"Tramp?" I had responded, incredulous. "Aren't you overreacting a little? I'm just trying to fit in. Suze and Nicky certainly do their share of innocent flirtation."
"There's nothing innocent about their flirtations. And they are sluts, pure and simple."
"You don't seem to mind sluts." I was frustrated. And pissed off. "You've certainly been seen with plenty of them."
"Seen by whom?" he asked coldly. I couldn't admit to snooping around on the internet and studying his pictures.
"Never mind."
"I'll have you know that I have not had any kind of sexual relationship with anyone at that theater."
"But everyone…" I was shocked. He was either lying or the prevailing assumption was dead wrong.
"Everyone should mind their own business and stay out of mine."
I intended to spend some serious time rethinking how much stock to put into anything someone else told me they 'knew' about Tristan King.
It wasn't all frustration. Tristan took me in his arms more than once in the dark corners of the theater. He told me he missed me, needed the comfort of my touch, wanted the completion of our desire. I lived on those words.
As much as I wanted to secure my parents' safety, I came perilously close to throwing caution to the wind. Only Tristan's conviction and control made it possible for me to keep from pushing him into something that could have blown up in my face.
I had to believe in him. He had brought considerable resources to bear on my father's predicament and he was convinced that the people harassing him were anything but amateurs. Tristan seemed to have personal knowledge of how this sort of thing worked and I was completely naïve. Trusting him was my only choice. In the end, if we kept our distance from each other it would only make the reunion sweeter, or so I told myself.
There was another bonus. Every night, after the rehearsal was over and we were both tucked into our beds, Tristan would call me and we would talk. We became experts at phone sex, but that can only go so far. Maybe it was because we weren't face to face, but laying in our separate beds in the dark that allowed him to let down his guard. He began to let me inside.
I learned that he was the only child of Maryann and Bradley King of Oak Park, Illinois. He grew up in the upscale suburb of Chicago, adored by his stay at home mother and well provided for by his father who worked at the Chicago Board of Trade. His father was distant, but Tristan said he hardly noticed because his mother was his world and he was hers.
His mother made a rare trip into the Loop to do some Christmas shopping on a cold winter's day. Snow was expected in the evening and Maryann assured her then eleven-year-old son that she'd be back well before the storm hit. She dropped him off at his best friend's house and kissed him good-bye as she ruffled his hair and told him to be good. Tristan never again saw his mother alive.
Her car hit an ice patch on the Eisenhower Expressway and was flattened by the semi it skidded into. He told me the next few days were a blur of shock and grief so deep and powerful that he was sure it was going to kill him, too. I wanted to crawl through the phone and take the little-boy Tristan in my arms when he said that his father never once held him after Maryann died. He had wept his grief out into his pillow until there weren't any tears left to cry.
By the turn of the New Year, he had left behind the big comfortable home, still decorated for Christmas, and moved into a high rise on Lake Shore Drive. It was expensive, modern and absolutely nothing like what he had spent his entire life around. His friends, of course, were lost to him. His father installed him in the best private school money could buy and hired a professional housekeeper to run his life. At almost twelve he didn't really need a nanny and he certainly didn't get one. He remembered Mrs. Humbolt as being nearly as cold as his father, only present.
Even when his father was home, he wasn't. He'd lock himself away in his office and pretend to work until he was tired enough and had enough scotch in him to put him to sleep. Young Tristan learned how to live alone.
"When high school finally and mercifully ended, I had my pick of any university. I had had the finest education and all the time in the world to devote to being a good student," he said one night. "I chose Wharton. In a rare conversation about my life, my father had said that he would like to see me go to Harvard or Princeton. Wharton wasn't mentioned."
I hated the tone that Tristan's voice took on when he talked about his father. There was a brittle edge to it that did little to conceal how painful the relationship must have been.
"Is you father still alive?" I asked one night.
"I talk to him once or twice a year. He calls me on my birthday. Sometimes I call him on his."
I couldn't imagine such a thing. My family life was so different. My father was the warmest, most comforting human being I could imagine. To talk to him just once or twice a year would be unthinkable.
Tristan's narrative went on for many nights and I began to be able to piece together the complex puzzle of the man I was falling harder and faster for every day.
He said he had thrived in college. The academic world was comfortable and comforting to him. Studying was all he really knew.
"So, after I graduated, I came to New York. The rest, as they say, is history." This was the wrap up he gave one night just before he told me good night. The following evening, when he picked up the thread again he was speaking in the present tense, telling me about what his firm did and how it worked.
Wait! I wanted to say. What about Elsa? What about the girl you were going to marry? The one who was killed? Something stopped me. I knew if he wanted to tell me, he would. I knew if I asked, he'd stonewall. Satisfying my curiosity had to wait. I couldn't risk spooking him.
***
Dress rehearsal was finally upon us. I got to see Tristan in the painstaking make-up that our resident genius had applied to a handsome young face to make it old, washed out and tired. The make-up guy had done an amazing job. Even though the audience would never see some of the details--like the tiny spider veins on Tristan's nose and cheeks--it had its value for the guys on stage.
Tom and a few of the set construction crew were the only people in the audience. I was backstage checking and rechecking props, curtain cues, light cues and every small detail I could think of. If the worst happened and someone dropped a line, I had my script in hand to prompt him.
The men did a brilliant job. It was going to be a helluva play. Tristan was on stage for almost the entire action. There were only three instances that he stepped out of the limelight and behind the curtain where I stood. When he came to stand beside me the first time he reached around and patted my ass. The second time he slid his hand between my legs from behind and caressed me. The last time he whispered in my ear "when this play is over next weekend, it's going to be our time. I can't wait any longer." Then he was back on stage for the final scene.