The Dream Lover (32 page)

“What you did, my dear, was to marry the wrong man,” she said. “He is all dullness to your effervescence. He is crippling you.”

She had had enough of Casimir even before the day he chastised her and me for “making ourselves conspicuous.” This is what he called it when, on a trip from Cauterets to Gavarnie, Zoé and I rode ahead of our party in order to escape their empty chatter and constant complaints.

“What a relief to be without those citizens from the land of banality,”
she told me as we waited for them to catch up. “Let us enjoy ourselves before they get here. Let us take in this extraordinary beauty in a
conspicuous
way!” I laughed, but her face grew serious and she said, “Aurore, you must never apologize for your superior intelligence and your insight. You have so much more to offer than those others who spend their entire lives never having one serious thought! And you deserve so much more than you have!”

I knew exactly whom she thought I deserved.

Aurélien was rich, he was handsome, he was an aristocrat; but what drew me to him was his facility with language and his natural wit. He was the most well-spoken person I had ever known and, like me, adored poetry. He was able to converse with ease and insight on many subjects, including philosophy and religion and literature, subjects that Casimir had no interest in.

Aurélien was engaged to a beautiful young woman named Laure Le Hoult, whom, he soon confided, he had discovered to be uninteresting and cold, with a flatness to her personality that her dazzling good looks had at first obscured. This he told me on a day when Casimir again went hunting and left me to seek my own pleasure, and my pleasure that day was a horseback ride with Aurélien. We had stopped by a stream to let the horses drink when he walked over to stand close to me, a warm light in his eyes. “I hope I will not offend you by telling you that meeting you has convinced me that I have made a mistake in proposing to Laure. Had I known that there was a woman such as you—”

“I am married, Aurélien.”

“As I am aware. And in sharing this with you, I mean only to…”

He sighed and looked into my eyes, and I felt a yearning to step closer that was so strong I had to move away.

But I was pleased by the admission; I could not hide it. After so long a time of feeling unwanted and unloved by Casimir, I found Aurélien's words wonderfully uplifting. But when he put his arm around me, I gave him a look that made him rapidly remove it.

“Aurélien,” I said, “I believe you may have been as deceived by me as much as by your fiancée. I am not always the gay adventuress you have been spending time with these last few days. I am oftentimes melancholy, full of an unhappiness I cannot explain, and in that state I am seemingly unreachable. So far as I can tell, my future is one of sadness; I have no hope that things can change. I cannot leave my husband, nor do I believe that I will ever achieve any sense of joy with him. I have chosen badly, but I have chosen. And miserable though I may occasionally be, I would feel worse if I were to betray my morals.”

“Then I will console you in your misery,” he said. He moved closer to me and pressed his lips to my neck.

It burned me. Literally. I jumped away from him and chided him, but my words could not convey an anger I did not feel, and he understood me to be glad of his affections. And there we were. Powerless to move forward or back, suspended in a way both agonizing and delicious.

He apologized, shamefaced. “It is exceedingly difficult to keep my ardor in check around you, Aurore. Yet my morals are the same as yours. And so at times when my will is weak and I attempt to make advances, I must ask you to resist me.”

We made a pact, then, to embrace our platonic romance, to find and enjoy in each other the pleasures we could not find in the people we were bound to.

W
HEN A TRAGEDY OCCURS,
one has a moment of innocence upon awakening the day after; one has forgotten the sadness of the day before. But then sorrow lands heavily at the center of the breast and all but steals the breath away. So it is with joy; one awakens having forgotten a happy event, and then remembers, and experiences a feeling like being shot through with light.

The day after Aurélien's admission to me, I awakened, lay still in
the bed, and then laughed aloud. I put my hand over my mouth to muffle the sound, but I had no need for doing so: Casimir was long gone, as usual, and rather than feel abandoned, I was relieved.

It was a very different feeling than when I had first been left to my own devices. Then, I had made a melancholy entry in my diary that spoke of how, when a husband took himself from his wife's side because of duty, it was a sadness shared and tolerated by the two of them, the sadness mitigated by the expectation of the pleasure they would enjoy when they were reunited. But if a husband needed to be away from his wife in order to live his life more fully, the wife experienced a loneliness made worse by humiliation.

