Chapter Twenty-Four
From Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable:
"Sugar and Honey: Rhyming slang for ‘money.’ "
"Sugar and Honey," he used to call out to her when he came in from wherever he’d been all day. It had seemed to her that he couldn’t make up his mind about a nickname for her so he called her both. It had charmed her. Once she asked him about it and he had merely smiled at her, kissed her lightly on the cheek and went about doing whatever it was he had to do. She never knew what drew him from her so often. Once Freddy had actually asked him that question.
"What is it you do, Mikhael? I don’t understand what it is you do."
"Sugar and Honey, leave it alone," was how he’d reply to her question.
It took her years to discover the secret behind the words. Once she knew it, she knew she couldn’t live with it. Some secrets are not to be borne lightly. So once again she had confronted the man she loved, had pledged to marry one day, with the question of his occupation.
"Mikhael, you know what I do. You know how I earn a living. It’s only fair that you share with me as much as I share with you."
"Don’t be foolish, Fredericka. Leave this alone."
"But why won’t you discuss this? What can possibly be so terrible that I can’t be a part of it?"
"If I told you, I would have to kill you," he said, and he laughed instantly after saying it as though it was a joke, a mighty joke. But Freddy knew it wasn’t a joke. She knew from deep experience now that this was not a joke at all.
"You’ve made that joke one time too many, Mikhael."
"Have I now, Fredericka? That is a sad statement."
"You have no idea how sad it is," she said.
"Why do you say things such as that which appear to be threats?"
"There’s no threat, Mikhael. There is only honesty."
"Honesty can be threatening t someone in my position."
"Then tell me about your position, Mikhael, and remove the threat by doing so."
"Fredericka, you have been reading too much fiction."
He sounded so superior when he said that, so overwhelmingly haughty and Freddy couldn’t bear it another moment longer. She reached into her handbag and drew out the small, folded piece of light blue stationery she’d been carrying for days.
"Here," she said. "Open it, read it."
He took it from her and slowly, very slowly, his eyes never leaving her eyes, unfolded it. He laid it on the table and smoothed it out with lowest, outside edge of his left hand, his thumb pointed up at his own face as did it. When it was flat and squared, he lowered his eyes to look at it. She watched him, watching his face for a change, a sense of recognition. There was nothing. He looked at the paper, and not at her, long enough to read what it contained, then he slowly raised his eyes again to look at her.
"You believe this to be true?" he asked her.
"I do."
"Then you cannot love me any longer, Fredericka."
"I love you, Mikhael. I love you, but I don’t trust you. I can’t."
"And you truly believe all this?"
She nodded.
"And what would you have me do, now, Fredericka?"
"Give it up," she said quickly. "Just turn your back on it and give it up."
"My life has been about protecting what is, and what shall be, mine. I cannot simply ‘give it up’ as you would have me do."
"Mikhael, your father destroyed his family and his world for a chair. You don’t have to do that, too. I’m your family now and I urge you to give back what was taken illegally. Save yourself."
"I cannot do this thing you ask of me. I will not."
"Mikhael, you’re a fool. You really are."
"I am what I was made to be. I cannot be something other than that."
"You can. We all can. Max has made himself other than what he was brought up to be."
"Max!" He looked angry when he said his former friend’s name. "You compare me to Max?"
"Max is a better man than you will ever be, I’m afraid."
"You have slept with Max?" Mikhael asked her. "You, also?"
"No, I never...what do you mean me also?"
"I mean...it is his world to sleep with many."
"No you don’t, didn’t, don’t. You meant something else, didn’t you?"
"I meant only what I said."
"I knew it." She gasped for a breath, "I always knew it."
She rushed from the room with his call of "Sugar and Honey" sounding somewhere behind her. She tore her clothing off her body and stepped into the bathroom naked and burning. She turned on the shower and stepped into it not knowing if the water would be cool, hot or tepid. It was hot. Steam rose from around her feet and suffused the curtained porcelain chamber in which she stood. Water spilled over her breasts and her abdomen, entered her and left the way it came.
In her mind’s eye she could see the two of them, Mikhael whom she loved and Max whom she adored, together, naked, legs intertwined, sexually interlaced. She closed her eyes and opened them and she felt betrayed by the visions she summoned and couldn’t send away again. She was crying, she realized, a soundless, noiseless sort of crying with tears and no sobs. There was regret and anger but no passion in her pain. The hot water, the steam and the thrust of it, was slowly cleansing the memory of moments she had never witnessed but could now see as clearly as if she had. She remembered that awful party at Max’s graduation and the anger she had witnessed at Mikhael’s reluctance to come to celebrate with them. She recalled the day in her mother’s apartment when she had watched the two of them at the window. She understood, finally, the pain she felt kneeling there between them. Suddenly it all made sense.
Then she heard him behind her, standing in the doorway watching her.
"Go away, you horrible pretender," she shouted at Mikhael, never turning around to look at him.
"I will do so when it is appropriate to do so," he responded. "At this time I want to talk to you."
"I don’t want to talk to you."
"You think you know something, Fredericka, that you never knew before."
"I know what I know."
"And you know what? That once a little boy fell in love with another boy? That is nothing. That is what boys do."
"Not the boys I used to know."
"Nonsense. We were the boys you used to know."
"I knew boys before you, Mikhael," she said turning to face him.
"But you never knew boys like me before you knew me."
"No."
"You can be very silly, Fredericka, when you say things like you are saying today."
"Can I?" She turned off the tap, leaving only a trickle of water from the shower head nozzle dripping on her shoulder. "Hand me a towel, please."
He did and she took it to dry her hair. She was standing naked before him, facing him full on. He had seen her like this many times before and so it meant nothing to him. She was unembarrassed, as always with him.
"And I already know what you do, Mikhael."
"How would you know this?"
"I am not as stupid as you think. I watch and I learn."
"Fredericka, I have never conceived that you are stupid, or foolish."
"Good, then we understand one another."
"And you will still marry me, Fredericka, when the time comes."
"I suppose I will. If you'll have me."
"And when that time comes, I will no longer be in this business you know about."
"No. You will have moved up from pretender to king and I guess you won’t need to be selling drugs any longer."
"I will not."
"And that’s that, I guess."
She moved into the bedroom again, a trail of watery pockmarks appearing on the carpet in the room. She opened her closet and took out a dress, one that he had purchased for her. She turned to show it to him.
"You like me in this dress?"
"I do."
"I’ll wear it, then, for the photograph."
"Ah, yes, the photograph for your mother, of course. That is today."
"Yes."
"And this picture will be for her alone, as you promised."
"Yes."
"Then, my darling Fredericka, enjoy the time with your mother."
He bowed to her, then kissed her lightly on the mouth. His tongue darted in between her lips and she licked the tip of it with her own tongue. Then he moved away.
"You shouldn’t have lied to me all this time, Mikhael, about what you do and who you are. It would have been so much better just to tell me the truth."
He turned in the doorway to look at her. "As you always tell the truth?" he asked.
"Yes. As I always have."
"And always will, my darling Sugar and Honey?"
"I always have," she said. She smiled at him. "I always have."
It was a scene she would try never to relive, she promised herself, and if she did replay it in her mind she would always see it exactly as it happened.
She was ready, dressed and made up, when her mother arrived ten minutes later to take her picture with Mikhael’s father’s chair. She was prepared to answer her mother’s question about sending the photo to the papers, too. She was ready to take on the world, if she had to, just to put an end to all these memories she could only imagine, not real, yet too real to be forgotten.
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