All He Ever Wanted (14 page)

Etna put a restraining hand on my arm. The boy smiled, which I took for insolence.

“Never you mind,” I said sharply. “You see to that fire.”

A marriage, I now think, should never begin with a wedding trip, for the excursion places upon the couple, who may be nearly
strangers to each other, too great a burden of expectation. Except for those persons for whom physical pleasure is paramount
and who are content never to venture from the bed (and who do not care whether or not this is ever noticed by the innkeeper
or other guests), the enforced togetherness — the endless hours of togetherness — sets up the assumption of continuous happiness,
in reality an impossibility. Better that newly betrothed couples should plunge into the responsibilities of the quotidian,
coming together at odd moments during the day (and of course during the night) than have to maintain the pretense of wedded
rapture.

Etna and I sat in silence in the room while the boy made the fire. As it was growing dark already, a walk outdoors was out
of the question (nearly out of the question during the day as well, owing to the precipitous drop from the cliff edge). Since
the hotel remained unheated but for the dining room and one or two other of the public rooms, wandering the hallways of that
cold building was also unappealing. As we sat there, a sense of claustrophobia threatened to sink my spirits altogether, and,
oddly, it was Etna who broke the stillness when the boy had finished the fire and left the room (I could not help but notice
the knowing smirk on his face as he shut the door).

“Nicholas, I should like to lie down,” she said.

“Yes, of course,” I said, standing.

“Just for a few moments. A rest.”

“I shall go for a walk.”

She was silent.

“I’ll just go down and have a cup of tea.”

“That would be nice.”

“Shall I send some up to you?”

She shook her head. “No, no. A short rest is all I need.”

With some relief, I left the room then and went down to the lobby. Stepping out onto the porch, I noted the remarkable view
in the twilight and could see how the inn might come to life in the warmer months. Aware of a sudden thirst (and needing some
courage), I searched for the insolent boy and found instead a woman cooking in the kitchen who agreed to send some tea and
sherry to a sitting room. I made my way toward said sitting room, where I smoked a stale cigarette that was on offer in a
silver box on the table. The boy brought the tea and a decanter of sherry and set them down on the table beside the wing chair
in which I was sitting. I gave him some pennies for his trouble. The sherry warmed me almost at once. The room grew dark but
for the fire in the grate, which snapped and hissed pleasantly.

As I smoked, I began to think about Etna, upstairs asleep on the bed. I wondered if she had undressed. Of course she had,
I mused; a woman would not sleep in her wedding dress, would she? I must confess that at that point in my life, I had had
little experience with women who were not skilled in sexual matters. Indeed, I think it is safe to say that I had seldom ever
been with a woman who was not, in some sense, a professional. My sexual life with Etna would be very different, I knew; it
would be I who was the more skilled, the greater teacher. Not for me the slim volume entitled
What the Young Husband Ought to Know
that was supposed to be of use to the bridegroom on his wedding night. (The servants who cleaned the dormitories at the end
of term would routinely find a dozen or so copies of the college-banned book when the undergraduates moved out for the summer.)
I understood that Etna would be a virgin, and I was, I admit, a bit concerned about my ability to cross that most sacred of
all barriers. I hoped that I would not hurt her, and I hoped something else as well: that the raw physicality of the act would
not frighten her and forever stunt the pleasure that might someday come her way.

(I have always been amazed by the secret world of sex in the same way I have always regarded the common occurrence of birth
as a miracle. Nearly everyone who grows to adulthood experiences the sexual act, and yet, removed from the event itself, it
seems astonishing that human beings should behave in the way that they do. Sometimes, during a worship service or when I am
having a cup of coffee in a crowded tearoom, it will occur to me that most of the well-composed persons there have had sexual
relations, perhaps even that very day. I will look at a middle-aged woman, for example, who sits primly with her purse on
her lap, barely concealing her impatience with the waitress, and I will think: What secret pleasures has this woman known?
Is she prim in public places but wanton in the night? Does she squander herself in various transports of connubial delight?
Does she favor, in private, practices that she might feel compelled to condemn in public? The woman, laced and buttoned as
she sits at a corner table, her packages beneath her seat, seems incapable of such animal-like activities. And yet one guesses
— one
knows,
unless the woman in question is that rare species, a spinster with no experience of love whatsoever — that she has once or
twice or often, or even daily, comported herself in a manner that we, in polite society, might label shocking. In my youth,
when I was a man of great passion, which I tried to contain with varying degrees of success, such idle thoughts and fantasies
plagued me hourly; it was a favorite game of mine, I must confess, to spot in a room the person who appeared to be the most
priggish and invent for him or her a sporting sexual life. I am, I am happy to say, less troubled by such thoughts in my old
age.)

I entered the bedroom lit only by firelight. Etna lay beneath a dimpled quilt. She stirred when I moved closer to her, and
she opened her eyes. I removed my boots and then my frock coat, and when I opened the wardrobe, I saw that the beige silk
wedding dress was hanging inside. The sight of that dress and the knowledge that Etna lay beneath the covers in her underclothes
or a nightgown was enough to ignite my senses, and I no longer had any fear of being able to perform the act. I quickly undressed,
crossed to the other side of the room, and slipped between sheets that Etna had already warmed. Because I sensed that to hesitate
even a moment might make any further action impossible, I embraced her at once. Her body was warm and loose inside her shift;
she had, I was thrilled to discover, already removed her corset, that tantalizing yet annoying garment.

“Wife,” I said to her, and pressed her hard against me.

