Fortune's Rocks (22 page)
“Fair enough,” he says. But he will not be bested at this game. “Olwen,” he trumpets.
“But that is a man’s name,” Olympia protests.
“No, actually it is not.”
She narrows her eyes. “Oleksandr!” she cries.
He thinks awhile and tilts his head. Then he kisses her. “I believe you have won,” he says graciously.
“Thank you, Dr. Haskell,” she says, fitting herself against him. And then, rather abruptly, she asks: “Do you think our love for each other is the same?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, your images and your memories surely are not so much of yourself as they are of me, while I see only you and feel only you and speak only to you. And do you not, because you are a man, with a man’s sensibilities and a man’s body, have different sensations than I and therefore different recollections?”
“All lovers seek the illusion of oneness,” he answers. “But you are right. Most of a love affair is in the mind.”
“Is it?” she asks.
“Of course, there are the times when we are together,” he says. “When we express our love for each other. But do not these episodes but feed the true and ravenous lovers, which are the minds, creatures unto themselves? So that love is not simply the sum of sweet greetings and wrenching partings and kisses and embraces, but is made up more of the
memory
of what has happened and the
imagining
of what is to come.”
memory
of what has happened and the
imagining
of what is to come.”
“But if that were true,” she says, “then it would not be necessary to be physically together at all. We could just simply imagine it, and be done with it. And not worry about being caught out or about hurting anyone else.”
“Yes. Well . . . ,” he says. “The imagination must have fuel. It must have something to base its memories on. In the beginning, when we would meet, I used to marvel how it was that we never began exactly where we had left off, but seemed to have progressed to yet another level, and then another. The mind is intolerably impatient. It can imagine the whole of a love affair in an instant.”
There is a sudden and strained silence between them.
“Have you done that?” she asks quietly. “Have you imagined the whole of us?”
“Yes,” he answers, “and you have done so as well.”
She stands and walks to a window, having long since lost her modesty in his presence. “The house will be ready by the weekend?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Then Catherine and the children will be returning for good,” she adds, stating an obvious truth that has been gnawing at her for some time.
“Yes,” he answers simply. He climbs out of the bed and stands beside her at the window.
“What is it?” he asks, although he already knows.
The future lies like a thickening gas all around them. They both dread Catherine’s return, for not only will it mean that the house,
their house,
the one Olympia and Haskell have christened and have loved in, will be occupied; but also it will mean that Haskell will have to move out of the Highland Hotel. Thus, they will have nowhere to meet. For Olympia, the tenth of August looms in the future not as a date of celebration, but rather as a day on which a particularly painful sentence is to begin.
their house,
the one Olympia and Haskell have christened and have loved in, will be occupied; but also it will mean that Haskell will have to move out of the Highland Hotel. Thus, they will have nowhere to meet. For Olympia, the tenth of August looms in the future not as a date of celebration, but rather as a day on which a particularly painful sentence is to begin.
“We have run out of time,” she says.
“If we wallow in the pain,” he says, “we shall have spent all our pleasure already. It was you who taught me this.”
“My father’s gala will be a grotesque charade. I shall feign illness.”
Though they both know that she cannot.
Beyond the salt-encrusted windows, they can see the noontime bathers on the beach. They watch as a man in a bowler hat constructs an elaborate canopy of wooden stilts and canvas around and above the stiff figure of a woman. She sits rigidly on a collapsible wooden chair and stares at the water. The day is hot, with a sort of lemon haze all along the shore, and she is overdressed in a heavy black taffeta suit. And though she wears a hat, and her husband is frantically trying to construct the canopy, she holds a black ruffled parasol at a precisely vertical angle. The haughty and cold demeanor of the woman is a painful contrast to the too-eager-to-please mien of the husband and seems to suggest an imbalance in the marriage, if indeed it is a marriage, or a desire on the part of the man to make amends for an unknown transgression. Olympia wishes suddenly, looking at the water, that she could bathe in the sea right now and that Haskell could join her.
