships have been with women, since I turned twenty-eight.”

  “So you did it to get back at your girlfriend. But you broke up with her.” Jane smoothed her hand along the leather of the couch. “What was that line of crap about being completely in character and doing it for Art?”

  “That was true. It wasn’t bullshit. But without the break-up, it probably wouldn’t have happened. “

  “Because it would have been cheating on your girlfriend.”

  “Eh.” Vaughn looked away.

  “Why did you break up with her, if you cared enough to try to make her jealous? You must have told her what you did, then, if it was to get back at her.”

  Vaughn laughed, a self-mocking laugh that petered off into something like despair. “The joke’s on me, love. I can’t tell her. Don’t have her number.” She put her hands out in a gesture of helplessness. “Burned that bridge.” She made an exploding sound. “She’s deep in the bloody bush or the veldt, or wherever unselfish doctors go when they want away from the western world. I don’t know where she is. Patching people up, curing people, giving them inoculations. Saving lives. Médecins Sans Frontières. Wouldn’t give me her number. Wouldn’t tell me where. Do you believe it?” She laughed the same sad laugh. “Sex-symbol-bombshell cries her eyes out every night because she’s an undesirable joke to the person she loves. There’s my luck. Career like a rocket ship, personal life like a guided missile of doom.” She sniffed. “On the other hand, can you believe someone like that loved me in the first place? She really did. She loved me.”

  Vaughn sank deep into her couch, into the half-hedgehog position of universal gloom.

  “Maybe she’ll come back someday.”

  Vaughn’s expression didn’t change as she considered this. “I’ve thought of that, dreamed of it. I think of going to look for her, wearing a funny hat, maybe. But you can’t make them love you, can you?” She grabbed at the bottle and poured herself more wine.

  “You sure can’t.”

  “Ian loves you.”

  “Maybe think of who you are to me before you say those words.”

  “I’m your friend, I hope.”

  “Do friends sleep with friend’s husbands? Do friends try to make friends feel sorry for them when they are the transgressor and they invite them over to dinner and try to seduce them?”

  “You have a horribly clear way of putting things.”

  “It’s a gift.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m in therapy, if it helps. I’m trying to learn how to be a grown-up who doesn’t blow up everyone’s lives around me.”

  “Why else did you do it? Other than to make your girlfriend jealous.”

  “Salossa. Her name’s Salossa.”

  Vaughn cradled her wine glass in her drooping fingers. With one hand she brushed her bangs away from her eyes and resumed her grip on the wine glass. “I was mad at myself that I’d fucked it up. She was going away and I had a fit like a baby, thinking she’d stay. She’s too grown up for that, of course.” She sighed. “I’m not used to maturity.”

  “But why? Why have sex with Ian?”

  “Why not? I didn’t care about anyone or anything except Salossa and I didn’t have her. I suppose, if I’m honest, there was a part of me that was just curious, you know? I was curious about a man like Ian. He seemed like fun. You don’t know what it’s like. Every single film I’m in has a sex scene. You have this hot guy pounding you, you’re grinding on him and it’s like teenager sex. It’s fun. It turns me on. When I said it wasn’t far off from the real thing, I wasn’t kidding. It’s incredibly intimate. It feels amazing, if you’re into the person.” She smiled a little. “Ian was sort of self-contained, I guess, but with this sadness seeping out, his passion seeping out of him.” She took a sip of wine. “He was someone who belonged to somebody else. He was forbidden. I wondered what that would be like. It shouldn’t have happened but we said it would.” As she spoke she became more intense and swept away by what she described. “We created our own little universe. It was our own little island. And on the island I was a goddess and I demanded he surrender himself to me. As Calypso I could ask more of Odysseus, and be given more, than as Vaughn I ever could. And Odysseus could be my reluctant lover, my slave, someone he never knew himself to be as Ian. We met each other as other people, other dark sides of ourselves. Our shadow selves, Ian called them.” She paused in her recital, as if coming back to Earth. She glanced toward Jane, then away. “We left those people behind on that island. Do I know Ian? Not at all. I knew one of his incarnations which no longer exists.”

