Fortune's Rocks (18 page)
But there is expectation in his features, too. Definitely expectation.
“Olympia,” he says.
He unfolds his arms and walks toward her. He puts his hands to the back of her neck. He bends her head toward his chest, where she rests it gratefully, flooded with an enormous sense of relief.
“If I truly loved you,” he says, “I would not let you do this.”
“You do truly love me,” she says.
He trails his fingers up and down her spine. Tentatively, she circles him with her arms. She has never held a man before, never felt a man’s broad back or made her way along its muscles. She no longer has fear, but neither does she have the intense hunger she will know later. The sensation is, rather, a sort of sliding against and sinking into another, so that she seems more liquid than corporeal. She brings her hands to the front of his shirt and lays her palms against him.
He seems to shudder slightly. His body is thicker than she has imagined it, or perhaps it is only that his tangible physical presence, under her palms, is more substantial than she has remembered. And it seems to her then that everything around her is heightened, emboldened, made larger than in her dreams.
“Olympia, we cannot do this.”
She is taken aback, unprepared for discussion.
“It is already done,” she says.
“No, it is not. We can stop this. I can stop this.”
“You do not want this to stop,” she says, and she believes this is true. She hopes this is true.
“I am a married man. You are only fifteen.”
“And do these facts matter?” she asks.
“They must,” he says.
He takes a step back from her. Her hands drop from his body. She shakes her head. She feels a sudden panic that she will lose him to his doubts.
“It is not what we are doing,” she says. “It is what we are.”
He briefly closes his eyes.
“I thought you understood that,” she says quietly.
“We will not be forgiven.”
“By whom?” she asks sharply. “By God?”
“By your father,” he says. “By Catherine.”
“No,” she says. “We will not be forgiven.”
An expression of surrender — or is it actually joy? — seems to wash over his features. She sees the strain of resistance leave his body.
“This will be very strange for you,” he says, trying to warn her.
“Then let it be strange,” she says. “I want it to be strange.”
He tries to unbutton the collar of her blouse but fumbles with the mother-of-pearl disks, which are difficult to undo. She stands away from him for a moment and unfastens the collar herself, impatient to reenter that liquid world that is only itself, not a prelude, nor an aftermath, nor a distraction, but rather an all-absorbing and enveloping universe.
There is a change in tempo then, a quickening of his breath and perhaps of hers, too. They embrace awkwardly. She hits a corner of the settee with the small of her back and stiffens. Her clothing seems clumsy and excessively detailed. He sheds his jacket in one sinuous motion. Her blouse is undone, open to the collarbone.
“Let me lie down,” she says.
If nothing is ever taught, how is it that the body knows how to move and where to place itself? It must be a kind of instinct — of course it is — a sense of physical practicality. Olympia has never had the act of love described, nor seen drawings, nor read any descriptions. Even the most ignorant of farmers’ children would have more knowledge than she.
She goes into the bedroom alone, into the room where Haskell and his wife have so recently lain together. The bed is unmade and rumpled, its occupant having left it in haste. There are no traces of Catherine now, nor of the photographs that were on the bureau. Olympia takes off her dress and her hose, her corset and petticoat. Wearing only her steps-ins and her vest, she lies down and covers herself.
Haskell comes into the room and stands at the foot of the bed. “If you only knew how you looked to me,” he says.
She watches as he takes off his collar and unbuttons his shirt. For the first time in her life, Olympia sees a man undress. She is struck by the way Haskell tussles with his cuff links, the way he removes the collar of his shirt as if freeing himself from a yoke. She feels odd and cold beneath the sateen puff and frightened at the thought of a man’s nudity, which, in fact, she does not entirely see this day. Haskell stops short of removing his undergarments before he slides into the bed with her.
She rolls into the crook of his arm and rests her head there. She puts the palm of one hand against his vest. Uneasy and expectant, they are silent for a time. There is nothing impetuous in their actions, nothing at all. Though impetuosity will come soon enough, it is as though each movement toward the other must be taken with some forethought, some understanding of what it is they do.
He shifts his position and dislodges her from his arm, so that she is now lying beneath him. “I saw you at the beach that day. You do not remember me.”
“I am not sure.”
“I think I loved you then. Yes, I am certain of this.”
“How is that possible?”
“I do not know,” he says. “But I am sure of it. And then when I saw you on the porch the night of the solstice, I experienced . . .” He searches for the words. “As though I had known you. Will know you.”
“Yes,” she says, for she has felt it, too.
“You cannot know how precious this is,” he says. “You will think that this is how it always is. But it is not.”
He supports his weight on his forearms. He kisses her slowly on her neck. As if they have all the time in the world, which, in fact, they do not.
“I envy you,” he says. “I envy your not having known anything else.”
She can feel him pressing into her, a weight lowering itself, even as his hands draw up her vest and push away the rest of her underclothing. For a moment, he fumbles with something he must have had in his hand when he entered the bed, something she cannot now identify, though later he will explain his caution to her.
Does she feel pain? Not exactly. Not terrible pain. It is more a sense of greater weight, of a thrusting against her, though she does not resist. She wants to take him in.
“Am I hurting you?” he asks once.
“No,” she says, struggling for breath. “No.”