She rests her head on his shoulder. She knows much about him now: the tufts of hair between his knuckles, the cords at the back of his thighs, the hushed pause, as though all the world held its breath, and then the low, quick exhalation of pleasure. But sometimes doubts creep into her thoughts, and she cannot help herself from wondering: Might Catherine know things about Haskell that Olympia has not had time to learn?
“What a silly woman,” Haskell says, watching the sad comedy of the chastened husband and his overdressed wife.
He moves behind her and wraps his arms just under her breasts. He looks out the window over her shoulder. “Now,
they
look to be having a better time,” he says, pointing through the window at a couple with a young child sitting on a rug near the water.
they
look to be having a better time,” he says, pointing through the window at a couple with a young child sitting on a rug near the water.
The wife is dressed in a loose white shift and has her skirts pulled up to her knees. She seems relaxed, though Olympia notes that she does not take her eyes off the child playing in front of her in the water. The woman’s husband has been bathing, for his costume droops with the wet. He sits beside his wife and runs his fingers up and down the thin cloth of the back of her dress. Olympia feels a keen, not to say ferocious, pang of jealousy and regret. For Haskell and she will never have what that couple have and, perhaps because it is so easy for them, cannot value as much as they might: a child, a marriage, the ability to sit outside in public and touch each other.
She turns quickly toward Haskell. There is again the lightning within her body, that endlessly repeatable lightning. The need for the relief and release only he can offer. She puts her face against the pad of his shoulder.
“We have only one more day,” she says.
As if echoing the man and wife outside, Haskell strokes her back with his fingers.
“In our imaginations,” he says, “we have a lifetime.”
• • •
She is later than she has said she would be, and as she walks, she composes excuses:
Victoria’s mother asked me to stay for tea. They were getting up a croquet match at the hotel. Julia and I were playing duets on her piano, and I lost track of the time.
The sand is hard, and her dress is wrinkled. She looks up toward her house, dreading having to enter it, and when she does, she is startled to see that her mother and Catherine Haskell and Zachariah Cote are sitting on the porch.
Victoria’s mother asked me to stay for tea. They were getting up a croquet match at the hotel. Julia and I were playing duets on her piano, and I lost track of the time.
The sand is hard, and her dress is wrinkled. She looks up toward her house, dreading having to enter it, and when she does, she is startled to see that her mother and Catherine Haskell and Zachariah Cote are sitting on the porch.
But surely Catherine is in York, Olympia thinks.
Olympia instinctively turns and bends to the sand as if she had dropped a handkerchief or purse.
My God,
she thinks.
We might have been caught.
she thinks.
We might have been caught.
Slowly, she stands and tries to smooth her skirts. Her fingers feel for the buttons at her collar to see that they are fastened. She checks to see that the locket is inside her dress. When she turns, her mother is already waving to her, beckoning her to join them. Olympia walks toward the house and makes her way up the porch steps.
“Olympia,” Catherine says when she has reached them. “I am so glad to see you. How are you surviving this ghastly weather?”
“Olympia seems to have a secret life these days,” her mother answers for her.
“Indeed,” says Cote, flashing her a smile.
“Tell me about it,” Catherine pleads. “You have a young man.”
“No,” Olympia says in a confused manner.
“Olympia, do sit down,” her mother says.
“It is just that I have made a number of friends here this summer, and I have been much occupied with them,” Olympia says in a voice tight with strain, a strain she thinks neither Catherine nor Cote can fail to notice.
“Olympia has learned to play tennis,” her mother says. Beside her, Olympia can feel Cote’s scrutiny.
“How delightful,” Catherine says.
“Catherine has returned a day early,” Olympia’s mother explains to Olympia. “She means to surprise John.”
“But I was seized with a sudden desire to visit your mother,” Catherine says, leaning toward Olympia and placing a hand on her knee. “To discuss this exciting gala in your honor on Saturday night. Your mother has been telling me all about your dress.”