It was not humiliation I was feeling now but a galvanizing excitement. I rose to tend to my toilette, to dress and breakfast, to spend time with Maurice before turning him over to the nursemaid, and then to go outside to find Aurélien.

Cauterets was a small town, and it was easy, not to say inevitable, to run into people again and again. I saw Aurélien often: with his fiancée, with Zoé, and, for brief, exhilarating periods of time, alone.

At one point, we went on a boat ride, and he carved the first three letters of our names into the boat. I had watched him doing it, but when he finished, I looked off into the distance, as if I had been unaware. “Look,” he said. “Even our names begin the same way.”

I made a face that suggested a kind of indifference I did not feel, and it hurt him. This spontaneous and joyful act, inspired by love, he now saw as juvenile and overly revealing; and he probably wished he could snatch the moment back for the sake of his dignity. The color rose in his face, he pocketed his knife, and we spoke very little until we reached the shore again, where we parted ways.

For the next three days, Aurélien did not speak to me. I suffered more in those three days than I ever had with Casimir; I wanted to die. Even the darling antics of little Maurice did not lift my spirits:
those times I took him from his nursemaid, I felt I had nothing to offer him. Having enjoyed with Aurélien the brightness of an engaged and loving presence who aroused a sensuality in me that I had despaired of ever finding, now I could not—or at least did not want to—be without it.

The next evening, the sky was dramatically streaked with violet and rose, and I went outside alone to enjoy it. I was walking in the street when I saw Aurélien coming toward me. I went quickly to him and asked if I might have a word.

“I am on my way to meet my fiancée and her family,” he said, in a way so pointed I felt sure it was designed to hurt me. But then, seeing the pain in my eyes, Aurélien took my arm and led me into the shadows. “What is it?”

I stood straight before him, my hands clasped tightly together. “I want to tell you that I did not respond to your romantic and endearing gesture of carving our initials on the boat because I'd promised to resist you. If I had shown you what it meant to me, one thing would have led to another, and we would be engaged in something we would end up regretting. Acting on our love would put an end to it, because we would not survive the pain we would cause innocent others. I must ask again: Given our circumstances, would it not be best for us to be chaste lovers, sharing of each other's minds and hearts alone? Might we in this way honor our obligations and yet satisfy our deepest desires?”

I knew, asking him this, that men were unlike women, that it was much more difficult for them to be without some sort of physical expression of their ardor. But Aurélien said, “Aurore, I love you for your mind and your soul, your superior intellect. It is not now nor has it ever been my intention to cause you any pain. I am sorry if you suffered on my account, thinking that I would ever ask you to do otherwise. I am, my dearest, quite simply yours; and obliging you is my best happiness.”

I could not speak for joy, and his face was radiant. He took my
hand, kissed it, and we walked our separate ways. I felt my life had tipped on its axis toward the proper angle. Even the prospect of Casimir coming home and regaling me for hours with what he believed were scintillating tales of shooting eagles did not mitigate my joy.

A
URÉLIEN HAD MADE PLANS
to take an excursion with Laure and her family to Gavarnie. I asked Casimir innocently if we might join them, and he agreed. On the way there, Aurélien managed to find a way to ride beside me.

“Thank God you have come,” he said. “Behave as though I am extolling the beauty of these cliffs and let me say instead how enchanting I find you, how perfect your exotic eyes, your supple waist. But know, too, that I would love you if you were ugly.”

I laughed, as did he. Then he said, “Soon we will have to part, but I will write to you and in this way attempt to preserve every tender feeling we have. I hope that you will answer me. Zoé has agreed to be our courier.”

The notion was thrilling. “How can you think I would not answer you? You suit me so perfectly. No matter what we are talking about, I find your words delightful.”