  Jane sat transfixed by Vaughn. The stabs of jealousy and anger had flooded her anew. Yet with her eyes on this other person baring her soul, she felt the transforming power of her own perception. In all her humanity, in the revelation of the loves and lusts and temptations and consummations and even pettiness, Vaughn was beautiful, because the soul in her was revealed, as imperfect as any other.

  Ian was a person, too, his own person, who lived his own shadow life, just as Jane had hers. No marriage usurped that other self, the self pushed away at the peril of the marriage being consumed by it. Jane could judge Vaughn, believe that only someone empty in her own life would try to wrest the imitation of love from another’s. But it was too easy. It was a way to push away the shadow in herself onto another. Tor had seen that. Tor had called her out on her own hypocrisy.

  Vaughn did not have the power to destroy anything. What happened had happened. What happened next would be determined by others. Jane felt blood rushing back into her hands and face, prickling her skin. Although Vaughn and Ian had crossed the line into the standard black-and-white territory of the unforgivable, it had happened. It had happened, but it hadn’t happened to her. There was something unknowable about it, because it was outside her experience, outside the realm of temptations laid before her. It hadn’t been her choice. It hadn’t been her mistake. Maybe it hadn’t been her luck?

  Calypso and Odysseus--Vaughn and Ian--in another time, another place. An alternate universe. Or maybe a part of this one Jane didn’t happen to share. What part of the universe was hers, that Ian didn’t know about?

  “How do you feel about it all now?”

  Vaughn raised her eyebrows and shrugged. “We did work that surpassed anything any of us has done. I felt it. There was magic in that day, in our scene. But I fear it’s tainted somehow.” She shook her head. “I feel guilty. I did it to hurt Salossa. I hurt you. Sometimes being bad feels good. And then it feels bad.” She smiled wistfully. “I’m a bad girl, what can I do?”

  Jane thought, looking at her, that through Vaughn’s thick smokescreen of sexuality was a sensitive soul, trying to connect, grappling for it with the wrong set of tools. “I wanted to know so much, when I found out about all this. I had to know what, and how, and who, and most of all, I wanted to know why. I wanted to solve the mystery of what happened.”

  Vaughn nodded. She didn’t say anything.

  Jane thought, we’ve become somehow attuned to each other, she knows not to speak right now. Jane wondered what Ian would have thought if he had seen a movie of Hank and her together, when she had been feeling alone and in extremis; how would he have felt?

  They sat for a while. Jane felt her sobriety returning to her; her head clearing, returning to its normal size, skin lying down smoothly atop her bones. Vaughn was lost in a reverie, staring at the light sparkling off the wine bottle. Jane rose and put on her jacket. She looked down at Vaughn’s face, washed clean by emotion, composed. As she prepared to leave she said, “You know, Ian felt something.”

  Vaughn stirred, looked up. “What?”

  “To him, that scene was an epiphany. It meant something grand. Meaningful. It changed him.” Jane walked to the door, looked at Vaughn once more from across the room, her shining beauty, before she left, shutting the door behind her.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  AFTER MIDNIGHT, RESTLESS, Ian walked his land. He couldn’t see a thing after coming from the brightness of the house, and once he was twenty feet from the front door light the inky night swallowed him. He felt his way, crossing from gravel to grass, his sense of direction taking over. The acrid scent of smoke, ominous yet reminiscent of childhood autumns, after he and his mother had moved from Ireland to upstate New York, floated faintly on the wind, yet no light flickered in the distance. Only a hearth fire, or a specially fueled one, could thrive after a rain like today. He contemplated walking the perimeter. After a time, he reached the eastern edge of the property line. On a breeze he smelt a heady noxious gust of kerosene. A drawling voice spoke out of the darkness.

  “You think you’re good for her?”

  Ian tried to see a human shape. The bare sliver of moon hung behind the trees, illuminating nothing. “Hank?” He couldn’t imagine who else it would be.

  Only the burning tip of a cigarette was visible. Ian smelled a mix of burnt and fresh-mown grass. Hank must have tried to burn wet grass with kerosene.

  “I know all about you.” Hank's voice was so curdled and venomous Ian hardly recognized it.