“And I have come early as well,” Cote says. “I did not want to have to travel north on that dreadful Friday train, and so I have slipped out of the city early. Indeed, I think I shall stay on in Fortune’s Rocks for a while now.” He pauses for effect. “I am sure the muse will find me here,” he adds, smiling again in Olympia’s direction. He accepts another cup of lemonade from Olympia’s mother and settles back into his chair.
“I used to play tennis as well,” Olympia’s mother says in a surprising non sequitur.
Olympia hardly dares look at either her mother or Catherine.
“I was rather good,” her mother adds shyly. “Actually, I had a beau once who was a tennis player. Before Phillip, that is.”
Olympia struggles to attend to what her mother is saying. She wonders if she should alert Haskell somehow, tell him of Catherine’s arrival. She tries to remember if they left anything at the cottage.
“He was the son of a carriage-maker in Rowley,” her mother says, warming to her subject.
“Oh, Rosamund, do tell us . . . ,” says Cote.
“There is so little to tell.”
“Rosamund, you must,” Catherine insists.
Her mother looks away and then back at her hands, which are folded in her lap.
“I met him on a day that I was asked to accompany Papa on an errand to his carriage-maker,” she says. “I was young, maybe seventeen, and we had been coming north for only a half a dozen summers. Papa went into the shop, but I was left to wait in the buggy. I remember that I was very cross at this, because it was hot and I was thirsty and he seemed to be taking an inordinately long time. But while I was sitting there, a young man came over to the carriage.” She raises a hand to smooth her hair and only then seems to realize that she has committed herself to her tale.
“What did he look like?” asks Catherine.
“He had pale blond eyebrows and thick blond eyelashes,” Olympia’s mother says.
“What was his name?” asks Cote.
“Gerald,” her mother says. “He used to say that he was Welsh, but my father insisted that he was Irish. I liked him very much. We talked for quite a while that day. So that by the time Papa returned, Gerald and I had somehow already arranged a meeting at a tennis club the following morning.” She pauses. “Over the next several weeks, he and I contrived to meet often. I would leave the house and walk a ways, and we would meet at an arranged place. I do not know why, but on the last morning we were to be together, I had decided that I was going to tell him that I liked him, for I sensed that he liked me greatly in return.”
She is thoughtful for a moment, as though if she waits long enough, she might be given a reprieve and be allowed another ending to her story. “We had planned that day to drive to the beach in Hampton for a picnic. And as we were walking onto the sand, he leaned over toward me and said something to me that in all these years I have tried to reconstruct, to hear. But before he could repeat the phrase to me, a man my father had paid to follow us came up behind him and took him away.”
“Rosamund, no,” Catherine says.
“I spent the rest of the summer more or less locked in my room.”
“How dreadful,” Cote says.
“I never heard from Gerald again,” Olympia’s mother says. “You see, I had no way to reach him, nor any access to anyone who would have known him. I did not even have an address to write to. But later that summer, I was allowed out of the house to attend a tennis match in Exeter. Since I was going with my father and mother, I suppose they thought little harm could come to me.
“During the interval, however, when I went in search of a glass of water, I came across a trophy case in the lobby. Inside it were medals and plaques and photographs of winning teams. Gerald’s picture was in one of those photographs. I slid the glass open and reached in and removed the photograph. I hid it in my dress. When I got home, I took a pair of scissors from my sewing box and cut out his picture. I have it still.”
“You must show us this photograph,” says Cote.
“Perhaps I will,” she says, bringing her glass to her lips. And as she does so, she suddenly looks different to Olympia, physically different, as though a portrait had been altered. And Olympia thinks that possibly such adjustments might have to be made for everyone she knows. Upon meeting a person, a sketch is formed, and for the life of the relationship, however intimate or not, a portrait is painted, with oils or with pastels or with black ink or with watercolor, and only at the person’s death can the portrait be considered finished. Perhaps not even at the person’s death.
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