Destiny (55 page)

She shook him a httle; he felt heavy and inert in her arms. A moment before he had been touching her, but now he was so very still, not moving at all. She felt something cool and wet against her face, and thought it was Billy's tears, but when she looked up, there were no tears, just blood. She could feel it in her hair and on her breasts and on her face and in her eyes. It was sticky and it smelled sweet and sour, and then Ned Calvert was there, telling her it was the best skin lotion in the world, and she opened her mouth and started screaming, very loudly and quite silently.

She woke, and jerked herself upright, shaking. She was bathed in sweat; her head was pounding. She looked around the still room, with its stripes of light, and for a moment she did not know where she was. She was still trapped in the dream, which was the worst dream she had ever had.

She sat very still; the colors of the dream were vivid in her mind. She drew in her breath, tried to steady herself, and waited, her heart beating very fast, until the dream began to fade. It was only a nightmare, she told herself; it was entirely normal that she should dream hke this. It would go away in a while. It would leave her.

But there was something she had seen in that dream, there had been an item of truth in its distortions. There, somewhere there, was something she should look at, something she should confront with her waking mind. / must think, she told herself; and she tried to make the dream come back, sequence after sequence. On the river, drifting toward the cottonwoods, and then . . . but the dream would not come back. Obstinately it evaded her, even as she reached for it, and now the room was reasserting itself, and the afternoon was reasserting itself, and the dream had gone. She stood up, and went into the bathroom, and splashed cold water against her hot face. She dried her skin on the soft white towels and felt calmer. Only a dream. Only a dream.

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She went back into her bedroom and opened the shutters. The sun was lower in the sky, and the air was cooler. She walked back and forth in the room, one part of her mind still intent on pursuing the dream, and another part already beginning to calculate the number of hours left before Edouard would return. Time seemed very slow; it was inching forward.

Against one wall of the room there was a small inlaid bureau which had been made for Adeline de Chavigny. It was supplied with writing paper and pens, and after a while, Helene sat down and idly drew out a sheet of paper. She picked up a pen. She toyed with the idea of writing to Cassie.

There was no one else to write to; she uncapped the pen, and looked down at the paper in front of her. Then, hurriedly, she wrote the date, and, under it: Dear Cassie. Then she stopped, and laid down the pen. Just the action of writing Cassie's name brought the past back. There it was, sharply, all around her: the trailer park, the hot air, her mother leaning back hstlessly in the old red chair. She saw Cassie's kind, careworn face: Take this, honey, I won Y be needing it . . .

She lifted her head and looked at the room in which she sat. So many beautiful things; so many valuable things. All the people she had grown up with, all the people she had loved—they had all been so poor. They'd worked and scratched and saved, and at the end of it, they couldn't have afforded to buy one thing in this room, not one single exquisite item. Could Edouard understand that? she wondered. Could a man Uke Edouard ever understand what it meant to be poor? No, she told herself, he could not, and in that moment, she felt a little distanced from him. In her world, she thought, people died and left no trace. They did not leave houses and gardens and portraits and traditions behind them; they had little, and they left nothing—in Billy's case, not even so much as a photograph.

She looked down at the paper in front of her, unsure if she were angry with herself, or with Edouard, or with life itself. She would not write to Cassie now, she decided. If she wrote, what would she say? That she was so much in love that the past no longer seemed real, and that when she was with Edouard, she was so happy she was content to let the future take care of itself? Cassie would not even be surprised if she wrote that. She'd expect it. That was what people did: they made all sorts of solemn resolves and promises, and then they didn't keep to them, and people who were kind, like Cassie, were careful never to remind them of that fact.

She stared down at the paper, and her eyes blurred with tears. Irritably, she brushed them away. She could not go on telling lies, she decided. Tonight, when Edouard returned from Paris, she would tell him the truth. Who she was and what she had been. She would tell him about her mother and about Ned Calvert. She would tell him about Billy. She would tell him about being poor. She would leave out nothing.