I draw the curtain now as I must, and it is not a coy gesture that I make. I do so to spare the reader of this narrative the
full harrowing nature of that encounter. I will reveal only these details. Etna trembled beneath the weight of my body and
yielded to me only as far as her wifely duties dictated. That I could have borne. That I might cheerfully have borne, content
in the knowledge that with careful tutoring, her fears would vanish and that it would not be long before my pupil would be
greatly pleasured and pleasuring in return. No, it was the other thing that so chilled my heart, that disturbed me so greatly
I was nearly unable to complete the act.

Though one can never be absolutely certain about such a thing, human anatomy being as variable as it is, I was sure that entry
into my new wife’s body had been made easier by another before me. Even as I was experiencing those moments of the greatest
physical pleasure a man can know, I was composing questions that would haunt me for years.
Who?
I cried silently. And
when?
I shuddered in the way that all men will do and then rolled onto my back. Beside me, Etna was silent. I thought of the good
Meritable’s pronouncement, that a child conceived on the wedding night would be clever and charitable. There would be no life
conceived on this night. The act would, instead, give birth to jealousy — intense and fruitless and all-consuming. Love, which
just moments before I had thought too domestic and tame a word for my nearly transcendent feelings for Etna, was replaced
by something for which I have never been able to find a suitable name: the helplessness that descends when a cherished object
has been stolen, the anger that one feels when one has been deceived.

I have often wondered if I had spoken at that moment, if I had expressed to Etna all the emotions I have just described, we
might not have had an unpleasant hour or two (a hideous hour or two, I imagine) that we would always be saddened to remember,
but that might have cleared the air and allowed us to go forward with some intimacy.

But I could not do that. No, no, Nicholas Van Tassel could not ask his new bride why there had been no barrier to her body.
He could not demean himself in that way. Instead, he lay on the bed, in the dark of his imaginings, his new wife breathing
quietly beside him.

W
e have had a brief stop, during which I debarked from the train to stretch my legs. I stood on the platform and watched the
sun and steam create a kind of luminous fog under the vaulted ceiling. A large clock, whimsically fashioned in the shape of
a pocket watch, glistened in this mist I write of. Men and women alike (I remember in particular a dark-haired woman in a
short cloth coat who stared straight ahead and smoked a cigarette) were blurred in the eerie light. This unlikely cloud produced
both an ethereal and a prosaic sight: the platform dirty with litter and oil stains, the shimmer so beautiful I wished I owned
a camera. Unwilling to leave my momentary oasis (which was strangely quiet apart from the hissing of the steam engine), I
had to run to catch my train when it began to move, doubtless a comical sight to those who had already attained their seats.

I take up my narrative on a morning fourteen years after my wedding day. Etna and I sit in a breakfast room papered with crimson
roses and trimmed with dark mahogany. The year is 1914, and somewhere in the house are two children — happy children, one
would have to say — not abed, both already up and noisy, and in the case of Clara, our elder at thirteen, already dressing
for her classes at the Thrupp Girls’ Academy. There are sounds throughout the house that indicate activity: a drawer closing,
a shoe dropped, the scrape against the stove of a cast-iron pan. In the sunlight of the transom windows, dust motes sparkle
against the dark woodwork. The pungent smell of coffee stirs the senses.

All this I remember as clearly as if I had just walked through the door. Yet when I look at the years preceding this memory,
it is as though time passed the way the leaves of a book caught in a breeze will do: the pages fluttering by so quickly that
it is sometimes not possible to glimpse but an expression or a phrase. “What words were said?” I ask myself as I hover now
over my journal. “What looks exchanged?”

I can recall a sense of how my marriage was — truths more felt than spoken — but not its precise content. Occasionally, scenes
or facts present themselves out of context, floating in the ether of time lost. I have an image of the baby Nicodemus at Etna’s
breast, his eyes as wrinkled as an old man’s, his hair stiff with birth matter. I recall a wonderful dress of Clara’s, a sort
of red velvet and crinoline confection that sounded like paper as she moved. I remember the first day Nicky walked by himself:
he strode wildly, pitched forward, and fell into my arms. And, of course, the larger facts about our life together are clear
enough (I do not mean to suggest a doddering fool); it is just that from the perspective of a sixty-four-year-old man, many
details bleach into a life composed equally of daily contentment and nightly anguish.

The daily contentment is easy enough to explain.

After my wife and I returned from our wedding trip, Etna settled in to prepare for motherhood, an event that was not long
in coming, though I was not to prove as prolific as my father. We had only the two children, seven years apart; Etna had miscarried
twice, to her great sorrow. As anticipated, she proved to be an excellent mother, and we were able to share a considerable
joy in our boy and girl. Etna was a superb teacher and had an aptitude for play that not all mothers are able to summon (certainly
neither of mine ever did). Thus I might find her in the nursery sitting on the floor, her skirts beneath her, manipulating
with considerable skill a pair of puppets to Nicky’s delight. Or I would sometimes see her with Clara in the garden, a slender
pair in their spring dresses, chasing each other all around in the manner of schoolboys. Etna had a strong constitution as
well as an unusual affection for the out-of-doors, both of which made her a splendid playmate. I was glad of this (and not
one bit disturbed by her lack of femininity in this regard), since I, as the reader will not be surprised to hear, felt disinclined
to sport. Etna was insistent that both Nicky and Clara learn to play tennis and croquet, and to that end, we had had various
lawns and nets installed on the premises. My wife always looked charming in her tennis dresses and was a disciplined yet encouraging
teacher. Over time, I came to understand that in these games with Clara and Nicodemus, my wife found appropriate release for
an inherent restlessness — one that I had seen fleetingly on her face when she was living in the home of her uncle; indeed,
one that I could be said to have taken advantage of.