She is thrilled, tremulous with the event. The sun moves and makes a hot oblong of light on the topaz sateen puff, so oddly unmasculine, a spread similar to her mother’s. All around them is the soft cotton of overwashed sheets — almost silky, almost white — and beyond these the austere mahogany of the carved furnishings: the wardrobe, the bed, the side tables. There are a man’s garments strewn upon a chair and on the floorcloth, which has been painted to resemble a rug. She looks up at the pattern on the sage tin ceiling.
Only near the end, just at the end, does she feel a quickening within herself, the barest suggestion of pleasure, a foretaste of what she will one day have. Oddly, she understands this prophecy, even as she hears for the first time the low hush, the quick exhalation of breath, and knows that the event is over.
His weight, which has been great upon her, becomes even heavier. She thinks he does not understand that he will crush her. She shifts slightly beneath him, and he slides away. But as he does so, he pulls her with him, nestling her within the comma that his body makes, as one might cradle a child, as, indeed, he may have nestled his own children. She arranges herself to fit within his larger embrace.
For a time, Olympia listens to his breathing as Haskell dozes in and out of consciousness, a particular form of sleeping that she will come to treasure over time, to feel privileged to witness.
He wakes with a start.
“Olympia.”
“I am here.”
“My God. How extraordinary.”
“Yes,” she says.
“I will not say that I am sorry.”
“No, we must not say that.”
She moves so that she can see his face.
“I feel different now,” she says.
“Do you? It is not just . . . ?”
“No.” As though she can never return to the girl she used to be. “I did not even know enough to wonder about this,” she says. “I did not have any idea. Not the slightest.”
“Are you disturbed . . . ?”
“No. I am not. It seems a wondrous thing. To become one. In this way.”
“It is a wonder with you,” he says. “It is with you.”
“I should go,” she says. “Before the maids come.”
And he seems sad that she has so quickly learned the art of deception. “Not yet,” he says.
They lie together until they hear footsteps in the corridor. Reluctantly, Haskell stands up from the bed, trailing his hand along the length of her arm, as though he cannot physically bear to remove himself from her. He dresses more slowly than he might, all the while watching her on the bed. Only when they hear voices in the hallway — native accents, chambermaids — does he collect himself and finish dressing more quickly. He leaves the room for a time and returns with a cloth, which he gives to Olympia. She feels the sudden incongruity of Haskell with his clothes on while she lies naked.
“You will need this,” he says, bending to kiss her.
Discreetly, he walks into the sitting room and closes the door so that she can dress. When she climbs out of the bed, she sees, on her legs and on the sheets, what the cloth is for. It shocks her, all the blood. She did not know. But he did. Of course he did. He knows everything there is to know about these matters, does he not?
He reenters the room as she is fastening her boots. She stands and turns to him across the bed, and as she does so, she realizes that she has not covered the stain. He opens his mouth to speak, but she waves her hand to silence him. There is a decorum to the moment, an action called for, though she is not certain what it should be. She is not embarrassed, exactly, but she does not want to discuss it. No, surely, she does not want to discuss it. Reaching down, and without haste, she brings the topaz puff up to the pillows and covers the discoloration. And she is certain that they are both at that moment remembering the childbirth they once witnessed together.
They walk together to the door. There is shame, she thinks, in his having to remain behind while she goes out. It is difficult to speak. She is glad that he does not feel it necessary to make plans to see each other again. She understands that it will happen of its own accord because now they cannot be apart.
He kisses her at the door. She leaves the room and steps into the corridor. All around her are the sounds of conversations, as though the rest of the world has come awake: the high-pitched voice of a woman, insistent, making points; the low snide chuckle of a man. The air has changed and has brought with it the smell of oranges. Behind her, she hears Haskell shut the door.
Her legs feel weak as she descends the stairs. She wonders what Haskell will do with the bloody flannel and the sheet. She catches sight of herself in a mirror in the hallway and is startled to see that her mouth is blurred and indistinct. Unwilling to go out the back door like a thief, she decides to brave the lobby, but when she walks across it, she knows that a dozen pair of eyes inspect her. She guesses that the desk clerk wonders what she is doing there, when she was to have taken Dr. Haskell to see the Rivard woman. Hotel guests, who have come down for breakfast and are waiting for their companions by the door of the dining room, glance at her as she walks by. Servants eye her as they cross the lobby to and fro with folded linens in their arms. She makes her way out to the porch, where she stands for a moment by a wicker chair, recovering her strength, unwilling yet to test her legs on the steep set of stairs. The sun is well up, but the light is muted. In the distance, she can see fishermen in their lobster boats checking their buoys.
“Miss Biddeford?”
Startled, Olympia turns. There must be an expression of fright on her face, for Zachariah Cote puts out a hand to steady her.
“I did not mean to scare you,” he says.
The sight of the poet, in a gray silk waistcoat, the furtiveness of the man emphasized in the way his sudden smile appears to have nothing to do with his eyes, is like an apparition from a universe she has left behind and does not want to reenter.
“I see you in the strangest of places,” he says amiably.
“Whatever do you mean?” she asks, moving a step backward.
He takes a step closer to her. “I am sure it was you, on the night of the Fourth, in a carriage by the side of the road? In the marshes?”
He cups an elbow in the palm of his hand and rests his chin on his knuckles. He studies her in an altogether impertinent manner, and she suddenly feels more naked than she did in the bedroom moments earlier. Indeed, his gaze is so frank and his smile so calculating that she wants to slap his face.
“No, it cannot possibly have been,” she says.
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