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It was wrong to go on lying like this, as if she were ashamed, and it was terrible to have kept Billy a secret; it was like killing him twice. Perhaps that was why she had those horrible dreams, she thought, because she went on telling lies. She picked up the writing paper impatiently, and was about to crumple it up into a ball and throw it away when something stopped her. Perhaps it was thinking of the dream again, which made her mind uneasy; perhaps the idea had been there in her mind before, and she had resolutely pushed it away until then—but whatever the reason, she hesitated, and then smoothed out the paper again and looked at it, and her skin grew chill.

She looked at the words; she looked at the date she had written. The letters and the numbers seemed to grow very large and then very small. They danced before her eyes, and, as she stared at them, their significance altered, re-formed, and took on a new and implacable shape.

Her mouth felt dry; her body tensed. She continued to stare at the date for a long while, her mind frantically calculating. Then, with a Uttle cry, she ripped the paper into fragments and threw them away.

The date she had written was September 15th. It was two months almost to the day since her mother had taken that last bus trip into Montgomery; two months since Helene had waited for her in Orangeburg; two months since she had gone down to the pool with Billy. It's the right thing, Billy, the right thing. . . .

September 15th. It was the day she realized nothing would be right ever again. It was also the day Edouard asked her to marry him.

He asked the question in a way very typical of him—without preamble, tacked on at the end of other sentences, other pieces of information, so that he startled her. He had not noticed that anything was wrong. A moment before, he had been talking about his mother.

"She had heard about us. I was summoned for an interrogation. Like all my mother's interrogations, it was oblique—but she has a certain instinct, I admit that. She has never once questioned me about my private Ufe before, so she had perhaps guessed ... I don't know. It doesn't matter, in any case. Except that I was delayed, and I wanted very much to be here." He paused. "I wanted to be here, and to be with you. I wanted to ask you to marry me."

His voice was level, almost matter-of-fact. Only one small gesture, a quick lifting of the hand, betrayed any emotion. They were standing in his bedroom; it faced out across the park of the chateau, and beyond the window, the hght was beginning to fade. Early evening, and a day which

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seemed to Helene to have gone on forever. She looked at Edouard; she would always remember him, she thought, as he looked then, his hair slightly disheveled, his face intent, his dark eyes watchful, a smile—because he was happy; she could feel the happiness radiating from him— beginning on his lips.

He said the words, and she went on hearing them, echoing through her mind. She couldn't move, she couldn't speak; she couldn't think or even feel anymore; all her faculties seemed numb. The silence that followed seemed intensely loud, and to last a very long time. In the silence, she saw his face change, and when she could bear it no longer, she turned her face away miserably. Still he waited, and then, very slowly, he crossed to her, hfted his hand, and turned her face to his, so that she was forced to look into his eyes.

He looked at her for a long time, his face grave and still, then he said, very deliberately, although his voice caught on the words, "If I am wrong about this, then I am wrong about everything. Everything. Do you understand? If this is a lie, there is no truth left. Is that what you are saying? Is that what you mean, when you turn away your face like that?"

Helene could hardly bear to meet his eyes, the pain and the anger in them were so intense. She felt burned by that look; the word no was clamoring in her mind, so loud and so insistent that she felt certain Edouard must hear it too. But her hps remained stiff; the word would not be spoken. Edouard continued to look at her, and all vitahty left his face; it became hard, and set, and terrifyingly cold. Then, without another word, he let his hand fall and turned away.

He had almost reached the door when she said his name. She cried it out, hardly conscious of doing so, and Edouard swung round. She saw the hope come back into his eyes, although the uncertainty and the anger remained. Then he crossed back to her swiftly and took her in his arms. He pressed his lips against her hair; he tilted back her face and began feverishly to kiss her eyes, her mouth, her throat. Neither of them spoke, and because the closeness of anger and sexuality was not something which she had ever experienced before, what happened next shocked Helene very much.