“I feel the same. And though I respect the wisdom of keeping our relationship to our minds and hearts, know that I nonetheless do indulge my imagination from time to time.” His eyes did not move from mine, yet I felt them travel the length of my body. “Please understand that I say this not to embarrass or dishonor you but to touch you in the only way I can—or will. I mean to find a way to sing the praises of an irresistible woman; being with you, one is helpless not to.”

“Where are you?” Laure called from up ahead, her voice thin and peevish. Aurélien gave me a burning glance before he spurred his horse forward. I watched him go, thinking it did not matter any longer where he was, when his heart belonged to me. I flashed a
smile to Casimir, because love from another had made me generous toward him.

S
OON IT WAS
A
UGUST,
and time to go home. Casimir and I felt that an abrupt descent from the mountains might be difficult for Maurice, so we decided to stop for several days at Bagnères-de-Bigorre. This was a fashionable spa, pleasant enough, with its cheerful clientele and the colorful carriages being pulled through the streets by handsome horses whose high stepping and prancing made Maurice clap and point. Its location in a wide depression in the land made one feel held in the palm of a gigantic hand. But then the heat began to take hold. I looked at the Pyrénées in the distance with longing, but of course it was not just the comfortable climate I missed.

On our last night there, Casimir and I were having dinner when I saw what I thought at first might be a hallucination. Aurélien was approaching our table. And then there he was, as real as my racing heart.

Hearty greetings were exchanged between him and Casimir, while I had all I could do just to speak. “Join us for dinner!” Casimir said, and Aurélien agreed, pulling up a chair and stationing himself at a safe distance from me. Everything about him had grown dear and familiar to me; I watched him cut his meat with an odd kind of proprietary pride. The very way he sat in the chair seemed perfect, artful; and I resonated to the intelligence and charm he displayed in talking about the most minor things.

Later, when Casimir left the table for a moment, Aurélien leaned in close to me and spoke urgently: “I could not go on to Bordeaux with my fiancée and her family; I had to come here and find you. I had to know if what I felt for you was true. Seeing you now only confirms it: you ravish my senses, you have my heart and my very soul.”

I flushed with pleasure; I wanted to leap into his arms and tell
him to forget my words advocating moral responsibility and restraint. But here came Casimir back to the table. He put his arm about me and said it was time for bed.

I said a prim good night to Aurélien, but then I added brightly, as though it had only now occurred to me, “Aurélien, on your way home tomorrow, would you like to ride over to Lourdes with Casimir and me, to see the grotto of the wolf? It is a unique experience, quite stimulating to the senses, I'm told.” I could feel Casimir's eyes boring into me, his discomfort at my inviting Aurélien on our expedition without asking his permission first. He no doubt took umbrage at the sexual undertone in my description of the place, as well. I didn't care. I felt a sense of desperation at the idea of leaving Aurélien again, so soon; and I knew that at least some of the time during the eighteen-mile journey, I could ride side by side with him without raising Casimir's suspicions. And indeed that is what happened: several times, for a few minutes each, I rode nearly knee to knee with Aurélien, grateful for the opportunity.

At the Grotte du Loup, we joined other tourists in crawling on our bellies into the cave. Then, as we progressed farther and could stand, we entered into a darkness so deep we could not see our hands before our faces. Our only source of light was the flickering torch the guide at the head of the party held, and we were bringing up the rear. At one point, I felt arms encircle me from behind, I felt someone pulling me against him and pressing his slightly opened lips to the nape of my neck. I did not scold Aurélien, I did not move away from him; rather, I leaned back for a moment, wishing that we could spend days in that forgiving and obscuring blackness.

All too soon the expedition ended, and Aurélien and I were again saying goodbye. I was relieved that Casimir's attention was diverted long enough that Aurélien could add one final thing to his otherwise formal farewell: “Hold in your heart what I said: from now on, I live to please you.”

I watched him ride away from Lourdes and felt as though he were taking my vitality with him. That night in bed, Casimir made
amorous advances that I did not think I should resist. But as he drove himself into me, I imagined it was instead Aurélien. Afterward, overwhelmed with guilt, I lay there listening to the sounds of my husband breathing, full of shame at the notion that though I had not betrayed him in the flesh, I had in spirit.