  Ian stopped trying so hard to see and waited for his eyes to adjust. An outline began to form—a familiar lanky man leaning up against the split-rail fence.

  “Think you’ve got it all figured out. Think you’ll have it both ways.”

  Ian stood where he was, about ten feet from Hank, which felt about right.

  “Think you know what you’re doing. Haven’t got a clue.” The lighted butt arced to the ground. Hank spat and twisted his heel on the spark. “And you’re heading for a shit-storm you don’t see coming.”

  Ian folded his arms, tucking his hands into the wedge between each underarm and bicep. He stretched his neck and studied the ground, chewed on his lip. He kicked the ground. “You been talking to Jane?”

  “None of your business if I have,” Hank's voice was low and level, yet with that something else in it.

  “You been reading the papers.” It wasn't a question.

  “I live in the world.”

  “Huh.”

  “You don’t understand dirt, do you?” The moon slid out from behind the trees and Ian could get a better view of Hank propped against the fence, details of his clothes revealed, though his face remained in shadow beneath his short-brimmed cowboy hat.

  “Why this new view of me, Hank?”

  “’Cause I’m a card-carrying member of your club.”

  “You don’t say.” Ian shifted his weight into an even stance, released his arms, brushed his hair behind his ears. His arms hung loose by his sides.

  Hank leaned easy and casual against the fence, his elbows propped against the top rung of the four-footer. “That’s right. You can’t hide from the eyes that seen, the feet that walked that path. I’ve done it all. You ain’t thought of nothing new.” Hank snaked his hand in the pocket of his denim jacket and brought out a tooled leather and silver flask, glinting in the darkness. He took a brief pull. Ian could see Hank’s arm reach out toward him in an insistent gesture, offering a swig.

  Ian had to walk closer to take the flask. He stepped away before tipping it back, tasting the smoky curl of bourbon as it slid down his throat. Returning the flask, stepping back again, he said, “I’m curious. This fellowship of ours. It’s not something you take particular pride in, I take it.”

  Hank snorted. “There’s no pride to be taken. Only the temporary pleasure such vices provide. ’S all downhill from there.”

  “I think you’re laboring under an…ah…misapprehension, there, Hank, and that’s where the trouble is.”

  “Trouble? There ain’t no trouble but what you’ve brought down on your house.”

  Ian was silent for a moment. “You’ve got it all worked out.”

  Hank’s voice became quieter, colder. “Some men’ll risk it all on a gamble, think it’ll take ‘em further than they ever dreamed. Make their career, maybe. Even if it costs them all they got.” He spat out the last word. His voice changed again, became reflective. “Now men who have nothing left to care for,” he shook his head, “they got nothing left to lose.” His eyes glimmered in the moonlight. “Nothing to lose, why not try for what might’ve seemed impossible?” He took another swig. “Watch yourself.”

  Ian didn’t know if Hank was talking about himself or Ian. Ian shook his head.

  In a blinding moment Hank had covered the ground between them and had Ian by the shirt. The alcohol on Hank’s breath evoked a memory: fresh, stinging, again, reminiscent, this time of his father in the early years, when he’d been around. Hank was a shade taller than Ian. He’s an old man, Ian told himself, though only by twenty years. He fought the urge to strike out, to escalate this pointless scene.

  “You’re a lightweight. You won’t hold her.” He stared Ian in the eyes for five beating seconds. Ian stared back. Hank turned away with a sneer.

  “Thanks for the advice, mate.” Ian repeated in his head: This isn’t Hank. This isn’t Hank. “See you around.” He stumbled as he tried to leave, as if he were the one incapacitated.

  Weaving across the fallow corn field, Ian saw the light of his house in the distance. He should have taken the offensive sonofabitch down. He didn’t have any illusions about one punch. He had the feeling Hank had been in his share of bar fights. Hank was no lightweight, like he’d accused Ian of being. But that wasn’t the kind of lightweight Hank had meant. Ian felt himself starting to shake, his skin turning to gooseflesh. A cavern seemed to have opened in his gut in which he could feel the seedling insecurities prompted by Hank’s words take root. He’d pierced through the armor Ian had accumulated over fourteen years protecting those particular vulnerabilities. So much better had he become at guarding himself, hiding that inner self and revealing it only in environments best suited for its survival, that he felt physically sick, as he had in his early acting days, before he’d learned how to control his emotions better. Hank had attacked on three fronts. His relationship with Jane. His moral fiber. His value as a person and contribution to society in general. Hank had a point there. At least a farmer could say he fed people.