He undid her dress, his hands rough and hasty. He began to draw her toward the bed, and when she hung back, he pulled her down onto the floor beside him. Usually, she would have reached for him, she would have helped him, eagerly, to remove his clothes, and when she did not, she saw his face darken. He stood up then, his eyes never leaving her face, and began to undress. She watched him loosen his tie; she watched him undo his belt; she could not watch him do that without wanting him, but now

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the fact that she wanted him made her curiously and suddenly angry, as if wanting him were a weakness in herself.

When he was naked he knelt beside her and Ufted her into his arms. He buried his face against her throat, and as Helene felt the warmth of his bare skin against hers, she arched back with a little cry. At once, his eyes became intent; he looked almost triumphant then, as if he were determined that what she would not say, he would make her show. He touched her then, in a certain place, and in a certain way to which they both knew she responded, and she did respond, but this time some part of her mind remained locked away, shut up tight in some blind and female obstinacy. He was forcing her, he was using his knowledge of her and their past lovemaking, and for a moment she almost hated him for that. She drew her nails sharply down his arm, and the blood welled.

After that, it was not like making love at all, it was like a battle between them. Edouard was her enemy and her lover, and when he did not draw back, but forced her down under his weight, she knew that in some strange way he was closer to her now when he fought her, than he had ever been when he was gentle. She struggled against him, glad that the anger had come so suddenly, and had wiped out all the unhappiness and despair she had felt.

This, at least, was very quick, and very simple. Edouard meant to prove something to her, and she was determined not to let him. He was stronger than she was, though, a great deal stronger. It needed very Uttle force on his part to hold her still, and very little force to enter her. He pushed once, and then, just when that dark blind part of her mind had resolved that she would lie motionless, and that she would defeat him with cold passivity, he gently turned her face to his, and looked down into her eyes.

He remained quite still, and Helene, looking up at him, saw the love and the desperation naked in his face. There was no more contest then; it was over as suddenly as it had begun—there never had been a contest between them, she thought, except perhaps in her own mind.

"Oh, Edouard," she said sadly, and, reaching for his hand, she lifted it and pressed it against her hps. There was blood on his wrist, where she had scratched him. She pressed her mouth against it, and as she tasted the sharp iron taste of his blood, he began to move, gently at first, then more strongly.

"No, wait," she said then, and pushed him back gently, so he slipped out of her body with a soft sucking sound. He knelt back, and she bent her head and took him in her mouth. Edouard groaned, and cradled her head. He felt hard and alive against her lips; she loved the taste of him, she thought, with a sudden wild and yet gentle happiness; she loved the taste of him, which was also the taste of sex, tangy and salt.

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She sucked him gently, drawing him deeper into her mouth, and when she feh him shudder, she felt also an extraordinary sense of power, the same power he had over her, quite equal. It filled her with great gentleness, that realization. When he began to lose control, she trembled also. He held her tightly, cupping her head in his hands; she touched him with her tongue, one particular place, and he came, spasm after spasm, life spurting into her mouth.

She cried then, and they stayed, clinging to one another, both shaking, their bodies wet with sweat, for a long time. Finally, Edouard drew back a httle.

"You see," he said quietly. "Ah, Helene, do you see?" She nodded silently. She did see, she thought. She saw just how much she loved him, and how much he loved her. In anger and in gentleness, there it was between them, this bond. As if he read her mind, Edouard lifted her hand, and pressed it between his own. "You can say one of two things," he said in a low voice. "You can say 'yes,' or you can say *no.' But whatever you say, I am bound to you, and you are bound to me. We are as much married now as we could ever be—aU the rest is just ceremony. Helene—tell me you believe that."

"I believe that."

"Then why —earlier? Helene, why did you turn away like that? Why?"

She hesitated. Then, because she could not bear to hurt him anymore, when she loved him so much, she bent her head.