  The porch light was brighter, but blurry. Ian brushed the air in front of his face as if chasing away flies. Fuck it. What was Hank’s bleeding motive anyway? What was going on while he was away from home? How far had the helpful neighbor act gotten him? Preying on a vulnerable woman alone in a big house.

  Kicking Hank’s ass was not going to solve anything. It would infuriate Jane, ruin neighborly relations, and put them on Kittrie’s shit list, perhaps forever. They were incomers, as it was. Hank was their connection to the town, their champion, the one who made them acceptable in the eyes of the folks who had found them a curiosity at first. Besides, it was obvious Hank was in an altered state from his usual gentlemanly reticence. Everyone deserved at least one free pass in Ian’s book. Ian’s ass-kicking days were well behind him, in any case.

  He dragged himself up the steps, turned the knob, entered his silent domain, and as he fell forward into the chair, her chair, he thought moodily that he might have made short work of Hank after all, had he chose.

  There’d been that one brief span of time, when he’d tried to live up to his father’s reputation; when he’d gone back to Ireland after his mother’s death and hung out with his Da’s old mates and their sons, and found himself backing up the lads in a pub brawl; a point of honor it seemed, if you were Benty O’Reilly’s son. He’d done the mates proud. And shamed himself. The pure surge of adrenaline, addictive and freeing, was too close to the bone. Close to his DNA. One of the lads, a graying, bristle-haired chap, had wanted to throw a pair of gloves on him, even at the late age of twenty, to train him as a fighter. Word spread around, in some circles, that Benty O’Reilly’s son was back: the prodigal son, going to take up where his father left off. People hadn’t cottoned on to his parentage before that, because of the loss of the O to his name and as he hadn’t advertised the fact. Even the mates had kept it quiet, knowing how he felt about it (and perhaps factoring in Benty’s reputation) until the brawl got everyone talking. Then everyone knew whose son he was. An excitement burgeoned, a buzz he could feel when he went into what had become his local, the pub where he felt at home and could relax after the work he’d picked up at a local brewery hauling cases, sweeping aisles and the like.

  The trainer was persistent. He drew a map to the gym for Ian on a beer coaster, tracing it over and over in black pen so Ian could see the path through the maze-like streets of Dublin.

  On his first visit Ian found the fuss he’d observed at the pub translated into bristles and snubs from the gym regulars, the same gym his father had fought out of. Sean Gallagher, the trainer, who had known his father, didn’t bother to introduce him around. The other men, mostly smaller, trim and shining, were silent, punching and jabbing fiercely, either at bags, the air, or each other, as Ian got a brief tour. He got the unspoken message. He wasn’t wanted. He didn’t know why. Sean glanced around, beady-eyed, circling his charge, voice upbeat as he muttered half-heard bits of wisdom, sometimes rising up on the balls of his feet, shifting weight as if someone might be about to take a shot.

  Somehow the atmosphere had been enough to suck Ian in. If only for the opportunity to wipe the looks off those faces turned away from his.

  The first weeks of training were achy and dripping in Ian’s memory. Then the clarity of his first time in the ring with an opponent, sparring. Sean had held him off, not wanting him in the ring, as the days dragged and his body protested. As he worked out, the other lads avoided him; as he learned the bag, learned how to develop his body. Except for the occasional under-the-breath comment he was let alone. He knew by some osmosis they thought he was too lean for his height. This gym was famous for its bantam and featherweight fighters, such as the bantam his father had been. The other fighters thought he needed more weight to fit his height, to fit his reach. And they thought he must have a glass jaw to go with his classic profile. Otherwise why would Sean keep him out of the ring? One day when he was around the corner from the benches, hidden from their sight by the L-shape of the room, he heard more of what they thought.